How to ruin a F1 career

One brilliant race cannot save a F1 career merely help to prolong it but a single race can destroy a driver’s reputation and then destroy their future prospects in the sport.

Heikki Kovalainen came into F1 having just missed out on the inaugural GP2 crown in 2006 to Nico Rosberg. Ultimately, that didn’t matter as he made his debut with Renault for the 2007 season. The car wasn’t good enough to win races or even finish on the podium regularly but he had a stroke of luck when Alonso parted with McLaren at the end of that year, leaving a seat open for which Heikki was snapped up for.

For most of the 2008 season, Heikki simply couldn’t match the blistering pace of Lewis Hamilton but when the Italian Grand Prix came around, Lewis was off the pace and failed to make the third part in a rainy qualifying session leaving a perfect opportunity for him where he qualified second beaten only by Sebastian Vettel in the Toro Rosso.

The common consensus through the paddock that evening was that Heikki would cruise to his second win in a much superior car to the polesitter but Vettel shocked the world by powering his way to his first victory. From there, Heikki’s  McLaren career never really recovered and he spent 2009 being totally annihilated by Hamilton leading to him being replaced in the team by Jenson Button leaving Heikki to drive for the new back of the grid Lotus team.

The 2009 Belgian Grand Prix sprung a huge surprise in qualifying that year with Nick Heidfeld, Jarno Trulli and Giancarlo Fisichella taking up the first three places on the grid with Fisi taking the pole spot. All year long, the Force India was a car that brought up the rear of the pack but at Spa, the low drag nature of the car saw it become a frontrunner for the weekend in Fisi’s hands.

Giancarlo led the race from the first corner but at Les Combes, a four car pile up brought out the safety car. When the race restarted, Kimi Raikkonen was right on the tail of Fisi but crucially the Ferrari had a KERS system fitted where the Force India didn’t. So on the restart, Kimi got past Fisi on the run through Eau Rouge to Les Combes. Unfortunately for Fisi, his lack of straight line speed cost him a win but even so, a second place was hailed as a massive achievement for the smallest team in F1.

That race caught the eye of Ferrari who after the accident of Felipe Massa who had the hapless and desperately underperforming Luca Badouer as the replacement.  Ferrari approached Force India so Fisi could move to Ferrari which inevitably happened as the lure of a Ferrari drive is just irresistible to an Italian driver.

Fisi’s Ferrari career was a not a success and he retired for F1 at the end of the year. It was just a shame that a one brilliant race ended up finishing off a career which probably would have been extended into 2010 if he had stayed at the Force.

A lot of people will think this next choice is strange but for this driver, the events of the race in question sent his career freefalling into limbo for two years . The driver in question is Fernando Alonso.

As most people will recall, tensions between Hamilton and Alonso had reached boiling point by the summer and when Lewis overtook Alonso in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, Fernando responded by holding position in his pit box forcing Lewis to queue behind and wait for his tyres to be changed. In the end, Lewis lost enough time that he wasn’t able to start his final lap thanks to the session running of out of time which saw Alonso receiving a five place grid penalty for holding Lewis up.

In the morning of the race, Alonso threatened his bosses Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh by saying he would go to the FIA to be the whistleblower about the team having and using Ferrari secrets. Dennis though called his bluff and informed the FIA himself leading to the team being $100 million dollars. After the season had finished, the two parties agreed to terminate the contract leaving Alonso without a race winning car for two years until he got himself into a Ferrari for 2010.

Hispania: Worth buying them?

Everybody knows that the Hispania team are not flush with cash and they are trying desperately to raise more capital and build for the future but what assets do they currently have?

The biggest one is the entry to F1 which is the most valuable asset a team has got and therefore can be sold to aspiring new teams for many tens of millions to teams. They also have an engine deal with Cosworth which doesn’t cost the team an excessive amount thanks to Max Mosley’ cost cutting efforts.

In terms of team personnel, they are surprisingly well equipped, the former Honda technical director, Geoff Willis is thought to be designing the 2011 car according to sources around the team and Ben Agathangelou who was a part of Red Bull’s aero team until 2007 looks to be looking after the aero side. Former dentist, Colin ‘Chavski’  Kolles is still the boss of the team with veteran Daniel Audetto acting as team manager.

The driver front is looking clearer after the announcement that Narain Karthikeyan is making a return to F1, only six years after he left the old Jordan team. Announcing the deal on Twitter, Karthikeyan was straight up admitting the fact that Tata Cars had bought him his seat.

