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Archive: Inside Line podcast

The new podcast to listen to

13 May 2009 01:01

Categories: Opinion

I will write about the Ferrari issue soon. But before that I just want to put up a quick post about a podcast.

Several times last year, I enthused about The Inside Line podcast, which featured Maurice Hamilton and Ian Phillips. It was without doubt the most insightful podcast around. There was nothing like it for getting a grasp of insider gossip.

I was just floored when it was announced that the British Grand Prix would be moving to Donington. Ian Phillips was the only person I could think of who ever assured us that the idea was really on the cards, and sure enough he turned out to be right! (Well, sort of!) That wasn’t a one-off either.

Unfortunately, it seems as though The Inside Line podcast is no longer being produced. But you can still hear Maurice Hamilton and Ian Phillips having a chit-chat in the new official Force India podcast. Sadly, their discussions are much shorter as part of the Force India podcast than as a standalone product. But it’s better than nothing!

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Another opinion on the incident

9 September 2008 17:49

Categories: Opinion

Several times on this blog I have recommended The Inside Line podcast with Maurice Hamilton and Ian Phillips. As always, it came up with the goods following the Belgian Grand Prix. Ian Phillips gave his opinion on the incident where Lewis Hamilton cut the chicane.

For those that don’t know, Ian Phillips is Director of Business Affairs at Force India. That team uses Ferrari engines, so Ian Phillips has no particular reason to express an anti-Ferrari viewpoint. Ian Phillips has been in the motor racing business for a long time and has probably seen more motor racing than I can ever hope to watch in my entire lifetime. So his opinion is always worth listening to.

I have transcribed what he said in the podcast below simply because, as it is in podcast form, it is not currently searchable and easy to find on the web. I would highly recommend that you subscribe to the podcast — here is an iTunes link, and here is a non-iTunes one.

The relevant part begins at 6:30. The podcast was recorded before they knew what the outcome of the stewards’ investigation was. According to Maurice Hamilton’s preamble at the beginning, they didn’t even know what the investigation was about, but they did know that there was an investigation. Here is what Ian Phillips had to say:

Lewis — again, this is what we have to state — was mature, because I think it was coming into, was it the last chicane? And he got squeezed by Räikkönen. He was right alongside him — actually… almost in front. Räikkönen squeezed him and made him take the short cut. And you’re not allowed to take that short cut. Well, you can, but you mustn’t gain position.

And of course he came out alongside Räikkönen. But he had the presence of mind straight away — because I don’t think anybody could have told him — he let Räikkönen come alongside. Then he actually let him go in front and pull in front of him. So they went nose to tail. But by the time they got to La Source, he was having another go at him! And it was extraordinary stuff.

But that moment was real maturity and professionalism when he was forced by Räikkönen to cut that chicane and I thought that was great presence of mind. Because he could have thought, “I’ve got this in the bag.” Now that would have been a stewards’ inquiry and that would have been a problem for him.

To my mind he behaved perfectly correctly and did the right thing. I think by then he knew he’d got the upper-hand. I think he’d been frightening Räikkönen. “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming.” And the guy [Kimi Räikkönen] is saying, “Where’s he coming from?!”…

I think the view of the entire paddock is that Lewis is entirely innocent of anything that’s happened in that motor race. He was an absolute hero. Räikkönen was the man making mistakes and ultimately went and threw it in the wall anyway.

But, this is Formula 1. In seven days’ time we’ll be talking from Monza, the home of Ferrari, the reigning world champions. So I won’t predict the outcome of the stewards’ inquiry.

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Showing your support — F1 teams and merchandise

13 August 2008 01:29

Categories: History, Opinion

About a month ago Craig at Craigblog wrote a post about F1 merchandise. It was quite a coincidence because at the same time I was on the verge of buying the first piece of F1 merchandise I had bought for a very long time.

Since the turn of the decade I have watched Formula 1 pretty much as a neutral. Of course, I prefer some teams and drivers more than others. In case you’re wondering, my favoured teams are BMW, Red Bull, Renault and (at a stretch) McLaren. Out of the drivers, I like Räikkönen, Heidfeld, Kubica, Alonso, Coulthard, Webber, Barrichello and (at a stretch) Kovalainen.

When I was younger my attention was grabbed by Stewart Grand Prix. Jackie Stewart’s was a famous name that I could latch onto, and the Scottish iconography appealed to me as a young Scot. I also loved the fact that they were a new team, seemingly with the odds against them, but did a fairly solid job.

