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Archive: Brawn

Congratulations to Jenson Button and Brawn GP

19 October 2009 22:26

Categories: Opinion, Report

A report on the stunning Brazilian Grand Prix will follow at some point this week. I will also consider the vexed question of whether Jenson Button deserves to win the World Championship.

I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting Button to seal it in Interlagos, especially after his poor grid position. So I must confess that I hadn’t really factored in the possibility when I planned my week ahead! So unfortunately, a more in-depth analysis will have to wait for a few days.

However, what I will say just now is that after the way Jenson Button drove in Brazil, he was fully deserving of what he achieved. It was as though he woke up on Sunday deciding that he would be World Champion come what may.

He was aggressive and ballsy — the things everyone was saying he’d forgotten to be in the second half of the season. He pulled off some of the best overtaking moves there have been all season and in my view was seriously impressive.

It is never good when a driver wins a Championship while not winning a race. It is a bit of an anti-climax. But in this case it didn’t feel like a damp squib. Jenson Button may not have won the race, but it was no leisurely drive to 5th place. He fought for it and as such took the Championship in style.

Congratulations must also go to the Brawn team. As was widely predicted, they faded away as the season progressed and they got swallowed up somewhat in the development battle. But the fact is that they had the fastest car, and one with bullet-proof reliability at that.

Considering how much their backs were against the wall last winter, you have to say that the Constructors’ Championship has gone to the best team. And the team spirit shines through. No doubt there is an intense and special bond between team members because of the difficulties they went through last year. This probably made them stronger and gave them the resolve to fight as hard as they did.

Congratulations to Jenson Button and Brawn GP.

7 comments

Japanese Grand Prix ponderings

5 October 2009 22:03

Categories: Report

This won’t take long.

First of all, it is worth pointing out just how awesome Sebastian Vettel was at Suzuka. At this “drivers’ circuit” which suited the Red Bull car down to the ground, Vettel was untouchable.

An error meant that instead of the normal on board channel, the BBC broadcast the on board camera of Vettel only for a large part of the race. Although this meant being unable to see any other cars on board, it provided an opportunity to watch an up-and-coming master at work. I can tell you he was definitely pushing hard, and to my mind he almost lost his car at Degner 2 twice. And they are only the moments I saw.

Vettel’s awe-inspiring dominance was in stark contrast to the other three Red Bull drivers in a weekend that promised so much. Even the Toro Rosso, which has been at the back for almost all of the season, looked like it had awesome pace. Unfortunately, its two rookie drivers both made a bit of a hash of things multiple times each throughout the weekend, meaning the potential came to nothing.

Webber also had a tough weekend after a big crash in Saturday Practice which left him with no car to qualify with. Having started from the pitlane, he then suffered a litany of problems forcing him to pit three times in quick succession. As a result, the race ended with one Red Bull dominating, and the three others footing the result sheet.

Beyond that, there is not much to say about the race. Jarno Trulli did a good job, which he does once or twice a year. But it’s not the sort of thing that would impress me enough to hire him. Maybe the new Lotus team will think differently.

For my money, the best action of the race came from Heikki Kovalainen. Firstly, there was his tangle with Adrian Sutil which appears to have divided opinion. I think it was a racing incident — Sutil was probably too optimistic to go for it, but Kovalainen was probably too eager to close the door abruptly having left it wide open in the first place.

But if that was a bad move from Kovalainen, he more than made it up with his gutsy and opportunistic overtaking manoeuvre on Giancarlo Fisichella while they were both coming out of the pits. I let out a yelp and probably woke up half the street at that time of the morning, as I thought it was going to end up as a huge accident. In the end, it turned out well for Kovalainen and I was left impressed. It is the only ballsy thing I can ever remember him doing. But it’s probably too late to save his career at an established team.

It says a lot about the state of F1 at the moment that the biggest talking point of the weekend was the way penalties were dealt with. Eight drivers were penalised after qualifying. Most were for ignoring yellow flags after Sébastien Buemi’s accident, another was for blocking and others changed gearboxes and chassis.

This left the entire world scratching its head as to what the actual grid might be. Apparently several permutations were doing the rounds, while the FIA decided to sleep on it and published the grid just hours before the race began. Seemingly this is not a case of the Random Penalty Generator — it all seems above board, with the grid having been determined as it should be by the letter of the law. But clearly this is a system that fails the fans. We watch qualifying to find out what the starting grid will be, only to tune into the race finding that the stewards have changed it.

