Confession time. I have always been a bit sceptical about the Le Mans 24 Hours.
There is nothing to doubt about its prestige, or the special challenge it presents. It clearly is one of the most important races on the planet.
But as a spectacle to watch on television, I have always been a bit wary. Could I be kept on the edge of my seat by a race where the gaps are ultimately measured in laps rather than seconds?
This year, for the first time, I have got access to Eurosport. So I decided to make a concerted effort to watch as much of the Le Mans 24 Hours as possible. For one night only, my sofa became my bed, and I dozed off with the race going on in the background.
I am mighty glad I did watch it. Because I discovered that Le Mans has it all and more.
All the initial indications were good. An intensely close battle between the Audis and Peugeots was promised. But disaster struck twice for Audi, with truly horrific crashes for Allan McNish and Mike Rockenfeller.
McNish’s crash was incredibly worrying. But the way the car teetered over the barrier before somehow opting to land back in the gravel trap, was truly frightening. I was concerned for all the photographers that were being showered in debris, and it can be considered luck that there wasn’t another 1955 Le Mans disaster.
Even scarier was Rockenfeller’s crash. It was difficult to make out anything in the darkness, but the mangled wreckage looked very little like an Audi R18 TDI. I feared the worst, and the Eurosport commentators revealed later in the race that they had as well. It was such a relief to hear that he managed to exit the car by himself and suffered only a cut arm.
These were two low points that punctuated a rollercoaster race. Once it was established that Rockenfeller was OK, I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke up at about 7am, I was astonished to see that — after around 18 hours of racing — the top three cars were all within two seconds of each other. I watched it while I could, but soon succumbed to the sleep monster for another couple of hours.
I awoke again to see my favourite of the Peugeots, the #7 driven by Anthony Davidson, Marc Gené and Alexander Wurz, had crashed off. The gaps had grown, and the fight was basically down between one Audi and one Peugeot, although there were a couple of other Peugeots a few laps down that could help out.
This tense battle, coupled with some hairy driving tactics from the Peugeots and an intriguing difference in strategy, ensured that the last few hours of the race were utterly gripping to watch. After 24 hours, the lead cars were separated by just 14 seconds. Incredible.
But it wasn’t just about the battle at the front. With 56 cars, there is no shortage of stories to tell. Plus, there is a variety in the designs of the cars and engines that simply does not exist in most other forms of motorsport.
It makes Formula 1 seem like toytown in comparison. All the F1 cars have practically identical 2.4 litre V8 engines. The spirit of innovation has been lost there in the drive to cut costs. But at Le Mans, it lives on strongly.
I also enjoyed seeing what the spirit of Le Mans is all about. The reactions of rival mechanics to the horrific Audi crashes. Victorious Audi chief Wolfgang Ullrich graciously congratulating his rivals from Peugeot immediately after the race. The deepest lows imaginable. Great joy at immense accomplishments. Sheer love of motorsport.
Watching Le Mans this year, it finally clicked with me. No longer do I just need to take people’s word for it that it is a special race. Now I feel it as well.
Over the past week or so, rumours that big changes are afoot at Williams have been ramping up.
Last week when I saw that a German website had written about this, I prepared a simple but telling graph looking at the form of Williams over the years. But I refrained from publishing it in case my conclusions were overly harsh.
What I would not be happy with doing would be not changing anything – even myself. Even if everyone said everything is perfect, I know it is not. So, I am not happy with the job that we have done as a group. I would review that anyway – including myself. I don’t exclude myself from any of that.
I, as technical director, have chosen the technical team that works for me… They are all people that I have chosen to put in those positions, so if it doesn’t work then it is my responsibility.
This is refreshing honesty. It is no secret that Williams’s form has been disappointing in the last few years. But it has never been properly confronted.
In the light of Sam Michael’s comments, here is the graph. It tracks the Constructors’ Championship positions of Williams throughout its 32 years in Formula 1. Alongside the annual positions, I have added a five-year rolling average to allow us to see the longer term trends.
It is well-known that Williams has always been a highly successful grand prix team. The 1980s were a bit of a rollercoaster. The team mixed hugely successful years with a few more disappointing years. Overall, the trend has been for the team to hover around 3rd place on average.
Then came the mid-1990s, when Williams were truly dominant. This was the period where Adrian Newey was on board. It is almost impossible for the five-year trend to get any higher, as the team strung together an incredible seven consecutive top-two finishes.
It is no secret that Williams have never dominated in this way ever since Adrian Newey left in 1997. But looking at the trend, Williams continued to average around 3rd place in the Constructors’ Championship — if anything, still slightly better than the pre-Adrian Newey years. But in the middle of the 2000s, it begins to change for the worse — dramatically.
