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Archive: Canadian Grand Prix

Is Hamilton becoming the anti-Senna?

15 June 2011 21:32

Categories: Formula 1

Shortly after the Canadian Grand Prix finished, Bill asked me in the comments what I thought about the latest tangle that Lewis Hamiton has found himself in.

It was another bad race for Hamilton. Two more clumsy clashes were added on top of the controversial incidents in Monaco that are still fresh in the memory.

It is starting to look like a bad habit.

Montreal incidents weren’t so bad

But the thing is, I don’t think either of the incidents in Montreal were nearly as bad as what he got up to in Monaco.

Yes, the move up the inside of Mark Webber at the start was too optimistic. But in the dry it probably would have worked. If you look at Hamilton’s onboard camera shot, Hamilton looks like he is going to make it, but then understeers through a puddle.

It would be right to argue that Hamilton should have taken the conditions into account. So in that respect, it was a dodgy move on Hamilton’s part. But at least he didn’t just steam straight into Webber in stable conditions, as he did to Felipe Massa and Pastor Maldonado in Monaco.

As for the crash with Jenson Button, I think this was an unfortunate racing incident. Hamilton got such better drive than Button, that it is perfectly understandable that he had a go. Plus, the racing line along the pit straight at Montreal effectively goes from the extreme right to the extreme left, back to the right again.

No matter which way Hamilton went, he would have found himself getting squeezed eventually. It was just a bad deal that Button couldn’t see him in his mirrors due to a mixture of bad conditions and confusion. Again, Hamilton should have taken the conditions into account. But, again, at least it wasn’t as malicious as what went on in Monaco.

Why does Hamilton get himself in so much trouble?

It does strike me, though, that Hamilton is taking on far too many of these marginal overtaking attempts. Hamilton has always been a little bit like this, though he had seemed to calm down a bit. His excitable inexperience is no longer an excuse — this is his fifth F1 season. He has more than enough grands prix under his belt to know what’s what.

But what is making him go for all these half gaps? One theory is that he just has to push harder this year to beat Red Bull, and is becoming desperate as a result. Undoubtedly that is part of the problem. But Hamilton had a much worse start to the season in 2009 and he wasn’t quite as clumsy as this then.

Senna’s influence

All the hype surrounding Ayrton Senna, following the release of the successful eponymous film, has brought one Senna quote to the fore:

If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver.

Senna was known for his high-risk, sometimes dangerous moves. The key to Senna, though, was that he was often able to intimidate drivers into moving out of his way. Michael Schumacher also had this trait.

It is well known that Hamilton idolises Senna. When Hamilton goes for a half opportunity, you can imagine him repeating the Senna quote to himself in his head.

It’s more than just “going for a gap”

But overtaking is about so much more than simply driving round another car by going faster. You need to assess the situation; analyse what the opposing driver has at stake, work out what he is thinking and how much he will yield. It is effectively a 200mph game of chicken.

Senna and Schumacher managed to balance the scales of this game of chicken massively in their favour by building up a fearsome reputation. They were the hard-chargers who would impose themselves on their opponents through a mixture of speed and aggression. Perversely, this possibly made it easier for them to overtake.

Hamilton, on the other hand, is very quickly building himself the opposite reputation. He is becoming clumsy Lewis — probably about to cause another crash that will be all his fault.

Even in a situation where Hamilton may have the upper hand on track, he may begin to find overtaking more difficult. Hamilton’s reputation is such that even in a racing incident, he could well find himself being blamed for every clash he is involved in. This, in turn, could make his opponents more open to defending more aggressively.

Could it be that in his attempts to become this generation’s Senna, Lewis Hamilton has actually achieved the reverse?

3 comments

You can’t make an old dog forget dirty tricks

18 August 2010 23:34

Categories: *, Formula 1

The Hungarian Grand Prix lived up to its reputation for being a boring circuit in terms of overtaking, but always delivering action of some sort. Hungaroring may be dull as a spectacle, but there is never a shortage of talking points.