Then there is the case of the investigation into Nico Rosberg failing to observe the lap delta times under Safety Car conditions. It transpires that Rosberg was unable to know what his target time was because the message was overridden by a low fuel message from the standard ECU. Given that McLaren Electronic Systems designed the ECU, my first thought was that this was a particularly elaborate way of penalising McLaren for the incident.

In all seriousness though, this just sums up how Formula 1 has been swallowed up by an officious governing body more interested in rules than racing. The Safety Car rules have become so ridiculously complex in the past few years, mirroring the crisis that hit qualifying a few years ago when several formats were tried out in quick succession.

I suspected that Nico Rosberg knew he was guilty of driving too quickly under Safety Car conditions when he conducted an evasive interview on the BBC after the race. When questioned, he would only say that he didn’t gain an advantage. When asked if he was within the rules, he only said “I definitely did what I should do”.

As it transpires, he probably had good reason to be coy given that it seems as though he simply did not have the information that should have been displayed, even if it meant he technically broke the rules. In that light, it is fair to let Rosberg off on this instance, but he shouldn’t even have been in this position in the first place.

Now we are left with the tantalising prospect of Sebastian Vettel making a Räikkönen-esque comeback. James Allen says that a mental block has been passed, with Vettel now within 16 points of Button with two races to go. That is closer than Räikkönen was with two races to go in 2007.

It still seems like a long shot, but if the momentum is going anywhere it is not towards Button. All of a sudden, the pressure looks like it’s all on Jenson Button.

8 comments

The Singasnore Grand Prix

28 September 2009 22:15

Categories: Report

There is not a great deal to say about the racing at the Marina Bay Street Circuit this weekend. With the novelty of the night race concept having worn off, Singapore’s street circuit revealed itself to be on a par with Valencia’s in terms of on-track boredom.

That is not to say there aren’t a few talking points. Even though the race was quite insipid in many ways, there is little insipid about the podium. Lewis Hamilton put in a solid, though uneventful, performance to take a well-deserved second win of the season.

But I was most interested to watch the interview with his team mate, Heikki Kovalainen, after the race. Amid the latest rumours that Kimi Räikkönen is heading back to McLaren, Kovalainen is on the back foot. He needs to put in better performances in order to prove to McLaren and other teams that he deserves to be employed. But his demeanour after the race said it all — he sounded like a driver who realised he had been found out. 7th isn’t really good enough when the car is capable of winning.

Full credit must go to Timo Glock for finishing second. It is true that he largely inherited this position as a result of the woes of drivers in front: drive-through penalties for Rosberg and Vettel, and brake failure for Webber. But he was there to capitalise, having done well to qualify sixth when quite frankly to my eyes the car looked horrible on Friday. His team-mate Trulli, meanwhile, finished a lowly 12th.

Fernando Alonso obviously likes the circuit and scored the best result of the season at the same point where Renault’s fortunes turned last year. The Renault hasn’t looked capable of finishing on the podium all season. And Alonso has seemed strangely off-key to me this year. But he did it this time round, and caused a stir by dedicating his podium finish to Flavio Briatore. Some are interpreting it as a parting shot; others the human reaction of a man who has lost the boss who helped make him successful.

Whatever, it seems increasingly clear that his move to Ferrari for 2010 has been secured, with the rumour mill frantically suggesting that an announcement will come at Suzuka this coming weekend. Perhaps that is the reason why Alonso’s fire in the belly has returned to allow him to finish third.

Then we come to the title protagonists. Red Bull had another nightmare weekend which has pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for their championship hopes. All four Red Bull cars seemed to be suffering from brake issues, with such a failure making Webber’s race end in the barrier. Vettel could have had a much better result were it not for a drive-through for speeding in the pitlane, something which Vettel is adamant he has not done. In that context, fourth is a pretty impressive result for him.

As for Brawn, they salvaged something from what threatened to be a disaster. It seemed to be an up and down weekend for them. They seemed happy on Friday, but Button began complaining vociferously during Saturday Practice. Then both Brawns struggled in Qualifying, culminating in Barrichello’s session-ending crash. Ross Brawn declared qualifying to be disastrous.

As it was, they put in an okay performance during the race to finish 5th and 6th. Most importantly, Brawn have practically sealed up the Constructors’ Championship.

