Who goes where?

It has reached that point in the year where the focus of many a driver and team is as much on the season coming as on the dog end of the one currently in train. Not so much, perhaps, if you are Red Bull, Ferrari or Mclaren, and are still in the running for this year's championships, but for everyone else, there is the hope that 2011 will be better.

And inevitably that means drivers thinking about whether they can land themselves with a more competitive seat, and teams pondering whether a change of drivers might bring a change of fortunes. It is perhaps no coincidence that the top three teams are retaining exactly the same driver line up for 2011, while it is far from clear that this is the case anywhere further down the grid.

For drivers, the most promising vacancy at the moment is probably the one alongside Robert Kubica at Renault. After a dismal 2009, where even the talents of Fernando Alonso were insufficient to keep them from slipping into midfield mediocrity, the team would appear to be once more on an upward trajectory. Current number 2 driver Vitaly Petrov has not yet been ruled out - and Eric Bouillier has been remarkably frank about what is required of the young Russian, saying that he doesn't need to match Kubica, but he does need to show that he has the potential to get rather closer to him that he is managing at the moment, but one senses that La Regie are sniffing around to see if there are better prospects out there.

I'm not convinced by the wisdom of taking on Kimi Raikkonen, though to be fair, much depends on whether the Finn is feeling a renewed enthusiasm for F1 following his sabbatical in the World Rally Championship, or whether he (or his management) is simply casting around for a way to make money as it looks like Red Bull are becoming disillusioned with the marketing potential of their tie-up at Citroen. However, if the Finn meets with Boullier and convinces him that he's genuinely serious about giving F1 another shot then, providing his pecuniary demands are not excessive, he's probably the fastest man Renault are going to be able to hire. Certainly it will be interesting to see how he compares with Robert Kubica.

More likely though, if Petrov goes, it will be in order to be replaced by one of a number of drivers who would meet Renault's job spec of being a good solid number 2 who can be relied upon to rack up constructors championship points, and who are currently finding their talents wasted in uncompetitive machinery. Timo Glock and Heikki Kovalainen have both shown they are good, serious racing drivers and their talents have been largely wasted with Virgin and Lotus this year. While it's possible those teams might be rather better prepared next year (I've rather more faith in Fernandes' Lotus operation than in the awkward menage-a-trois between Wirth Research, Richard Branson and Manor Motorsport) a Renault seat would still look a more tempting prospect.

Then there's Nick Heidfeld, back for the moment at his spiritual home of Sauber after spending much of the year on the sidelines at Mercedes, hoping that Michael Schumacher might throw in the towel. Again, Renault would be accepting they're not hiring a future mega-star if they took him on, but he's certainly not slow - he's been teamed up with Raikkonen, Webber and Kubica in the past, and held his own against all three of them. Probably a better bet than Sauber, even if Heidfeld disregarded the awkward truth that Peter Sauber's choice of driver to sit alongside Kobayashi next year is likely to be governed by financial constraints rather than driving talent.

The other name that strikes me as a possible for Renault is Force India's Adrian Sutil. The Anglo-Indian team started the year well but have been gradually slipping back towards the rear of the midfield, and it seems to me that if the German rainmaster is to progress then he's going to have to find another ride. Assessing how quick he is has never been easy - he's easily had the beating of Tonio Liuzzi this year, but he didn't always look any quicker than Giancarlo Fisichella, and going back to his debut in the sport at Spyker, it is striking that HRT's Sakon Yamamoto wasn't that far off his pace. He'd be a gamble, but there have been odd hints - particularly when the heavens open - that he's got something special about him.

Although Renault might not be his only option. Of the top teams, Renault is the only one which officially has a vacancy but Martin Brundle mischievously noted that an awful lot of drivers were seen coming and going from the Mercedes motorhome over the Monza weekend earlier in the month. Nico Rosberg is almost certain to be driving for the team again next year, but I can hardly be alone in wondering whether Michael Schumacher will call time on his so far rather uninspired come-back, or should he not jump, whether the team might opt to push him. It would be an ignominious end to a long and tremendously successful career, but time and tide wait for no man...

... And if Mercedes is to remain a German 'super team' then Adrian Sutil might be a good fit. It has been said that a part of the motivation for Mercedes' involvement in the sport has been to increase its appeal to younger car buyers, and if that is their aim then Sutil perhaps makes more sense than Nick Heidfeld (who may be relatively young by any normal definition, but, at 33, is in F1 terms beginning to run out of time). As mentioned above, Timo Glock might also be available and if the team were prepared to pay Williams enough money to get them to release him, Willi Weber's new protege, Nico Hulkenberg would tick all the right marketability boxes, and more importantly, after a rather shaky start, has begun to regularly match and sometimes beat team mate Barrichello. Perhaps not the new Schumacher, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's now faster than the old one is these days.

So far, in considering Renault and Mercedes' options, I've not mentioned any young drivers still seeking to break into F1. The bad news for would-be F1 drivers is that those top teams which might have a vacancy have enough choices from among the established F1 drivers that I'd be surprised if either of them hired a rookie. The truth is that the options for drivers looking to get their first F1 ride in 2011 are looking rather limited.

Toro Rosso and Williams have yet to announce their line-ups for next year, but I wouldn't be especially surprised if both teams retained their current line-ups. Sauber have already announced that Kamui Kobayashi will be driving for them next year, so the vacancies are likely to be made up of the following: The second Sauber, one or possibly both seats at Force India and, perhaps, a seat or two at Lotus or Virgin if someone manages to pinch Kovalainen or Glock.

Scottish DTM driver Paul Di Resta is seemingly considered a shoe-in at Force India, and if hiring a driver who hasn't raced in single seaters since 2006 seems a rather eccentric choice, then it is worth remembering that he is the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries title that year, and that his DTM career has taken off after he regularly started doing incredible things with a second string two-year old Mercedes in his debut season. Whether he's as good, or even better than Vettel, or ultimately turns out to be another driver with a strong junior record who doesn't quite cut it at the very highest level, only time will tell, but as a fellow Edinburgher, I'm glad he's getting a chance.

So who might the other hopefuls be? There's GP2 champion Pastor Maldonado, but after some stories over the summer that he was in talks with Sauber, things seem to have gone very quiet on that front of late. His problem, I suspect, is that he took a very long time to come good in GP2, and has had a wildly inconsistent career that would make him a bit of a gamble. He comes with plenty of cash, but almost certainly not as much as Telmex-backed Sergio Perez, the man whom he beat to the GP2 title. Perez was in only his second season in GP2 (as against Maldonado's 5th!) and the signing of fellow Telmex-backed driver Esteban Gutierrez as a test driver at Sauber suggests that he may have a chance with the Swiss team.

Beyond those two, it's not quite clear who else would be in the running for an F1 seat - Daniel Ricciardo has impressed me with his performances in the Renault World Series but as a Red Bull backed driver, he's unlikely to get a shot next year unless the team lose faith in Alguersuari or Buemi, both of whom have been doing a fairly decent job of late. And in any case, it might make more sense to give Ricciardo the benefit of another year gaining experience in GP2 if, as I reckon is likely, he takes the Renault World Series at his first attempt this year.

