Among the final cars to launch was the Red Bull Racing RB5, which was launched yesterday. We can safely assume that the Toro Rosso will be very similar, while we are led to believe that the Force India will be in large part a McLaren customer car. Everything has gone all quiet on the Honda front in recent days, so who knows if that car will ever break cover.

So this is it then. And good things come to those who wait. The RB5 is a real beauty, though you wouldn’t expect anything else from the pencil of Adrian Newey.

Of course, we are now used to the strange new wings so the RB5 doesn’t have that shock factor to it. But the RB5 has all the sleek style you would expect from a Newey design. The pointy, narrow front nose has become something of a Newey trademark over the past five years or so. It’s very interesting to see that he has stuck to this principle, while other teams appear to be adopting wider, chunkier nose designs.

F1 Technical describes the front wing as “the most advanced out there”. You can’t fail to be struck by the detail in the front wing which doesn’t seem present in most of the other teams’ designs.

History shows that Adrian Newey adapts well to radical regulation changes, as James Allen recently noted. The 1996 Williams was about as dominant as a car gets. I have strong memories of that season. It was my first full year of watching F1, and the Williams car was awesome. I still remember to this day that they had the Constructors’ Championship wrapped up in Hungary. Amazing when you consider that their two drivers were hardly the greatest ever to grace a race track.

By the time the regulations radically changed again in 1998, Newey had moved to McLaren and he nailed it right away again. The McLarens were utterly dominant in Australia, and they clinched both Championships that season, ending a seven year long drought.

But beware Adrian Newey’s Achilles’ heel. The RB5 is among the last cars to be unveiled because Red Bull have made the decision to forego track time in order to give Newey more time to perfect his design. This may result in the RB5 being a fast car with possibly the best aerodynamics. But you have to hope that it works.

It’s the opposite approach to Ferrari’s. Ferrari launched their car a month ago, deciding that they would like plenty of time to “debug” the car. But if something is wrong with the RB5, they won’t have long to debug it. That is even more of a worry this year when in-season testing is banned.

You get the sense that Adrian Newey likes things to be “just right” from his perspective, even if that is at the expense of other things — even things as basic as fitting the driver into the car (hello, Alex Wurz and Juan Pablo Montoya!). It is not a pragmatic approach. Newey’s cars look the best on paper, but he has developed a reputation for being involved with unreliable cars.

In 2008 Red Bull had a fairly solid year reliability-wise. But the fact that the RB5 had to be stopped with gearbox issues just 14 laps into its first run does not bode well. Red Bull’s 2007 season was notorious for gearbox problems. Let us hope for Red Bull’s sake that they will not make a return.

The Brazilian Grand Prix heralded the end of David Coulthard’s career. Unfortunately, the race ended in a turn 1 smash. It deprived David Coulthard of a dignified send-off to his career, as well as depriving us of the awesome helmet cam, used by FOM for the first time since 1994.

In most ways it sums up David Coulthard’s 2008 season, which has seen him become a magnet for crashes. It was a most unfortunate season for the Scot with only one or two highlights — most notably 3rd place in the Canadian Grand Prix. Overall, though, the impression left is that DC may have been better off retiring one year earlier.

It is going too far to say that the first corner crash sums up DC’s career. Even though he could never count himself among F1’s very most talented, the statistics of his career make for pleasant reading. With 246 grand prix starts under his belt, he is the fourth most experienced Formula 1 driver of all time.

He is arguably the most successful British driver of all time. His tally of 13 race wins is relatively modest compared to other British drivers, particularly Nigel Mansell, Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark. But he has scored more points than any other British driver — 535. By this measure, he is the 5th most successful driver of all time.

For the majority of his career, David Coulthard has been lucky enough to have the best machinery. His race début came in the saddest of circumstances, as he was chosen to replace Ayrton Senna when the Brazilian died in 1994. But he raced for a Williams team that was just entering a phase of true dominance.

When he moved to McLaren just a few years later, it was in time for the Woking squad to make its own major resurgence. Ace designer Adrian Newey had moved across to McLaren from Williams at roughly the same time.