Presumably, Tata will bring plenty of cash to the team as Colin Kolles had been reported to have said the team can take a chance on the second driver who’s got a contract to race next year but doesn’t have a seat, presumably referring to Tonio Liuzzi.

The Xtrac gearbox which came packaged with the Cosworth engine has come in for some major criticism from all of the new teams for some major reliability problems with only the Virgin team keeping faith in it for 2011. Instead, Hispania have turned to Williams and done themselves a deal to run their gearboxes ensuring that at least one part of the car is competitive and reliable.

Most of the teams nowadays have their own factory, their own windtunnels and even their own supercomputers but do Hispania have any of that? No, they don’t even own the factory they run from, that’s owned by Kolles who used to run his old DTM team from there.

Sponsorship has been a problem ever since the day the team was founded by Adrian Campos who had the belief that simply being a Spanish team would guarantee sponsors to come flocking in. That didn’t materialise. Then Bruno Senna was hired to attract sponsors with his famous surname with that plan failing miserably.

Even so, the team has been attracting the attention of Spain’s biggest companies such as BBVA and Repsol albeit only rumoured in internet forums and Twitter. Where the money will come long term is a mystery and doesn’t look like being solved anytime in the near future.

The old 107% rule makes a return this year and had it been in force last year, the team would have failed to qualify on several occasions. Starting the year with a redeveloped version of the 2010 car which is the plan will see the team struggle to qualify for most of the races and that will scare potential sponsors away from the team.

Much investment is needed if the current owners or potential new owner come in and that’s just to get them competitive with Lotus and Virgin. If they ever want to be a midfield runner, they will have no choice but to have their own facilities and access to a wind tunnel. Until this happens, moving off the back of the grid seems implausible.

 

Giorgio Pantano: A Lost Talent?

As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, if you want to drive in F1, talent simply isn’t enough to get you there, just ask Sakon Yamamoto and Jereme D’Ambrosio.  As proven by those two, a chequebook is also needed and that was the one thing that 2008 GP2 champion Giorgio Pantano doesn’t have.

Pantano managed to attain one of the best CV’s imaginable in his karting days where he started at the tender age of nine and current Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg even admitted that he grew up with a poster of the Italian on his bedroom wall and has also described the Italian as being “probably the best of all time in karts.”  Two time champion Fernando Alonso even declared that Pantano was “invincible” and that in karting he had seen him as being “a really incredible talent’’.

His first chance in Formula One came in 2000, where Benetton brought him in for a test. But unfortunately for him, a F1 drive didn’t materialise so he decided to race in F3000 for the Astromega team in 2001 and he managed a win at Monza.  In that same year, he tested for McLaren but again nothing happened for him. Pantano carried on in F3000 for the next two years, winning two races for Durango in 2002 and then won the title in 2003. In that time, Minardi and Williams were the latest teams to test him but once again, his dream of a race seat didn’t happen for him.

Finally in 2004, Jaguar had approached Pantano for that elusive race seat and was so close to sealing a deal until Christian Klien torpedoed him for the drive with ten million Red Bull reasons for Jaguar.

Luckily for Giorgio, Eddie Jordan was after a cheap young driver so he made his debut with the cash strapped Irish team after finding some cash from to pay for the seat.  Results weren’t brilliant and he struggled to match his experienced teammate Nick Heidfeld and matters came to a head at the Canadian Grand Prix when a financial disagreement with the team saw him dropped for the weekend. He regained his seat afterwards but by the Chinese Grand Prix that year, he was dropped by the team again for the rest of the as a result of poor performances.

After leaving F1, Giorgio got himself into a GP2 car for the year  where he finished sixth in the title race with forty-nine points and in the middle of his GP2 activities, Giorgio found himself driving a Ganassi car for two road races in the Indy Racing League. He had hoped to continue with the team for 2006 for a full season but the team decided to downscale to two cars for Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon leaving Giorgio back in the shop window and back into GP2 after missing the first three rounds

He then signed a deal with Giancarlo Fisichella’s outfit where he managed three wins and finished fifth in the championship with forty-four points to his name.

Most teams outside of F1 don’t pay their drivers especially in the junior categories but in 2008, Giorgio bucked the trend and was paid a salary to drive for Campos Grand Prix. Four wins saw him winning the title and also got him a few records along the way becoming the most experienced GP2 driver and the driver with the most career wins.