In fact, if you look at the trendline, with no other knowledge I think you could actually guess when Sam Michael became technical director. In case you haven’t spotted it, I have added a subtle hint that pinpoints the year.
This could well be a harsh assessment. Sam Michael seems to be well respected among his colleagues at Williams. But from the outside, it has long perplexed me why there hasn’t been more of a question mark over Sam Michael’s role.
The team has made many changes in recent years. They have switched engine manufacturers from BMW to Cosworth via Toyota. They have brought on board hugely experienced drivers (Alexander Wurz, Rubens Barrichello) along with promising rookies (Nico Rosberg, Nico Hülkenberg). And there have been lots of changes behind the scenes with the operation of the business. None of these changes have done the trick.
Now, with Williams enduring their worst start to an F1 season since their very first one in 1978, it is crunch time. They need to face up to their issues properly.
We know the problem is not money. After all, the team keeps telling us they have no money worries whatsoever!
Currently the team languishes in 10th place in the Constructors’ Championship, behind Lotus, a team that is not yet two years old. Indeed, in China, Pastor Maldonado was beaten fair and square by Heikki Kovalainen in the Lotus.
Amazingly, this position is up from the situation after Malaysia, when the team was also behind Virgin in the Constructors’ Championship. Virgin is another team looking carefully at its technical set-up, as Nick Wirth’s CFD-only approach fails to prove its worth.
Here, just for fun, is the graph of Williams’s Constructors’ Championship positions with their current 10th place for 2011 added.
The final part of the factory tour was the chance to see the simulator. It is an impressive piece of kit. The driver sits in a cockpit, surrounded by a massive screen that curves round to take up his entire field of vision.
Little wonder it has been known to induce sickness. Drivers are advised that they may want to close eyes if they spin in order to avoid reacquainting themselves with their lunch. Apparently drivers have been known to be sick all over the place while driving the simulator. Come to think of it, I’m slightly suspicious because I remember that the cleaner was leaving the room just as we were entering it. We were told, though, that Kazuki Nakajima is amazing in the simulator and can spend all day in it with no ill effects.
The circuit models are said to be very accurate indeed, albeit some more accurate than others. For instance, someone else has exclusive rights to the best map of the Nürburgring. The maps are constructed using lasers. A van drives slowly around the circuit emitting laser beams at multiple angles, creating a map of millions of dots. This means that every bump on the circuit is accounted for.
An aerial image of the circuit is then overlaid on top of these dots to create the environment. But if you look at the circuit, some of the landmarks are not very accurately reproduced. In fact, some of it looks like bad virtual reality graphics. The idea is to reduce any confusion that might be caused by too many cues. If they don’t think something will give a driver an accurate cue, they won’t implement it.
Some teams have more sophisticated simulators. In some simulators the car will be on a moving platform to give the impression of movement — something clearly lacking from the still Williams cockpit. It is said that some simulators even have belts that tighten up to give you some impression of g-forces. Williams shun such devices, which they regard as off-putting.
I have to confess that I have been slightly sceptical about the Williams simulator in the past. McLaren’s is said to be amazing, but it is jealously kept under wraps from outsiders. Williams have no such qualms however. It is the only simulator that I have seen on television. See, for instance, this ITV video with Mark Blundell and this BBC video.
We were lucky enough to be in the room when occasional Williams tester Daniel Clos was driving it. He was there to acquaint himself with the Hungaroring in preparation for the GP2 races which were being held just a few days later. I have to say he didn’t look very good while we were there, and he even spun at one point. But those must have been his very first laps round the circuit and of course I am in no position to pass comment. In the real thing, he finished 11th in both races.
It is presumably a service that Williams are happy to offer young drivers in the hope of developing them into a Formula 1 star of the future. Whether Daniel Clos is one remains to be seen. But surely on his way to F1 stardom is another Williams tester, Nico Hülkenberg. Simulator Engineer Jeff Calam is adamant that the simulator is a worthwhile piece of equipment to invest in, pointing at Hülkenberg’s highly impressive GP2 results at circuits he hasn’t driven at before. This fact puts to bed my doubts about the quality of the Williams simulator.
Once the factory tour was over, we had a Q&A with Sam Michael. He was largely very open in his responses, and came across very well to me. I was impressed that he took the time out of his schedule to talk to a bunch of bloggers. You can hear audio of the Q&A session over at Brits on Pole once again.
After that, we went for a tour of the fabulous Williams museum. Here, we were expertly guided by Scott Garrett from Synergy, the company that arranged our visit on behalf of Philips. Although he now works for Synergy, he was previously Head of Marketing at Williams and now has links with a number of F1 teams. This makes him a highly knowledgeable speaker on Formula 1, and Williams in particular. It was a real pleasure to have this sort of insight.
