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.
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?
Another grand prix, and another Sebastian Vettel victory. In terms of race results, it is now on a par with Michael Schumacher’s 1994 campaign. Five wins and a 2nd place from the first six races. It is difficult to get much more dominant than that.
For the 2010 World Champion, 2011 is looking much easier. Some drivers, like Kimi Räikkönen, lose their hunger after they become World Champion. Others are taken to a new level. When the best driver in the world becomes better, it’s truly scary.
But despite his World Champion status, some still argue that Sebastian Vettel somehow isn’t the best driver.
Mechanical advantage
After all, he has the best car — and that is indisputable. Who can say what Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton or Jenson Button might be able to achieve in that awesome Red Bull?
On the other hand, Vettel has the upper-hand over Mark Webber. Vettel’s advantage was marginal last year. But this year he is much more dominant. Comparatively, Mark Webber is struggling in the supposedly all-conquering Red Bull.
Ah, they say. Red Bull favour Sebastian Vettel. Webber must have a different car, says his manager Flavio Briatore. “Each time something happens, it happens to Mark.” That glosses over the kers issues that Vettel has constantly suffered from, along with Webber.
For most of his career, Webber has had more than his fair share of bad luck. That has continued this year. It is nothing more malicious than that.
Question mark over wheel-to-wheel combat
“Oh! But Vettel can’t overtake!” Oh really? I have long found this argument spurious.
Partisan Brits may still fume at his accident with Button in Spa, but in low-grip conditions it can happen to anyone. It was just bad luck that Button happened to be there at the time. All drivers lose control from time to time.
Jibes about the number of wins Vettel has taken from pole are unimpressive too. It is hardly a revelation that it is easier to win a race from pole position than any other place on the grid. But Vettel the idea that all of Vettel’s wins have been plain sailing affairs from pole is just wrong.
Those three crucial passes on his out lap in Spain ought to have put this to bed once and for all. Sebastian Vettel can overtake.
Defensive driving under pressure
Vettel can also soak up the pressure. Also in Spain, Vettel had to fend off a hard-charging Lewis Hamilton. Martin Brundle noted in the post-race analysis that Vettel was modifying his line according to how close Hamilton was to passing. He knew when he needed to defend, and he knew when not to. A masterclass of efficient driving.
Making the most of a bad strategy
In Monaco, Vettel demonstrated that he could make a bad strategy — even a strategy cock-up — work well. The race threatened to unravel during his disastrous pitstop when he ended up on ‘prime’ soft tyres, when a second set of ‘option’ super-softs was apparently in order. Apparently a radio jam caused the confusion.
That could have been disaster for Vettel. But instead, the strategy was modified brilliantly, and it caught strategy masters Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso off guard.
Button went for a three-stop strategy that probably worked in the simulations. Alonso went for a two-stopper. But Vettel held out on a one-stop strategy. It is almost unthinkable with this year’s Pirelli tyres, but Vettel lasted a mind-boggling 56 laps on soft tyres.
Of course, the red flag helped matters. Theoretically, Vettel would have run out of grip sooner or later — certainly before Alonso, who would in turn lose grip before Button. We can never know if that would have been the case.
But I was keeping an eye on the timing screen as the battle was intensifying, and Vettel was normally the second fastest man on track at any one time. His lap times were holding up remarkably well. There was no sign that Alonso or Button were on the verge of actually getting past.
The reality is that Vettel came out on top. Even though the circumstances with the red flag were unusual, the bottom line is that Vettel’s radical emergency strategy paid off as well as it possibly could have. He won the race.
How does Vettel compare to his rivals?
What else has Vettel got to prove? Well, who are the rivals for the mantle of “most complete driver in F1″?
Jenson Button is reliable and smart. But he doesn’t always have the fire in his belly, and consequently his awesome drives are mixed with anonymous tours.
Lewis Hamilton certainly has the fire in his belly, and his talent is awesomely supreme. But his enthusiasm often gets the better of him and he is prone to making massive errors in the heat of the moment.
Fernando Alonso is normally cited as being the “most complete” driver. There is no doubt that he is a formidable talent. And despite not having the equipment to win the Championship in recent years, Alonso remains a joy to watch. His qualifying lap in Spain is just one example of how Alonso passionately drives out of his skin.
