SofaF1

A case of so close and yet so far for them last year. But with that sense of loss for the championship and Michael will they be able to pull it back together with the new team.

The drivers

Kimi comes in to this season with something to prove. The greatest drivers should be able to drive around a failing car. There were flashes of this last year but there were certainly points where it seamed the whole team including Kimi had decided not to bother. And that’s not the behaviour you expect from somebody who wants to be World Champion. He has the speed but will he be able to adapt to the Ferrari culture? Despite all of these questions we know that he’s still lightning fast when he has the car under him. McClaren has a lot to do to catch Ferrari. He must start the season as favourite. But if he doesn’t deliver with such favorable conditions big questions will start being asked.

If Kimi was a let down last year then Massa was a revelation. Because of a willingness to learn he was one of the only drivers last year who was actually getting faster on his own bat rather than simply waiting for his car to catch up. Certainly with his relationship with team principal Jean Todt being so strong he will now be the best supported second driver in F1. But can he catch Kimi? He came close to Michael a few times last year. But I think we were already seeing some waning of the great man’s powers. If he can catch Kimi in the same car then he’s truely arrived.

The team

Well Ferrari have had the biggest shake up of all the teams. The core has been ripped out with Michael and Ross on their respective ways. And there are many rumours that this might be the last year for Jean Todt too, although there is a possibility of Ross coming back it will still be a very disrupted year for them.

The problems

If the team doesn’t work together then things might be tough. Especially with the amount of personal pressure on Kimi, although you have to imagine that he takes that kind of thing in his stride.

Outside Bet?

Ross Brawn is back on the pit wall by Australia.

More Likely?

Kimi wins his first world championship with Ferrari.

The 2007 season is shaping up to be an exciting one. With new drivers, old drivers in different teams, changes within the teams themselves and everybody claiming to have a good car after winter testing, its hard to guess how it is all going to pan out.

Since the SofaF1 world will be humming with wisdom, driver form comment, pole polls, wishful thinking and Nick’s crazy prediction of the week, why not try and harness some of the predictive effort into a bit of a competition?

This would require the competitors (i’m guessing at just us 3!) to submit a prediction to SofaF1, before each qualifying session and race, of the top 8 (or something) positions for each. Points would then be awarded on some basis and the race (from the sofa) would be on.

Anyway its just an idea at this stage, but if you think it is worth a go and we can think up a scoring system then i am happy to administrate the point accumulation.

Double world champions last year. But with Alonso gone what can they do to keep momentum?

Drivers

Fisi is no Alonso but at least he's won a race or two and he knows the team pretty well. However this is one of those situations where familiarity seems to have built contempt rather than respect.

Hekki seems to be super fast and it's going to be really interesting to see how it goes for him. Last year saw the promising Rosberg disappoint. But learning in a difficult car can be tricky – just ask Massa who came on in leaps and bounds once given the chance in a Ferrari. We don't yet know what the Renault will be like but it's hard to imagine it's going to be as bad as a Williams. And with his key rookie opponent being Hamilton in the "needing vast improvement" McLaren. And it's certainly going to be easier to look impressive next to Fisi than Alonso.

The team

The team have hardly changed other than a minor tweak to Pat Symonds role. Which is probably their biggest strength over Ferrari and McLaren where things have been moving a lot.

The Problems

The team don't think Fisi can win. But some of the team think that showing they can win even with Fisi will prove the car is the star. Both of these opinions will piss off their rather sensitive driver. As will Hekki beating him on occasion.

Outside bet?

Fisi quits or is fired before the end of the season.

More likely?

Renault end the season in fourth proving that the drivers are important in Formula one.

When Jenson Button finally won his first grand prix this year he was pretty cool about it. And spoke about how it had been a great vindication for all those years of trying without success. But at least one member of his group, his PA, was unable to contain her excitement about the whole situation.

Here’s some video of her going kind of crazy with excitement when he wins.

Last season was like one big sending off party for Michael Schumacher and now we're suffering from the hangover.

As I've often said, or at least tried to say, is that the on track action is really only part of the appeal of formula one. The over-reaching story is the most interesting part. And once you become invested in the story you find it hard to tear yourself away. Because unlike a soap or professional wrestling formula one isn't scripted.

But the end of a chapter (or considering it's scope volume) means the has been a little lull as everyone gets used to the idea that Michael isn't coming back. But in the aftermath everyone has shifted around using this chance to grab their moment at the top.

The big question for a year almost already defined by change is: do you want to be the most stable or the most radical?