For obvious reasons, photography was strictly forbidden in the factory, but we were free to take as many photographs as we wanted in the museum. And boy did we take the opportunity!
The museum is impressive, with a range of cars from the full history of the Williams team’s existence. The first car you see is Alan Jones’s FW06 with its Ford Cosworth engine peering out the back. Cars are displayed, more or less a car for every year, right up to 2007′s FW29 — the very car that the competition winner will be driving.
All-in-all, the museum contains over forty cars. We are told that Frank Williams is a hoarder. The team still owns 106 chassis, while it only makes around six per year. Most of these cars are well looked after and can theoretically still be driven. The main exception is the Honda-powered cars, because they asked for the engines back!
For the most part, the cars are laid out in chronological order, and as you make your way through the museum videos are played telling us about Williams during the period of the cars in the vicinity. The relevant cars are lit up while the video is playing.
Unfortunately, this means that they are plunged into darkness once the video is finished, and you are supposed to move along to the next section. It is a pretty clever device to get us to keep moving and get rid of us quickly, but quite annoying for those of us who would have liked to have done it at our own pace. One person sarcastically remarked under his breath, “you have a lot of great cars, then put them in the dark.” It is for this reason that the lighting is not very good in some of the photographs.
Despite the chronological layout of the museum, there is still a fairly clear centrepiece. Two cars in particular are displayed on a higher plinth — the FW18 and the FW19, the team’s latest two championship-winning cars from 1996 and 1997 driven by Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve.
A great moment of F1 geekery occurred when Mr Garrett pointed out that the FW19 on display is the actual car which Michael Schumacher famously crashed into at Jerez in 1997. Everyone went “oooh” and inquisitively gathered to look at this particularly historic Williams F1 car. The damage is still evident. I had heard that Patrick Head liked the car to be displayed with the tyre mark still there, but it has since been restored and now just looks like a couple of holes have been punched in the corner of the sidepod.
“We never got on very well with Michael Schumacher,” Scott Garrett noted, just in case we didn’t get the clue. This prompted a cheeky question from someone else, “How did you get on with Ralf?”
There is a notable omission. The most distinctive F1 car in the team’s history, the FW26 with the “walrus nose” is nowhere to be seen. It is perhaps not the team’s proudest design.
One unusual design does proudly feature though. Williams were never able to race with their FW08B six-wheeler. It was banned by the FIA before the season started over fears that it would be too dominant.
Go up the stairs, and you will see two cars that are clearly very special to the team. One is Ayrton Senna’s test car from 1994. The other is the record-breaking FW10, in which Keke Rosberg was the first person ever to set a lap at a speed of 160mph in 1985. The record was set at Silverstone and remarkably stayed in place until 2002!
All-in-all, it was an absolutely fantastic day. Although Williams are not among my favourite teams, they have got to be admired for being so accommodating to us. If you ever get the chance to attend such an event, I would highly recommend it. A massive thank you to those who organised it and invited me.
Below is the full slideshow of photographs from my visit to Williams.
A pain in the neck has brought a halt to Michael Schumacher’s planned comeback. The injuries caused by his motorcycle accident in February have proved too much to cope with.
There were rumblings about his neck immediately after his first test in an F2007, but the extent of the problem was not made clear. The possibility that Schumacher’s comeback was gently brought into focus last week when his spokesperson Sabine Kehm emphasised that his comeback was not certain and depended on medical assessments.
Now we know for certain that Schumacher will not be racing in Valencia. Now it was nothing more than a useful distraction for the media to occupy themselves with over the otherwise quiet holiday period.
Amazingly, in Schumacher’s place instead will be Ferrari’s veteran test driver Luca Badoer. In a way it is payback for the way he was treated in 1999. I always felt sorry him since he was overlooked in favour of Mika Salo when Michael Schumacher was unable to race after he broke his legs at Silverstone that year.
But Badoer’s comeback is a real shock for a variety of reasons. For one thing, he is almost as old as Schumacher himself. At 38, Luca Badoer will be the oldest driver on the grid in Valencia. He also becomes the second man on the grid to have raced against the likes of Prost and Senna. Like Rubens Barrichello, he made his début in 1993.
Barrichello has gone on to race in every season since then, in the process becoming the most experienced Formula 1 driver in history. But Luca Badoer has notched up a very different kind of record. He has amassed more starts than any other driver never to have scored a point. In 48 races, his career best finish was 7th, at the 1993 San Marino Grand Prix.
