This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: feeder series

Opportunities for potential constructors

12 August 2010 20:45

Categories: Blogging, Formula 1

I have a guest post up at F1 Fanatic today: Why F1 needs a feeder series for teams. With the recent drive towards attracting new teams to F1, where are the real opportunities for potential constructors to hone their skills in lower formulae, where spec series increasingly dominate?

I might have a couple of other posts up on F1 Fanatic in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

Comments closed

The testing ban: another botched rule change?

4 March 2009 01:49

Categories: News, Opinion

It has to be said, unintended consequences are never far away in the world of F1 rule changes. For just one example, take a look at how quickly aerodynamic flick-ups have resurfaced, despite their supposed banning. Skate fins? What on earth?

Now we are presented with a number of oddities that have come about as a result of this season’s new testing restrictions. In-season testing is banned completely. Each team is limited to 15,000km, but according to James Allen it looks as though no teams will top 10,000km, because this year’s testing events have been so heavily disrupted. Teams that go to Portugal and Spain get relentlessly rained on. Those that go to Bahrain are treated to sandstorms.

Moreover, what little testing time there is has been eaten into by the need to test 2010-spec tyres. The bans in refuelling and tyre warmers coming into effect next season will put different demands on the tyres. As such, Bridgestone need to get data so that they don’t end up barking up the wrong tree as they develop the new tyres. But with no opportunity to do this later on in the season, some teams (McLaren and BMW) have had to sacrifice some time from their already tight pre-season test schedule.

Now McLaren’s test driver Pedro de la Rosa has expressed concerns that the lack of test time is actually dangerous for reserve drivers. Should a reserve have to come in for some reason, he will be thrown into the deep end, straight into the action having had little experience of the car. That would be bad enough in a normal year, but with the radical rule changes that have come into force this season you can expect out-of-practice drivers to be even rustier.

Now it is becoming obvious that the testing restrictions are damaging the careers of young drivers. All winter, it had looked as though Rubens Barrichello’s chances of retaining his seat at Honda / Brawn were close to zero. Reading some reports, you’d believe that Bruno Senna was practically a shoo-in.

Now it looks as though Barrichello has been given the nod, leaving Senna with nowhere to go. The ever-excellent Grandprix.com trailed the possibility a few days ago, noting that “Barrichello is a better bet [than Senna] as his experience will be useful in a year when there is little opportunity for young drivers to learn how to drive F1 cars.”

From this perspective, it looks like Honda / Brawn have made the right decision here. Moreover, Barrichello outperformed Button last season, and it would have been a real shame if Barrichello’s career ended with a snub. Mind you, there is the risk that Barrichello will have a David Coulthard-style final season of doom, and we wouldn’t really want that.

But what now for Bruno Senna? Holding out for an F1 seat, he has more or less ruled out staying in GP2 for a third season. Indeed, it is difficult to see what he could achieve with another year in GP2. Drivers who spend too long in a category like GP2 tend to have their potential stunted.

In a sense, this is a predicament which is yet another symptom of the serial mismanagement at Honda which has deteriorated this winter to extreme levels for obvious reasons. Senna sounds pretty frustrated over this situation, and wouldn’t you be?

But any other year it would be no big deal. Senna could sign as a test driver for one year, as countless other drivers have done before, and spend the season racking up the miles on the test track in preparation for his first full season. And should he needed to replace another driver mid-season, he would have experience required of him.

Failing that, he could have gone on to make a decent career as a test driver. It may not have the glamour of a race role, and you can bet your bottom dollar that all test drivers yearn to race. But it is, at least, a decent income earned from driving cars — and they can always hope. People like Luca Badoer, Marc Gené, Anthony Davidson, Alexander Wurz and, yes, Pedro de la Rosa, have all made a decent living out of testing F1 cars. Felipe Massa started out at Ferrari as a test driver, and today he challenges for Championships.

Now what? All Bruno Senna can do is twiddle his thumbs. He can always suffer the humiliation of going back cap in hand to a GP2 seat. But this could backfire on him, and all the best seats have already been filled.

Could this be one reason why there is only going to be one rookie this season? Sébastien Buemi is the only newcomer to F1 this season, but he has done plenty of testing for the Red Bull teams and he is filling a vacancy that David Coulthard voluntarily left behind.