But at both Williams and McLaren, his team mate usually made much more of the opportunities the best car provided them. Damon Hill was a major contender for the 1995 World Championship. Meanwhile, Mika Häkkinen strung together two World Championships in a row in 1998 and 1999.

It is too easy to say that Häkkinen got favourable treatment at McLaren. DC may have moved over for the Finn in two successive races, in Jerez 1997 and Melbourne 1998. Critics point out that nice guys never win, and that DC’s apparent happiness to let his team mate past was evidence that DC did not have what it really takes. But the fact is that Coulthard struggled to get to grips with his McLaren car from 1998 onwards. That may have been due to the introduction of grooved tyres or whatever.

DC was to be further thwarted by another rule change a few years later. The Scot never could get to grips with one-lap qualifying. When the pressure was on him to deliver at the first time of asking, he more often than not found himself unable to deliver. Things did not improve much when the knock-out format was introduced.

Despite the patchy record, though, DC has had some great highlights during his career. When Häkkinen lost his motivation, DC was in prime position to challenge Schumacher for the title in 2001. He did, admittedly, finish up a long way behind Schumacher, having scored just 65 points. But he was definitely best of the rest that season, and the only person who could seriously claim to have given Schumacher any bother that season.

And a tally of 13 wins, no matter how good his machinery was, is fairly impressive stuff. David Coulthard was no fool.

Just when it looked as though DC’s career was coming to a halt, he moved from McLaren to Red Bull. It breathed new life into his career. He was reinvented as Formula 1’s elder statesman, a role he adapted well to. In his first season at the midfield Red Bull team in 2005, he scored as many points as he had at McLaren in 2004.

Since then he has been reunited with the chassis designer that has accompanied him throughout his career, Adrian Newey. He scooped up a clutch of great results, including two podiums along the way.

Overall, throughout his many many seasons, David Coulthard has driven for just three teams in his entire career. That demonstrates just how valuable every team felt he was to the package.

All the while, David Coulthard was great entertainment off the circuit as well as on it. Even though some nicknamed him ‘David Cardboard’ at first, he quickly developed a strong personality and was unafraid to use colourful language in his interviews.

Now his career has fizzled out. And even though DC never achieved the status of true greatness, and the World Championship eluded him, I think he has a lot to be proud of.

Thankfully, this colourful character promises not to go away for good. He will remain at Red Bull in an advisory role, proving yet again that teams invariably appreciate his input. Furthermore, it looks almost certain that DC will form part of the BBC’s team covering F1 from 2009 onwards. At least it looks like he will be entertaining us for years to come.

And here is one of the most entertaining moments in F1, provided by David Coulthard himself:

It is worth remembering that the 2008 season so far has been, by all accounts, an exciting season for on-track action. There have been plenty of overtaking manoeuvres of note. Felipe Massa’s double move on Kovalainen and Barrichello in Canada was a stormer that I won’t forget quickly. Nick Heidfeld managed two double overtakes at Silverstone. And let’s not forget Lewis Hamilton’s bold moves at Hockenheim.

Even races that were expected to be utter snooze-fests have contained their fair share of surprises. The French Grand Prix was spiced up by Räikkönen’s exhaust problem and even the Hungarian Grand Prix had an incredible sting in the tail.

This season the field is closer than it has been perhaps for decades — who knows, perhaps ever. I’ve had a look at this season’s qualifying times, and the average gap between the fastest car and the slowest car is 103.26%. That’s not bad going at all when you recall that around a decade ago it was fairly common for drivers to fail to qualify for being more than 107% slower than pole time.

The closeness of the field this year — not just from the fastest to the slowest car, but particularly the closeness of the teams vying to be 3rd or 4th fastest a the moment — is what has contributed to this season’s great racing and an intriguing championship.

It’s not an accident that the field has become so close in Formula 1. The relative stability of the technical regulations in recent years has meant that the teams’ R&D programmes are yielding diminishing returns. As one team boss told Grandprix.com recently:

We work 24 hours a day in the wind tunnel. But we have hit a wall. We have only managed to find three percent more downforce this year. We just cannot find any more.

