The Jigsaw Falls Into Place

So in the end, Fernando Alonso went back to the obvious place. For all the wild talk that the Spaniard would drive for Toyota, or Red Bull, or even Honda or Ferrari, he's back with the team with which he won two world championships - Renault. We shouldn't be too surprised. All of the above teams, in theory, did not have a vacancy. Honda have been at pains to insist that Rubens Barrichello will be staying with them next year, Red Bull have Mark Webber and David Coulthard in place and Toyota pretty much removed themselves from the bidding process when they hired GP2 champion Timo Glock to drive alongside Jarno Trulli in 2008. Ferrari have always insisted that Felipe Massa would be retained alongside champion Kimi Raikkonen, and for all that Massa was seen hanging around the Toyota garage earlier in the year, it would appear that they meant it.

Renault, on the other hand, always had a vacancy. Giancarlo Fisichella's contract was up, and it was plain that the Italian had had a disappointing season and had looked no match for Heikki Kovalainen in the latter part of the year. It was no surprise when he was let go. On the reasonable assumption that Alonso didn't really have anywhere else to go, it was no surprise to see him agree terms with Flavio Briatore.

What was more of a surprise was the news that Heikki Kovalainen would not be kept on. Kovalainen had been a Renault development driver for some years, and after a faltering start, had acquitted himself well in the latter part of the season, with a second place in treacherous conditions at Fuji being both his, and the team's highlight of the year. It could be argued that his start was just a little too faltering - certainly he looked out of his depth in his first few Grands Prix - but I would have thought he had done enough to merit retention. Rumours have circulated that Kovalainen left because he was unwilling to accept no.2 status to Alonso, but it now appears that his departure had more to do with a very rich Mexican backer, Carlos Slim who reputedly made it clear that he wanted Nelson Piquet Jr in the second car.

If, briefly, this appeared to be bad news for the Finn, it might have been a blessing in disguise. For the moment he became available, he stood out as far and away the obvious choice at Mclaren to replace Fernando Alonso. After all, who else was there? Of the test drivers Pedro De La Rosa is a known quantity, but really, what we know about him is that he isn't quite quick enough. Gary Paffett and perhaps even Paul Di Resta were possibilities, but they would represent a serious leap into the unknown, as neither has any previous F1 racing experience. It would probably have been easy enough to prise Adrian Sutil out of his contract with Force-India but he too be something of a gamble. He looked impressive against Albers in the early part of the season, but he really ought to have been a good deal quicker than Sakon Yamamoto if he really represents a great white hope for the future. Besides, he'd already been made to look rather ordinary when he went up against Lewis Hamilton in F3, so why on earth would things be any different this time round?

When Nico Rosberg unexpectedly took himself out of the equation by re-signing with Williams, that all only left two out-of-work old stagers about whom Ron Dennis has previously been fairly dismissive - Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella. One began to wonder whether Ron Dennis might put aside all concerns of propriety and try to pinch a guy who was already under contract. Mark Webber, Jenson Button and Robert Kubica all must have seemed intriguing prospects. When Kovalainen suddenly became available, he was the obvious choice for the Woking team. Fast, reliable and seemingly a team player who probably doesn't quite have the pace to seriously threaten Lewis Hamilton on a regular basis. The pair could be the new Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, and certainly it is hard to imagine their relationship being quite as antagonistic as that which the team had to endure this year.

I could see this being a pairing which works well. If I were Ron Dennis and had complete freedom to run any driver other than Raikkonen or Alonso alongside Hamilton, I'd probably pick Nick Heidfeld. A good worker, with plenty of experience, who knows how to set up and develop a car. BMW, however, have doubtless recognised the same qualities in the bearded German and would probably not have been keen to let him go. Aside from anything else, by the time the Hinwil team had been paid off, Heidfeld was liable to be very expensive. Kovalainen, who was suddenly unemployed and lacking other options, was probably very cheap. Mclaren may have one of the biggest budgets in the sport, but when you've been hit with a $100m fine, saving money on driver salaries is likely to be important. Kovalainen strikes me as a good compromise. Seemingly a fairly apolitical team player, and probably the fastest unemployed racing driver on offer, he did a good job in his debut season at Renault once he had got on top of the tyres. With a year's experience under his belt, he might even start to threaten last year's star rookie on occasion.