Meanwhile, Jenson Button has extended his Drivers’ Championship lead for the first time since Turkey. He edged further ahead of Barrichello by just one point, but with just three races to go, it looks like a tall order if anyone is to overhaul Button’s 15 point lead.

Maybe that makes the Championship boring now, which is perhaps why my eyes glazed over during that period in the middle of the race when nothing seemed to be happening. It has been an interesting season, but not an exciting one. Fair enough — we have had plenty of exciting seasons over the past few years and were perhaps overdue a dodgy one.

I am very much looking forward to the next race at Suzuka though. F1 finally returns to this classic circuit after three years, and it will surely provide a better class of show than the gimmicky Marina Bay circuit.

Just a final word about Adrian Sutil. What a chump. Fair play to him for trying to overtake someone, but his was a foul-up of Coulthard-esque proportions. Indeed, the entire incident was reminiscent of Coulthard’s attempt to overtake at Valencia last year.

But from my perspective, Sutil’s attempted move on Alguersuari was never on in a month of Sundays, and his determination to keep the throttle floored while in a spin was a stupid move when there was oncoming traffic. You have to feel sorry for Nick Heidfeld, who had his amazing run of consecutive finishes brought to a cruel end by a driver who should know better. Sutil’s $20,000 fine seems hefty, but I don’t feel much sympathy.

10 comments

Thoughts on the Renault punishments

25 September 2009 00:24

Categories: Opinion

Apologies I’m so late on this one. I have had a busy and tiring week.

On Monday, before the outcome of the WMSC meeting was known, I decided to think about what the outcome might be. Was there any punishment — even zero punishment — that I could not imagine the FIA handing out?

I couldn’t think of a scenario that was outside the realms of possibility. I suppose we are so used to the FIA Random Penalty Generator that you genuinely might as well have a lucky dip.

For the same reason, it is difficult to get too angry at the state of affairs. Because the other question I asked myself before the verdict was delivered was: is there any punishment that anger me? Honestly, I could not think of one.

This case is so complex, with so many factors, and there are a lot of ways to look at it. Particularly given that everyone involved in the conspiracy had already been dispensed with through natural business decisions, it’s difficult to see what further punishment is necessary. At the same time, there is an understandable need for the FIA to send some sort of message that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated.

As it was, when the penalty was announced, I was certainly interested. But there was nothing to get too angry about. Many journalists felt that Renault got off lightly. I noticed a few in the media pointing out that just two years ago McLaren were hit with a ONE HUNDRED MEELION DOLLARS fine after one staff member’s wife went to a shop and photocopied the Haynes Ferrari manual.

Deliberately crashing a car is no mere intellectual property theft — it is a major safety issue. It goes without saying that someone could have been killed. So there does appear to be a mismatch between McLaren’s “espionage” fine, and this relatively light punishment for Renault.

That just further underlines the ridiculousness of the McLaren fine. It was the McLaren punishment, not the Renault punishment, that was wrong.

I am a believer in individual responsibility. I am not keen on the idea of an entire team being punished for the acts of one or two rogue individuals. If there are repeat instances, and there appears to be a culture of bad behaviour within a team (and by that I don’t just mean that the FIA President slightly dislikes the team boss), then you can go and punish the team. But for a one-off crime carried out by an individual, it is right to punish that individual.

In that sense, it is right for the FIA to focus on the individuals involved in this case, even if the media wanted to report on an embarrassing punishment for the Renault team. The fact is that there are hundreds of good people working for the F1 team, and countless people working for the manufacturers, who are just as badly let down as anyone else. Renault’s defence in the WMSC meeting was that it was as much a victim as anyone else, and it is an argument I have some sympathy with.

As one British politician might say, Renault have been tried in “the court of public opinion”. They have already been found guilty and paid the price. The penalty already handed out to Renault as a car manufacturer has been an unimaginable amount of bad publicity which could well have an impact on its sales. After all, even for people who know nothing about F1, they are bound to have heard something about this story and the one name they will remember in relation to it is “Renault”. Anyone buying a car just now may well have this influence their decision, even if it is subliminally.

For the Renault F1 team, not only have they lost two of the most important members of the team, they have also lost two of their most important sponsors, including their title sponsor. Okay, so ING only had four races left anyway, and going by previous history Mutua Madrileña will follow Alonso wherever he goes. But anyone thinking of inking a deal with Renault will be having second thoughts, and will almost certainly be able to pay less for the privilege of having their logos displayed.

