SofaF1

I found this on another blog, a very funny alternative view of 2007. A short sample click through for the rest.

Pre-season testing continues in Spain. Toyota are one team encouraged by their winter progress and state that they will be looking for wins this season and the title the next. David Coulthard starts to press Red Bull for a decision on his 2008 race contract. Meanwhile, over in the United States, Juan Pablo Montoya surprises everybody by leaving NASCAR for a return to Champcars after an injury sustained playing snooker causes friction with his team.

http://f1.autohtone.net/11/2007-f1-championshipfrom-beginning-to-the-end/

So Scott Speed still hasn’t been confirmed as the Torro Rosso driver number 2 because his commitment or lack of it. You can hear Gerhard Berger talk about it here. It seems like Scott isn’t very good at taking criticisim which seems reasonably likely.

But I can’t help feeling that this is all a smoke screen, for what I don’t know, because they appear to be filming Scott Speed in the Red Bull Driver’s Mood Movie for 2007, which strikes me as the kind of thing that you’d only do if you’ve signed the guy. Especially as the movie is going to be broadcast at the Australian GP.

So with less than a month to go until the season starts, the beer is chillin’ and here at SofaF1 we’re just getting revved up.

We will have a number of new features rolling out over the next month as we countdown to Australia including from today our new poll. (It’s over there on the right unless you are looking at this in rss in which case you will just have to imagine it, or you know amble over to the site and take a look).

But as our regular contributors squeeze themselves back onto the sofa, we want to say thanks for sticking with us during the off-season, welcome back, and most importantly write some bloody comments (surely ‘feel free to take part’ – Ed).

Thanks for reading,

The SofaF1 Team.

Bridgestone are still planning to force teams to use two different tyre compounds during a race. The poll on itv-f1.com suggests that fans simply aren’t interested in this manufactured attempt to produce excitement. As much as Formula One is an automated sport, for most of us this is one step too far towards the artificial. With Schumacher gone, everyone’s looking forward to close and equal racing (even within the Ferrari team). Bridgestone feel they have to do something due to the lack of true competition from Michelin. Nothing can recover that particular challenge, but I think without the two-compound rule we could still have some interesting results. What has been emerging from the tests is that some drivers, and some teams, are coping better than others getting to grips with the new tyres. In particular Alonso and Kubica, with their aggressive turn-in style, are struggling, whereas Button is enjoying them. Most of the teams knew Michelin were leaving (probably since Indianapolis 2005), but they can’t have had the chance to develop their cars around the new tyres as well as those previously with Bridgestone. So, what I’m suggesting is that just the challenge of everyone on Bridgestone will be exciting enough this year. The race-long endruance of new rubber for some of the drivers and some of the teams will create a disparity that will give us good racing naturally. There’s no need to force it. And, indeed, this is a problem in general with many of the rule changes coming this year and soon – the engine freeze and aerodynamics etc. They aim to force overtaking and close racing when previous seasons have shown us it is exactly what we can’t control that produces these things.

Sorry, especially to Stew, for two video posts in one day but I really thought this was interesting. At Goodwood in 2006 they had Jackie Stewart and Nico Rosberg switch cars and describe what it was like. Nico seemed to have no problems with the old car and descibed it like he was driving in a lower formula. But Jackie explained that the new systems seemed very complicated and non-intuitive to him. In fairness Jackie is more likely to be honest than Nico is at this point in his career. But on the other hand, it is very interesting that the modern Formula 1 car seems so alien to a seasoned professional.

Was he rubbish? Or did he simply have the misfortune to be the top British racer when Michael Schumacher was at the height of his powers:

“He doesn’t give a shit, You can imagine him saying, ‘Okay, I’m done with F1, bye’ for no reason.” – Mr Villeneuve has made his pronouncement on Kimi saying that he thinks Massa is more likely to be team leader. You can read all about it here.

The thing is that Jacques is a friend of Massa’s so he’s probably slightly biased. And, although I can’t find it I seem to remember him saying something very similar when Montoya came to McLaren about how Kimi should get ready to see what a real driver was like. At the time I seem to remember thinking that it was less about bigging up Montoya and more about annoying Kimi and especially Coulthard.

But it might all have a lot more these days to do with making sure he gets in the press on what is the launch day of his début album “Private Paradise”.

To comfort everyone who is very disconcerted that there are no certainties anymore now that Michael has gone, I am going to accurately predict the order of the teams for the first few races:

Ferrari, McLaren, Renault, BMW, Honda, Toyota, Williams, Red Bull, Super-Aguri, Toro Rosso, Spyker.

If I am right, you all owe me £10 million.

Nick’s comment yesterday reminded me of something that has annoyed me for a few years now but came to the fore at the end of last year. It’s Martin Brundle’s description of Michael when he was asked if Michael was the best. He would always say that he felt Senna was the best but that Michael was the most complete driver.

I do think that there is a difference and I can understand the difference. Some people when they are asking who is the better driver mean who can go fastest round the track if put in the same car and given exactly the same conditions. But that’s a failure to understand the sport. The sport contains elements such as strategy, looking after your car at any given moment, fitness and bringing your team with you so they prepare the car you need.

In fact at the moment I would say you can see this being played out between the two men at the top of the sport. Many think that Kimi is faster than Alonso. But that Alonso is the more complete driver. This is why, in part, people are worried about Kimi at Ferrari where they are used to having somebody tell them exactly what they need.

By the way for those who are thinking, “why isn’t it the fastest who wins”? The answer is, “there’s a reason keep-y-up-y isn’t a sport”.

So if I agree with Martin about the difference between the two then what’s the problem? The problem is first that he describes a less complete driver the best status which seems slightly backwards logic but secondly it is that Martin always then goes on to say that we can never tell how good he really was because he never had a serious rival.

While I agree that by having a serious team mate means that we can see that Senna was awesome and perhaps the fastest driver ever. Surely if you want to win as many world championships as you can you want your whole team focused on you. You want to get them all behind you so you can go out and win. It’s part of being the most complete driver. And it’s part of being the best.

As I’ve been looking at the test times vaguely over the last few weeks I keep doing a stupid double take. I keep thinking to myself. Okay those numbers are interesting but we won’t know what they mean until we see Michael’s time. And then I realise that I’m being silly.

The problem isn’t that I’m missing Michael per say but more that I don’t know naturally what the baseline is. Michael always provided that. You always knew that Michael had this machine like consistency and to an extent the Ferrari has been the car to beat (even when the Renault was the fastest we knew it was fast because it could beat the Ferrari).

My point is that with all of the uncertainty of this year causing predictions to be difficult this is going to be the main one. We just don’t know how they all compare to Michael. The others don’t yet seem to have the gravitas.