Certainly it makes more sense than taking a seat at HRT next year. Whether their struggles with the recalcitrant Dallaras have done anything to further the careers of Bruno Senna, Sakon Yamamoto or Karun Chandhok this year I rather doubt, and the simple truth is that, stuck in such a hopelessly uncompetitive car, there is a limit to what any driver can do. Even beating your team mate might depend as much on the vagaries of the machinery as on any difference between the drivers. Where Lotus look like they will make progress next year and Virgin at least look like they might do so, I see no reason to expect HRT to be any less hopeless than they have been this season. On the other hand, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they weren't on the grid at all. Which might be a blessing in disguise for some young F1 hopefuls.

When Good Isn't Good Enough

No driver announced his retirement at the end of the last race of the 2009 season in Abu Dhabi, and it should perhaps therefore be assumed that, at the time at least. every one of the 20 drivers on the grid for that race wanted to be back in five months time when the F1 circus reconvenes in the sands of Bahrain. We have since learned that Kimi Raikkonen has opted to turn down whatever Mclaren were prepared to offer him in favour of driving a Citroen C4 in the World Rally Championship, but every other driver in the field appears intent on continuing their career in the sport.

The vast majority of them have drives in place, though I would be very surprised if Kazuki Nakajima reappeared, now that his long-time patrons, Toyota, have pulled the plug on their F1 team. For similar reasons, it is far from clear that we will see anything more of Kamui Kobayashi, which is a shame because he looked rather handy in his two races for the Japanese team at the end of the season. It’s far from clear whether Renault will be back on the grid next year either, but if they are, I would be very surprised if Romain Grosjean were back in the car after his lacklustre showings with the team this year.

Of the remaining established drivers, though, those with several seasons to their name, only Nick Heidfeld and Giancarlo Fisichella are without drives for 2010. While it seems more likely than not that Heidfeld will find a berth, either at the new Mercedes team or at Sauber if Michael Schumacher really is coming back to F1 with the German squad, it appears that Fisichella’s long F1 career might finally have reached its end.

Giancarlo Fisichella has been around in F1 for a very long time now and he’s one of very few drivers on the grid during 2009 who had experience of the previous generation of slick-tyred Grand Prix cars. In fact, with 231 races over 14 seasons in the sport, he is the fifth most experienced driver of all time, with only Barrichello, Patrese, Michael Schumacher and Coulthard having taken more starts. But what to make of those 14 long years? What did he achieve?

He came into the sport with Minardi in 1996, as an Italian F3 champion who had been driving for Alfa Romeo in the predecessor series to the current DTM, the ITC. The 1996 Minardi, only a minor re-working of the previous year’s car, which itself hardly set the world alight, was not a car in which anyone was going to be able to put in giant-killing performances, but Fisichella was generally quicker than his more experienced team mate, Pedro Lamy. It wasn’t enough to prevent him being moved aside to make way for the hapless but moneyed Giovanni Lavaggi when Minardi’s precarious financial state got really bad. He did enough, though, to attract the attentions of one Eddie Jordan, and for 1997, he was paired up with newcomer Ralf Schumacher in a Jordan Peugeot, where he instantly made an impression. The highlight of his second year in the sport was a second place at Spa in a wet-dry race, but he was also on the podium in Canada, and might even have won in Germany had he not suffered a puncture. In a car which was no match for the Williams, Ferrari, Mclaren or Benetton most of the time, his 20 points represented an impressive haul and identified him as one of the sport’s rising stars.

Then his career took a wrong turn. He switched to Benetton in 1998, just as that team was on a downward path, and he was forced to watch while Jordan’s fortunes rose, enabling them to take their first win in 1998, and to emerge as outside contenders for the World Title a year later. Fisichella spent four years at Benetton, and while he generally outpaced his team mates, Alex Wurz and, for one year, Jenson Button, he was no longer perceived as being destined for greatness. Flavio Briatore, boss of Benetton at the time, publicly criticised his ‘laziness’ and lack of commitment in 2000. He was turfed out for 2002 when the team became ‘Renault’ and its form began to improve. So he found himself back at Jordan, just as things were falling apart for the Anglo-Irish team. A confluence of freak circumstances saw him pick up a win at Interlagos in the rain in 2003, but the team’s general level of competitiveness is best illustrated by the fact that he would score points only once more all year, at the attrition-hit US Grand Prix.

Things took a turn for the better when he cut short his Jordan contract and ended up alongside sophomore Felipe Massa at Sauber. After initially being outpaced by the young Brazilian, whose full potential was then not widely recognised, he established himself as the faster and more consistent of the two Sauber drivers in the second half of the year, bringing in a consistent haul of points. At that point, it was hard to know what to make of Fisichella. Some wrote him off. He’d been around for a long time without ever really establishing himself as a front runner. Ron Dennis, when asked whether he was considering hiring the Italian, said dismissively “If I was going to sign Fisichella, I would have done it years ago.” Others, though, noted that he had proven as quick, if not quicker, than every team mate he had ever come up against and wondered if he was one of the sport’s great lost talents – someone who was simply never in the right place at the right time.

In 2005, we got our answer. After Mark Webber turned Renault down in favour of Williams, Flavio decided to give Giancarlo another crack of the whip, alongside Fernando Alonso. It’s hard to credit now, but at the time, it was far from clear which of the two would come out on top. Alonso was not a double world champion, but, like Fisichella, a man who had won but a single race. He didn’t appear to have quite the devastating one-lap pace of Jarno Trulli and it seemed to me at the time that they might be very closely matched. As it turned out, Fisichella never really even got close to Alonso. He won his first race for the team, but was helped by a freak rainstorm that left the Spaniard way down the grid. Thereafter, he was on the podium just twice more all season, in a car which Alonso took to seven wins and the world title. The following year, Alonso again took the title, and Fisichella again scored only a solitary win, on a day when his team mate had been hit by refuelling woes. And we had our answer, Fisichella didn’t have the right stuff.

To me, Fisichella’s lack of pace in his two years alongside Alonso at Renault remains one of the great mysteries of the sport. Was he just not quick enough? Perhaps, but this was a man who had shown himself as more than a match for the current world champion, Jenson Button, when they were paired at Benetton all those years ago, who had been quicker than last year’s vice-champion, Felipe Massa when they were both at Sauber. Who had looked quicker than just about everyone else he was ever paired up with in F1 (at least until those dismal last few races for Ferrari alongside Kimi Raikkonen). Was it psychological frailty? Briatore had Fisichella marked down as lazy, but I wonder if it was more that he simply couldn’t produce the goods under pressure. Think, for example, of the way he crumbled under attack from Kimi Raikkonen as they fought for the win on the final lap of the 2005 Japanese Grand Prix. Yes, his tyres were shot, but I’d still place a substantial sum that Alonso would have been able to keep the Finn back in the same circumstances. And when the teams opened the radio transmissions up to the TV broadcasters, it was notable how much more encouragement, how many more ‘hurry ups’, Fisichella seemed to need than many of his rivals. It’s always hard to know for sure, but I don’t believe Fisichella’s problem was fundamentally about a lack of innate ability. Rather, it seemed to me that, up against the very best, he lacked the competitive nature, the rage to win, needed to succeed at the highest level.

