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Archive: Mika Häkkinen

The career of David Coulthard

6 November 2008 17:15

The Brazilian Grand Prix heralded the end of David Coulthard’s career. Unfortunately, the race ended in a turn 1 smash. It deprived David Coulthard of a dignified send-off to his career, as well as depriving us of the awesome helmet cam, used by FOM for the first time since 1994.

In most ways it sums up David Coulthard’s 2008 season, which has seen him become a magnet for crashes. It was a most unfortunate season for the Scot with only one or two highlights — most notably 3rd place in the Canadian Grand Prix. Overall, though, the impression left is that DC may have been better off retiring one year earlier.

It is going too far to say that the first corner crash sums up DC’s career. Even though he could never count himself among F1′s very most talented, the statistics of his career make for pleasant reading. With 246 grand prix starts under his belt, he is the fourth most experienced Formula 1 driver of all time.

He is arguably the most successful British driver of all time. His tally of 13 race wins is relatively modest compared to other British drivers, particularly Nigel Mansell, Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark. But he has scored more points than any other British driver — 535. By this measure, he is the 5th most successful driver of all time.

For the majority of his career, David Coulthard has been lucky enough to have the best machinery. His race début came in the saddest of circumstances, as he was chosen to replace Ayrton Senna when the Brazilian died in 1994. But he raced for a Williams team that was just entering a phase of true dominance.

When he moved to McLaren just a few years later, it was in time for the Woking squad to make its own major resurgence. Ace designer Adrian Newey had moved across to McLaren from Williams at roughly the same time.

But at both Williams and McLaren, his team mate usually made much more of the opportunities the best car provided them. Damon Hill was a major contender for the 1995 World Championship. Meanwhile, Mika Häkkinen strung together two World Championships in a row in 1998 and 1999.

It is too easy to say that Häkkinen got favourable treatment at McLaren. DC may have moved over for the Finn in two successive races, in Jerez 1997 and Melbourne 1998. Critics point out that nice guys never win, and that DC’s apparent happiness to let his team mate past was evidence that DC did not have what it really takes. But the fact is that Coulthard struggled to get to grips with his McLaren car from 1998 onwards. That may have been due to the introduction of grooved tyres or whatever.

DC was to be further thwarted by another rule change a few years later. The Scot never could get to grips with one-lap qualifying. When the pressure was on him to deliver at the first time of asking, he more often than not found himself unable to deliver. Things did not improve much when the knock-out format was introduced.

Despite the patchy record, though, DC has had some great highlights during his career. When Häkkinen lost his motivation, DC was in prime position to challenge Schumacher for the title in 2001. He did, admittedly, finish up a long way behind Schumacher, having scored just 65 points. But he was definitely best of the rest that season, and the only person who could seriously claim to have given Schumacher any bother that season.

And a tally of 13 wins, no matter how good his machinery was, is fairly impressive stuff. David Coulthard was no fool.

Just when it looked as though DC’s career was coming to a halt, he moved from McLaren to Red Bull. It breathed new life into his career. He was reinvented as Formula 1′s elder statesman, a role he adapted well to. In his first season at the midfield Red Bull team in 2005, he scored as many points as he had at McLaren in 2004.

Since then he has been reunited with the chassis designer that has accompanied him throughout his career, Adrian Newey. He scooped up a clutch of great results, including two podiums along the way.

Overall, throughout his many many seasons, David Coulthard has driven for just three teams in his entire career. That demonstrates just how valuable every team felt he was to the package.

All the while, David Coulthard was great entertainment off the circuit as well as on it. Even though some nicknamed him ‘David Cardboard’ at first, he quickly developed a strong personality and was unafraid to use colourful language in his interviews.

Now his career has fizzled out. And even though DC never achieved the status of true greatness, and the World Championship eluded him, I think he has a lot to be proud of.

Thankfully, this colourful character promises not to go away for good. He will remain at Red Bull in an advisory role, proving yet again that teams invariably appreciate his input. Furthermore, it looks almost certain that DC will form part of the BBC’s team covering F1 from 2009 onwards. At least it looks like he will be entertaining us for years to come.

And here is one of the most entertaining moments in F1, provided by David Coulthard himself:

10 comments

Ferrari: Constructors' Champions

6 November 2008 09:21

Categories: Opinion, Report

Even though most of the focus tends to be on the Drivers’ Championship, the Constructors’ Championship is the prize that reflects a team effort. Ferrari are the sort of team that, if it misses out on the Drivers’ Championship, it will pick up the Constructors’.