It seems as though the teams have discovered almost all there is to discover about how to make their cars go faster — certainly in terms of aerodynamic factors. You can see this in the wide indifference the ’shark fin’ has met with. Team after team says that the shark fin has made little or no perceptible difference in performance — yet they all still run with it. One theory I have heard is that Red Bull simply designed the shark fin so make more space for the Red Bull logo, and that all the other teams have simply copied the design to make it look as though they’re still trying to experiment with aerodynamics.

Now the FIA proposes to do away with all of this ‘closeness’ nonsense by ripping up the rulebook and starting again. If there is one thing a radical overhaul of the rules is sure to do, it is to spread the field. We saw this in 1998 when McLaren rose from the midfield to become almost dominant. 2009’s regulation changes are far more radical, potentially opening the door for next season to be a snooze-fest dominated by one team that just happened to find the edge first.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that such a radical change in the rules does not do very much in terms of cutting costs. Yet again, the FIA’s cost-cutting mantra is undermined by the FIA itself.

I have not even touched on KERS yet, which is bound to lead to huge gaps between different teams. You can see this in the reaction of some teams who are currently trying to get the other teams to agree to run without KERS until 2010. Those teams whose KERS programme is not quite up to scratch are desperate to delay the new system’s introduction.

This is inevitable as KERS is very much at the experimental stages of its development and different teams are trying out different techniques. One of these techniques will be shown in the long run to be the most effective, but we are yet to find out which that is. In the meantime, the teams that were lucky enough to strike on the right technique first time will crush their opponents.

Closer racing in 2009? Don’t count on it. Make the most of the great racing of 2008 while you can.

The 2009 season will bring a completely new look to Formula 1, with one of the most drastic and far-reaching overhauls of the rulebook in the sport’s history. The only comparable change I can think of in my lifetime is the rules brought in for 1998 (grooved tyres and narrower cars), but even that pales in comparison to what will happen for 2009.

The new rules are being brought in partly to remedy the perceived lack of overtaking in F1. The various aerodynamic devices that have appeared over the past decade or so are said to create ‘dirty air’ which makes it very difficult for one car to follow closely to another, therefore reducing the amount of overtaking. These devices will be outlawed from 2009.

Furthermore, rear wings will be made taller and narrower, and front wings will be wider. F1 Wolf has tried to describe what the new cars will look like. If you have a copy of the August 2008 issue of F1 Racing, you will see a good illustration of a typical 2009 F1 car on page 102–103.

The FIA was basically forced to admit that the problem with ‘dirty air’ had become serious when Fernando Alonso was penalised during qualifying for the 2006 Italian Grand Prix for supposedly impeding Felipe Massa. You can view a video of the full lap including the infamous incident below.

The car in front of Massa is Fernando Alonso, but he always stayed a large distance in front of Massa. But Massa stumbled on the final corner of the lap, Parabolica (at 1:05 on the video). Even though Fernando Alonso was so far ahead of Massa, the ‘dirty air’ caused by Alonso was deemed to have prevented Massa from setting a fast lap. No wonder, therefore, that overtaking is such a rarity in F1.

But is overtaking as rare as the doom-mongers make out? The way some people go on, you would think that there were only about a dozen overtaking manoeuvres all season. But according to the June 2008 edition of F1 Racing, there were in fact 270 on-track overtaking moves pulled off in the 2007 season. Interestingly enough, Felipe Massa topped the table, completing a total of 20 overtaking manoeuvres during the season. The Japanese Grand Prix alone contained 46 passes.

To clarify, this does not include positions gained in the pitlane or as a result of retirements. Nor do the figures include any passes made on the first lap of a race. Because of the methodology adopted by F1 Racing, the statistics will also omit any instance where a driver overtook then got overtaken again later on in the same lap.