But he has also begun to make a few too many mistakes. His errors in 2010 — at China, Monaco, Silverstone and Spa — are well documented.
Alonso remains fearsomely awesome. Just look at his starts in Spain and Monaco to see just one instance where Alonso excels.
But I am beginning to wonder if Sebastian Vettel is now the closest F1 has to the “complete package”. Whether he is or not, his youth alone should be a cause for concern among his rivals. Vettel is currently showing up drivers with masses more experience than him.
If Vettel is still learning, and he is already trouncing the opposition, it boggles the mind to imagine just how good he might become.
There have been four grands prix in 2011 so far, and they have been widely hailed as a great success. There is no doubt that the races have been action-packed, with something always going on.
But I wasn’t feeling it quite as much as many others were. I thought the Chinese Grand Prix was okay. But the reaction of others left me perplexed. All kinds of platitudes were bandied about. “The best dry race in decades!” “The best since Japan 2005!” Really? I wasn’t feeling that at all.
But I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was leaving me cold about F1 in 2011. There have been a lot of changes for this season, which has led to a very different style of racing. But what was it about the new F1 that was leaving me less thrilled than others?
It took me some time to work it out. But once I hit on it, the worse it seemed — and it has left me feeling a bit pessimistic about the prospects for truly good racing in 2011.
A pain in DRS?
A lot of attention has been focused on the brand new drag reduction system. Results of the DRS have been patchy.
At some races — particularly Australia — the DRS has been just enough to allow a driver behind to catch up. At the opposite extreme, in Turkey it was obvious that the DRS zone was far too long, and drivers were making easy passes that were not pleasing to watch.
The core problem is that it gives one driver and advantage over another — a significant deviation from the purity of racing. Comparisons to turbo boosts in the 1980s are no good. It may be a button that drivers can press, but there the similarity ends.
Back then, all of the options were open to everyone. You could choose to have a turbo or not, and you could use it whenever you wanted. But to say who can use a device and when they can use it is not on.
To artificially give the trailing driver a speed advantage is taking us into Mario Kart territory. As a friend said to me, “It’s like they have allowed cheating”. It is fundamentally wrong and does not belong in any event that calls itself a sport.
I love the idea of moveable rear wings, but the implementation is all wrong. I don’t even understand why it can only be used in one part of the circuit. As Niki Lauda said, why is it the FIA’s job to say where drivers can pass each other?
Moreover, the hit and miss nature of the DRS zone is leading to different sorts of results in different races. The zones change size, and sometimes the FIA have got it wrong. They have even changed the position of the DRS activation point during a race weekend. What other word is there for this apart from ‘manipulation‘?
This may be a device designed to “fix” the “problems” with overtaking. Instead, we have come one step away from fixing the results.
F1 has sold its rubber soul
But I am more concerned about the situation with the new Pirelli tyres. While the DRS is widely criticised, people have been much kinder about the tyre situation. Indeed, one of the more popular refrains this year has been “thank you Pirelli”. But I am in no mood to thank them.
They are designed to degrade artificially quickly. This is a significant deviation from the concept of F1. Formula 1 is now no longer about the best drivers in the best cars. It’s about the best drivers in the best cars — with the worst tyres.
While technical regulations have always restricted cars (it is the “formula” in Formula 1, after all), the tradition has always been to maximise the performance to create the fastest car possible that adheres to the formula of the day. That is what brings us radical ideas like the double diffuser and the F-duct, that many F1 fans love to talk about.
With the tyres, Pirelli have deliberately made them perform badly. Come on, this is supposed to be elite motorsport.
Moreover, these dodgy tyres have now become the central issue of a grand prix weekend. I have long bemoaned the dominance of tyres in F1. If a car has better aerodynamics, you can see it. If an engine is faster, you can hear it. But the tyres? They are just black boxes that sit in the four corners.
But there is no getting away from it — tyres are hugely important to the performance of a car. What I don’t understand is why you would want to accentuate that.
Critics of F1 often complain that the drivers of the best cars always win. What these people misunderstand is that F1 is all about engineering excellence, just as much as it is about great driving.
But now we have now reached a stage where the deciding factor is neither the driver nor the car. It is now all about strategy — driven by deliberately dodgy tyres — above all else.