The irony, though, is that had Mark Webber not turned down Flavio Briatore in 2005, we might still be wondering today how good Giancarlo Fisichella might have proven to be had he got himself in the right car. Had that happened, Fisichella would probably have gone to Grove just as the team were spiralling into their own vicious circle of declining performance and falling budgets. As it was, though, he got his opportunity – he got it late, undoubtedly, but he got it, and he was found wanting.

It is noteworthy, I think, that with the exception of Michael Schumacher, the drivers who have had the very longest careers in the sport have tended to be good, rather than great. Barrichello, Patrese and Coulthard all won Grands Prix, but none of them ever took the World Title. I’m not sure I’d rate Fisichella in quite the same league as those three, but he was undoubtedly a very quick racing driver on his day. But as his career amply demonstrates, that isn’t enough on its own.

Every Dog Has Its Day - F1 2009 In Review - Part Two

Only Brawn, Red Bull, Mclaren and Ferrari actually won races this year. Yet the strangest thing about this season, in many ways, what marked it out from the 25 or so I've seen before, was that almost all of the remaining six teams on the grid had days when they looked as though they were in contention, and with a fair wind, they might have joined the winners' circle.

Perhaps the strongest of the six was the now departed Toyota team. It is ironic that the German-Japanese squad have had the rug pulled from under them by the parent company just as they were beginning to look like a serious racing team, as opposed to an enormously expensive white elephant. They made a number of very good calls this year. They were one of three teams to hit upon the double-diffuser concept from the start, and this put them in good stead in the early part of the season. They were also the only manufacturer team not to divert time and money into a KERS programme that they couldn't make work. The team locked out the front row at the third round in Bahrain, and I still wonder if they might have been in with a shout of victory of they had played a tactically smarter game - and in particular had they not put the wrong tyres on both cars at the first stop.

For much of the mid-season, the team appeared to slip into anonymity, struggling to make the tyres work and scoring little after Trulli's podium in Turkey. It was perhaps during this long, disappointing summer, the nadir of which came with a truly embarrassing performance at Monaco where neither driver could get sufficient heat into the tyres and one-time Monte Carlo winner Trulli was left ambling round at the back, seconds of the pace, that the decision was taken by the Toyota board to throw in the towel. If so, the late season return to form is all the more ironic. Timo Glock took an impressive second in Singapore after Rosberg and Vettel eliminated themselves from contention with penalties for pitlane offences and, Jarno Trulli, who had been nowhere in Singapore, settled the score at Toyota's home race (albeit on a track owned by Honda) at Suzuka, with another second place. In the end, it was a case of close, but no cigar for the team though. This year, they came closer than they ever have to taking a maiden race victory, but they leave the sport winless.

The same cannot quite be said of BMW-Sauber. Nonetheless, Mario Thiessen's decision to abandon development of the 2008 car to concentrate on a 2009 title assault now looks mightily presumptuous. It was never quite clear what was wrong with the 2009 BMW. There were times when it ran quite respectably. Aided by luck with the timing of the safety car, Robert Kubica looked in with a shot of victory at the opening race in Melbourne before he locked horns with Sebastian Vettel 3 laps from the end. Nick Heidfeld, who showed rather better relative to his much heralded team mate than he had last year, picked up a lucky second place a week later in Malaysia, and did a good job of picking up the minor points in a car that appeared capable of no more. There were days when it appeared Robert Kubica wasn't really interested, although it may only have been that he was less able to adapt to the 09 BMW's foibles than Heidfeld, who has rather greater experience of driving 'difficult' cars. That said, Kubica's drive to second in the Brazilian Grand Prix was one of the highlights of the year for me.

Unlike Toyota, who always struck me as a rather soulless team, devoid of real character, I'll miss BMW. Yes, they were ultimately just the plaything of a large corporation, but they done a good job of turning the Sauber team into a front-running squad, until things went wrong this year. That they didn't do the right thing by the Swiss team, failing to sign the Concord Agreement and selling the assets to shady investment company Qadbak rather than handing it back to Peter Sauber, leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth. A shame, because the building blocks were in place to put together a really first-rate racing team.

Renault, in contrast with Toyota and BMW, appear for now to be sticking with F1. From being, at least in terms of race wins, the most successful of the manufacturer teams last year, they slipped well back down the order in 2009. It is hard to assess exactly how bad the 2009 Renault was, because it was effectively a one-car team. All of the squad's 29 points came from their departing number 1 driver Fernando Alonso. It is hard to know whether this was a case of Alonso dragging the car places it didn't really belong, or whether Romain Grosjean and Nelson Piquet simply weren't getting the job done. Probably it was a mix of the two. There was a pole position in Hungary, achieved by running ridiculously light, and a podium in Singapore, but other than that it was a barren year for the Anglo-French squad. They made the news only when the 'crashgate' story broke in the aftermath of the sacking of Nelson Piquet Jr.

Given the $100m fine that Mclaren got for unauthorised use of Ferrari data by one of its employees a couple of years back, the deliberate arranging of an accident to attempt to fix a Grand Prix seemed to be remarkably lightly punished all told. But then perhaps the FIA decided that now was not the time to start driving teams out of the sport. And arguably the chief beneficiary of the move, Fernando Alonso, got off lightest of all. It seems hard to believe he would have run the strategy he did in Singapore had he not had some inkling what was planned. Flavio Briatore bore the brunt of the FIA's wrath. He'll probably be missed about as much as Toyota F1.

Williams started the year in the best form they have shown for several seasons, another team to benefit from spotting the 'double diffuser' loophole in the 2009 aero-regs from the outset. Sadly, the cards never seemed to fall their way. Potential podiums in both the opening races were lost to the timing of the safety car and a bungled pit stop in Australia, and to the timing of the opening of the heavens in Malaysia. The team flattered to deceive to some extent, usually topping the timesheets in free practice, only to slip back down the order when it counted on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

All the same, the team were probably stronger than their 7th place in the Constructor's Championship might suggest. Only once, at Singapore, did they look as if they might be within striking distance of winning a race, although Lewis Hamilton probably had Rosberg covered even before Rosberg effectively eliminated himself from proceedings by tripping over the white line on the pitlane exit. However, there were other races, notably Brazil and Malaysia, where car and driver looked much stronger than the final points tally suggests. As with Renault, Williams were held back by the fact that, in a tight and competitive field, they relied exclusively on Rosberg to pick up points. Kazuki Nakajima might be better than I thought him to be based on his GP2 performances, and certainly he was much closer to Rosberg on pace than Grosjean or Piquet was to Alonso, but in the end, he just wasn't quite quick enough to merit a place in F1. With Toyota's departure, his F1 career is probably over, unless he can use his connections to get a drive with one of the new teams next year.

