SofaF1

So this is it. Not really a just a race but a championship decider. It all comes down to this. But with Renault so far ahead it is very much theirs to loose. But Ferrari can’t just wait for Renault to fall off the road they need to be in first and second place when they do.

The maths goes something like this. To win the drivers championship Michael needs to win the race and have Alonso score no points. For Alonso to win he just needs one point. For the constructors it’s slightly more complicated. If Ferrari want to win they need to come 1st and 2nd and Renault only need to come 3rd and 5th.

With the situation so obviously in Alonso’s favour the team will want to try and be conservative. Perhaps the most important thing for them is to finish.

To do this Renault have gone for a conservite package. All of the four drivers are on new engines this weekend. Ferrari have their two weekend engines tuned up to higher revs which they can do because they know they won’t have to last a second weekend. Alonso is going for a similar plan but with his revs left as they are in this more conservative approach. But they know that to ensure that they can keep ahead of the other teams they need to keep developing even now. And so Fisi is no another new spec engine. This engine has been designed specifically for just one race (rather than being a tuned up two race engine). So it is likely to be less reliable but faster.

The race is unusual in that it requires the drivers to go anti-clockwise and that the home drivers do surprisingly badly. Which may be a concern for Ferrari about Massa.

So what does this all mean? Well it means then end of a wonderful season, but in a season this exciting. Don’t expect anything but a fascinating race to the line.

Now that Paffett is ‘free to drive elsewhere’ it seems inevitable that Hamilton will be partnering Alonso next year. McLaren could go with De la Rosa, but I think the temptation, and the media hype, is too much for them. Do you think he’ll match up against Alonso? I think he’ll be terribly out-performed, but will nonetheless put in some impressive drives/qualifying sessions to ensure himself another year or two.

Other than that, despite the huge changes happening next year (Schumacher leaving, Alonso to McLaren, Kimi to Ferrari) – there is not much else left in the driver market. I hope Montiero keeps his drive – maybe Albers should have gone. The two Toyota drivers definitely weren’t worth keeping. Nor were the two Toro Rosso ones – both, as Martin said in Japan, have had far too many accidents. Super Aguri will no doubt keep Sato and swap other Japanese drivers depending on whether they’re banned or not, or maybe they’ll give Davidson a chance? Overall, it’s a hard year for new drivers to get into F1. I would’ve liked to have seen Piquet get a race drive, but he’s playing it sensible with a testing role for Renault.

In response to Adrian’s comment:

It’s really difficult to achieve this kind of thing in F1. But in essence it has happened from time to time without people appealing the outcome (or rather without those appeals winning).

Four times in the last 20 years the world championship has been decided by one driver driving his rival off of the road, thus securing the championship. Each time it was to maintain the points advantage that they had going into the race.

In 1989 Prost made a deliberately dodgy move across on Senna to keep position, the situation was reversed the next year when as Senna put it he “aimed for Prost”. Both of these situations were allowed to stand.

In 1994 Michael took out Damon Hill to secure the championship and this too was allowed to stand (it has been stated recently that Williams [Damon and Senna’s team] didn’t drag it to the court because they were still reeling from Senna’s death earlier in the year).

But in 1997 when Michael tried the trick for the final time he messed it up. He didn’t successfully knock Villeneuve off the track, but did manage to take himself off. Which meant that Jaques won the championship and the marshals afterwards accused Schumacher of such dangerous driving in the incident that they stripped him of all of his points from the year.

Some have said that the climate had changed by the time Michael tried his final attempt. And that in fact the climate of Formula 1 had changed after Senna’s death and that drivers should have been so cavalier after that. And that Michael had only really got away with it because Williams didn’t appeal because they were in such disarray.

But actually the real reason seems to be that you should only do something that reckless if it’s going to work. Bernie will do anything in his power not to have the world champion decided in an anonymous court somewhere. He wants it decided on the track dirty or not. And he would put enormous pressure on the teams not to sue in this situation. And in 1994 he had an extra stick to beat Frank Williams with. He was able to say something along the lines of “well the sport is already loosing credibility and viewers because of Senna’s death, we better not confuse the public any further – drop the case”.