This year’s was provided by Michael Schumacher. His already infamous move to push Rubens Barrichello towards the pit wall while both were travelling at top speeds was one of the most vicious I have ever seen. I was yelling while it was happening.

I think I will forever vividly remember watching the onboard shot from Rubens Barrichello’s car live. I was cheering him on as he lined up to overtake Michael Schumacher. Then I was horrified when I realised what Schumacher was doing.

Not that it is much of a surprise. It is well known that Michael Schumacher is capable more than anyone else of pulling a dirty move out of his lowest drawer. His famous tainted legacy: Why does driver who is so good — a seven time World Champion no less — feel the need to pull off these extreme moves.

In a way, what he did to Barrichello in Hungary this year was worse than anything we have seen from him before. When he crashed into Damon Hill in 1994 it was to win the championship. When he crashed into Jacques Villeneuve in 1997 it was a last-ditch attempt to win the championship. When he parked his car at Rascasse in 2006 he was a championship contender. This? A futile fight for 10th position in a nothing year for him.

By now everyone knows that 2010 has not been the comeback Michael Schumacher was hoping for. In his recent interviews he has stated that he is only interested in winning championships. Scrapping away in the midfield is not interesting to him. He doesn’t like racing; he is only interested in winning.

I have always felt that his wheel-to-wheel abilities are actually quite poor. Schumacher’s speed cannot be in doubt — when he is out in front. But when he is on the back foot, he switches into panic mode. All of his most notorious moves have been snap decisions that he has made in a moment when he has suddenly been put under pressure. He is a quick driver. Unfortunately this means he often makes a move before he has engaged his brain.

This is what we have seen this year. Not just in Hungary, but also in Canada. He noticeably struggled in Montreal. He had a scrappy race and made a few panic moves, including a chop across Felipe Massa.

Unfortunately, an uncompetitive Michael Schumacher is no less ruthless. If anything, he is worse when he is on the back foot. Is it really the done thing to desperately try to push someone into the pit wall for the sake of one point?

One perspective is that this is good, hard racing. I also liked the viewpoint put forward by Axis of Oversteer — that this is the manifestation of genuine bad blood between two drivers. Schumacher and Barrichello have a lot of history, and it’s easy to imagine that this was all in the minds of both drivers.

But full credit to Rubens Barrichello for completing the move. He showed great bravery on the track, and immense integrity off the track. Barrichello’s behaviour after the race was exemplary. Meanwhile, Michael Schumacher complained that Barrichello is a whiner.

It is said that at Spa in 1998, Michael Schumacher stormed up to David Coulthard and accused him of “trying to fucking kill me”. I think Barrichello had cause to do a lot more than merely “whine”.

Michael Schumacher knows that in order to be successful you have to be ruthless, and at times aggressive. He is by no means the only aggressive driver on the grid. Mark Webber stands out. In fact, Webber was involved in quite a similar incident at Fuji in 2008 with Felipe Massa. But in this instance, Webber’s move across the track was made much earlier, much more gradually, and he did not push Massa nearly as far.

As such, Webber is respected as an aggressive driver, but also one who speaks about on-track safety with authority. As major player in the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, Mark Webber has made it his business to care about safety. This is the beauty of Mark Webber — he pushes it, but he knows exactly where the limit is, then stops. The problem Schumacher has is that he doesn’t know where the line is drawn.

Michael Schumacher is a hugely successful driver that many look up to as a role model. I would hate to think that he finds these sorts of dangerous manoeuvres acceptable. I am surprised that he did not receive a disqualification. He should also have received at least a one race ban. I bet if, say, Vitaly Petrov tried the same thing, he’d be sitting out the next few races.

The next race is in Belgium — where Schumacher’s fans turn out in force. The race after that is Monza, where the fans have quite a few fond memories of Schumacher as well. I would hate to think it is the case, but you would almost think the powers-that-be had one eye on the purse strings and the PR value of having Schumacher continuing racing — even though he is a known danger.

