SofaF1

Sorry for the delay I was a bit distracted this week.

So off to Spain where Max will launch the race against racism campaign / no-one will mention the war.

It’s the begining of the European season and the race which is often the best predictor of the season as a whole. There are some crazily accurate stats about the person who is on pole here winning the world championship.

Ferrari have their new nose cone ready for action and seem to be quite quick with it. They seem to be downplaying it’s importance and they wouldn’t possibly have a reason to lie about it.

The all important question is will McLaren be able to respond. And if they don’t will BMW be able to overtake them?

As usual we would love to hear your pole prediction and your top eight for the race.

Good luck!

I know i’ve raised this issue before but i have been thinking about it again recently and thought it was worth a mention.

Last year at the Canadian Grand Prix (i think?) Martin Brundle said he was a great one for statistics as Hamilton jumped into the championship lead in that more often than not the championship leader at that point in the year would go on to win the championship. Of course last year this wasn’t to be, but actually this upheld another set of statistics.

No European F2, F3000 or GP2 champion has ever won the F1 world championship (except when F1 was run to F2 rules back in the 50’s). I know Nick suggested that this was because any really good drivers were snapped up before they had a chance to and went straight to F1 and he may well be right but it is interesting nonetheless. These formulas (F2, F3000 and GP2) were/are supposed to be the feeder series for F1 but no one who won them seemed to have had much of a chance at the F1 Championship at all. Indeed ony 4 F3000/GP2 Champions have even won an F1 race let alone a championship. Alesi (1), Panis (1), Montoya (7) and Hamilton (5 currently).

Maybe it is a bit early to judge the GP2 series, and we do have 5 F3000/GP2 Champions in F1 currently, Heidfeld, Bourdais, Rosberg, Hamilton and Glock, and certainly Hamilton has showed he is more than capable of winning a championship, and last year he could have done, but didn’t. Very interesting.

On the flip side using these same statistics, people like Kovalainen and Piquet Jr could be in with a shout of the F1 title at some point, losing the GP2 title could actually be a good thing for their careers.

Did we know this? Sorry, I may be behind the times. New baby and that. When he grows up he wants to be a racing driver you know. Or an accountant. For a racing driver.

Where was I? Oh yes:

Formula One to phase in Kinetic Energy Recovery System from 2009-2013

@Alex: guess this might be termed ‘work-related’ 🙂

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but I’ve been very busy and getting this uploaded was a bit of a chore.

Nathan Lane was on The Daily Show and mentioned the Max Mosley scandal. As they point out different regions treat sex scandals quite differently. But for Max the problem is he is supposed to be the head of a global association not just a European one.

Note: There is no unsavoury content in this video.

You may have seen today that ITV won the best sport event BAFTA for their coverage of last year’s Canadian Grand Prix. I’m unsure to the extent to which this is based on how exciting the event was, or how good their coverage was. I don’t remember the ITV crew doing anything spectacular at that Grand Prix compared to the others. What I can ask, however, is whether that was the best race of the year, or whether they chose it because it was the first race Lewis won, and it happened to be on at prime time on a Sunday evening?

My vote would instead go with either the European Grand Prix, for its battle to the end between Massa and Alonso, or the rain-soaked Japanese Grand Prix in Fuji.

Nick recently wrote a post Ferrari are a nose in front of McLaren and I started writing a reply but it ended up being a bit longer so here it is…

It looks to me like next years developments will be really something special. A huge reduction in downforce which makes the cars slower matched by a return to slick tyres which will make up the difference (3 seconds a lap from the looks of testing).

Once you combine the two of these with a lack of traction control and no tyre blankets you’ve got a quite a bit more pure racing experience. This puts the onus back onto the drivers and that is something that really has to be good.

I do fear all of the cars looking the same like they do in GP2, or even worse them looking like they do in GP2. But also remember there is wheel to wheel racing there.

Passing for the sake of passing is not the point of Formula 1 of course. And I do worry about Push to Pass creating a mockery of genuine overtaking manouvers.

Probably the most important change with the lack of traction control was the removal of segregation. Now different drivers are faster on different parts of the track and can’t easily get around this (they used to be able to match the gear ratio to every corner as they went around). We are seeing a lot of close following this year because of this, there is a yo-yo-ing effect creating a natural opertunity for more overtaking. The problem is that right now when they get close they can’t do anything about it.