There are those who speculate that the partnership of Alonso and Piquet Jr. could be explosive. I'm not so sure. We know from his GP2 days that Nelsinho Piquet can be incredibly fast, especially over one lap, when he puts his mind to it. What I'm not yet convinced about is that he really has the determination, and the work ethic, to succeed at the highest level. Piquet Jr has had his path smoothed up to now by his father's name, wealth and connections. Now he's in F1, that isn't going to help him a great deal. While he could be utterly imperious when the mood took him in GP2, there were other occasions on which he really looked rather ordinary. That said, it has always been open to question whether Piquet Sports was really a top-flight GP2 team, and if it was not (and certainly no other Piquet Sports driver has ever achieved much), that rather puts a different light on Piquet's junior series record. Against a man with the kind of relentless, grinding race pace as Alonso, Piquet is going to have a real fight on his hands if he wants to repeat Hamilton's remarkable feat of upstaging the double world champion in his rookie year.

One thing that we can be sure of is that Fernando Alonso is unlikely to react well to being beaten by a rookie team mate again. I think, given how exceptionally quick Alonso is, that it is rather unlikely that lightning will strike twice though. For one thing, it is clear that Alonso was caught out by the switch from Michelins to Bridgestones (as probably was Kovalainen, which may explain why Fisi had an edge over him in the early part of last year). That won't be the case this time round. Equally, while Piquet may, conceivably be the equal of Hamilton in terms of outright pace, I somehow rather doubt that he will have been as carefully groomed for F1 success as Hamilton had been by Mclaren. Renault doesn't strike me as that sort of team, and for in any case, until he was brought on board as a test driver last year, Piquet's career was largely managed by his father. Call me a cynic, but I somehow can't see Nelson Piquet Sr. having been quite as methodical as Ron Dennis and his men.

In the end, I can't help feeling it will come down to how good the new car is. It had better be an improvement on the machine which left Giancarlo Fisichella demotivated and uninterested. Else I suspect that a bruised Alonso, battered about by a difficult year at Renault, might simply get bored and start looking around for people to blame, while an inexperienced Piquet is to my mind even less likely to be able to help the team turn things around. Alonso claims that he was responsible for Mclaren finding 9/10ths of a second last winter. I've always rather doubted the claim, but to judge by Renault's performance in 2007, he might need to repeat the trick come January.

ENDNOTE: I'd just like to take this opportunity to wish readers an enjoyable Christmas (if you celebrate it) and a great New Year. I'll be taking a break down in the wilds of Northumberland, but will be back early in the new year with more of my ramblings,

Patrick.

GP2 in review - Hamilton at a canter......

If nobody quite knew what to expect in the first season of GP2 last year, then this time our hopes were high. Close fought racing between almost F1-quick single seaters with no electronic trickery or driving aids and most of the best aspiring young would-be F1 drivers at the wheel. With slick tyres this year, they edged still closer to the back of the F1 grid in performance terms - on occasion they might have been in a position to give at least the earliest version of the Aguri F1 car a fright in lap speed terms. In other words - more often than not the most interesting part of the Grand Prix weekend. I think its fair to say that GP2 entirely lived up to these elevated expectations this year.

At the start of the year, I predicted that the title battle would be fought between between Premat, Lapierre, Carroll and Piquet. Which shows how much I know. In my defence, I can only point out that, of the newcomers, I did single out Glock and Hamilton as the series debutants most likely to upset the applecart. Certainly I didn't expect Hamilton to take the championship by the kind of margin that he eventually did.

If the championsip battle was not as close fought as that between Kovalainen and Rosberg last year, the same could not be said of the individual races, some of which were very hotly contested indeed. The battle between Jose Maria Lopez and Timo Glock in the sprint race at Hockenheim stands out in particular, while the last lap of the feature race at Barcelona, where ART team mates Premat and Hamilton fought it out was a graphic illustration of how close it sometimes got.

In all there were 9 different winners in the 22 races this year. For sure, the feature/sprint race split, with the latter being run with semi-reversed grids, probably inflated this number a little (neither Andreas Zuber nor Michael Ammermuller ever really looked like winning a feature race) but there were still 6 different winners in the 11 feature races - not a bad total when compared with F1, or especially with this year's world rally championship.

With 5 wins, three of them in feature races, and a further 9 podium finishes, Hamilton was clearly the dominant force this year, and the way he dominated his second-year team mate, Alexandre Premat (who, after all, was not really any slower than Nico Rosberg last year, merely a little less consistent) indicates that he is something really rather special indeed. Whether or not he gets the Mclaren seat alongside Alonso next year, it seems pretty clear that this is a young man who is going places.