5 comments

F1 2010 mid-season rankings — part 1

17 July 2010 17:10

Categories: Formula 1

I can hardly believe we are already more than halfway through the Formula 1 season. It has gone by so quickly. Normally I look at the performances of the drivers at the halfway point. But this year I haven’t felt as able to keep on top of everything, so instead I will look at the constructors.

12. Hispania

Of the three new teams, Hispania have probably had the hardest job after taking over the Campos entry at the eleventh hour after it hit severe financial difficulties. Although their car is probably the slowest, it does not have the poorest reliability record, and as such the team currently sits ahead of Virgin in the Constructors’ Championship. Hispania have also acted quickly to sort out the problems with the Dallara chassis, and have hired big name designer Geoff Willis to sort out the mess for next season.

However, recent musical chairs involving their drivers have left a sour taste in the mouth. Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok are both well-liked drivers who have done an admirable job in hugely difficult circumstances, even though you might say neither is a potential future World Champion. Sakon Yamamoto is not liked very much, and is not terribly good as demonstrated in his previous two stints in F1. But the team appear to be desperate to get him into the car nevertheless. The process has been handled appallingly.

11. Virgin

On the track, Virgin is probably the least exciting of the new teams. Their reliability record is poor, and the speed is not particularly impressive, even if they occasionally manage to beat a Lotus every once in a while.

On the plus side, their controversial approach to design the car without the use of a wind tunnel has proved the doubters wrong, as the car has not been disastrously off the pace.

Both drivers have shown flashes of brilliance. But you sense that Timo Glock in particular would be capable of more if only he had decent equipment.

10. Lotus

Lotus have very quickly established themselves as the fastest of the new teams. But it has not all been plain sailing for them, and their reliability record needs improvement. I also wonder how much better they would be doing if they had two better race drivers than Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen, although the experienced line-up is probably ideal in a development sense.

The next target for Lotus is to start beating the established teams on a regular basis. But with Williams and Sauber both having made significant improvements recently, it is difficult to see how they can make much headway beyond battling with Toro Rosso. Whatever, next year will be important for Lotus — anything below ninth in the 2011 Constructors’ Championship would surely be a disappointment. But that just shows how far they have come already.

9. Williams

Although they have begun to make strides up the grid in the past few races, the fact remains that this has been another disastrous year for Williams. They have spent much of the season battling at the wrong end of the grid, counting Sauber and Toro Rosso among their rivals.

Perhaps the most worrying thing is that when you hear the likes of Patrick Head and Sam Michael try to explain the team’s performance over the past few years, they seem to be at a loss, except for vaguely talking about money being an issue. Williams lack answers.

Rubens Barrichello has been doing more or less the sort of job you would expect him to do. Meanwhile, promising rookie Nico Hülkenberg has not shown as much promise as you might have hoped. This has been coupled with a heavy dose of bad luck. I hope the second half of the season is better for Hülkenberg, of whom I am a fan.

8. Toro Rosso

I am finding it difficult to draw any firm conclusions about Toro Rosso yet. They have had some very poor showings indeed. But on the plus side, you must remember that this is their first year as a ‘proper’ constructor, designing their own chassis. On this basis, this season must be regarded as a success, even if they have not always been as quick as they may have liked.

Both Jaime Alguersuari and Sébastien Buemi are continuing to improve. Alguersuari has shown some real flashes of brilliance, and has impressed me a lot this season — particularly in a couple of battles with Michael Schumacher!

But with a more anonymous season, Buemi has been keeping his nose clean and has picked up the majority of the team’s points haul so far. That is mainly due to his assured performance at Canada, where he did well standing his ground as he briefly led the race as the pitstop phase was shaking itself out.

7. Sauber

After a promising winter testing season, the start of the actual season itself was deeply embarrassing for Sauber as they totally failed to convert pre-season promise into real race results. The car was not only frightfully slow, but it was also horrendously unreliable, making Sauber easily the worst of the established teams.

A question mark also hung over the choice of drivers, probably the riskiest on the grid. The decision to opt for Pedro de la Rosa, who had not raced since 2006, was bizarre — and I am a fan of de la Rosa! Meanwhile, Kamui Kobayashi was a man whose entire reputation was built on two races in odd circumstances.