They are now so important that the situation is now threatening to make qualifying a complete non-event. After all those years spent tweaking the format of qualifying in the name of “the show”, you have to laugh when further changes totally break a format they finally got right.
The reason? Because you need as many fresh sets of tyres as possible to last the whole race. This means less track action on Saturday, as teams are fearful of using too many sets of tyres. What is this, Formula 1 bean counting, or Formula 1 motor racing?
Divergent strategies reduce real racing
In addition to spearing Saturday action, it is my view that the tyres situation is making Sundays less exciting too.
Take the experience of Mark Webber. He climbed from 18th on the grid to finish 3rd in China. You’d think if anyone would be excited about the wheel-to-wheel action in 2011, it would be him. Not so much.
After the race he told the BBC, “Sometimes the overtaking moves aren’t that genuine because the guys really have nothing to fight back with. It’s more tactical now, and a bit less racing.” During the BBC’s broadcast from Turkey, Martin Brundle revealed that Webber had told him privately that he got no satisfaction out of the progress through the field in China. James Allen further hinted at Webber’s distinct unhappiness at the situation.
Following Turkey, Jenson Button lay the blame for his poor result squarely on his strategy. Asked about what happens when his tyres go off, Button said, “You’re not racing any more. You’re trying your best to get the best out of the car, but you’re not racing anyone around you because you are a sitting duck… They just come past you and you can’t do anything.”
Overtaking has looked like it’s too easy this year, and it is not just because of DRS. The situation with the tyres means that drivers are dealing with such radically different levels of grip that the slower driver does not even bother to defend any more.
Many celebrated Lewis Hamilton’s pass on Sebastian Vettel for the lead of the Chinese Grand Prix. But for me, it killed the race as soon as it happened. I was hoping for Vettel to be able to defend, but he simply couldn’t. As it was, the pass was inevitable for laps in advance.
In the laps between Hamilton’s pitstop and his pass on Vettel, the McLaren driver was an average of 0.9s a lap faster than the Red Bull. (At one point he set a lap time 1.6 seconds up on Vettel.) To put this into perspective, during Q1 in China, a 0.9s gap to the fastest driver would have earned 18th on the grid.
Is it really exciting to watch a car that’s got an advantage of around one second a lap breeze on by? Not for me. This isn’t overtaking — it’s merely passing. It’s hardly Dijon 1979, is it? Today René Arnoux would flip his flap, press his boost button and head off into the distance on his superior tyres — race over.
The performance differences are huge, and it is all down to decisions that are made by computers far in advance. It is out of the driver’s hands. What is this, the Excel Grand Prix of Spreadsheet?
It is right that strategy plays a part in a race. But this year the balance has been tipped way over the edge, to the point where the driver’s influence on the outcome of the race has been severely diminished. You almost may as well hold the grand prix on a computer where all of the strategies have been put in.
To open up strategy options for this season without resorting to crap tyres that create crap pseudo-racing, they could simply have ditched the rule whereby drivers are forced to run on both compounds. This would have opened up the possibilities of running a 0, 1 or 2 stop strategy.
Instead, we are now seeing record-breaking levels of pitstops — upwards of 80 pitstops a race — for no good reason. This has taken away the emphasis from the on-track action, and has made huge amounts of the “racing” totally irrelevant.
It wasn’t broke, so why “fix” it?
The most disturbing thing about all the changes this season is the fact that there was very little wrong with Formula 1 in the first place. I didn’t complain that Formula 1 is dull. And while there was room for improvement, I have long bemoned the gimmicky thinking that has come about through efforts to “improve the show”. Now it is in danger of jumping the shark.
I love Formula 1 motor racing. I have done since the mid-1990s. There were lots of other people who claimed they also loved F1 — but at the same time complained about “processional races”. They said that F1 was too dull. Yet, for some reason, they still watched it anyway, and demanded changes. Huh?
I feel like the sport I love has been hijacked.
I also believe that the criticisms of the new format have been misunderstood by some insiders. It is not “too much overtaking” or “too much of a good thing”.
James Allen said, “it’s a bit like going into a sweet shop and eating half the stock, when you’ve only been used to getting a packet of Polos at best.” That’s not how I feel. It’s actually more like going into a nice restaurant expecting a good meal and being served a Big Mac instead.
