In my review of the European Grand Prix, I didn’t mention Luca Badoer, who made his high-profile Ferrari début at the race. It was always going to be a tough ask, because the odds were so heavily stacked against him.

For one thing, he had to get used to the car, which he had never driven at racing speeds before. According to Ted Kravitz:

Evidently the Ferrari F60 is a very complicated car to operate. There are many buttons and dials to turn and twist: Kers harvest and usage settings, brake balance and bias levers, fuel and oil pumps, front flap adjusts and the usual revs, throttle and mixture settings.

I’m not sure if he is implying that the F60 is more difficult to get used to than other current F1 cars. But whatever, it is certainly new territory for Badoer who is used to driving cars in the relatively tranquil environment of the test session rather than the intense spotlight and razzmatazz of a grand prix weekend. To deal with all of this in the first time he’s properly driven the F60 — and in his first race for ten years at that — is undeniably a big ask.

Luca Badoer must have been as shocked as everyone else when it was announced that he was to race in Valencia. It is typical of Badoer’s luck. F1 has shat on this driver for his whole career. I would highly recommend his biography on F1 Rejects for a full overview.

He may not be F1 championship material. But he is the 1992 Formula 3000 champion, having beaten Rubens Barrichello, Olivier Panis and David Coulthard among others in the process. So he is no fool.

But in F1 he never got the proper chance to demonstrate his abilities, being stuck with back-of-the-grid teams Scuderia Italia, Minardi and Forti — and despite usually having the upper-hand over his team mates on the racetrack, politics often meant he found it difficult to move ahead in his career.

You might have thought that signing with Ferrari to become their test driver in 1998 would have seen an upswing in his fortunes. In a lot of ways, Badoer must be the unsung hero of Ferrari’s success since then. He is the test driver who has helped develop cars capable of winning Championship after Championship following a twenty year drought for Ferrari.

Normally a team’s test driver would be the first choice to step in if a driver needs replaced. Inexplicably, when Michael Schumacher broke his legs in 1999, Ferrari opted to look outside the team. They placed Mika Salo in the car, when most observers expected Badoer to get the nod. Subsequently, Badoer stayed on with Ferrari having been promised that he would be the reserve driver.

Since then, Ferrari has had a remarkable period of driver stability. Between 1999 and 2009, Ferrari changed drivers only three times (Irvine replaced by Barrichello, Barrichello replaced by Massa and Schumacher replaced by Räikkönen)! At no point did any driver have to be replaced at short notice. No space for Badoer ever emerged. One must imagine that after twelve years waiting, he would have given up believing.

Then Felipe Massa was injured at Hungary. In the year that there was a radical change in technical regulations which is said to be the biggest in 25 years. In the year that testing is banned. In the one year that Luca Badoer had never driven the Ferrari car. And when the next race was at a brand new circuit which he had never visited.

Of course Luca Badoer didn’t get the call. Michael Schumacher did instead, and the media could barely contain their excitement. Schumacher is a seven times World Champion, but still people openly wondered: is Schumacher up to the task? Can he get used to the new car? Is he fit enough? At 40, will he be too old? In the end, it turned out that Schumacher couldn’t do the job because of the injury he picked up while racing Superbikes in Germany.

So it was down to Badoer to shoulder the responsibility of making something out of the pickle that Ferrari found themselves in. Of course, the media won’t be lining up with the same excuses that were already being served up on Schumacher’s behalf before his comeback. This was despite the fact that there are actually quite legitimate reasons for Badoer to be off the pace. Badoer is not much younger than Schumacher, and is the oldest driver on the grid. But that is not an excuse apparently, despite the fact that it supposedly would have been for Schumacher.

Instead, the media has spent its time openly laughing at Luca Badoer, almost willing him to do badly. The schadenfreude soaked through the reports as the journalists gleefully reported Badoer’s four pitlane speeding offences on Friday, a symptom of the fact that the pitlane speed limit is substantially higher during test sessions and Badoer needed time to adjust to the new braking points required.

All I can say is, Badoer is not the one who parked his car at Rascasse, but never mind. Of course, the journalists were just taking it out on Badoer because he isn’t Princess Schumacher so they lost their “fairytale” story that is so desperately needed to sell a turgid circuit like Valencia.

I found the gulf in opinion between the journalists and the drivers very interesting. While the journalists were busy thinking up oh-so-witty nicknames like “Look-how Bad-you-are”, the drivers in contrast felt sorry for the situation that Badoer found himself in. Jarno Trulli described Badoer’s situation as “impossible”. Lewis Hamilton said that Badoer has “done a good job just to keep it on the track”, while Kovalainen shrugged: “I don’t know what else you could have expected.”