Rubens Barrichello’s drive to 2nd in Monaco in 1997 was exciting to watch, and for a second I thought they were going to win when Michael Schumacher briefly ran off the road at Ste Devote. Mostly though 1997 was a year fraught with reliability problems. 1998 brought a further dip in form.

But the 1999 season as a whole was brilliant for Stewart GP as Barrichello once again shone. Who could forget Barrichello leading at the Brazilian Grand Prix? And then Johnny Herbert took a fantastic win at the Nürburgring. This team was only three years old, yet was in a position to fight for good points hauls, finish 4th in the championship and even win a race. That’s more than the team’s subsequent owners, Ford (as Jaguar) and Red Bull can say for themselves.

Besides Stewart, I developed a soft spot for Jordan. I loved the way they came back from a disastrous start to 1998. Halfway through the season they hadn’t even scored a single point. Then things started to look up during the British Grand Prix. I can remember watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Jordan’s 1998 season. Eddie Jordan was nervously pacing around the Jordan pit area mumbling, “I need this feckin’ point… Come on, I need this feckin’ point so much.” He got that feckin’ point.

Just a few races later Jordan Grand Prix scored a magnificent 1–2 in Belgium, with Damon Hill heading Ralf Schumacher. It was the team’s first win and it ushered in a new, though fleeting, era of competitiveness for the team.

The 1999 season was a joy to watch, not only for Stewart but for Jordan and Heinz-Harald Frentzen in particular. The German driver took an amazing six podiums including two wins, particularly memorably in France. For a long while it looked as though Frentzen was a genuine championship contender, though in the end it was not to be.

In retrospect, the work the Jordan team put into the 1999 season diverted their attention away from the future. Ian Phillips said as much in the latest Inside Line podcast — the championship run burnt the team out, and they never recovered.

In subsequent years the Jordan team drifted ever further into mediocrity and it became more and more difficult for me to like the team. 2003 was particularly painful. Giancarlo Fisichella took a flukey win in Brazil, but that disguised a truly awful season in which the team otherwise scored the miserable total of three points. If the previous year’s scoring system would have been in use, the win would have been their one and only points score.

To compound matters, in 2003 Eddie Jordan got into a needless legal fight with Vodafone which he was seemingly never going to win. From then on Jordan struggled financially. That team is now known as Force India and has had four different owners in the past five years.

However, the late 1990s were great Jordan-supporting days. And along with supporting the team comes the merchandise. I had two Jordan caps (one generic Jordan and the other Damon Hill, mimicking the Hills’ famous helmet design). I also had a Damon Hill t-shirt that commemorated the “place in history” that Hill took by taking the first win for the Jordan Grand Prix team. I also have a 1:43 diecast model of Damon Hill’s Jordan 198, the car he drove in 1998 and helped secure Jordan’s famous 1–2 in Belgium.

That is not the only F1 merchandise I bought when I was younger. I also had an Orange Arrows cap. I think I got it because I liked the colours. I am sometimes surprised to see people still wearing Orange Arrows gear from time to time, around six years after the team folded. I also had a rather colourful Ferrari t-shirt commemorating their 1999 Constructors Championship victory. What can I say? The folly of youth.

In addition to the Damon Hill 1:43 diecast, for a period of five years I decided I was going to collect 1:43 scale models of every single Formula 1 world champion. So in 1998 and 1999 I bought two Mika Häkkinen McLarens and from 2000–2002 I bought three Michael Schumacher Ferraris.

To spice things up a bit I bought models of Alberto Ascari’s 1952 Ferrari 500 F2 and Nelson Piquet’s 1981 Brabham BT-49C. But I got bored after that.

Grand Prix Legends were looking for excuses as to why diecast models don’t sell so well nowadays. I think the reality is that 75 quid for a 1:18 model that will only gather dust on a shelf is a bloody rip-off. Back in the day I think I spent around £20 per 1:43 model. I don’t think that’s something I would do today.

Aside from the normal annual purchases of video games (when available) and the season review DVD, I have not bought any Formula 1 merchandise for a while.

Until now.

BMW Sauber t-shirt

I have bought this jazzy BMW Sauber t-shirt to express my support for the team. Like many, I have been wooed by the methodical, grounded approach of the team’s principal Mario Theissen and its drivers Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica.

The win was coming for a while, and the fact that it was a 1–2, just like Jordan’s maiden win, was the icing on the cake. The team’s recent dip in form won’t deter me. Now, for the first time for several years, I am not a neutral. I am supporting BMW Sauber.