Time to end the fixation with “the show”
Don’t get me wrong. I am still deriving satisfaction from Formula 1 this season. But the wheel-to-wheel action has become a lot more insipid this year, and bland passing has become so prevalent that overtaking has become devalued.
Kers is great for Formula 1. But the tyres situation, combined with DRS, is threatening to spoil the party. It wasn’t broke, but they fixed it anyway. But in “fixing” the racing, we have come just one step away from fixed races. The positioning of the DRS zone, determined by an FIA mandarin, could potentially make the difference between who wins and who loses.
Somewhere along the line, F1 has become so fixated on “the show” that it has forgotten about the race. There are now too many gimmicks and complications that deviate from the core concept that has served motorsport well for over a century: put a bunch of cars on a track and discover which is the fastest.
Of course, motorsport must always seek to entertain the audience. It wouldn’t exist otherwise. But you also need to remember why fans of motorsport tune in. Clue: it’s because they want to see a motor race. There are plenty of other places where you can be entertained by contrived or fictitious means.
But sport is supposed to be based on merit. It needs to be real.
When Renault’s James Allison said “We are an entertainment business,” it showed how wrong this whole approach is. We are dangerously striding towards WWE territory. If James Allison wants to work in an entertainment business, he can go to work in Hollywood. I want to watch a race.
This is a post that I should have written at the end of last season, but didn’t get round to before deciding to go on hiatus. Many of these points will have been made before, and it may be a bit past its sell-by date — but here it is anyway.
I am in awe of what Red Bull Racing achieved last season. In one sense, it should all be so easy. They have the best designer in Adrian Newey. And they have one of the best drivers in Sebastian Vettel — and Mark Webber is pretty handy too.
But those elements were in place in previous years too. Plus, it is easy to forget that Adrian Newey has not been involved in a championship victory since 1999.
Vettel, too, was by no means a shoo-in for the championship. It took a fairly bizarre set of circumstances for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to go his way. And it was a tall order for him to become the youngest ever world champion.
The truth is that the achievements of Red Bull Racing and Sebastian Vettel are massive. Red Bull is a soft drink company. Yet they have shown world-class car manufacturers and experienced grand prix teams how to do it.
When I grew up watching Formula 1 in the 1990s, the talk was of F1′s “big four”. These were the dominant teams: Benetton, Ferrari, McLaren and Williams. Between 1979 and 2008, no-one outside of the big four won the Constructors’ Championship (if you account for the fact that Benetton became Renault).
In the past two years, there has been a breakthrough. The stranglehold was broken, first by the Brawn team in its first — and only — year in F1; an unprecedented achievement. But, impressive though its achievements were, the Brawn team could trace its history in F1 back to Tyrrell’s first grand prix in 1968.
In a way, therefore, Red Bull’s achievements are even more extraordinary. Although Red Bull (much like the Brackley-based Tyrrell-BAR-Honda-Brawn-Mercedes squad), bought an existing team, this team in much younger. Originally set up as Stewart Grand Prix in 1997, it took 14 years for this team to win a Championship having been set up from scratch.
Red Bull truly is part of a new generation of championship winners. The next-youngest championship-winning team is Benetton / Renault, originally set up as Toleman in 1981.
A hat must go off to Paul and Jackie Stewart for their roles in this. I have heard it mentioned in passing once or twice, but I am surprised that more has not been made of it.
The Stewarts expended great efforts to set up their grand prix team, and against all the odds they achieved great things in the short three year lifespan of the team. Despite the best efforts of Ford to run the team into the ground with its misguided Jaguar Racing venture, the team has since gone on to achieve even greater things as Red Bull.
So hats off to Paul and Jackie Stewart. And hats off to Dietrich Mateschitz, Adrian Newey, Christian Horner, Sebastian Vettel and everyone else inolved in Red Bull Racing’s amazing achievement.
What do viewers at home love about F1? It is great wheel-to-wheel racing? Lots of overtaking? Strategy calls? Or the venues? Looking at the polarised reactions to this past weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix got me wondering.
I saw that this drew a few hoots of derision, including from me! Because from the comments made by other fans watching at home was that… well… it was a bit dull really.
It wasn’t a stinker by any means. There was some good action and a fair few talking points. But large stretches of the race were rather processional. Hardly epic.