He did almost score three points at the hugely eventful 1999 European Grand Prix. But when his Minardi had to be stopped with gearbox problems, he famously broke down in floods of tears at the side of the track.
But in his defence, he has only ever driven for minnows in the past: Scuderia Italia, Minardi and Forti. This will make Ferrari the fourth Italian team he will have raced for.
His last race was a staggering ten years ago. I can’t imagine even Badoer ever believed he would get the race drive at Ferrari, especially after the 1999 snub. If he wasn’t good enough then, what on earth makes him good enough now, ten years since his last F1 race?
On paper, Marc Gené seemed like a much more feasible candidate. His last race was only five years ago. He scored a point for Minardi after Badoer’s breakdown in Europe, and scored another two at Monza with Williams in 2003 when he stood in for another Schumacher, Ralf.
He also has recent experience of other racing, having put in some relatively good performances in Le Mans Series. Indeed, he won this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans alongside David Brabham and Alexander Wurz. Being a Spaniard, Marc Gené would also have made commercial sense for racing Valencia.
I am sure Ferrari have their reasons though. I look forward to seeing how Luca Badoer performs. No doubt he is being thrown in at the deep end, but I for one am happy to see him getting one last chance to race in a Formula 1 grand prix.
Wow, a day certainly is a long time in F1. I am not sure when I will get round to actually writing about the Hungarian GP, though at least there is a long break until the next race.
But the big news this evening is that the next race will feature Michael Schumacher on the grid. He has been announced as the replacement for Felipe Massa while the Brazilian makes his recovery.
A lot of names have been bandied around over the past few days, and none of them seemed terribly lucky. Optimists suggested that Fernando Alonso or Robert Kubica might be able to get out of their current contracts to move to Ferrari mid-season.
Mirko Bortolotti was another driver on the radar. Last year’s Italian F3 champion has impressed in previous tests with Ferrari. He is currently building up his skills in Formula Two is widely tipped to have a bright future. But it is near enough unheard-of for Ferrari to hire a young rookie.
Some talked up the chances of David Coulthard or Anthony Davidson getting the role. That seemed a bit like pie in the sky thinking though.
The other drivers who currently have relationships with Ferrari are the team’s official test and reserve drivers, Marc Gené and Luca Badoer. But they were unlikely to step in for a whole host of reasons. Neither has a particularly strong track record as a race driver, although you can argue that neither ever had a decent opportunity to show their skills.
But their lack of fresh experience will have seriously counted against them. Gené last raced five years ago for Williams, and faced the ignominy of being replaced by Antônio Pizzonia for being too slow! Meanwhile, Luca Badoer hasn’t raced in F1 for ten years.
The last time Ferrari had to replace a driver midway through a season was when Michael Schumacher broke his legs at the 1999 British Grand Prix. Then, it was widely expected that Luca Badoer, as Ferrari’s test driver, would take his place. Instead, the Scuderia controversially overlooked him and hired Mika Salo.
It was a bad year for Badoer, who came close to finishing 4th for Minardi in that season’s European Grand Prix before his car broke down. He has never had an opportunity to score a World Championship point since.
Luca Badoer has held the test role at Ferrari for a staggering thirteen years without there ever being a sniff of a race drive. If he was overlooked in 1999, he was going to be overlooked today.
Now that testing is banned, it makes you wonder just what the point of a test driver is any more. I recently read that neither Marc Gené nor Luca Badoer have had any mileage whatsoever in this season’s Ferrari F60, in which case the advantage of selecting them over Michael Schumacher — who has loads more talent and, perhaps even more importantly, ocean loads of PR value — is non-existent.
This comes mere weeks after an elaborate re-arranging of deckchairs at Red Bull, as they apparently sought ways to replace Sébastien Bourdais at Toro Rosso without putting Brendon Hartley in the car. Up until the mid-season point, Hartley had been the official Red Bull reserve driver. But mere days before the reserve driver would actually be needed, he was replaced by Jaime Alguersuari.
Other drivers left twiddling their thumbs this year include: Pedro de la Rosa, Gary Paffett, Christian Klien, Romain Grosjean (though perhaps not for long), Adam Khan, Kamui Kobayashi, Nicolas Hülkenberg, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Anthony Davidson and Alexander Wurz.
If a team had to bring in a replacement driver, how many of these would be considered ready and able to race? Not many of them have much in the way of decent mileage of 2009′s cars. Who is to say, for instance, that McLaren would not rather stick Paul di Resta in their car over Pedro de la Rosa? Would Toyota happily give Kobayashi a seat, or would they prefer to take Nakajima?
Just a few years ago it looked like drivers could make a decent living out of being a test driver. Now they never get to test, and they’ll be lucky to get to race.
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