Unfortunately for Giorgio, GP2 rules state that their champions are not allowed to return to the series leaving him looking for a return to F1. Teams didn’t like the fact that he was pushing thirty which in their eyes was too old to come to F1. He later admitted that he was frustrated about the lack of interest from teams and in an interview with Autosport said:

 

“I challenge anyone to have a CV as good as mine. I won two karting world titles, three European, three Italian, German F3, GP2 and was always at the front in F3000. But now I don’t have a seat in F1, is this a joke? That’s what it’s like now, if you don’t get in touch with people, no one looks for you. I feel abandoned. The only person behaving fairly has been Ecclestone. I called him a few days ago and after ten minutes he called me back. The only real drives still available are at Honda and Toro Rosso. Bernie told me that if anything moves, I’ll be the first to know. But I feel total indifference towards me. I read of Senna and Buemi but, really, what have they done? At this point, a guy in my situation must think that being a racing driver is not advantageous, doing another job would be better. Money is becoming the priority in order to race, talent doesn’t exist any more. I think I could still do six or seven years in F1 at high levels.”

Giorgio Pantano seems to be one of those drivers who was never in the right place in the right time but he was good enough to be in F1 after he won the GP2 title but his age counted against him. Now he can be added to the list of drivers who never got a chance to show off their talent properly.

 

F1′s Best Drivers (Not!)

Journeyman driver Jos ‘Jos the Boss’ Verstappen this week claimed that Vitaly Petrov was the “worst driver” on the grid this year adding that “The different in quality and in points with his teammate Robert Kubica was enormous, but it’s maybe not a fair comparison because Kubica – along with Vettel and Alonso – is the very best” and “Whether against a wall, spinning off or messing up his start, he ruined quite a few races and you can’t let that happen when you’re driving for a strong team like Renault.

A bit rich coming from the man who Enrique Bernoldi once thought was a good benchmark for himself until Frentzen came in and was two seconds a lap quicker than Verstappen ever was.

Reading Verstappen’s comments, it made me think about the worst drivers in the sport’s history. If you ever wanted a definitive list, you should head over to F1 Rejects and they have a vast library of uncompetitiveness. I’m going to pick out a few drivers who really didn’t deserve to have a place among the world’s elite drivers.

The first driver on my list is Alex Yoong from Malaysia who made his debut for Minardi in the final three races in 2001 (with the backing of what sounded like an ice cream company Magnum) to replace Tarso Marques who had a clause in his contract which allowed his team to replace him with somebody with a bigger cheque. His deal was then extended into 2002 but this time the Malaysian government stumped up the money for Yoong and in the process ended up title sponsoring the team.

His season started well after avoiding the first corner pile up and wound up seventh. From there though, he struggled to be anyway near in pace to his teammate Mark Webber and even failed to qualify in San Marino, Britain and Germany with deciding to rest/drop him for two races. He then returned for the final three races but his F1 career fizzled out at the end of the year.  It was maybe too soon for Yoong to come into F1 as he manage to prove himself to be a decent pedaller in Champ Car and A1GP.

Super Aguri was set up after a public outcry in Japan when the factory Honda team replaced Takuma Sato with Rubens Barrichello. Their mission was to have an all Japanese team which was to include the chassis, the engine and the drivers. Yuji Ide was the man chosen to partner Sato and it’s fair to say not many people in the paddock knew who he was and his first major problem was a big one. English the main language spoken in F1 and Ide didn’t speak a word of it so he found it near impossible to communicate with his team without a translator.

It also didn’t help Ide that his car was based around a four year Arrows car which certainly wasn’t setting the world on fire back in the day. Others drivers constantly complained about his lack of pace and experience from the get go and then the circus rolled into Imola. On the first lap, Ide closed the door on Christijan Albers and managed to tip the Spyker into a barrel roll. After the race, the FIA decided to remove his superlicence saying he needed more European experience before it would be considered for renewal. From there, Ide returned to race in Japan and stayed there ever since.

Another driver who came into F1 with more money than talent is another Japanese driver Sakon Yamamoto. Initially, he  joined the Super Aguri squad initially as a test and reserve driver after the previous incumbent Franck Montagny moved up to the race seat to replace Ide. As it was the team’s wish to have an all Japanese team, Montagny dropped down to test and swapped seats with Yamamoto. Unfortunately for Sakon, the all Japanese approach was dropped for 2007 leaving him without a race seat, but by midseason, Albers had run out of cash at Spyker so Yamamoto got another chance for the rest of that year. Again, Sakon lost his drive at season end this time thanks to team being bought out by Vijay Mallya and this time was replaced by Giancarlo Fisichella.

That was the last people though they would see of him but this year, he returned to help HRT with a much needed bucket of cash and once again failed to match up to his teammate despite the fact that rookie Bruno Senna barely had any racing experience under his belt.