Remember when everyone was certain that Renault were not going to re-sign Nelsinho Piquet? Then, out of nowhere, they signed him for another season. Is that because, for all his faults, he at least has experience that the likes of Romain Grosjean and Lucas Di Grassi now cannot hope to attain?

Let us not forget another major FIA-instituted change for 2009, which is yet another instance revealing the lack of joined-up thinking inside the FIA. This season sees the inauguration of Max Mosley’s Formula Two project. Remember, this new feeder series was supposedly invented specifically to make it easier for young drivers to reach F1.

Well, it’s all very well adding yet another “second-top” rung in an already-cluttered world that contains GP2, A1GP and World Series by Renault among others. But the top rung now has a fundamental crack that will cause the ladder collapse when a driver reaches it, sending him — and his career — crashing to the floor.

There might be an allowance in F1 for “young driver training”, but this is no more than a fig leaf. A “young driver” is someone who has not tested on more than four days in the past 24 months. How is a young driver supposed to progress with such scant “training”?

Max Mosley likes to use F2 to make out that he is opening doors for young drivers. The reality is that this door leads drivers up the garden path. There have seldom, if ever, been as many feeder series as there are today. An F1 team can take their pick from 20+ GP2 drivers, countless A1GP drivers, anyone from WSR who takes their fancy and goodness knows how many F3 drivers. F2 isn’t needed, especially now that young drivers will find the welcome mat at F1′s door cruelly swiped from their feet.

4 comments

Are there now too many feeder series?

16 September 2008 19:30

Categories: News, Non-F1, Opinion

I will turn my attention to the Italian and Belgian Grands Prix later this week. But over the past couple of days a lot more information has come out on the new Formula Two series. It has got me thinking.

I was one of many who was really sceptical about the Formula Two idea when it was first announced by Max Mosley. It was clearly a move in the strategic political wrangling between Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone — just another Max Mosley vanity project.

The FIA’s insistence that a Formula Two car would only cost around €250,000 seemed infeasibly optimistic. But the plans look a lot more solid now that it has been announced that the cars will be supplied by Jonathan Palmer’s MotorSport Vision company. The cars will be designed by WilliamsF1 (yes, that WilliamsF1), and the engines will be turbocharged 1.8 litre Audis. Although it is not yet clear who will manufacture the chassis, the firm aim is to keep costs to below $350,000 (at current exchange rates, very close to the original target).

MotorSport Vision will also own the commercial rights to the series. MSV knows its stuff as it already owns the commercial rights in addition to being the promoter and organiser of British Superbikes. The FIA hasn’t chosen a bunch of dummies to run Formula Two.

Initial reports seemed to be written on the assumption that Formula Two would replace the already established Formula Palmer Audi. However, according to Grandprix.com, Jonathan Palmer is still committed to expanding Formula Palmer Audi in addition to Formula Two.

Meanwhile, GP2 — clearly the most well-established second-tier motor racing category in Europe — will continue unaffected. GP2 already has the F1 support slot, so Formula Two will instead support the World Touring Car Championship with a possibility of supporting some races in the Le Mans Series and DTM, with a few standalone races chucked in for good measure.

This news surrounding Formula Two does make me wonder though. Are there now too many lower-category racing series?

For all the doom and gloom about costs in Formula 1, motor racing as a whole appears to be booming. In recent years a handful of series with big ambitions have all been set up. I can’t think of any that have disappeared to make way for them. These new series are all more or less competing with each other, finding more and more ludicrous “unique selling points” in order to justify their existence.

Just last month Superleague Formula held its first race. Superleague is probably the strangest of the lot. Each car represents a football team. The cars’ liveries are based on the football club’s colours. Instead of drivers and teams scoring points on the racetrack, football teams do. Huh?!

It’s not an original idea. A few years ago someone else came up with Premier 1 Grand Prix which was fundamentally the same idea. But that never came off the ground. In fairness to Superleague, they have at least got their championship going. There are also some impressively big names involved. There are some cute associations too. For instance, the AS Roma car is run by the Fisichella Motor Sport team — Giancarlo Fisichella being a Roma supporter.

However, I doubt what Superleague can really achieve. It lacks a really, really big name like Manchester United. Grandprix.com has also been disparaging about the quality of the drivers involved. The most famous driver in the field is the embarrassed F1 reject Antônio Pizzonia who will race for Corinthians when it doesn’t clash with his glittering career in Stock Car Brasil.