   ‘Congratulation on the championship’, Ron said through gritted teeth.
   ‘Well,’ said Fernando, wiping sweat from his brow, and suddenly becoming very serious, ‘the thing about you guys is that you make it so difficult because you keep developing your cars.’
This was not the reply Ron was expecting.
   ‘You could be part of it’ he said, trying to make light of the comment, half-joking.
   ‘I’d like to be.’
Ron’s smile disappeared instantly. Suddenly the room was filled with noise, more people started arriving, Kimi and Juan Pablo, officials and the podium representatives.
   ‘Are you serious?’ he managed to ask as Fernando was being ushered away.
   ‘Yes’ came the reply, and Fernando nodded, emphasising his seriousness with his thick Spanish eyebrows.
Ron waited a moment as everyone left the room, now quiet and still again. He heard the roar from outside as the drivers stepped on to the podium.
   ‘Mr Dennis, we’re ready for you now’ said an official, poking his head back through the doorway, then disappearing.
Ron took a quick look around then did a Schumacher leap, jumping a foot from the ground, punching his fists in the air, and left the room singing to himself ‘Back in the saddle again!’.

I was just thinking, since we seem to be entering the awards season, how about a little competition of our own to round off the 2006 F1 season (arguably one of the more exciting seasons for a while)?

I propose that anyone interested can submit a contender for “Quote Of The Year” on these very pages and i’m sure we could find a suitable independent judge to decide the winner.

Whose quotes are eligable? Well, I reckon anyone recognisable as being involved in F1 in some capacity talking about anything, or any random person talking about F1 should cover most of the interesting, bizarre, ridiculous or hilarious things that sofaF1 might want to hear!

It might not work, but lets give it a go and see!

In this week’s Autosport Ron Dennis is quoted as saying some quite damaging things about the current drivers on the F1 grid. He is trying to justify his selection of Hamilton and says ‘We reviewed the whole grid and when we looked at the drivers other than the top three we felt that they had pretty much reached a plateau in their careers and there was no one that really shone’. So who does this hurt? Button I think especially, but also Webber, Fisichella and Barrichello.

He went on to say ‘I am distinctly unimpressed with the majority of drivers involved in F1’. Perhaps he is right to not be excited about some of them, but these remarks seem to be quite desperate, and quite deliberately ignorant of some of the great drivers around. Obviously, first off, he is still annoyed at losing Raikkonen. Then he fails to mention Kubica, Kovalainen, Rosberg and (coming soon!) Piquet (all of whom are wrapped up in other teams). Ron, it turns out, might have had no choice but to hire Hamilton – he might have walked to another team if he wasn’t given a race seat at McLaren.

McLaren have always seemed to be the thinkers of Formula 1. But for a while they seem to have had their mind on other things. Much as Ron likes to protest it he was distracted by first the McLaren motorhome and then the McLaren headquarters. In fact the running of the McLaren group as apposed to the racing part seems to have been his focus ever since Kimi arrived. A terrible shame as I hope Kimi will prove at Ferrari this year.

Taking his eye off of the ball like this meant that Adrian Newey couldn’t stay. And actually it was impossible to keep him. He’d done winning at McLaren, so why would he be interested in more of it. McLaren probably wasted time by keeping him on when he was desperate to do something else (he even considered designing racing boats at one point so he was pretty desperate).

But things started changing at McLaren just over a year ago. Personally I think Ron decided not to bother really competing in 2006, he didn’t expect to not even win one race but he did know it was a transition year before the start. He signed Alonso, he had a chance on Hamilton (at the beginning of the season he couldn’t have known how well Hamilton would settle over the course of the year). He finally knew what was happening with Adrian Newey so he could work out the new strategy. And probably the most important thing of all McLaren group finally made a profit last year. This has probably freed Ron from one of his personal challenges.

So what does this all mean? I think McLaren are going to come out next year all guns blazing and full of promise. Why? Because Ron’s started making proper decisions again. It was a ballsy move to hire Alonso out from under the noses of Renault, it’s another one to put a rookie alongside him and finally the move to hire Mika as a test driver is genius.

They know that every second you can get of testing is vital, and the testing you get earlier is even more vital to the cars development. And we know that Lewis Hamilton and Gary Paffett don’t have any F1 racing experience. And while we know that Pedro is a great tester and has some racing experience it is hardly the kind of thing that’s going to get a championship car ready. There’s been a lot of talk from McLaren that this is a one off thing and it came from Miki etc. But there was one quote from Ron which said something like “with Alonso unavailable and with Kimi and Juan-Pablo disinclined to help us we needed to turn to somebody else” which makes me feel that they are making the right decision. Mika will be able to tell very quickly how the car is hanging together. He won’t be able to tell them things like is this bit better than before or whatever that’s the other testers jobs. He’s going to talk to them about the raciness of the whole car and that’s really important.

For a while I really have felt that Ron has lost his ability to make a single decision. McLaren have a very complicated system using Bayesian Logic to basically make decisions for them (I’m going to talk about this in another article). And it would make the “right” decision but would it ever make the “ballsy” decision? This lead to McLaren having heavy fuel loads and putting the cars in the middle of the pack which lead to McLaren not winning. But this set of decisions of late remind me more of the Ron of old. The whiley fox who would say, “you just wait” and actually mean it.

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Hamilton gets 2007 McLaren drive: “Englishman Lewis Hamilton will drive for McLaren in Formula One next season.
The 21-year-old, the reigning champion of the GP2 feeder series, will be the first black driver to race in F1. “