The single biggest upset of the year, perhaps the greatest shock of the decade, came when Giancarlo Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa - not by running a silly fuel load - but by plain outpacing everyone else in a Force India. The team formerly known as Jordan were making steady progress towards the back of the field up to that point, sometimes frightening Toyota and BMW on their off-days, but until that weekend in the Ardennes, they had never actually scored any points. Yes, Sutil wasn't far off at Silverstone, and he impressed mightily in the rain in China until he flew off the road a few laps from the end, but the best you could say, really, was that while still backmarkers, they were much less far off the back of the pack.

Then Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa, and finished second. He was faster than eventual race winner Kimi Raikkonen too - it was really only the Ferrari's KERS equipment and, to be fair, probably Raikkonen's superior race-craft, which enabled the Italian team to take the victory. To prove it was no fluke, a week later, both Force Indias ran top-5 at Monza too. The VJM002 was clearly well suited to fast, open tracks. To judge by both the car's speed-trap times and it's remarkable fuel efficiency, which was better than that achieved by either of the other Mercedes-powered teams by some margin, it appears that the crucial advantage they had was tremendous aerodynamic efficiency. At tracks like Singapore and Abu Dhabi, where mechanical grip through slow and medium speed corners was crucial, they remained also-rans, but their late-season form was nonetheless a revelation.

Last, and in most respects, least, there was Toro Rosso. There was no repeat of the giant-killing performances of 2008 for the Faenza team, and it was a little hard to believe that they were running the same basic car as the Red Bull team which was in the running for the title. I suspect a large part of the explanation is that they simply didn't have the drivers to get the job done. Sebastian Buemi did a solid, competent job for a 20 year old in his first season, but it was hard to assess how quick he really was. Should he be judged by his pace relative to Sebastien Bourdais, who never seemed to get to grips with F1 at all, and relative to his still less experienced team mate Jaime Alguersuari? Or would a fairer comparison be with the 'A team' Red Bulls?

In what was a very competitive year, it could be argued that Toro Rosso did well to pick up eight points over the course of the season with what is by some distance the smallest team on the grid. Their approach to driver selection continues to baffle me. Jaime Alguersuari might be a British F3 champion, but his performances in the Renault World Series were hardly such as to mark him out as anything particularly special. If racking up points was the objective, then Takuma Sato or Anthony Davidson would surely have made more sense. On the other hand, Alguersuari is Spanish and well-connected, so it's possible than sponsorship concerns may have driven the decision, especially if Red Bull are still intending to sell the team. He did just enough, in my book, to merit a full season next year. In the end, Toro Rosso didn't have a bad season, especially in comparison with the team from which they were born, Minardi. The trouble is, everyone else, even Force India, had a better one...

End Note: Shell got in touch with me recently regarding promotion of a competition offering bloggers and aspiring writers the chance to establish a career as a motoring journalist. Those who know me will be aware that this is strictly a hobby for me - Ten years ago, it might have been right up my street, but these days I'm well settled in a job as a policy-wonk in Government and have seen too many people end up disillusioned when they mix work and pleasure. You, however, might feel differently, and if you do, you might want to take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXYNn1ZxTc&feature=player_embedded
http://www.writeintogear.co.uk/shellv-power/,

Nearly Was, Almost Ran....

Handbags at dawn. Thanks to Nelsinho Piquet's post-sacking outburst, we now know what many of us have long been pretty sure of anyway. That Flavio Briatore wouldn't know a diffuser from a differential. He was never a racer in the real sense. He started out selling clothes for Benetton and was brought in to run the clothes manufacturer's race team in the late eighties. He's in Formula 1 because he sees opportunities to make money, not because he's in thrall to the smell of Castrol GTX, the sound of a Ferrari V12, or the sight of an F1 car on the limit through Eau Rouge. All of which makes him a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with the sport.

It doesn't mean he's not good at his job though. Just as the CEO of an electronics company needn't have the first clue how to wire a circuit board, so long as he knows who does, in the modern era, an F1 team boss doesn't necessarily have to know the first thing about motor racing, provided he knows how to manage people who do. Having a team principal who knows how to play the political game with Bernie and the FIA, and who knows who understand the racing side of things is arguably more important. It's not an approach without its downside - arguably one of the root causes of the banking crisis was that so many of the men at the helm of the banks had little real understanding of banking, but the evidence suggests that Flavio knows who to hire and fire. How did Renault win two world championships on a fraction of the budget of Mclaren or Ferrari? In part, because Flavio ensured the team had Alonso and Symonds on the payroll - he might not have understood the intricacies of what either man does, but he knew their worth....

And whatever Nelson Piquet might say, I'm afraid I think Flavio made the right call in giving him the boot after Hungary. Now, you could argue that he has been treated unfairly. Yes, he was comprehensively outpaced by his team mate throughout his year and a half at Renault, but his team mate was double world champion Fernando Alonso. In the past, that might have been enough that he would have been cut some slack. Unfortunately for him, a couple of years ago, one Lewis Hamilton, the man who beat him to the GP2 title in 2006, showed the world that there was no intrinsic reason why a sufficiently talented rookie couldn't take the fight to even Alonso straight away.

Piquet's been about half a second a lap off the pace of Alonso this year, and has struggled particularly in qualifying, seemingly unable to unlock the pace he was sometimes able to find in free practice. With overtaking so difficult in Formula 1 these days, and with the field so close, being half a second off the ultimate potential of the car in qualifying is a tremendous handicap. Piquet's problems with nailing a qualifying lap suggest that the problems are as much to do with his response to pressure situations as with any lack of ultimate pace. The team might have been willing to forgive him this in his first season, but when he showed no real sign of improvement in his second year in F1, his head was never going to be far from the chopping block.

Nelson might have denounced Flavio. Calling him his 'executioner'... But I can't help but think that Briatore was simply learning from past mistakes. For two years, the team ran Fisichella, another driver who showed flashes of real pace but who struggled when the pressure was on. For a while, I at least wondered when he might come good. He never really did. With the constructors so evenly matched, the team simply couldn't afford to carry a sub-par driver any longer in the vain hope that he might one day come good.

Perhaps it might all have been different if Piquet had ever shown flashes of real inspiration. If there had been even one or two race weekends on which he had simply outpaced Fernando Alonso. Despite on occasion being able to best Lewis Hamilton in GP2, that simply never came. On occasion he finished ahead of Alonso, but that always owed more to the vagaries of fuel strategy and the impossibility of overtaking in modern F1 than to any genuine superiority of pace. In the end, he will go down as yet another driver who shone in the junior formulae - British F3 champion in 2005, runner-up in GP2 in 2007 - but who was found to lack that extra something at the very highest level.

In fairness to Piquet, though, he came into the sport at perhaps the worst time to be an F1 debutant. The multi-race engine and gearbox rules provided a strong disincentive to letting a driver do a significant number of laps during Friday and Saturday practice. The knock-out qualifying format puts extra pressure on drivers to make every lap count (how different from the days, many years ago now, when drivers got two shots at qualifying - an hour on Friday and another hour on Saturday, with no limit on the number of laps in either session!). And, of course, for some years now, there's not been a Sunday morning warm-up available in which to concentrate solely on running with race fuel. And then there's been the ever greater restrictions placed on in-season, and even off-season, testing.

