One of my favorite features on the ITV website are Ted Kravitz’s Notebook articles where he explains what he thinks went on behind the scenes technically.
Rather interestingly, this week, he goes slightly off his usual format right at the end to criticise the race for only having 2 overtaking maneuvers in the whole race. I’m not suggesting he’s right but it’s interesting to see a slightly more coherent argument than most…
Next year will be the most fundamental shift in the driver’s market in a long time. We could see all new drivers in the top three teams – Ferrari, McLaren and Renault. It all depends on Michael. If he stays, Massa will probably stay. Raikkonen then might go to Renault. But if Michael leaves, everything is up in the air. Raikkonen will go to Ferrari, leaving Renault with no top-line driver. They’ll want to get rid of Fisi, but won’t have anyone to replace him with. Montoya wants to leave, but has nowhere to go, and I doubt Renault will want him. So who’ll partner Raikkonen at Ferrari and Alonso at McLaren? One thing is for certain: nothing is certain. Next year’s championship will be fascinating, it’ll separate the good from the great: only the most stable team, and driver most capable of adapting to new circumstances will win. My money’s on Alonso.
They’ve added a graphic for this year on a Saturday to help with the situation in qualifying where you’re trying to work out who is in and who is out at the end of each of the three qualifying sessions. And the graphics there work reasonably well except there is one problem that seems to have occurred three drivers this year have remarkably similar names. It started with two but since Ide got chucked out it’s gone from bad to worse. Those drivers are: Monteiro (MON), Montoya (MOY) and Montagny (MOT). The thing is that Montoya is the bigger driver but didn’t get MON. He only got MOY which seems odd especially as he’s so often known as JPM (for Juan PABLO Montoya – James please please try and remember that other cultures have multiple first names and that you aren’t simply missing out his middle name by calling him Juan Montoya you are CALLING HIM BY THE WRONG NAME! He’s either Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo Montoya or Montoya. NOT JUAN MONTOYA! Calm, Calm, try to be calm).
So they must have been doing the naming order by alphabetical order which makes Montagny so controversial. He, had he been there at the beginning of the season, would have been MON. But now he has to be MOT. It’s so very sad.
Actually I think that graphic which shows how qualifying is going (the one in the top left) works very well. The scrawl is also good but I tend to use that one less. I also liked the introduction of the new graphic in Spain which showed what the top speed through a particular speed trap was of all of the cars.
One new graphic that I think would be really useful would be on which showed the number of miles raced by an engine. This would include all practice laps and from the previous race.
Anyone else out there got a suggestion for a graphic?
I have an Italian friend who runs an Italian restaurant in London. And I fell into conversation with him about Formula 1 this week while I was eating there. He and I were talking about the current state of F1 and all of the things that made formula one the way that it is right now. I asked him if he was still watching all of the grand prix this year, and he said “almost”. But then he said that he felt more and more betrayed by Ferrari.
Italy and Brazil (and now Germany and Brazil) are really countries where nationality play a big part in the formula one experience. Formula 1 is very important in Italy, which is probably understating it a little bit. My friend was saying though that he felt that they had all been mis-sold the Ferrari dream by Montezemolo. He might love Ferrari, but why couldn’t they put an Italian driver in the team. To his mind they had sold themselves short with Irvine and then Barrichello (I myself still have a soft spot for Rubens but he was arguing that if you wanted to find out what position Rubens was in the race you just had to ask how many of his competitors had fallen out of the race – a tad unfair but that’s what he said). And now, he continued, with Massa they really are taking the piss. If they don’t care how good the second driver is, which – he said – was obvious by the choice of Massa then why couldn’t they bring in some crap Italian driver. And if they were going to pick an Italian driver then why not pick one of the best.
To his mind the best was Trulli. Trulli was ultra fast over a single lap and a born winner. So why wouldn’t they include him, or at the very least Fisi. Surely it would be better to give him a chance?
The problem is – I think – that Ferrari can’t actually employ an Italian driver ever again now. They can’t do it without seeming like “they only gave it to him because he’s Italian”. That’s why they want Rossi because he’s Italian but nobody can argue that he hasn’t won anything he’s a massive world champion in a similar sport.
So in the end it was the same old story. Italian guy upset that Italian racer wasn’t allowed to race for Italian team. But the most interesting thing for me was his driver selection. I had to push him quite hard to reveal it to me. But his choice of Trulli interested me. Trulli is rumoured to be retiring this season, but he had a logic to his choice that I thought was very interesting.