The split was also demonstrated on the Chequered Flag podcast. David Croft mocked, “even Yuji Ide had more promise” (which is totally untrue — Badoer has already achieved much more in his career than Ide could ever hope for). F1 Racing’s Bradley Lord said, “Badoer approached this race as a test — and he failed this one.” Ha-very-ha. Anthony Davidson had plead to his bloodthirsty journalist colleagues, “give him some space!”

David Coulthard summed up the situation nicely: “Who would be Luca Badoer? You wait 10 years for your chance to race for Ferrari and then, despite having no preparation whatsoever, you get slated for not being Michael Schumacher.”

In Checkpoint 10’s excellent analysis, it is shown that Badoer was not actually half as bad as the journalists would have you believe. His qualifying time was 103.4% of the fastest time, when the 107% rule used to eliminate drivers on a regular basis.

He struggled during the race. After a good start, he was obviously spooked by being surrounded by other cars on lap 1 and spun. He then panicked in the pitlane, seemingly allowing Romain Grosjean to overtake him before he crossed the white line. And he had a worryingly erratic second stint. But overall, Badoer showed improvement as the race progressed, and noticeably caught up with Räikkönen’s pace as the race progressed and Badoer became more comfortable.

In sum, yes, Badoer had a very disappointing weekend. But that is mostly because driving standards are so high these days. You don’t have to go far to find real joke drivers who definitely did not deserve to be racing and did a much worse job than Badoer.

I grew up watching people people who paid to get a race seat trundle around up to a dozen seconds per lap off the pace. Hell, you only have to go back a few years to encounter and Yuji Ide, who suffered the ignominy of being stripped of his super license. The last pay driver went when Sakon Yamamoto lost his seat. Driving standards all the way through the grid are very high compared with ten or even five years ago. This amplifies Badoer’s rustiness.

Badoer’s performance in Valencia is the sort of thing that would have been commonplace at the back of the grid in the mid-1990s. You might say that this is not the mid-1990s, but when you consider everything that is stacked against Luca Badoer — his age, his lack of experience, never having driven the F60 before, never having been to the Valencia Street Circuit before, and having to get used to the modern-day race weekend environment — I think he should be cut a bit more slack.

I feel very sorry for Badoer, who has had a very tough F1 career where he has been given the rough end of the stick at almost every turn. It looks likely that Badoer will be replaced come Monza, which would be fair enough if he doesn’t show a perceptible improvement in Spa.

But now Badoer will probably be remembered for these two difficult races where he was thrown in at the deep end, and everyone decided to point and laugh at this man (who, do not forget, is actually putting his life on the line when he goes out to race). I am not sure whether this is better than being remembered for breaking down in tears at his previous European Grand Prix, in 1999.

In my previous article, I argued that the problems that are hitting journalism are more to do with the quality of the content than with the fact that it’s difficult to charge for content these days. “Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?”, I asked.

I am sure plenty of journalists realise this if they stop to think about the situation. The fact that so many professionals blame bloggers for the industry’s ills says it all. Despite journalists’ qualifications, experience and resources, their entire business is supposedly being dismantled by a bunch of hobbyists who spend the odd hour of their spare time opining on the internet.

A few weeks ago I met a journalist at a party and I engaged him in a conversation about the future of his industry. He told me he hates bloggers (whoops! — I kept schtoom). But he told me that in his view the biggest problem was people scooping him on web forums! If the professionals see online discussion forums as not only competing with them but doing better than them, that surely must make them wonder if the product they are asking people to buy simply is not good enough.

Anyone who thinks that bloggers and the mainstream media are competing is wrong. If they are competing, the media simply isn’t doing its job properly. Let us face facts. For the most part, bloggers don’t have the contacts, the resources or the expertise to do, for instance, a big investigative story.

If the media is worried about amateur bloggers, it is a pretty bad reflection on the professionals. Perhaps to distinguish itself, the media should be focussing on those aspects of content production that bloggers cannot do.

The supply of mediocre content is too high. Too much of the same sort of content is as readily available to news junkies as sea water is to beach-goers. In effect, for the past decade or so newspapers have been driving up to the beach with a tankful of sea water, then pumping their water into the sea. Later they started stretching out their hands like beggars wondering, “why won’t these beach-goers pay us for all this seawater we’re providing them?!”

So what is the answer? In my view, less is more. What newspapers need to do is offer something distinctive and different. They should specialise more and differentiate their content from everyone else’s. They need to offer less, but better, content.

Newspapers should forget about reporting all the same hard news as every other outlet is. It is a crowded marketplace so there is no money to be made there. Instead, they should work on more exclusives, investigative reporting, analysis and features.

Actually, there is a problem with that idea, which is that it won’t save all newspapers as we know them at all. It points to a future where many daily newspapers may wither. But weeklies, monthlies and specialist publications are more likely to thrive. It wouldn’t stop the press from having a difficult period of job losses and paper closures. But it would mean those who could get it right would be able to charge for content quite comfortably.