The good news is that Sauber have turned the corner. de la Rosa is not making a fool of himself, and only needs more luck now in order to start scoring points. Meanwhile, Kobayashi looks set to become a points-scoring regular now. His performance in Valencia was absolutely superb, and he backed this up with another solid performance at Silverstone.

Sauber have also acted quickly to improve the car, making the decision to hire James Key early on as the car’s deficiencies became clear. The improvements he has made since joining the team can be seen vividly in the results.

2 comments

F1 can’t learn too much from Canada

8 July 2010 00:23

Categories: Formula 1

Without doubt, the Canadian Grand Prix was a highly unusual and exciting race. It brought us a new, unfamiliar situation and it was fascinating to watch it unfold. The staggering figure of 65 on-track passes will count as among the very highest seen in a dry race in recent years.

It is therefore no surprise that the kneejerk calls to “learn from the Canada show” have come thick and fast. In my view that is dangerous.

First of all, as I have pointed out before, the focus on “the show” is vacuous, trite and antithetical to the idea of the sport. Of course F1 should be exciting. But what you can’t forget is that we love F1 already — because it already is exciting.

What we now risk — with this crazy obsession with “improving the show” — is future of F1 that is increasingly watered-down. F1 is becoming too convoluted due to bizarre rules that are tacked on bit-by-bit in a misguided and unnecessary attempt to engineer excitement. This is the stuff of bad game shows or WWF or Nascar. We are talking about F1, the greatest sport in the world. It doesn’t need this.

I am particularly disappointed in Mike Gascoyne’s bizarre call to attempt to somehow incorporate the conditions that occurred in Canada into the tyre rules:

If you were going to write the tyre rules for how you wanted races to be, they would be like Canada. You had changing strategies, overtaking and lots of excitement.

It was exactly what F1 needs, and it’s proved that the argument for one tyre being very marginable is very strong.

This surely overlooks the key reasons behind why the Canadian Grand Prix was such a great spectacle. First of all there is the fact that it is an incredible circuit that brings us great, edge-of-your-seat races time and again, regardless of what the current rules are. Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a great circuit. Full stop.

Moreover, one of the features of the circuit that has emerged as a major factor over and over again is the fact that it is hard on tyres. I vividly remember the 2006 Canadian Grand Prix, where the tyres were degrading in such an odd way that the circuit was absolutely covered in marbles. I seem to recall David Coulthard describing those conditions as the worst dry-weather conditions he had ever raced in.

Then there is the fact that this is the first time Formula 1 has visited Montreal with the current slick tyres, and with the current restrictions on the numbers of sets of tyres teams can use, and there you have your recipe for the 2010 Canadian Grand Prix.

Some of this cannot be replicated. Some of it already is. The rest is artificial interfering.

The call for the tyre supplier to provide the teams with increasingly marginal tyres goes against everything that F1 is supposed to be about — the best drivers using the best equipment. Artificially hobbling drivers is a fake approach to racing. More overtaking is meaningless if it isn’t real overtaking.

That is why Pirelli’s stated desire to “have a Canadian GP every race” sends a shiver down my spine. I was hoping that the switch of tyre supplier would be the perfect opportunity to ditch the current tyre regulations, which are currently a mess from a sporting standpoint. Instead, it looks like the tyre rules are only going to become worse.

But most of all there is the issue that the unpredictable will soon enough become predictable. The way events unfolded in Canada caught the teams off guard. But the second time something like that happens, they will be much better prepared. The third time they will begin to set a routine in place. After a handful more occasions, they will know the drill down pat. All the unpredictability will be gone.

This is what we saw with refuelling. At first it was an interesting novelty, and it added an interesting strategy element. But by the end of the refuelling era, it was adding nothing to the show. Armed with 15 years’ worth of data, and with the calculation powers of modern computers, the teams always knew what the optimum strategy was and employed it. The result was neutered racing, with the refuelling only adding an incentive for drivers to “overtake in the pitlane” and avoid on-track action.