In relation to this, I note that during the WMSC verdict, Max Mosley declared that this was nothing to do with Renault the company, only Renault the F1 team. Given that the team faces a permanent ban, suspended for two years, I wonder exactly how the “F1 team” is defined.

Perhaps there is already an official answer for the FIA (though knowing them there probably isn’t). But if, say, someone like David Richards came along and bought the Enstone-based team, is that still Renault F1? If there is a Brawn-style scenario, is that the same team? It today’s Renault team the same team that entered as Toleman and competed against Renault in 1981?

As for the three people implicated — Nelsinho Piquet, Pat Symonds and Flavio Briatore — I would be surprised and disappointed to see any of them involved in motorsport again. The punishments for Mr Briatore and Mr Symonds seem fair to me. Although Briatore’s lifetime ban is, on the face of it, draconian, if he was implicated as the WMSC appear to believe then I see no reason why he should be allowed to work in F1 again.

Reaction to this has been mixed. Different drivers have different views. I find it interesting that the drivers who are sceptical of Briatore’s involvement have all been closely involved with Briatore in the past and are sure to know his character and if he is capable of plotting such a scheme. Fisichella and Trulli have both driven for him, while Mark Webber is positively glowing about his experience being managed by Briatore.

Jarno Trulli’s comment is, in a way, a backhanded compliment: “Briatore knows little or nothing about strategy, it’s weird that he would be the one who paid the highest price.”

That is interesting when you consider that Pat Symonds still maintains that it was Nelsinho Piquet who came up with the idea to deliberately crash a car, something which is backed by the mysterious Witness X. F1 Wolf points out:

Graham Stoker questioned Mr. Piquet about this “discrepancy” during the hearing (about 19min25sec mark of the recording). Nelson Piquet replied in line with his previous statements and then Mr. Philips, his lawyer, came to Piquet’s defense ridiculing the possibility that 20 something guy, a junior driver in a team could have come up with such strategy. And that was it, no more questions on this topic.

Well, the question is not about who came up with the strategy. We know the strategy came from Mr. Symonds, nobody seems to dispute that. The question is, who came up with the idea to deliberately crash the car.

It seems very possible that Symonds may have mused that Alonso’s only chance to win the race was for a Safety Car to come out early in the race. Who is to say that Piquet did not at this point suggest crashing the car?

Whatever, I am disappointed in the fact that Piquet was given immunity. For me, he is the biggest criminal in this situation. Neither Symonds nor Briatore had the power to crash the car. Piquet was the driver. The steering wheel was in his hands; the throttle was underneath his foot. Piquet was the man with the power to say: “no”.

Caron Lindsay argues that Piquet deserves some sympathy because of the amount of pressure he was under. No doubt his situation was unusual, not least because his team boss also happened to be his manager.

But as I have pointed out in a previous article, Martin Brundle (another person who has driven for Briatore) is not convinced that Piquet was under an inordinate amount of pressure. Piquet’s main defence appears to be that he was worried he was going to lose his job. How many drivers has this applied to in the past? Even this year, Sébastien Bourdais was on the verge of losing his job all season until it finally happened, and he managed to avoid deliberately putting other people’s lives at risk.

I would also suggest that if Piquet can’t handle pressure, racing in Formula 1 is probably not the right profession for him. It seems as though Piquet is a fragile character, and you can’t criticise him for that. You can’t really help this sort of thing. But if you are in such a poor mental state that you decide it would be a good idea to crash, you can’t really have that in F1.

Maybe his heart wasn’t in it. Piquet is a proud name, and the events of the past few weeks have clearly been conducted in large part by Senior. It seems to me as though Piquet Jr was as much a victim of pushy parenting as anything else.

5 comments

Button's bounce back

14 September 2009 21:01

Categories: Report

This season never ceases to amaze me. The racing hasn’t always been the best, but the outcomes have seldom been predictable. At first, the utter dominance of Brawn, and Button in particular, was unbelievable. They were unstoppable, and it took longer for the other teams to catch up.

Then when the other teams caught up, it looked like Red Bull had the pound seats. But in fact the whole thing unravelled for Red Bull and we instead saw a run of six different drivers winning six different races. That hasn’t happened since 1985.

Throughout that period, Button had underperformed. And despite maintaining his Houdini-like grip on the Championship lead, he appeared on the back foot. He faced questions over how he was handling the pressure of fighting for the Championship, and lost his cool when asked a direct question about it by Ed Gorman of The Times.