My own view is that the theory that there used to be more overtaking in F1 is utter bobbins. For a start, no-one seems to be able to agree when F1 did have more overtaking. Most people talk vaguely about the past. Many people on the BBC’s 606 discussion board decided that there was more overtaking in F1 ten years ago. But an article on Grandprix.com bemoaning the lack of overtaking in F1 was written thirteen years ago — and could as easily have been written today.

Is it not possible that these people are all looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles? It is notable to me that when harking back to the past it is often the same few races that are cited over and over again.

Yeah, so there was an ace wheel-to-wheel battle between Gilles Villeneuve and René Arnoux in the 1979 French Grand Prix. But that wasn’t emulated in any other grand prix in 1979, nor in any GP in 1980 or 1978 either. In other words, it was a one-off. Note Murray Walker’s commentary: “There has never been a more exciting battle for a major position than this one” — and that was before the real fireworks started!

You can argue whether or not F1 needs more overtaking or if it has the balance just right. We all like to see a great overtaking manoeuvre. But the reason an overtaking manoeuvre is so great is precisely because it is so rare. If you artificially encourage overtaking, it will become devalued.

Keith Collantine had a great post about this last year. The last thing F1 should do is follow the “Nascar example”. Overtaking is so common in Nascar that a move is scarcely worth mentioning — so what’s the point? I would agree that GP2 has the balance right.

GP2 does have its own boring processions from time to time. But the occasional boring race is inevitable. Unless you want your sports dumbed down to a horrendous extent like they are in America, true sporting contests are not always designed to be entertainment spectacles. A processional F1 race is like a 0-0 draw in football. We don’t like it, but we live through it for the high times.

One of the proposed changes for 2009 threatens to devalue overtaking. I have mentioned the wider front wings already. What I didn’t mention is an extra feature the front wings will have — an adjustable flap. The flaps are huge and drivers will be allowed to adjust them by six degrees as much as twice per lap.

This, to me, is just a terrible idea on so many levels. For one thing, it smacks of A1GP-style gimmickery. Formula 1 is supposed to be about pure racing — a fast person and a fast car, end of. “Push to pass”-style schemes can be left to the mickey mouse series as far as I am concerned.

For another thing it seems to me that the drivers will quickly find out where the optimal time to adjust their wing is during practice. If each driver is able to make two adjustments per lap, they will make those two adjustments at the same two points on every lap. So the cars will all go faster and slower in the same places. How is this supposed to encourage overtaking?

About a month ago Craig at Craigblog wrote a post about F1 merchandise. It was quite a coincidence because at the same time I was on the verge of buying the first piece of F1 merchandise I had bought for a very long time.

Since the turn of the decade I have watched Formula 1 pretty much as a neutral. Of course, I prefer some teams and drivers more than others. In case you’re wondering, my favoured teams are BMW, Red Bull, Renault and (at a stretch) McLaren. Out of the drivers, I like Räikkönen, Heidfeld, Kubica, Alonso, Coulthard, Webber, Barrichello and (at a stretch) Kovalainen.

When I was younger my attention was grabbed by Stewart Grand Prix. Jackie Stewart’s was a famous name that I could latch onto, and the Scottish iconography appealed to me as a young Scot. I also loved the fact that they were a new team, seemingly with the odds against them, but did a fairly solid job.

Rubens Barrichello’s drive to 2nd in Monaco in 1997 was exciting to watch, and for a second I thought they were going to win when Michael Schumacher briefly ran off the road at Ste Devote. Mostly though 1997 was a year fraught with reliability problems. 1998 brought a further dip in form.

But the 1999 season as a whole was brilliant for Stewart GP as Barrichello once again shone. Who could forget Barrichello leading at the Brazilian Grand Prix? And then Johnny Herbert took a fantastic win at the Nürburgring. This team was only three years old, yet was in a position to fight for good points hauls, finish 4th in the championship and even win a race. That’s more than the team’s subsequent owners, Ford (as Jaguar) and Red Bull can say for themselves.