It will be an even bigger problem for the man who will replace him in Valencia. Romain Grosjean has, despite being Renault's official test driver this year, had only very minimal time in an F1 car, and almost none at all in this year's R29. How will he fare? In truth, it's hard to be sure - you never really know whether a driver has what it takes until he steps up to F1. His career record to date is a rather chequered one. Way off the pace in the F3 Euroseries in 2006, he beat Sebastien Buemi to the title the following year. He followed that with victory in the GP2 Asia Series in 2007/08 and, driving for double champions ART, looked a shoo-in for the summer series title at the outset.

It didn't quite work out that way. He showed flashes of real pace, but made too many dumb errors, perhaps most notably the needless move on Kamui Kobayashi in the sprint race at Barcelona in 2008 which probably cost him victory and certainly second place. This year, with Barwa-Addax, he hit the ground running, and runs second in the championship, but has not been on the podium since Monaco in May. It's not clear that he will necessarily prove any better than Piquet.

But is there anyone obviously better? Anthony Davidson, I'd argue. But leaving him out of it, there's not any single driver in the junior ranks at the moment who stands out ahead of the others. Lucas Di Grassi? A solid enough performer, but he never looked as quick as Glock when they were up against each other in GP2 in 2007. Nico Hulkenberg? Maybe, but he's had a habit of binning cars when he's tested for Williams - who obviously aren't so enamoured of him as to give him their second seat ahead of Kazuki Nakajima. Bruno Senna, maybe? Perhaps, but I've never been entirely convinced. Haven't Renault had enough trouble with people with famous surnames from Brazil? What about Andy Soucek? He's been dominating Formula 2, and as the cars are all run centrally by Palmer's engineers, we know that it's not down to the brilliance of his race engineers - always a possibility in GP2. On the other hand, though, who exactly is he beating? Aside, perhaps from Robert Wickens, is there anyone in the F2 field who's really known to be quick?

I think the team have made the right move, though. Whichever way you look at it, Renault were going to need at least one new driver in 2010, and quite possibly 2. In an era of very limited testing, putting Grosjean in the car gives the team a chance to assess his potential, and gives Grosjean an opportunity to get some F1 mileage under his belt should the team decide he's worth keeping on for 2010. And if he doesn't make the grade? At least they find out now and can concentrate on giving other candidates seat time over the winter. Flavio might not understand motor racing, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't understand Formula 1.

Straws in the Wind

Things have been moving quickly these last few days in the world of F1. On Saturday morning, I'd been planning to put together a little piece about how Jaime Alguersuari was faring as the youngest man ever to start a Grand Prix. By the conclusion of qualifying, that story had rather been overtaken by Felipe Massa's freak accident, which looks set to knock him out of action for the rest of the season. We can only be glad that the debris struck the side of his helmet as opposed to the visor, in which case he might not still have been with us at all.

The Hungarian GP itself didn't provide much entertainment, aside from Hamilton's as it turned out rather crucial pass of Mark Webber in the early laps on the exit of Turn One, so I got to pondering who might replace Massa at Ferrari for the rest of the season. I struggled to remember the names of their current test drivers to be honest (Luca Badoer and Marc Gene, in case your curiosity has been piqued) and I couldn't see either of them ending up in the car. I wondered instead whether the Scuderia might make a swoop for a current F1 driver. Robert Kubica, who hasn't seemed especially happy at BMW for a while, seemed a possibility.

The post-race penalty imposed on Renault for sending Alonso off down pit-road with a loose wheel-nut made me wonder if instead Ferrari had the Spaniard at the top of its wish list to replace Massa. With Renault seemingly out of the European Grand Prix at Valencia, and with it being Alonso's home race, it seemed all too possible that he might jump ship, especially as it's much rumoured he'll be heading over there in 2010 anyway.

Conspiracy theorists might wonder if the decision to penalise Renault (though not the driver who limped round the lap with a loose wheel. albeit to be fair he might not have known that the wheel was loose, as opposed to punctured) indicates that the FIA were somehow complicit in all this. After all, drivers have been sent out of the pits without wheels being properly secured plenty times in the past, it's just one of those things that happens from time to time.

To be fair, while it's possible, I'm not sure it's the most likely explanation. In the wake of Henry Surtees' tragic death at Brands Hatch the previous weekend, and in the light of Massa's practice crash, the stewards perhaps had reason to take an especially dim view of a team deliberately allowing a car with a wheel on the verge of flying off to continue back to pitlane. And besides, in these post-Todt, FOTA days, does the FIA really still stand for Ferrari International Assistance any longer?

What holed this particular theory below the water-line, though, was one of two further developments today - the news that Michael Schumacher will be returning to the cockpit to sub for Felipe Massa. To be honest I'm a little surprised that the German multiple world champion wants to get back into what does not look an especially competitive Ferrari, without the undisputed number 1 status. At the age of 40, he'll be by some margin the oldest driver to have competed in contemporary Formula 1 for a long time, and still nursing injuries picked up while motorcycle racing earlier in the year, it's not clear he's really at full fitness. Past returns by retired world champions - think Mansell at Mclaren in 1995 or Alan Jones in the admittedly uncompetitive Lola in 1986, have not gone well.

All the same, it will be interesting to see how he goes, even if it does perhaps threaten to overshadow what is fast becoming a very intriguing title battle between Jenson Button and the Red Bull pair of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. It seems pretty clear that, even on hot days on circuits where mechanical grip counts for more than absolute aerodynamic efficiency, the Red Bull appears to be ahead in terms of pure pace now. On the other hand, Button has a very handy points advantage, and provided that Rubens Barrichello can be made to recognise the reality of the situation, it is at least clear that only one of the Brawn drivers can realistically walk away with the driver's title, while it is far from obvious even which of the two Red Bull drivers the team would be better off backing if they wanted to.

Today's other story, of course, which just might overshadow even the return of Schumacher, is the news that BMW is to pull out of the sport. After four years as a full manufacturer team (having previously provided engines to Williams) the Swiss-German squad appeared to be making real progress last year, with Kubica winning his and their first race, and being in contention for the title until the penultimate race. They've gone dramatically backwards this year and it has been interesting that both Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA have insinuated that this lies behind their withdrawal from the sport.

Which is of course entirely possible. Teams that are winning don't tend to quit. Teams that are embarrassing the owners, on the other hand, like Honda last year, do. That said, BMW were a leading light in FOTA and it will be interesting to see what the impact of their withdrawal will be on the sport. Perhaps the most ominous reading is that their decision to quit has little to do with either the global economic picture or the team's current lack of competitiveness (which may after all be temporary) but is a judgment on the way that the sport is being run. Ecclestone's tasteless comments about Hitler, Max Mosley's seemingly deliberate combativeness, and perhaps now the nagging suspicion that if Jean Todt wins the forthcoming FIA elections, little will really change.