My guess is that next year the cars will look as different to each other as they do now. All these random flip ups will be gone and the cars might look a little bit less space age and we might be sad about that for a moment. But when we see the racing all will be forgiven.

F1 Fanatic has a set of fantastic videos. Bored of all the Max Mosley talk he’s decided to post theFunniest Video F1 moments. Make sure you check out the ones in the comments too…

You may have seen the story this week about Ferrari showing off their new nose cone. This is what I love about Formula 1. You’d expect it to be one of the struggling midfield teams to come up with radical aerodynamic experiments in order to try to bridge the gap to the front runners, but no, this time it’s Ferrari, currently the fastest car on the grid.

The problem is, however, that as of next year (I believe) this sort of device will be banned. The aim? To promote overtaking. Of course, I love to see cars race wheel to wheel, but I also love that Formula 1 cars are one step away from fighter jets. We seem to be getting incredibly close to having all the cars look and perform the same. It’s always a fine balance, but I believe next year the sport is going too far.

What the actual solution is to the ‘overtaking problem’, if there is one, nobody nose.

The most important thing about the weekend for BMW was that Kubica came in only one lap earlier than Kimi and only two laps earlier than Massa. This establishes one thing that is quite important and another thing that is very important.

First that they are not that far off the pace and that they may well be in the hunt for second place in the constructors championship.

Second, and most importantly, it shows that Dr Mario isn’t in it for the PR. There was some expectation that Robert might have been on a very low fuel strategy which had flattered to deceive. But actually while he was slightly light he was genuinely in the hunt.

Sadly for BMW one factor remains the whole front section of the grid was messed up. Kimi was in a lighter car but never quite got it together. Massa should have been on pole but made two mistakes on his flying lap. These things gave Robert the pole. He was of course the only driver to keep it on the black stuff properly and string the lap together so of course Robert deserves that pole. But the car itself isn’t quite as strong as it might have seemed. Something we could see in the race.

The big plus point for BMW is how far off the pace McLaren seem.

The big points this week go to Nick, who is starting to recover some of his 2007 form, and Fourstar who gets back some of his flair from Melbourne.

Clearly the key to doing well is picking the winner, Massa this week gave Nick a big boost when pretty much everyone else had written him off. Maybe that’s not quite true as Fourstar and GrifF1 did manage to hang on for one point each, but Igor and Alex didn’t rank him in the points at all!

Raikkonen was a good earner this week for all of us, though Nick and Igor took 2 points each, and everyone else had to settle for one. Kubica too was pretty good in the points stakes, Igor taking another 2, Alex, Fourstar, Nick and myself taking one which just leaving GrifF1 with nil point for the pole sitter.

Fourstar and Igor both scored points with Kovalainen, 2 and 1 respectively, which just leaves Fourstar and Alex to pick up the last point each with Rosberg who ended disappointingly down in 8th position after his strong weekend.

So after Round 3

1 Nick 7
2 Fourstar 6
3 Igor 5
4 Alex 3
5 Bearded Stew 2
5 GrifF1 2

Which gives the top 3 a whisker of a gap in the Championship

1 Nick 14
1 Fourstar 14
3 Igor 13
4 GrifF1 10
5 Bearded Stew 9
5 Alex 9

Well Massa gets off the starting blocks with a good solid win in Bahrain. Kubica had a great weekend, scoring a historic pole position on Saturday and running well in the race and Raikkonen held it all together to pick up 8 valuable points.

Hamilton was probably the biggest loser from the weekend, a series of problems culminating in a collision with Alonso’s Renault via a poor start pretty much ruined his afternoon. Kovalainen driving well again but still struggling for pace really for much of the race, but again scoring better than Hamilton (probably not too hard this time!)

BMW are really starting to make their mark out there on the track, both cars in great positions taking BMW to the top of the constructors points table.

I think at some point this year on a track that Ferrari struggle with there could be a BMW win if McLaren continue with their less than impressive pace.

But who knows, the season kicks off proper when we get to Europe in three weeks and the form book could have changed again completely.