He said that he personally loved Trulli because in the complete race for speed of qualifying he’d always been able to prove himself. And that he’d been able to doubly prove himself by being able to stand up to Briatore when Flav had criticised him Jarno had just basically said “I don’t need this any more I’ll just go off and do my own thing”. And that slight amount of extra brain toughness put Trulli ahead of Fisi. But he said that’s not the reason that Ferrari should hire him, that’s the reason that he would hire him, not the reason that they would. They should hire him because of the qualifying. Because somebody that good in qualifying, and that good at keeping everyone behind him in the race (except his team mate) would be the ideal second driver.
And if he just happened to be Italian – well…
Alonso said at the race this weekend after qualifying, “it doesn’t make a big difference for the championship, winning here, just the difference between 10 or 8 points, but psychologically it’s a big win”.
The thing with this kind of statement is that it just shows how much he doesn’t really think that anyone but Michael is racing against him. If you ask him a straight question then he always tries to dilute the competition by talking McClaren and Honda but this kind of answer lets you know the real truth I think. Alonso doesn’t really think that there is any one else in the competition.
Is racing/playing at home an advantage?
I predicted Schumacher would win today’s race, not necessarily because he had the faster car, but because I thought Alonso wouldn’t be able to take the pressure. For Alonso, like I would say Barrichello, racing at home is normally a disadvantage. Nonetheless, Alonso, showing his class, managed it.
But, there’s another point to be made: Montoya spins on lap 17 and stops in an extremely dangerous position. They should put out the safety car. They don’t. I remember a few years ago the marshals pushing Michael back onto the track when he spun into a gravel trap in Germany. A couple of years later he did the same thing (somewhere like Australia), but no one came to push him. The home advantage isn’t just the fans cheering you on, it is the marshals and the race organisers as well. If the safety car had been deployed, Alonso would have been in trouble…
He’s been such a changed man ever since that happened. But… I couldn’t help but laugh when he said, after he’d been knocked out of the qualifying, that he’d have to “take it on the chin”.
Tomorrow’s race is going to be decided by the strategists I think. Which is very much how it should be at a race where overtaking is more tricky. There are a large number of factors in a Formula 1 weekend, but each race falls into a number of categories. Is it fast or slow, does it have gradient or is it flat, is it hot or cold and can you overtake or not.
The last of these is generally the most important. And if it’s the case that you can’t overtake then the Ross Brawns of this world, the Pat Symonds become more important than ever!
This leads me to my first criticism of Steve Ryder. I found a comment of his from the last week very unknowing of the sport. He asked if it would be “a technical battle or more of a race”.
The thing is that if you dismiss the races that don’t have any overtaking on the track as “not races” then you are missing the sport and you are going to be sorely disappointed. An overtaking manoeuvre should be seen as almost the icing on the cake. Great fun and an amazing moment but not what it’s all about.
So Barrichello finally out-qualified Jenson last weekend thereby proving the promise of the season, and today he’s done it again. Before the season had started who can deny that it was one of the most interesting battles.
The logic goes something like this. The best way to judge a driver is by his team mate. How he drives versus his team mate is one of the most important factors. The thing is that when the other driver in your team is Michael Schumacher then it’s a slightly unfair comparison. Nobody else came close for a couple of years there and Rubens was left trying to hold his own. And Rubens did well. I mean it wasn’t necessarily awesome but he certainly beat Michael on a number of occasions.
And Jenson has, actually, beaten most of his team mates (in fact it may be all – I can’t remember). And all of his defenders have claimed that he is a great driver but that he’s just never had the right car. The problem is that we haven’t been able to test this until now. Now we have a driver who has been in a Ferrari. A great car. And we wanted to know, to really know how good Jenson was. And a fight with Rubens was the only way to do that.
At the beginning of the season it looked dismal. It looked like we might have all have been wrong about Barrichello. He might have been propped up by that good car and once he was in an ordinary car have turned out to be an ordinary driver. But oh no. Now we are really seeing the true story. Now we are seeing Rubens really show what Jenson is made of.
Last week Bernie accused Alonso of not doing enough for the sport and saying that Jenson would be a good world champion. Of course that was just Bernie doing what he does best – stirring. And especially supporting the British driver to the British press. But he did have a point of a sort. Jenson does more PR and because he does more PR the media reward him with ideas above his station. If it was a driver from any other nation then we would be treating a driver like Jenson as a punchline. And yet… And yet we are being asked to consider Jenson as world championship material when…
HE HAS NEVER WON A RACE!
F1 has always been considered one of the most exacting sports in the world. But it really is coming to something if we are going to have to start measuring times in fractions of thousands of a second. Because Rubens and Ralf finished in qualifying on the exact same time. The rules had a solution which awarded Rubens the upper hand because he had secured the time earlier in the session. But it really is quite something that something so precise could be matched.
Should we be measuring the qualifying times more accurately or do the current rules have the solution? Or should we just have let Rubens and Ralf run a lap and seen who was fastest?
There’s only one way to settle this… Fight!
SofaF1 