There remains the question, too, of whether BMW will be the last of the manufacturer teams to pull the plug. The vultures have been circulating over the Renault team for some time now, and the FIA's decision to ban them from the European Grand Prix for doing nothing that other teams haven't done down the years will hardly have done anything to encourage them to stay. Toyota continue to burn vast amounts of cash achieving relatively little - with that first win looking no more likely than it has. And if Dietrich Mateschitz ever decides that he's got better things to do, say once he's picked up a World Title for his Red Bull team, a real hole would be left in the sport.

That's perhaps accentuating the negative. After all, there's supposed to be three new teams coming in next year, and there were several others who applied for entries only to be turned down by the FIA (cynics suggest because when the FIA was playing poker with FOTA, it wanted to keep some credible 'would be' entries up its sleeve). If these teams were thinking of entering in their own right, and weren't mere paper tigers, it shouldn't be beyond the resources of one or two of them to pick up the pieces left behind by BMW and Renault. And that's if Peter Sauber doesn't retake the helm at his old team, and Flavio Briatore can't find a friendly billionaire to take over at Renault.

Interesting times, then. I only hope that it doesn't overshadow what is fast turning into yet another intriguing world title battle, both between Red Bull and Brawn, and between Webber, Button and Vettel. There are times when it seems the F1 world is focused more on next season that on what is happening on the circuit on a Sunday afternoon. Not surprising, perhaps, at this time of year when all but a few teams and drivers will know by now that this is not to be their year (Hamilton or Raikkonen could quite easily win all the season's remaining races without standing any realistic chance of taking the driver's title) but a shame if an intriguing fight between three drivers and two teams which have never before been in this position ends up being overlooked.

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.

Au Revoir, Magny Cours

So it looks like we've just seen the last French Grand Prix, for the foreseeable future. I have to confess that my reaction, on first hearing the news, was so what? No more dreary, overtaking-free Grands Prix at Mangy Course? Who cares?

Still, as Joni Mitchell sang, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone... I have to confess that, I'd never really noticed how spectacular a modern F1 car looks through the Nurburgring chicane, or how tricky the Imola chicane is, with its blind apex, leading to the big stop at Chateau D'Eau. Come to that, Grande Courbe is pretty noteworthy these days, as one of relatively few really fast, really challenging corners on the F1 calendar. There was even a fair amount of overtaking last Sunday - with the Alonso's pass on Heidfeld into Imola, of all places, perhaps the single stand-out move of the season thus far.

There's another reason to regret the passing of the French Grand Prix, though. It is another sign that the sport is losing touch with its roots, treating its history with disdain. From an Anglo-centric perspective, it is easy to think of the UK as the natural home of motorsport, and to some extent that is true. More than half of all the F1 teams are based here, we've produced more Formula 1 champions than any other nation, and at the grass roots, we have a large number of circuits and a huge number of club-level championships.

But the sport did not originate in Britain. Motorsport was born on the other side of La Manche. The earliest city-to-city races were almost exclusively French affairs and the first race to carry the title Grand Prix took place at Le Mans in 1906. While its winner, Ferenc Szisz, was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is noteworthy that he won in a Renault - a French car. Those French roots are still reflected today in the fact that the sport's governing body is the Federation International De L'automobile, and has its home in Paris.

In the early years of Grand Prix racing, France was one of three major players. For much of the 1910s and 1920s, Germany's Mercedes Benz and Italy's Alfa Romeo and FIAT fought it out with French marques like Peugeot, Delage, Talbot and, most famously, Bugatti. Only as Mussolini and Hitler's regimes discovered the propaganda value of motorsport, and began to pump serious money into Alfa Romeo, Mercedes and Auto Union, did France's pre-eminence in the world of Grand Prix racing begin to decline.

Despite this, as the world stood on the brink of war in 1939, France could lay claim to 3 of the best racing drivers of the era: Robert Benoist, Louis Chiron and Jean-Pierre Wimille. Sadly, the Second World War claimed the life of Benoist, and ruined the career prospects of Chiron who was well into middle age by the time top level motorsport began to re-establish itself after the war. Wimille, who was 10 years younger than Chiron, and might have offered a serious threat to Fangio and Ascari in the early 1950s, was killed in practice for the 1949 Argentinian Grand Prix.

Perhaps the most dramatic indication of the decline of French motorsport in the post-war years is the fact that, after Charles Pozzi's win in the non-championship 1949 French Grand Prix, the home fans would have to wait 30 years for another home victory. There were some moderately successful French racing drivers in the intervening years. Maurice Trintignant won a couple of Grands Prix, as did Patrick Depailler. Francois Cevert just might have become an immensely successful driver in the mid 1970s, but was killed in practice for the US Grand Prix before we really got to see what he was capable of.

Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for much of the period between 1950 and 1980, French drivers paid the price for the fall of the French racing teams. Grand Prix teams may profess to hire on the basis of talent alone, and that may even be true, but a strong racing culture will inevitably breed more top F1 drivers. Surely it is not mere coincidence that the UK has produced more world drivers champions than any other country and has, over the same time period, dominated the world of F1 car manufacturing. If you doubt this, then ponder the otherwise unfathomnable lack of first rate German F1 drivers until the emergence of Michael Schumacher.

Things began to change in the 1970s when the state oil company, Elf, and the tobacco company, Winfield, began to put driver training and development programmes in place. They were probably the most involved such schemes of their time, and in 1980, they hit the jackpot, with the arrival in F1 of Alain Prost. Prost's debut season, at the struggling Mclaren team (in the pre-Ron Dennis days) netted only a trio of points finishes, but it was enough to impress the team bosses at Renault, who were very much a team on the up as the advantages of their turbo engine experience paid dividends. If you think Lewis Hamilton's exploits have been impressive this year (and I wouldn't argue with that), then consider this: On no occasion when the car lasted did Prost finish lower than 3rd - every race he finished, he finished on the podium. Still, with 9 retirements, even a late winning streak wasn't quite enough to put him in contention for the world title.

The 1982 season again saw Prost frustrated by the indifferent reliability of the Renault, but 1983 looked for sure to be his year. Sadly, the great French victory never came - Prost's relationship with the Renault team went into meltdown as the season neared its conclusion, with the performance of the car going off the boil, and Nelson Piquet snuck in to win his second title for Brabham. (As an aside, it is now generally reckoned that Piquet's late season form owed much to illegal fuel being used by Brabham, and Prost's 1983 Renault hangs from the ceiling of the the Chapel at the Musee Des Arts et Metiers in Paris - the French-built championship winning car that wasn't). Renault sank into oblivion, gone from F1 by the end of 1985, and Alain Prost went on to win 4 world championships, driving for English teams, and establish himself as without question the best French driver of all time.