The chance for any crossover appeal is surely also limited. A mickey mouse series like this certainly won’t get my interested in football. And I have spoken to a friend of mine who is an avid Glasgow Rangers supporter who is just perplexed by the whole idea. He only cars about Rangers winning on the football pitch, not on the racetrack.

Another relatively new series along similar lines is A1 Grand Prix. It might have a name like that cowboy plumber’s firm, but A1GP markets itself as the “World Cup of Motorsport”. Again, teams and drivers don’t score points. Instead, nations do.

Like Superleague, the driving standard does not seem too high. The only drivers to have made the leap from A1GP to F1 in the past are Scott Speed and Nelsinho Piquet. It’s not exactly the champions’ hall of fame.

At first I thought A1GP was a silly concept, and I still think in many ways it is. But to its credit, whenever I have caught highlights of the races it has looked pretty exciting. The series seems to grow more and more every year. For the coming season they have pulled off a major coup by clinching a deal with Ferrari to supply chassis and engines. A1GP has made a big name for itself in the space a few years and looks set to stay.

Increasingly, Formula 1 drivers are emerging from the World Series by Renault. Its first incarnation was as a relatively modest series centred in Spain. Over the years it has grown and grown until it has become a convincingly European series. Part of the prize of winning the championship is to have a test drive with the Renault F1 team. Six of its nine champions have also had careers in F1, sometimes in the following year. Heikki Kovalainen and Robert Kubica have been two notable beneficiaries of the Renault F1 test.

GP2 is also a relatively new series, although it was built on the foundations of Formula 3000 and has and advantage because it is essentially Bernie Ecclestone’s pet project. This means that all of the races have a ready-made audience in an F1 support slot. The racing is great and plenty of promising drivers have come through the ranks including Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton and Timo Glock.

Rumour has it that next year will see the inception of GP3. The series is said to be a re-branding of International Formula Master, which currently supports the FIA World Touring Car Championship. Formula Master was itself only invented in 2007 and was envisaged as a competitor to Formula 3.

GP3 even has a logo that looks very similar to the GP2 logo. It seems a foregone conclusion that any GP3 Series would run as a Formula 1 support event.

The Formula 1 package is already pretty full up, never mind motor racing as a whole. In addition to Formula 1 and GP2, the Porsche Supercup is a well-established part of the F1 weekend. However, as a supercar race as part of a package of open-wheel racing, it sticks out like a sore thumb. If any series gets the heave-ho for GP3 (which you imagine would have to happen), it is surely the Porsche Supercup.

It’s worth remembering that F1 already had a new support series in 2007. Formula BMW Europe has supported several F1 races this year. This series is yet another new invention, although it is a merger of Formula BMW UK and Formula BMW ADAC. Now instead of being an entry-level series with cars tootling around small national circuits, Formula BMW Europe is now an impressive international series that is held on Formula 1 circuits.

If this all comes together, Bernie Ecclestone would have quite an interesting little portfolio. Formula 1, GP2, GP3 and Formula BMW Europe. Those are four pretty distinctive categories with a clear hierarchy. Makes you wonder — maybe it is only a matter of time until Formula BMW Europe is rebranded as GP4.

With so many lower-level series now, I can’t help but wonder if it’s all a bit much. Are there really enough credible drivers to keep so many high-profile international series going? What is the unique selling point of each of these series?

I thought Formula Two would never be able to carve itself a niche. But the FIA has already come up with a pretty good justification of its existence:

The objective is to make top-level international single-seater racing available to drivers who at present have difficulty in raising enough money to demonstrate their talent… [C]ompetitors from countries which do not yet have an established motor racing structure will find it easier to progress.

The FIA will also award Super Licenses to drivers competing in the Formula Two championship. If the FIA decides to stop awarding Super Licenses to GP2 drivers, they could well successfully swipe the rug from underneath GP2′s and Bernie Ecclestone’s feet. Whatever, I find it difficult to believe that there is space for quite this many “second tier” series.

Update: I don’t believe it! I have just written this post and I have already learnt about yet another new racing series called A2GP, with A3GP possibly also in the pipeline. I mean really!

6 comments