The epic race without the racing
Will Buxton justified his comments:
No sarcasm. Epic race. ALO VET lap trading, WEB early stop and brill drive, HAM / WEB moment, GLO driving arse off. KUB amazing.
There is some truth in what he says. While Webber and Kubica provided some entertainment, this was only because they were out of phase with the surrounding cars strategy-wise, so were not on an equal footing with the drivers they were battling with.
As for the battle at the front, the problem was that Alonso’s victory was never truly in doubt. He commanded the track all weekend, and always even looked like he might have a bit extra left in the tank too.
During the first phase of the race, Vettel drifted back to 3.5s behind Alonso. After the pitstops, the gap eventually grew to over 2s before slowly decreasing again. Vettel did get mighty close to the end of the race, but this was typical Alonso driving conservatively.
Renault engineers always talked about how conservative Alonso was as a driver. They never had to tell him to turn the engine down; he had already done it.
So it was in Singapore. Alonso had done just enough to establish himself as the certain winner of the Singapore Grand Prix and had the whole situation under control.
It may have looked good on the timing screens. I did indeed get excited when purple sectors were being set and Vettel started to decrease the gap. But the “lap battle” was partly down to the street circuit becoming cleaner and faster towards the end of the race.
I’m sure they were playing with each other, but neither looked to be pushing particularly hard. Alonso was always in control, and Vettel never looked interested in truly pressurising.
At the start of the race, Vettel had ceded the first corner, setting the tone for his race. It did not look like he was particularly interested in winning — a suspicion confirmed by Vettel’s comments that passing Alonso would have been too risky. And why bother? Alonso is the ultimate defensive driver, as his amazing battle with Michael Schumacher at the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix demonstrated.
The bottom line is that if you hold a race on a street circuit with one overtaking spot — two at a push — then the racing isn’t epic. There might be stuff surrounding the racing — strategy, crashes, pretty buildings… But not much overtaking.
Interesting, yes. Epic, no. The ingredients simply weren’t there.
Epic racing or epic facilities?
There is a trend for certain venues to be talked up a lot by the F1 circus, no matter how good the racing is. I particularly remember Valencia Street Circuit — which has served up three of the most turgid grands prix seen in the last decade — was universally praised by the teams as being a great venue for grand prix racing.
Scratch the surface of the headlines, though, and you see that they are not so interested in the racing itself. Ron Dennis said that the 2008 European Grand Prix at Valencia was so great that it made him “ashamed to be English”. But it left most others ashamed to be F1 fans, it was so bereft of racing.
Of course, Ron Dennis was thinking about the facilities. Facilities are apparently the only thing that matter in F1 these days. Never mind what the viewers at home make of the track. As long as the venue is equipped with a shiny silver throne for the McLaren chief to do his golden business in, who cares about the people at home?
Similarly, the journalists have clear favourite places to visit and places they can’t stand. China? Don’t talk to them about it. And spare a thought for poor, poor Magny-Cours. It was so awful — not because of the circuit, of course, but because it was in the middle of nowhere, as the journalists never missed the chance to remind us!
Meanwhile, Melbourne is always the “great place for a race” — is that code for a booze-up? And Singapore is now “epic”.
Never mind the fact that the Marina Bay Street Circuit is not great for overtaking. Never mind that the 2008 race needed a manufactured crash to pep it up, and that the 2009 race was voted the fourth worst of the season by F1 Fanatic readers.
TV coverage demonstrates skewed priorities
The scenario was not helped by some rather lacklustre television coverage from FOM this weekend. It looked to me like the director was more used to directing pop music videos than motorsport.
Coverage at night races is always dominated by shots of the lit-up buildings and the scenery surrounding the circuit. It feels more like the Singapore Grand Prix is more like an advert for Singapore than a motor race. Who was going to bed last weekend without seeing that flashing “Your Singapore” banner in their sleep?
When it comes to races like this, Bernie Ecclestone’s priorities are clear. Why else would the bland coverage of last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix have won an FIA award for best coverage of the season? Much of the race action was missed. Anyone not paying full attention would have thought that the race was won by a hotel that looks like a giant flashing lady-toy, so fixated were the cameras on anything but the cars.
Those in the inner circle in F1 should remember that the fans at home are looking for epic racing — not epic Holywood movies, epic nightlife or epic superloos.
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