It’s strange because I was never a supporter of the Sauber team at all. Nor was I keen on BMW when they were in partnership with Williams. But the magical combination of BMW and Sauber under the leadership of Mario Theissen has attracted me to them to the extent that I am a card-carrying, t-shirt wearing fan.

So which teams do you support, and do you buy merchandise to show that support?

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More problems with F1's infrastructure in Hungary

4 August 2008 16:30

Categories: Opinion

The Hungarian Grand Prix saw yet more worrying failures of Formula 1′s important equipment.

The timing glitches that struck the German Grand Prix returned at the Hungaroring. Seemingly, despite the clear evidence that Kimi Räikkönen’s car had a faulty transponder, no-one decided to check it out.

So Räikkönen’s times for sector 2 and sector 3 were not recorded, he tumbled down the timing screen a couple of times before re-appearing in his proper position and his first pitstop didn’t properly register at first. Nor did he appear on the lap chart, as you can see by clicking here and launching the live timing archive.

More worryingly, though, no fewer than four teams had major problems with their refuelling equipment during the Hungarian Grand Prix. Fuel rigs are standardised and supplied by the FIA. The multiple failures occurred despite the fact that there were no new parts used in the refuelling process.

Of course, it could be just a coincidence. Flash fires in the pitlane do happen from time to time. Usually, however, you see two or three a year — not three within five minutes of each other. Sébastien Bourdais’s Toro Rosso, Kazuki Nakajima’s Williams and Rubens Barrichello’s Honda all briefly caught fire as the fuel hose was coming off. Meanwhile, Timo Glock lost around 15 seconds due to a fuel rig that did not fit his car properly.

One widely suggested explanation is that the heat in Hungary either changed the shape of the fuel hose enough so that it did not fit properly, or that the fuel expanded in the heat causing it to overflow. However, this explanation does not quite seem right as there are hotter races during the year, notably in Malaysia.

Whatever, this essential equipment ought to be designed to cope with ambient temperatures of 32 °C. This was the highest temperature recorded by FOM’s equipment during the race, and it does not strike me as overly hot for a summer in the middle of a continent towards the south of Europe.

A cheeky suggestion put forward by Ian Phillips during The Inside Line podcast is that flames are good for viewing figures. That is going a bit far even for Bernie though.

More seriously, this is quite a serious safety concern. Although the fires were small and all immediately extinguished, this sort of thing should not be happening. The FIA should get to the bottom of what on earth was going on during the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Other posts on this topic

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Another scoop for The Inside Line

10 July 2008 00:54

Categories: Opinion

You might recall about a month ago I wrote a post praising The Inside Line podcast which is presented by Maurice Hamilton and Ian Phillips. When they called it The Inside Line, they weren’t joking.

The following week, in the French GP podcast, the pair were discussing the (at that time) new rumour that Donington was in the running to hold the British Grand Prix. While the news on Friday that the Grand Prix would be moving to Donington was described as “surprising”, “shocking” or “unbelievable” by many, I had an inkling that the announcement was coming.

When Ian Phillips was discussing the rumour on The Inside Line podcast the previous week, he pointed out that in his view it was very much a goer. If you want to look for it, it’s 28:30 into the French GP podcast. The thing about what Ian Phillips was saying was that it wasn’t just neutral or half-hearted. He sounded like a man who knew something and he seemed convinced that Donington was in with a decent shout of getting the gig.

As for the suggestions that Donington will not be ready in time for 2010, he had this to say: “Yes, it needs a lot of work — but so does Silverstone.” Moreover, Ian Phillips revealed that there is a faction within the BRDC that says they shouldn’t even bother trying to get a new deal with Bernie Ecclestone.

This is probably the key issue. In Bernie Ecclestone’s mind, Silverstone is simply not up to the standards that are expected of a modern F1 venue in 2008. And he has apparently found dealing with the BRDC an absolute nightmare, with the old gentleman’s club seemingly not able or willing to come up with the goods. Ian Phillips’s suggestion that some within the BRDC actively do not want to come up with the goods, you can well believe that. So why not start from scratch at Donington with people who might want to make it work?

The following week when I read BRDC President Damon Hill say that it was “50/50” whether the GP would go to Donington or Silverstone, I knew the story really had legs. The announcement didn’t just come out of the blue. A “surprise” it was not. I had a suspicion that it was coming, because I heard it on The Inside Line and from Damon Hill himself.

It’s a bit cheesy. I swear I’m not paid to do this. But I really think this is now an utterly unmissable podcast. So if you’re not already subscribed to it, do so now!

My thoughts on the proposed move to Donington will be the subject of a future post

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