Evidence suggests that this shift may already be happening. Speaking personally, there is not one daily newspaper that I would be happy to pay for. But up until recently I was perfectly happy to pay for the weekly Economist (and in truth, I only stopped because I didn’t have the time to read it). As for specialist publications, I still like to read the monthly F1 Racing if I get the chance.

It may be the same for other people too. Recent evidence seems to suggest that many specialist publications are doing well at the moment, even amid all the turmoil in the press and the worst recession in living memory. According to Malcolm Coles, 216,000 people are perfectly happy to pay £7.75 per month for an online subscription to Which?.

Yesterday I also read about two major news websites relaunching — with less emphasis on news. On the new LA Times website, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker wrote:

Scroll down from the top of page at the new LAT site and you find: Health, Food, Education, Technology, Sports, Blogs, Columns, Opinion, Photos & Video, Summer Hot List, and “Your Scene, Your Comments.” Did you miss the, say, ‘International news’ section? It is way up at the top in tiny tiny type. Below the top fifth or so of the page, there is no “hard news” at all.

As for the new Newsday website… well, just take a look.

Someone still has to do the worthy news stories though. Maybe that can be better left to agencies or major broadcasters. But maybe a simple reduction in the number of newspapers would suffice. Iain Hepburn recently estimated that as many as 17 major media outlets are all aiming at the same audience in Scotland. We make do without 17 major supermarket chains — five or six different ones satisfy most consumers. So do we need more than five or six major news outlets?

A merger here, a takeover there and even the odd shutdown or two might be a good thing. Fewer outlets can have a higher market share, more resources, more of the best journalists — and they’ll produce a better product as a result. Five or six excellent news sources would be much better than 17 so-so ones, which is more or less what we’ve got at the moment. Surely that is what’s needed to make news a viable business going forward.

Okay, so it’s not from the vaults, it’s from my attic.

I just happened to mention in passing to “me” from Sidepodcast on Identica the short-lived F1 magazine GPX. He asked me to upload it so that he could see what it was like, so I took photos of the two issues of GPX I own and uploaded them to Sidepodcast’s Dropio. I hope the people at Haymarket don’t mind too much. But this is over ten years old and it obviously didn’t make them much money at the time, so…

If you’re interested, Issue #3 starts here, and you need to click the left arrow to go through the magazine. Issue #4 starts here.

Issue #4 was the final issue of GPX. Obviously Haymarket had high hopes for it, and I even remember seeing posters in the window of a WH Smith advertising it. The magazine totally tanked though.

Originally designed to be a “laddish” magazine, issue #4 shows some signs of desperation with features designed to appeal more to females, including the “Top 20 sexy F1 drivers of all time” and a “hunky” poster of Mika Salo. Stuart C from F1 Racing has a bit more on GPX over at Sidepodcast here and here.

In retrospect, GPX wasn’t a quality magazine. It did have some good gags in it though. I like ‘Brainstorming with the Prost team‘ and the joke about spelling out ‘Schumacher’ with beer cans made me chuckle at the time.

The magazine as a whole has slight shades of The Red Bulletin and Sniff Petrol. In fact, GPX might actually have had a chance if it was as consistently funny as Sniff Petrol…

While I was rummaging for those issues of GPX, I found some other interesting old F1 magazines and various other bits and pieces. Most of these almost certainly came free with F1 Racing. Click below to see what I found.

Click for more »

One of the stories that emerged during the recent Olympic Games was the extraordinary diet of Michael Phelps who won eight Olympic gold medals this year. The swimmer takes in an incredible 12,000 calories per day. Here is his intake for the day:

• Breakfast
  • Three fried egg sandwiches topped with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise
  • Two cups of coffee
  • Omelette made out of five eggs
  • Bowl of grits
  • Three slices of french toast sprinkled with sugar
  • Three chocolate chip cookies
• Lunch
  • Half a kilogram of enriched pasta
  • Two large ham and cheese sandwiches of white bread with mayonnaise
  • 1,000 calories of energy drink
• Dinner
  • Half a kilogram of enriched pasta (again)
  • A whole pizza
  • 1,000 calories more of energy drink

All I can say is, with a breakfast that big I hope he doesn’t have to commute!

This extreme diet reminded me of another extreme diet I read about earlier this year. It is not uncommon to hear about drivers stacking up on the pasta — the carbohydrates do them good over long distances.

But pasta is a big no-no for Robert Kubica nowadays. The pole is among the tallest drivers in F1 at 184 cm. That can be a major disadvantage in a sport where teams are always looking to trim unnecessary weight so that they can put ballast in the best position for the performance of the car.