But in 1997 Michael messed it up and didn’t make it stick. So at the end of the race before the Marshals did anything the world championship was decided for Villeneuve. So the Marshals had free reign to punish him, and in many ways his punishment was that harsh because he was being punished for 1994 as well. (Technically for those keeping score of the stats, they stripped him of his seasons points but not his wins. This is why Michaels wins and points tally don’t add up – crazy huh?).

So what of this occasion? Well in all of the previous situations the driver just had to stop his rival from finishing because going into the race they were in the lead in the championship. And as we’ve seen even that is hard enough sometimes. But this time Michael also needs to win the race.

So he’d have to delegate. The difficulty of this is massive. To begin with drivers don’t like following team orders at the best of times. Also the risk for Massa would be all of his points being taken away, a risk to his life (something that if you’re winning for somebody else would probably seem more important to you all of a sudden) and with no real upside for him. But maybe you could convince him, for the good of the team, to do it.

But the team wouldn’t want him to. Why? Because of the constructors championship. Ferrari really want to win this because even if Michael wins he’s about to swan off with the number 1 (I did write an article about this on my other site for some reason: Being Number 1) and so they need to win the constructors. At the moment they are 9 points behind Renault. So lets do a bit of maths here…

Say it goes:
1 – Michael – 10 points
2 – Massa – 8 points
3 – Alonso – 6 points
4 – Fisi – 5 points

Which means net Ferrari make up: 7 points. Leaving them just 2 down. It’s still not enough to win the constructors, which is a key point anyway. But imagine Massa takes out Alonso to help Michael win? In that case they would be 7 points behind Renault. Obviously neither of these is a winning strategy but. To win naturally they only need 1 additional driver ahead of the Renault pack (or possibly more likely Alonso will be in third but two drivers between him and Fisi). Whereas if Massa takes out Fisi then they’ll have to round up someone else to take out Fisi.

I’m not saying it’s impossible but it’s just much harder, this would all change if Fisi or Alonso just stopped somewhere unrelated to Ferrari.

So no, I don’t think Michael will cheat this time. The risk is too great. But if a Ferrari engineer happened to be walking past an open Renault engine and throw in a few washers in then that might happen.

Renault’s party on Sunday night must have been muted. They’ve won, but not quite yet. They can celebrate, almost. All they have to do next weekend is play it safe, but playing it safe is a very dangerous policy. Alonso has to drive aggressively, otherwise he could easily have an accident, or fall off the road. Remember 2003? Michael had to score one point, and Kimi had to win the race. In the end, Rubens won the race preventing that eventuality from even happening, but Michael had huge problems scoring that one point. Will it be the same for Alonso?

Incidentally, if Michael had won this year (and he still might) then he’d have won the championship as many times as he’s lost it (8 wins, 8 losses). I think that’s the incredible statistic he was aiming for. Now, however, it will be 9 losses, 7 wins. Not quite so good. Alonso is 2 wins, 3 losses. Not bad for a rookie. I remember Michael saying he’d give up when someone came along to challenge him. Do you think he’s finally accepted Alonso is that man?

This weekend I was increasingly annoyed by James Allen’s notion of ‘never giving up’. He used it incessantly during the race, and in his review of the race on itv-f1.com. He was claiming it was Schumacher’s ‘motto’, and that it has now become Alonso’s: this race being proof of how he never gives up.

I’ve got two problems with this. The first is that no driver ever gives up. It isn’t a motto, it’s the principle behind the whole sport, in fact behind every sport when any sportsman enters an event. They don’t give up until the game/race is over. That’s what sportsmen do. It isn’t a motto particular to any one or two. Everyone knows if you want to win that’s what you have to do.

My second problem is that whilst ‘never give up’ is true for an event, it isn’t a general motto for a sportsman’s life, because part of the very nature of being a sportsman is being able to know when to give up. There comes a point in every race when a driver does give up (if nothing else, at the chequered flag). Michael has given up on the championship, even though he could still win it. And more importantly, Michael has given up on F1 when clearly if he continued next year he’d still have a chance of winning. Michael, if he’s lucky, will live to about 80 years old – ie, the majority of his life will be out of Formula 1. This bizarrely short amount of life dedicated to one career is particular only to sportsman.