To my mind, the numbers are about right in placing Nelson Angelo Piquet best of the rest. Like his father, he seemed happiest when out in front, and never really seemed to have the same racer's instinct as Hamilton. Neither was he as consistently quick, but on the other hand, it was hard to evaluate the competitiveness of his team (Xandi Negrao never really figured in the other Piquet Sports car) and he perhaps didn't have as good a car as ART were able to provide Hamilton with. He also showed impressive speed in the wet at Hungary, winning both races, and wet weather speed is always a sign that there is something special about a driver. He deserves his Renault testing role, now that Heikki Kovalainen has been promoted to the race team for 2007. Whether he has the mental toughness and racer's instinct to be a really first rate F1 driver, on the other hand, remains to be seen.

There remains the tantalising thought that had Giorgio Pantano done all the races, or had Timo Glock started the season with ISport, rather than with BCN, with whom he never really seemed to gel, one of these two ex-Jordan F1 drivers might have given Piquet and Hamilton a serious run for their money. The numbers suggest they probably would not quite have been able to, but Glock, in particular, looked more than a match for anyone in the second half of the season. Certainly it is a mystery why he was quite so slow in the BCN Competition car, and does beg questions about the degree to which team, rather than driver ability, plays a part in a series where the cars are supposed to be identical.

Equally intriguing were the sheer number of occasional one-off outstanding performances that were witnessed over the course of the year. Franck Perera, for instance, might not generally have made much of an impression, scoring just 8 points all season - but he got all 8 of those at Monaco, where he started and finished 2nd, behind Hamilton. There was another front row start for him at the Nurburgring - just enough perhaps, to suggest that the Toyota junior driver might make rather more of an impression if he gets another run next year - but still very much against the run of form. On other occasions, Hiroki Yoshimoto, Tristan Gommendy, Adrian Valles and DPR boys Olivier Pla and Clivio Piccione all showed flashes of real front running pace (Gommendy's front row start at Valencia, Valles' podium at the same, Yoshimoto's performances at Imola and the Nurburgring and the DPR drivers' performance at Monaco. None though, were able to threaten the front runners on anything like a regular basis - though whether this boiled down to inexperience, the limitations of their team, or their own foibles as drivers was very hard to tell. Yoshimoto, though, does look a rather more sensible bet for a Super Aguri drive than either Yamamoto or Ide did.

There were a few notable disappointments this year as well. Arden failed to recapture the form that took them to so many F3000 titles, and perhaps have lost the momentum they had before team owner Christian Horner took up Dietrich Mateschitz's offer to run Red Bull Racing. Of course, it might be the fault of the drivers. I, for one, expected Nicolas Lapierre and fellow Frenchman Alexandre Premat to figure a little more strongly after their dominant winter double act over in A1GP, but Premat was rarely close to his team mate Hamilton, while Lapierre came no closer to actually winning a race than he did last year. He was at least a little closer to the front than he had been last year, though an injury at Monaco put paid to any kind of a serious challenge.

Another man to struggle despite high pre-season hopes was Racing Engineering No1 driver Adam Carroll. In race trim he was as aggressive as ever, but he was often off the pace in qualifying, seemed to be harder on his tyres than just about anyone else in the field (for which he often paid a heavy price in the longer feature races) and, in the first part of the season at least, simply made too many mistakes. Whether the problem lay with Carroll, or Racing Engineering (whose other driver, Jose Villa looked utterly lost after being talked about as the 'new Fernando Alonso' in F3 the year before) was hard to tell. Perhaps it was a combination of the two - Carroll has always struck me as being a 'seat of the pants' kind of racer, and he might have suffered for not having an experienced team mate to help get car set up pointing in the right direction. Champ Cars seems the obvious place for him, if you as me.

Of the rest, Ferdinando Monfardini occasionally impressed, Lucas DiGrassi had a reasonable mid-season run, Felix Porteiro looked like a driver who might shine given a little more experience, and that was about it. Jason Tahinci, Fairuz Fauzy, Sergio Hernandez and Vitaly Petrov, in particular, seemed to represent a waste of a good cockpit.

So, not a bad sophomore year, all in all - the series did a pretty good job of establishing itself as not only the most important European single seater championship outside F1, but as being at least as competitive and suffused with talent as the IRL and Champ Car series. With the big names once again moving on to bigger and supposedly better things, lets hope that 2007 proves as exciting.