There is also the fact that the cockpit of an F1 can be quite a confined space. Alexander Wurz was unable to deputise when Juan Pablo Montoya had his “tennis injury” a couple of years back because the Austrian still couldn’t fit into the McLaren car! In 1995 Nigel Mansell also struggled to fit into his McLaren, though that was probably more because he had grown outwards!

Over the winter, Robert Kubica went on an extraordinary crash diet which allowed him to lose an incredible five kilos in just five weeks. That is amazing for someone who looked so gaunt in the first place. This weight loss is said to be a major factor in his competitiveness this season. Here is a typical day in Kubica’s regime according to an article by Peter Windsor in the June 2008 issue of F1 Racing.

• Breakfast: fruit
• Lunch: A 50p-sized piece of chicken with some carrots and a sprig of broccoli
• Dinner: “A forkful of protein”

(A 50 pence piece is 27.3 mm in diameter.)

“No carbs. No dairy. Nothing artificially sweet.”

The prospect of eating so little throughout the day would be bad enough for me, never mind being banned from carbohydrates! Like Michael Phelps, Robert Kubica has had to display tremendous self-discipline and commitment. It is just another reason why Robert Kubica is surely a future world champion.

Unfortunately the Valencia Street Circuit did not come up with the goods. There was excitement in some quarters about the possibility of overtaking in Valencia, but the race was in fact one of the most processional we have seen all year. The only decent overtaking move was Coulthard on Piquet very early on in the race. Coulthard was later caught out by an over-optimistic move on Adrian Sutil.

However, there are a few talking points coming away from the European Grand Prix and they all centre on Ferrari. I can’t work out who has got the upper hand in the championship battle between Ferrari and McLaren. But definitely think that the ball is in Ferrari’s court. It’s theirs to win or lose.

First of all, it is now crystal clear that Ferrari have gained a huge performance advantage in the engine department. This is astonishing given that there is a supposed “engine freeze” whereby development on the engine is not allowed. It looks like Ferrari have been utilising a loophole whereby they can change parts of the engine on reliability grounds.

This is demonstrated by the sheer pace of the Ferrari engines at the Valencia Street Circuit with some long straights. Through the speed trap during the race, the top five fastest drivers were all using Ferrari engines. This ranges from Sébastien Bourdais’s top speed of 313km/h down to Sutil with the fifth-fastest speed at 311km/h. It’s been the same story all weekend.

It seems clear that most other engine manufacturers have been using this loophole, albeit perhaps not quite to the same extent as the Scuderia. It is equally clear that Renault have barely lifted a finger when it comes to developing their engine this season.

You can see this in the advantage Toro Rosso now have over Red Bull. They both have an identical chassis, but Toro Rosso use a Ferrari engine and Red Bull use the Renault. Toro Rosso have moved forwards while Red Bull have moved backwards. Frank Williams said in the September 2008 edition of F1 Racing that he had heard a rumour that one of the Red Bull drivers drove a Toro Rosso and was amazed at the pace of the Ferrari engine. More and more evidence mounts that Ferrari have a major engine advantage over Renault.

You can point the finger at Ferrari if you want to (and yes, I do want to). But the fact is that Renault have failed to exploit a loophole. This is a cardinal sin in Formula 1. Renault have taken the engine freeze at face value and failed to look for the loopholes which is what every other team has done. It’s amazing to think that this is effectively the same team that bent the rules to breaking point in the mid-1990s when Michael Schumacher drove for them in the Benetton days.

At the start of the season Renault blamed their woes on aerodynamic deficiencies. But it is clear now that they are hurting more in the aero department. It would be funny if it was mainly down to aero because if anything Renault have moved forwards as the season has progressed while Red Bull are steadily sinking towards the bottom end of the grid.

However, one has to wonder if Ferrari’s ability to find so much engine pace within the bounds of the rules is so healthy. Teams are allowed to develop new engine parts on the grounds of reliability. However, as I think Keith pointed out in the liveblog for the race, Ferrari’s engines have become more unreliable if anything.

This has culminated in two spectacular engine blow-ups in two consecutive races — one for Massa in Hungary, and yesterday’s blow-up for Räikkönen. The FIA ought to be asking Ferrari some probing questions about their engine development. Why are they able to use this loophole to make their engines less reliable?

Like I say, I can’t decide if Ferrari have the upper hand or not. They clearly have the fastest car now. However, the unreliability must be a major worry. Despite not being on the pace for the past two races, Hamilton has extended his lead after both races — and it’s all because of Ferrari engines blowing up.

It’s worth pointing out that the next two races put huge strain on the engine. Spa has long, fast sections and Monza is the fastest circuit in the calendar. If any period of the year demands a reliable engine, it’s this period. Ferrari will be looking hard at their engine to make sure they don’t blow up in Belgium and Italy.