The same would happen with tyres, as the teams gather data and become better prepared. They may say they want to improve the show. But they also want to win the race. It is a classic prisoners’ dilemma — and, just as with refuelling, the teams will always try to win the race before thinking about the show.

It is worth considering that the reason the Canadian Grand Prix was so exciting was that the teams pushed too hard and ended up painting themselves into a corner. The Bahrain Grand Prix was so boring because the teams were far too conservative, fearful of overstepping the mark with the tyres and ending up in exactly the scenario that unfolded in Canada. The teams want to have their cake and eat it.

F1 teams are constantly looking for the boundaries of performance, and sometimes they go beyond those boundaries. When they do, they learn the lessons and adapt their approach for next time. No set of rules can affect this fundamental nature of the way teams behave.

What we really should take away from the Canadian Grand Prix is the joy of watching a great race. This is the sort of thing that should be celebrated. But there were great races in the past, and great races are caused by a variety of factors that cannot be pinned down.

Even if they were pinned down, knowing the factors would be a surefire way of ensuring boring races for the rest of the sport’s future. What makes F1 exciting is its inherent unpredictability. Trying to engineer unpredictability is surely an oxymoron.

This does mean that sometimes we endure the odd mediocre race. But since we follow a sport and not a show, we are all happy with that — aren’t we?…

3 comments

Badoer: the fastest-ever slowest driver?

31 August 2009 13:51

Categories: History, News, Report

Allow me to explain. Despite all the jibes about Luca Badoer struggling, it occurred to me that he may now have another unusual record to add to his list.

Here is the official lap chart for this year’s Belgian Grand Prix, as published by the FIA. Do you spot anything unusual about it?

2009 Belgian Grand Prix lap chart

Despite the fact that he was last of the classified runners, Badoer was only 102.1 seconds behind the race winner, Kimi Räikkönen. “Only?”, I hear you say. But he was still on the lead lap. In fact, the lap chart reveals that there was no lapped traffic for the entire race.

I wonder if this is a first. There are a few things that lead me to believe this is the case. First of all, it is commonly believed that Formula 1 cars have never been as close in terms of performance. Surely the amazing speed of the Force India in Belgium is testament to the idea that there are no longer backmarkers in F1 like there used to be.

Luca Badoer, the slowest man in qualifying, was around 2.5 seconds off the quickest time. Although in F1-2009 style this invites derision, even five years ago this would have been a creditable performance. Read a grid from the 1990s, and it is routine to see cars a dozen seconds or more off the pace.

Furthermore, Spa-Francorchamps also has the longest laptime of any circuit currently in use in F1, which in itself makes it less likely that cars will be lapped during the race. I have checked some previous Belgian Grands Prix to check, but all have had lapped cars, apart from this year’s. For this reason, it is also possible that some races at longer circuits used in history (notably the Nordschleife) may not have seen any lapped traffic, but with more reliability problems and poorer driving standards back then, I wouldn’t count on it.

(Update: I have checked all Formula 1 Grands Prix to have been held at the Nordschleife, and each race had classified runners not on the lead lap according to Wikipedia.)

Against that argument is the fact that since 2007, lapped cars have been able to join the lead lap behind the Safety Car. This makes it much less likely that there will be lapped cars at the end of the race — but there will still have been lapped cars during the race.

I asked on Twitter if this was the first time none of the classified runners had been lapped. Amazingly, Alianora La Canta set to work and used her awesome research skills to find out that the last time all the classified runners finished on the lead lap was at the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix.

However, this was one instance where a Safety Car allowed lapped cars to join the lead lap. The official lap chart (PDF) reminds us that there was indeed lapped traffic during the race.

So it looks like I may be right in my hunch that Badoer is the only person ever to finish in last place, yet not have been lapped during the race. So does anyone know if Badoer’s achievement truly is a first? I would love to know.

As ever, Keith at F1 Fanatic provides us with a list of interesting facts about the race. I wonder if Badoer’s fast last place is one to add to that list.

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