So, I wish James would stop saying his motto, because it is his motto, not Michael’s and not Fernando’s. James just invented it for himself. It doesn’t actually mean anything.

Will Michael get any satisfaction, sitting on his flight back home, from knowing he beat Alonso fairly today, and that it was only his car that let him down? (Whereas when Alonso failed at Monza, he was behind Michael). I doubt it. This is the way of Formula 1. Michael knows that. You could see it on his face as he trudged back to the pits to shake the hands of all of his mechanics. He had done his best, but it didn’t matter. He had driven to win when it didn’t seem possible in China, and he had a (uneasy) 5 second gap to Alonso and looked like maintaining it to the end. He had, you might say, won the championship on lap 34.

But on lap 35 ITV went, quite understandably, to an advertisement break. Nothing, after all, was going to happen now until the end of the race. Once again, however, they missed a crucial moment in F1 history. Schumacher goes out of the race, and out of the sport, in his first Ferrari engine failure since 2001. This anticlimax to the season will also mean that the next race, which due to its evening slot was bound to draw huge viewing figures, will be watched by only the true fans, and the truly insane Schumacher-lovers who think he can still do it…

Before the race started Ted mentioned in the race build up that Michael hadn’t lost an engine since Indianapolis 2001 which was really odd. The only reason he mentioned it was to highlight that Alonso’s engine faliure was more recent. But it was really an odd thing to mention. So I think he jinxed it. It was either that or Nick and I saying to each other that we thought Michael was taking it easy.

I wonder what this means for Ferrari’s homologated engine next year.

Just posting to prove I’m online and ready for this morning’s race. Are you?

It’s warm and sunny in Suzuka, but how is Michael going to get past Massa? How far will the Renaults get up the grid from their fast starts? Everything is pointing Ferrari’s way, but we were saying that in Spain when Renault won easily, and we must always remember that F1 in reverse is IF.

Those were Mark Webber’s words describing Alonso yesterday. This weekend he’ll really have to be because Michael is on fire at the moment and although these things probably mean nothing these days Alonso has never won in Japan and Michael has won there seven times.

That’s not the only thing in Michael’s favour. The Bridgestones and Ferrari always do well here. But the story is really about the chances Renault are simply giving away.

As we know in the run up to the race Alonso has dissed his own team for not supporting him enough which is likely to cause him more problems not less. Renault have also attempted a re-gig of the pit crew which is particularly dangerous coming as it does in a week where there’s not really been any testing time. And finally Flavio Briatore has come in to diffuse the situation – which is not necessarily the best strategy the world has ever seen.

In Flavio’s press release he says that he’s sorted everything out, cleared the air, and made everything fine. That he’s made it clear to Alonso that everyone is behind him and made it clear to the team that Alonso is behind them too. But then he couldn’t help but slip in a detail saying firstly that it was the teams fault about the wheel nut in Hungary which probably has pissed of the team a bit. And then this quote from him about China, “It was impossible to keep Fisi behind and hold Michael [Schumacher]. You guys saw the race. We never expected the graining, and we changed the tyre only because it was requested by the driver.” So China’s tyre thing was Alonso’s fault – that’s what Briatore slipped in. Up until this point that too had been a team decision. So with Flav’s own form of diffusion well and truly on the warpath I’m sure Renault are going to have some trouble working cohesively which is exactly what they don’t need at this point. All they need now is a choice comment from Ferrari, something like “we would never reveal whose decision it was to change a tyre and we think it’s very unfair of Renault to do such a thing to their driver” and there will be a full scale blow up.

So with what’s going wrong at Renault lets look at the positives. They were really unlucky in China. Fair play to Michael he made that race work for him and I don’t want to diminish that one bit however there were a variety of chances which Renault couldn’t or didn’t exploit last weekend which were mainly luck or bad decision making rather than having a slower car. Which means these are things you should be able to fix in a single week (at least if you are talking about them you should). There is a strong chance of wet weather again in Japan and the Bridgestone still has problems in the wet. The other aspect of this is that the Bridgestone wet weather trick is out of the bag now and there is no way that Pat Symonds at Renault didn’t notice. The Bridgestones don’t work as well at the Michelans in the wet, but work better than the Michelans in a drying line after time. They clearly hold themselves together better, and detierate less. This is the reason that Michael was able to pull himself up to sixth. His mega middle qualifying session was all him just being amazing, but once he was in the final session he ran down one set of tyres and everyone went out and helped him dry the racing line. And a very similar situation happened in the race.