Besides Stewart, I developed a soft spot for Jordan. I loved the way they came back from a disastrous start to 1998. Halfway through the season they hadn’t even scored a single point. Then things started to look up during the British Grand Prix. I can remember watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Jordan’s 1998 season. Eddie Jordan was nervously pacing around the Jordan pit area mumbling, “I need this feckin’ point… Come on, I need this feckin’ point so much.” He got that feckin’ point.

Just a few races later Jordan Grand Prix scored a magnificent 1–2 in Belgium, with Damon Hill heading Ralf Schumacher. It was the team’s first win and it ushered in a new, though fleeting, era of competitiveness for the team.

The 1999 season was a joy to watch, not only for Stewart but for Jordan and Heinz-Harald Frentzen in particular. The German driver took an amazing six podiums including two wins, particularly memorably in France. For a long while it looked as though Frentzen was a genuine championship contender, though in the end it was not to be.

In retrospect, the work the Jordan team put into the 1999 season diverted their attention away from the future. Ian Phillips said as much in the latest Inside Line podcast — the championship run burnt the team out, and they never recovered.

In subsequent years the Jordan team drifted ever further into mediocrity and it became more and more difficult for me to like the team. 2003 was particularly painful. Giancarlo Fisichella took a flukey win in Brazil, but that disguised a truly awful season in which the team otherwise scored the miserable total of three points. If the previous year’s scoring system would have been in use, the win would have been their one and only points score.

To compound matters, in 2003 Eddie Jordan got into a needless legal fight with Vodafone which he was seemingly never going to win. From then on Jordan struggled financially. That team is now known as Force India and has had four different owners in the past five years.

However, the late 1990s were great Jordan-supporting days. And along with supporting the team comes the merchandise. I had two Jordan caps (one generic Jordan and the other Damon Hill, mimicking the Hills’ famous helmet design). I also had a Damon Hill t-shirt that commemorated the “place in history” that Hill took by taking the first win for the Jordan Grand Prix team. I also have a 1:43 diecast model of Damon Hill’s Jordan 198, the car he drove in 1998 and helped secure Jordan’s famous 1–2 in Belgium.

That is not the only F1 merchandise I bought when I was younger. I also had an Orange Arrows cap. I think I got it because I liked the colours. I am sometimes surprised to see people still wearing Orange Arrows gear from time to time, around six years after the team folded. I also had a rather colourful Ferrari t-shirt commemorating their 1999 Constructors Championship victory. What can I say? The folly of youth.

In addition to the Damon Hill 1:43 diecast, for a period of five years I decided I was going to collect 1:43 scale models of every single Formula 1 world champion. So in 1998 and 1999 I bought two Mika Häkkinen McLarens and from 2000–2002 I bought three Michael Schumacher Ferraris.

To spice things up a bit I bought models of Alberto Ascari’s 1952 Ferrari 500 F2 and Nelson Piquet’s 1981 Brabham BT-49C. But I got bored after that.

Grand Prix Legends were looking for excuses as to why diecast models don’t sell so well nowadays. I think the reality is that 75 quid for a 1:18 model that will only gather dust on a shelf is a bloody rip-off. Back in the day I think I spent around £20 per 1:43 model. I don’t think that’s something I would do today.

Aside from the normal annual purchases of video games (when available) and the season review DVD, I have not bought any Formula 1 merchandise for a while.

Until now.

I have bought this jazzy BMW Sauber t-shirt to express my support for the team. Like many, I have been wooed by the methodical, grounded approach of the team’s principal Mario Theissen and its drivers Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica.

The win was coming for a while, and the fact that it was a 1–2, just like Jordan’s maiden win, was the icing on the cake. The team’s recent dip in form won’t deter me. Now, for the first time for several years, I am not a neutral. I am supporting BMW Sauber.

It’s strange because I was never a supporter of the Sauber team at all. Nor was I keen on BMW when they were in partnership with Williams. But the magical combination of BMW and Sauber under the leadership of Mario Theissen has attracted me to them to the extent that I am a card-carrying, t-shirt wearing fan.

So which teams do you support, and do you buy merchandise to show that support?