Alain Prost's success appeared, superficially, to have a positive effect on French motorsport. A flood of drivers began to emerge from the Elf Driver programme and elsewhere, but just as one suspects that Javier Villa, Felix Porteiro and the hordes of Spanish single seater hopefuls are no match for Fernando Alonso, so Yannick Dalmas, Philippe Alliot, Philippe Streiff, Olivier Grouillard, Eric Bernard and Erik Comas were ultimately not from the very top drawer. Then, as the 1990s got into their stride, the Elf driver scheme became mired in the more general corruption scandals surround the oil giant, Evin's law put paid to tobacco sponsorship, and the number of French drivers in F1 shrank slowly back to the current figure of 0.

Without top level drivers, a country's interest in Formula 1 is liable to wither away. Witness the difficulties Bernie Ecclestone has in selling F1 to the Chinese or the Malaysians - or, for that matter, the Americans. That's bad news for race promoters, and in particular for the FFSA, who were faced with the difficulty of bringing large numbers of people to Magny Cours.

The French Grand Prix has been held in various locations over the years - the fantastic Mini-Nordschliefe at Charade, the daunting Rouen Les-Essarts and the sunny, relaxed Circuit Paul Ricard on the Riviera. Some of them were better, location wise than others. Some of them were better, as circuits than others (Reims was particularly dreary, now I think of it). Magny Cours, though is built in the middle of nowhere. Why? Our old friend, political corruption again. Magny Cours became the home of the French Grand Prix at the behest of the Mitterand government (the same bunch who threw endless state tobacco money at Guy Ligier's people for seemingly no return whatsoever) because, amongst other things, he is reputed to have had a lot of friends in the area who appreciated the construction contracts. It would be like closing Silverstone down and building its replacement in Northumberland, or north of Inverness. And so, with no home heroes to cheer and no nearby population to come and watch, it is perhaps no surprise that in the end, the French Grand Prix died a death.

With no teams (unless one counts the Enstone-based Renault), no drivers and no Grand Prix, the outlook for the future looks pretty bleak. Is there a chink of light? Yes, I think. For F1 is not the whole of motorsport. France has two iconic events, the Monte Carlo rally and the Le Mans 24 hour race. It has 3 time world champion Sebastien Loeb lording it over the rallying world in a Citroen C4 (I have a nagging suspicion that, given some serious track time, he'd be as good a circuit racer as anyone, too). It has Sebastien Bourdais, aiming for his fourth consecutive Champ Car title for Newman Haas. Now, will someone give him an F1 drive next year?

Les Autres

I had intended to pontificate at length on the subject of team orders and the FIA's dubiously motivated 'investigation' into Mclaren's activities at the Monaco Grand Prix. Thankfully, however, as I was bashing out my vitriolic rant, news came through that the FIA had seen sense and let the matter lie. Its a shame that we didn't see a fight all the way until at least the second set of pit stops at Monte Carlo, but there's to my mind a pretty significant difference between asking drivers to hold station and asking them to swap positions.

So instead, I feel it is time to take a break from what is a rather fascinating four way battle for supremacy at the front of the field, and in particular the relentless attention being given to one Lewis Hamilton and focus for a while on how the other new boys are doing.

Though you might not know it if you only ever read the popular press, there have been four other rookies, or near rookies on the grid this season. If you have the dubious pleasure of picking up the ITV coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking Lewis Hamilton the least experienced driver in the field, but in fact, the man with the least previous experience of powerful single seaters, let alone F1 mileage, is Spyker new boy Adrian Sutil.

Sutil, unlike Hamilton, has hardly had an error free start to his F1 career (offs in four of his five Grands Prix so far). On the plus side, though, he has looked very fast from the off - comfortably outpacing his more experienced team mate Christijan Albers. And remember, Albers had little trouble seeing off Monteiro last year. At Monaco, he went one better and outqualified Takuma Sato and Ralf Schumacher. Frankly, being anywhere other than on the back row is always going to be a pretty impressive achievement in the primitive and underfunded Spyker .

Even the mistakes are somewhat more excusable given his more limited testing mileage, the fact that he is trying to make a name for himself in a desperately slow car, and the fact that those at the wrong end of the grid are far more likely to get caught up in opening lap chaos.

The other absolute beginner on the grid, of course, is Heikki Kovalainen. Unlie Sutil or Hamilton, he has very extensive F1 testing experience, having been Renault's official test driver throughout last year. However, one wonders if this was necessarily the best preparation for his first F1 season, or whether it has simply left him race rusty, and unused to driving at the full potential of the car. Testing doesn't normally involve driving at 10/10th, and perhaps after a while it becomes habit-forming. Certainly this might help to explain not only his performance, but also the rather lacklustre start of F1 returnee Alex Wurz over at Williams.

In a way, I feel rather sorry for the Finn. If Hamilton had not come along and redefined what it is possible for an F1 novice to achieve, then Kovalainen's performances in the Renault perhaps wouldn't look so bad. Sure, he was awful in Australia and utterly anonymous in the midfield in Monaco, but in Bahrain and Malaysia he looked the equal of the vastly more experienced Fisichella, and in Spain he actually appeared the quicker of the two.

Given that Fisichella has comprehensively outpaced all but one of his former team mates, including Jenson Button and Felipe Massa, that's perhaps not bad going for a newcomer. Or it wouldn't be, if it wasn't for the fact that said former team mate is himself being given a much harder time by another new boy than Fisichella ever managed to give him. Which, if nothing else, has raised the bar for what is possible for a rookie in the right car, even against the most experienced of team mates. Perhaps he is suffering for the fact that this year's Renault is emphatically not of the same kind of quality as the 2006 car. Certainly it has been said before that while anyone with enough natural talent can be quick in a good, quick car, experience comes to the fore in getting the best out of a more troublesome machine.

Aside from the genuine debutants, there are two nearly new boys - men who have raced before, but who are doing their first full season this year. Anthony Davidson's F1 career, until this year, had been brief and disappointing. Two outings in the second Minardi in 2002 both ended in the gravel trap while a one-off run with BAR in 2004 lasted just a handful of laps before the engine gave up. His potential, therefore, remained something of an unknown when he was announced as Takuma Sato's partner at Super Aguri.

That, to some extent, is how he remains. There has been little to separate him from his more experienced team mate, but it is very hard to know how well, or how badly, the Super Aguri pair are doing. They are in effect running a well proven car on a very minimal budget with the wrong tyres on it. When Davidson or Sato start mixing it with the Williams and Toyotas, it is hard to know whether that is because they are doing an outstanding job, or because a year old Honda on Bridgestone tyres with a group of experienced ex-Arrows men doing the engineering is a pretty serious proposition.

Similar question marks surround the performance of the other nearly-new boy, Robert Kubica. Some people expected that, given his explosive debut last year, he would blow Nick Heidfeld away this season. It hasn't quite worked out that way. The BMW has proven to be a seriously competitive piece of kit, but it has generally been the hitherto anonymous German who has got the most out of it. It is hard to know quite why this should be - perhaps Heidfeld has found having Kubica alongside him a wake up call, perhaps after 8 years in F1, he is finding that having a competitive car has sparked his motivation. Or perhaps Kubica, like Alonso and Raikkonen, is simply struggling to adapt to the very different demands of the new Bridgestone rubber.