The problem for Michael is that once people know that this is the only way his tyres can operate then that means they know exactly what his strategy will be. That’s the kind of information you don’t really want to have given away to somebody like Pat.

The bottom line is this, Michael and Alonso are determined to win. And this two race championship is about to begin. Michael could win the World Championship on Sunday. But it’s just possible that he’s already won it psychologically.

The only little fly in the ointment of the two great men is a certain Kimi Raikkonen. We know he’s fast in Suzuka lest we forget he won the race from 17th place last year. And we know that McLaren was flying last week before it fell apart – again. So if Kimi manages to get some selotape past the scrutineers then he might be in with a chance of winning the race.

Alonso, who has been so lauded as the old head on young shoulders in Formula 1 is falling apart psychologically. It’s been getting worse and worse, and frankly the only thing that could have rescued his situation was the big win last weekend which never came.

For about 10 races Renault would arrive each weekend saying things like “yeah we don’t think we’re going to be doing very much this weekend, Ferrari have the clear advantage”. And then they would wipe the floor with Ferrari which was a great psychological trick as it meant that they were implying Ferrari had thrown away a good chance. Unfortunately Ferrari started believing the hype and started winning races. And ever since then Renault have gone into reverse saying that they have the best package and that they know they are super strong going into the weekend. But then they find that Ferrari have won the race and have managed to be hoist by the their own petard. Now it looks like Renault are throwing away their chances and the only people causing this sensation is Renault themselves.

The fact that they have been lying so much for so long makes such claims as Pat Symonds current one that he knows the Renault will be fast in Japan because it’s similar to Silverstone difficult to work out. Not only does it sound like the same old guff that the Renault is faster but also Silverstone and Suzuka are not normally compared.

However this was the story so far. The Renault team who had been doing so well in the black art of PR and manipulation have been becoming slowly unstuck as nobody knows if they should believe what they say. And slowly but surely people are having more confidence in what Ferrari are saying which means they seem to have more confidence in Ferrari.

But what is this? When asked in the press in Spain how the team were after China Alonso said that while some of the team were disappointed most of the team were happy because they had regained the lead in the constructors championship. And that this would particularly please a certain faction who don’t want him to win because if Michael wins nobody gets the number 1 next year least of all arch rival McLaren. Er Whoops.

He even then went on to say that he didn’t really think that the team were fully behind him and that Michael had much better support.

Renault have now swung into overdrive trying to say that they are working as a single team, and hadn’t he seen that Fisi was totally driving a team game in China when he ended up in third (rather neatly implying that they swapped Alonso and Fisi) and that with the points balance so tight you’d have to win both.

But the problem with the press release is that it isn’t from Alonso saying that he was misquoted and misunderstood, that say he had simply said that the team weren’t as disappointed as they could have been because they had regained the championship and the reporter must have dreamed the rest. The press release is to Alonso not from him. They are trying to convince him that they are behind him.

But I’ll tell you what expect any of the engineers who were wavering about him to be in full revolt now. Those guys work 20 hours a day on a race weekend just to make their drivers cars go a bit faster and people under that much pressure respond well to grandiose gestures of love like “I know that we can do it if we just pull together and work that little bit harder for this final push and the reason I know we can do it is because I love my team and I know we are the best” rather than “work harder you bastards I know you don’t love me”. Which boss would you work an extra hour for?

So expect more little things to go wrong in the next two races. More wheel nuts not quite working. More slight variations in water pressure more gear box trouble. The little things that go wrong when people are two tired and the adrenalin just isn’t coming. Alonso just pushed the self destruct button and it’s not going to be pretty.

PS. Also expect Ferrari to mention the press release to the FIA and suggest that team points be taken away from Renault for having team orders.