Silly Season again

It’s now December with just over three months until the first race in Bahrain, five teams have yet to confirm their driver lineups for  on the official entry list, with Renault and Virgin the only teams to confirm their lead driver leaving Force India, Toro Rosso and Hispania the only teams not to name a single driver at all.

Toro Rosso however insist that Sebastian Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari will race for them with Daniel  Ricciardo being the reserve driver and will drive in the Friday morning practice. What they  didn’t say in their press release is that the two current incumbents, Buemi and Alguesuari are under massice pressure to succeed and should they fail to live up to expectations, they will be dropped in favour of Ricciardo midseason, in the same way that Scott Speed and Sebastian Bourdais were dropped midseason for Vettel and Alguesuari respectively.

Meanwhile, at Force India, all year long, there have been rumours that Adrian Sutil has been looking to move onto a bigger team namely Renault or Mercedes but that did not go down well with the boss leaving him so unhappy that he is now considering replacing him. One driver who Autosport seem to think will get a drive at the Force is the recently crowned DTM champion Paul di Resta who spent his weekends off with the team as their test and reserve driver. Tonio Liuzzi who is contracted for 2011 is not expected to be with the team next year with Williams refugee, Nico Hulkenberg thought to have jumped the queue for a seat ahead of him.

Vitaly Petrov made his F1 debut with the Renault team this year but there has been a question mark over whether or not he would stay for a second season mainly due to his mainly disappointing season and adding to this, there was a cash flow problem hanging over the team ever since Renault sold a 75% stake in the team to Genii Capital but now Lotus Cars have come in and bought the remaining 25% of the team from Renault guaranteeing the team’s future and any cash flow problems. Even so, Petrov’s Russian rubbles are still very attractive to the team and his sixth place in Abu Dhabi certainly improved the Russian’s reputation.

Drivers like Adrian Sutil, Timo Glock, Nick Heidfeld and Heikki Kovalainen have all been linked with the Enstone based squad all year long but team owner Gerard Lopez this week gave the strongest suggestion that Petrov will stay for another year by saying

“I have always said that my preferred choice would be to keep Vitaly in the car, He needs to accept to be in an English-speaking environment all the time and if he accepts those things, and if we believe that through those things he can deliver consistency, then there’s no question about who is going to be our second driver.”

Timo Glock felt the need to take to Twitter to announce that he was staying with the Virgin team for 2011 after he was left off the official entry list but after Glock announced himself, the team said on their own twitter account that the reason Glock wasn’t listed was because they wanted to confirm both drivers together. Lucas di Grassi has done a solid job in his rookie year but he didn’t bring much or any cash to the team so it did seem that Jerome D’Ambrosio was going to replace him especially after he took over the Brazilian’s seat in first practice for the final four races but recently the Russian car manufacturer, Marrusia bought a ‘significant’ stake in the team seemingly giving di Grassi a reprieve but it has now been rumoured that Mikhail Aleshin who just happens to be Russian might come in and steal di Grassi’s seat.

It would be a shame if di Grassi lost his drive as he is regarded as a good development driver in his work as a tester for Renault and developing the second generation GP2 car

There really isn’t much I can write about who might drive for Hispania next year but the only things the team possesses at the moment is a F1 entry, a Williams rear end and a Cosworth engine so drivers are the last thing on their mind with Colin Kolles even admitting that the line up will probably be sorted three days before the first race. The owners came out this week saying that the team isn’t for sale after rumours that it was but it probably is for sale if the right offer came in.

Is the F1 calendar too big?

Recently disposed FIA chairman Max Mosley has been chatting to the German press recently saying that twenty races in a year is too much. He then goes on to say that “In my honest opinion it will be too many Sunday’s for the fans who will have to adjust their Sunday afternoons to fit with the sport. At some point it becomes a nuisance”, then started musing on the fact that fans might start to miss individual races “If you start to skip a race, that can quickly become a habit and, when it comes to the TV ratings it leads to a snowball effect.”

This year, we have had an record equalling nineteen races with the calendar set to expand further for next year with the addition of the Indian Grand Prix and then in 2012, the US race returns to the calendar.

The Concorde Agreement which is signed by all of the teams has a clause in there stating that the calendar has a upper limit of seventeen races meaning that if there any more races, all the teams must be compensated for each extra race.  Taking this into account, I’ll have a go at picking out a seventeen race calendar and I will take out any races that I don’t think benefit the sport.