Whatever way one looks at it though, the mixed fortunes of what is to my mind, the most promising set of F1 rookies in a very long time is a significant story in itself. It would be a shame if it were entirely lost in the hype surrounding the undoubtedly highly talented Lewis Hamilton.

Post Script - Motorsportsramblings will take a one week break next week. I'll tell you why when I get back...

How to go Motor Racing

Peter Sauber's old boys are doing rather well aren't they. There's little doubt that, after the first 3 races, Ferrari and Mclaren are some way out in front of the field, but contrary to what might have been expected, it is BMW which is leading the chasing pack. Renault, Williams, Toyota, Honda and Red Bull would certainly be happy to swap their position with that of the Swiss/German team.

I have to confess that when BMW took over the Sauber team, I didn't think any good would ever come of it. I wasn't alone on this, either - Mike Lawrence confidently predicted that they would never win a race - save in the kind of circumstances which led to Giancarlo Fisichella's shock win for Jordan at Interlagos in 2003. The doubters had good reason to be pessimistic. After all, Mario Thiessen had spent six years trying and failing to win the world championship with Williams - a real racer's team which had won multiple titles with Renault, Honda and Cosworth. One got the impression that both parties were more interested in apportioning blame for failure than in seeking success. Certainly, there appeared to be a degree of resentment from Frank's men at what they saw as inappropriate meddling on the chassis side of things. The odds seemed against Thiessen achieving anything with the solid and respectable, but hardly front-running Sauber team. It looked for all the world that BMW's board had sanctioned a colossal ego-trip on the part of their motor-racing chief.

And yet it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe Thiessen was simply capable of much more when given complete control. Maybe Frank Williams and Patrick Head are simply out of touch these days. Maybe the shared Germanic culture of Sauber and BMW has smoothed working relations, but BMW have emerged as the front running full manufacturer team in just their second season of F1.

This begs an interesting question. If, for example, Volkswagen's board was looking at putting together an F1 programme, what lessons are there to be learned about how to go about it. More importantly, perhaps, what traps should definitely be avoided. Here are 6 useful pointers:

Resist the temptation to start from scratch

Formula 1 is a seriously complicated business these days. The balance of power between the teams may shift from one year to the next, but all are relying on a vast bank of knowledge and past experience. Toyota have spent perhaps more than any other team in establishing their Formula 1 team over the past five years, and yet still it has not paid off. BMW and Renault, on the other hand, have done well out of buying up a midfield team and injecting fresh capital. Chassis manufacture, in particular, remains something of a black art even now, and its better to buy in the experience of an existing privateer team. Going further back, Renault did everything in house first time around, and while they came close to winning the title in 1983, there is little doubt that they squandered a huge early advantage with their turbo engines because they didn't know enough about chassis building. Michiel Mol, and perhaps even Dietrich Mateschitz or Frank Williams could probably be persuaded to sell at the right price.

Leave the job to the racing people

I may not be Mario Theissen's greatest fan, but he has been around motor racing for a long time and he understands how the business works. Likewise, Renault have taken a very hands-off approach to the running of their race team. They have left the Enstone team in the guiding hands of Flavio Briatore, a man who may not understand what makes a car fast, but certainly knows how to manage racing people. By contrast, Toyota have always more directly involved their company's senior management, and recently, it appears Honda have begun to head down the same track. The task of building two fast racing cars is very different from that of building hundreds of thousands of reliable cars that people want to buy. Don't assume the skills are interchangeable.

Don't hire and fire

Surely nobody made a bigger mess of running their works Formula 1 team than Ford/Jaguar did. In the five years they were in F1, they got through countless team principals and managers - Neil Ressler, Niki Lauda, Bobby Rahal, Tony Purnell and Dave Pitchforth. Nobody was in the job long enough, or was given enough freedom, to turn things around. It's worth remembering, too, that top F1 people tend to come with massive egos and an unshakeable belief that they are right and senior management are wrong. Let them think that. When it comes to F1, they're probably right. Toyota and Honda are widely rumoured to have sacked Geoff Willis and Mike Gascoygne because they showed insufficient respect for company bigwigs, and look where that got them. Renault and BMW, on the other hand, have tended to be able to keep hold of their technical people.

Don't think an F1 team is just another corporate department

I've pointed out before in a piece about Toyota that running an F1 team as if it is a department in a large corporation is unlikely to work out. Recent anonymous articles from a Honda insider at Pitpass indicate that the same problem is infecting them now. I think it was Jackie Stewart who said that an F1 team should have a "corner shop" rather than a "big store" mentality. This means a degree of flexibility and a distrust of strict hierarchies that is uncommon in any large commercial organisation. Renault, in particular, seem to have done a very good job of maintaining this feel to their race team, and the result is that the best people want to work for them, even though they are not thought to offer the same kind of financial incentives as, say, Toyota or Mclaren.

Making sure that the parent company doesnt interfere with the operational decisions of the team for non-racing reasons is equally important. When Jaguar came into F1, they had a much greater budget than in their later years but it was squandered on things like ensuring that the computer systems were in line with Ford company procurement policy. Toyota's switch to Bridgestone tyres in 2006, long after the team had begun designing their 06 car around Michelin rubber was rumoured to be similarly motivated by corporate, rather than racing reasons (Toyota road cars come with Bridgestone, rather than Michelin tyres, apparently). The long and the short of it is that F1 is too cut-throat a business to allow for these kind of compromises.

Sort out the drivers

Getting the right drivers is a notoriously tricky business. As Patrick Head once said, the problem is that its always a bit of a shot in the dark. There are, however, some obvious mistakes to avoid. Don't pay over the odds for a driver who is clearly not from the very top drawer. There is really very little reason to pay more than, say £2m to any driver who is not Raikkonen, Alonso or (it would now seem) Hamilton. In particular, there really is no earthly explanation for why Toyota have made Ralf Schumacher the second highest paid driver in the F1 paddock. He's not necessarily a bad choice of driver for Toyota. He's competent and fast, if not quite from the very top drawer, and he arguably makes more sense than an unproven youngster, but there is no way he is worth what he is paid. Jaguar Racing, who made pretty much every mistake in the book, made an arguably even greater error in paying a vast fortune to Eddie Irvine to tool around in a series of awful Jaguars for 3 years.

Ask whether its really worth it...

I don't have the definitive answer to the question of whether "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" really holds true. I think that various marques have enhanced their image by their involvement in F1. This may have helped them to sell cars. It may not have done. It is entirely possible that advertising/branding itself is a great swindle perpetrated on the industrial classes by cunning arts and media studies graduates. That's for another time. What I do know is that Mercedes stick to building engines, and leave the racing car manufacturing to Mclaren. It saves them an awful lot of work, and right now, I'm not sure they're getting any less positive publicity than they would if the car was simply a 'Mercedes'. In fact, by being directly associated with a famous racing name like Mclaren, they might even benefit more. Did winning the world title as 'Renault' really do Renault any more for their image than winning it as the engine supplier to Williams or Benetton? Perhaps Toyota should sell the racing team and jump into bed with Williams...