He turned up at Monza apparently reinvigorated. It is said that he changed his approach. Instead of worrying about defending the Championship, he was thinking of it was a five race championship in which he had a 16 point head-start. His tail is now up again, and this weekend he was part of a great Brawn revival.

I have to confess that I didn’t predict Brawn doing well at Monza. After all, at Spa-Francorchaps, a circuit with similar characteristics, Brawn were stuck firmly in the midfield. But I guess the hard braking zones, coupled with the awesome power of the Mercedes engine, played straight into their hands.

It was a disciplined approach from Brawn, who shunned headline-grabbing table-topping throughout the weekend. They instead went for a one-stop strategy, which left them occupying row 3 of the grid, but played into their hands massively during the race.

The only problem for Jenson Button was the fact that it was Rubens Barrichello who won the race. But despite having his best race since Turkey, Button has only lost two points from his lead — which is more-or-less the same sort of drop he has had from most of the past six races.

At the same time, Red Bull had yet another disastrous weekend. Mark Webber’s race was over after a first-lap tangle with Robert Kubica through the tight Roggia chicane. Meanwhile, Vettel lacked pace and could only score one point. The chance of a Red Bull driver winning the Championship has significantly diminished. Vettel has a 26 point deficit with only four races to go.

However, the most noteworthy part of the race was probably when Lewis Hamilton crashed on the final lap while he was running in third. The odd thing about it is that there is no immediately apparent reason for the crash. It seems that Hamilton just pushed a bit too hard. He was certainly pushing very hard all race, but you have to wonder why he thought he had a chance of catching Button with so little of the race remaining.

Some people like the fact that Hamilton is an aggressive driver, and I agree that it is more fun to watch than a more conservative driver who might settle for third. But this kind of needless mistake is something that Hamilton is particularly prone to, and it is what, for me, stops him from being a truly great driver. He needs the maturity to realise when is the right time to be aggressive rather than the simple “always push hard” approach.

You look at a race weekend like this and it is no surprise that Mercedes appears to want to back Brawn rather than McLaren in future. The Mercedes engine was clearly the class of the field, and McLaren had the perfect opportunity to make it work for them.

Fuel-corrected, Heikki Kovalainen was fast enough to be on pole position. But he had a horrendous first lap, getting swallowed up by car after car, and losing four places when he really should have gained places because of his kers. Looking at his strategy, many tipped Kovalainen to win. But he looked very average during the race and could only finish 6th.

It further cements my view that Kovalainen is a driver who is simply unable to win. His one career victory was inherited after Massa’s engine blew. Fair enough, but he can’t race his way to the front. His underwhelming performance at Monza this year is very reminiscent of last year’s Italian Grand Prix. That was another one that Kovalainen should have won, but he was unable to challenge Sebastian Vettel in the Toro Rosso.

Oh, McLaren. If they’re not getting themselves embroiled in political scandals as a result of their overly complicated interpretations of the rules, they are messing up their strategy or making some awful error in the pitlane. As for their drivers, one is too aggressive for his own good and makes high-profile mistakes, while the other one is too slow to ever be in a position to make mistakes.

It’s interesting to compare McLaren’s driver line-up with Brawn’s. The Brawn pair have both been written off in the past, yet this year they are the class of the field. Meanwhile, McLaren’s highly-rated drivers of moderate experience end up looking like the Chuckle Brothers in comparison. It seems like Mercedes’s shift in focus towards Brawn can’t come soon enough.

The other Mercedes-powered team, Force India, continued its good form from Spa-Francorchamps. I suppose on reflection Force India may have cause to be disappointed. On the back of Fisichella’s scintillating performance in Belgium, Sutil’s 4th place looks relatively subdued. Meanwhile, Liuzzi’s retirement with transmission failure while he was looking set for a solid result must count as a missed opportunity.

Mind you, how impressive was Liuzzi this weekend? Liuzzi is a star of the future of the past, having once been tipped for a drive at Ferrari while he impressed the world in F3000. But he ended up getting swallowed and spat out by the Red Bull driver development juggernaut, where he was messed about by the management.

But it should be remembered that Liuzzi held his own against Sebastian Vettel while at Toro Rosso. The talent is there but has been wasted over the years. His performance at Monza surely cements his future at Force India or perhaps even a better team.

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