The season would start in Australia at Albert Park, then a week later move onto Malaysia ending the flyaway season two races earlier than usual.  The European season would now start with the now traditional Spanish grand prix but instead of the Circuit de Catalunya, the race would be hosted b6 the Aragon circuit and then from there, the teams would go off to Monaco. Then the teams would all go off to North America and visit the Circuit de Gilles Villeneuve and then a week later go back to the world famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The European season would then resume with the British Grand Prix at Silverstone as a standalone race. I would then bring back the A1 Ring now called the Red Bull Ring to be paired back to back with Hockenheim. After that, the championship would go to Bahrain and call in at Istanbul Park on the way home and then after that, the European season would finish at Monza.

For the end of the season, I would keep the flyaway races pretty much the same as they as already are but Abu Dhabi would be dropped and Singapore, Korea and Japan would be in a triple header all back to back. Finally, I would have the season finishing at Interlagos two weeks after the Japanese race.

With this calendar, I’ve tried to get rid of places where the racing is consistently terrible and counter intuitive to overtaking and I’ve tried to bunch the races together geographically. I’ve never understood why for example, the teams would all go to Melbourne, come back home and then fly back to Malaysia two weeks later, surely it’d be more cost effective to stay in the region for a couple of weeks rather lugging the equipment around the world for three extra times.

Whilst this topic was being discussed on the PF1 forum, Alienturnedhuman came up with the idea that inside of the main championship, mini championships could be created with a Pacific, European and Americas mini seasons. This would be one way of keeping the excitement levels up when the main championship might already have been decided and it help some promoters to generate some more interest in the events.

I would then have a mini three week championship in Asia, with Singapore, Korea and Japan all held back to back with the season finale to be held at Interlagos.

The disappointing thing about creating a fictional calendar is the fact that all of the tracks I’ve not included are only on the real calendar thanks to the amount of money that gets paid to Bernie Ecclestone. Ultimately though, I think the calendar will expanded to a maximum of 25 races but having seven or eight extra races will raise the costs significantly for the teams and may endanger some of the underfunded teams. (I’m looking at HRT in particular)

Did the new points system help Vettel to the title?

This year, Sebastian Vettel won the driver’s title by 4 points from Fernando Alonso but for the ringmaster of F1 Bernie Ecclestone, that is simply not good enough for him. For two years now, he has been actively campaigning for an Olympic style medal system to be brought in to replace the classic accumulative points system.

Instead of getting twenty five or ten points for a win, a driver would be given a gold medal and at the end of the season, the driver with the most gold medals would be the champion. If two drivers had the same amount of gold medals after the final race, it would then be decided by how many silvers and then if that was tied, it would go to most bronzes and then if that was tied, the champion would be determined by who had the most points using the 2010 points system.

If Bernie had managed to pushed his vision through for use this year, Vettel and Alonso would have tied with each other with 5 gold medals, they also tied each enough with silver and bronze medals so it reverted to points so with Vettel beating Alonso by four points, there wouldn’t have been a different champion this year.

I’ve been going through old points systems going back to the 80’s have to see if those systems might bring up a different champion. First of all, the system used from 2003 up to the end of the 2009 championship gave the winner ten points with the rest of the points going down to the 8th placed driver being given a point. (10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1)

Using that system, Vettel would still be the champion but this time only by five points from Alonso and nine points from his teammate. Hamilton under this system would have managed a three point victory over Webber and would only came a point away from matching Alonso’s tally. Button would have finished up with 87 points in the end and would have been out the title race after Brazil if this system was used.

For twelve years between 1991 and 2002, points were given to the top 6 drivers with ten for a win, six for second, four for third and three for fourth and so on. Again using this system, Vettel would have been champion with eighty four points but this time his winning margin would only have been three points over Alonso. This time, Hamilton and Webber would have matched each other point for point with seventy six each with Button a long way off with only sixty one points to his name.

The system used from 1981 to 1984 was virtually the same as the one above with the only difference being that the winner took nine points for a win instead of ten. Vettel would be champion again with seventy nine points with Alonso again being only three points behind. Hamilton and Webber are closely matched again with this system but Webber came out on with seventy five points beating his rival by two points.

I skipped the system from 85 to 90 because for those years instead of counting every result for the championship, only the best eleven results counted towards the title letting the drivers to have a few poor races without penalty. Again, the end result was that Vettel would have been champion by three points from Alonso staying with seventy nine points. Hamilton and Webber would have equalled themselves with points with seventy two apiece with Button bringing up the rear with fifty nine points.

After going through the different points systems dating back to the 80’s, I’m pretty certain that most systems would have given Vettel the title in any circumstance, the only systems that might have stopped him would be the ones where for example, the driver had to count their best eight results from the first nine races then count the seven best results from the last eight races.