The last time McLaren won the drivers’ Championship, with Mika Häkkinen, the Scuderia scooped up the Constructors’ prize. That was in 1999, and it was a victory that signified a team very much on the rise. This year, it reflects a team that refuses to go off the boil, even though they threatened to do so.

Let us not forget the massive changes that have been made in the Ferrari team over the past few years. Michael Schumacher, the most successful driver of all time, retired. Ross Brawn took a sabbatical and re-emerged at Honda. Rory Byrne took a back seat. Now Jean Todt has left. The axis of Schumacher is no more.

This was Stefano Domenicali’s first year in charge of the team. He had a baptism of fire in Australia, an unmitigated disaster with both drivers suffering from some kind of engine failure. Even though that proved to be a blip rather than the norm, it was by no means a one-off. The team that propelled Michael Schumacher to five World Championships is no longer the slick operation it was a few years ago. We have caught glimpses of the Italians’ calamitous ways once again.

In addition to the Australian disaster, there was a Singapore snafu. Before Kimi Räikkönen crashed out, Felipe Massa left the pitlane with his fuel hose still completely attached, the traffic lights having turned green. The controversial traffic lights system also caused Felipe Massa bother in Valencia, when he was dangerously released straight into the path of Adrian Sutil. Then, the team was simply slapped on the wrist by the FIA. In Singapore, though, it completely ruined Massa’s race.

Ferrari say they will bring back the traffic lights system for next season, adamant that it saves them enough time to justify the risk of complete foul-up. But if it saves them a couple of tenths, is that worth the occassional loss of ten points? Given how close the championship ended up being, that traffic lights system transpired to be a very expensive mistake for Ferrari.

The Scuderia also often found itself completely unable to answer the McLaren challenge. Hamilton was unstoppable in Silverstone while the Ferraris were spinning like tops in the midfield. Similarly in Hockenheim, Hamilton managed to make Felipe Massa look like a small child. A final sub-par performance came in China, though at least that time round they still finished 2nd and 3rd, albeit a long way behind Hamilton.

There were also a few alarming reliability problems. Ferrari continued to (legally) develop their engines through the engine freeze, though this was at the expense of reliability as two Ferrari engines went pop in two successive races, in Valencia and the Hungaroring. Perhaps more startling was the loose exhaust that ruined Kimi Räikkönen’s race in France — and that was when the rot began to set in in the Finn’s season.

A question mark also remains over the ability of their two drivers. Massa is clearly competent as I outlined in my previous post, but he is no Schumacher as a number of errors, particularly at the start of the season, demonstrate. And Räikkönen’s slump into near-obscurity remains a mystery to all observers. Meanwhile, four arguably better drivers — Hamilton, Alonso, Kubica and Vettel — are all weapons in their main rivals’ armoury. Ferrari are retaining their pair until at least 2010, and you have to wonder if that is the right decision.

All-in-all, then, Ferrari have had an up and down season. They have had some wonderful highlights, and also some incredibly low troughs. But almost all teams have had a poor season for one reason or another. Certainly their main rivals, McLaren, cannot exit this season without taking a particular look at their strategy or the performance of their second driver Heikki Kovalainen.

As such, even though I cannot stand the Ferrari team, I have to concede that they have done a great job this year. They have had eight wins to McLaren’s six. And both of their drivers were regularly in contention for good results unlike McLaren. So congratulations to the Scuderia. I just hope they don’t win too often.

2 comments

From the vaults: Old F1 magazines

26 September 2008 00:30

Categories: History

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…

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

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 »

8 comments

Which drivers missed slicks?

17 August 2008 17:49

Categories: History, Opinion

One driver whose coat is on a shoogly peg is Sébastien Bourdais. After a strong Australian Grand Prix, Bourdais’s season has been rather disappointing to say the least. He is completely anonymous during races. While this at least means he isn’t making many mistakes, the fact is that he is being utterly outclassed by his team mate Sebastian Vettel.

Bourdais has excused his performances, explaining that he will come good when slick tyres make their long-awaited return to F1. The Frenchman is of course used to slick tyres having used them for several years in ChampCar.

For the past decade Formula 1 has been unusual among motor racing categories for its use of grooved tyres in dry conditions. Slicks were abandoned in 1998 in a bid to reduce speeds amid a newly-ignited tyre war between Goodyear and Bridgestone. The powers that be were in no hurry to do away with grooves as the tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin was even more intense. But now that Formula 1 now effectively has a control tyre with one supplier, the need to curb tyre development is no longer there.

Grooves were always unpopular among fans who prefer to look of a proper racing car with slick tyres. Drivers also tend to dislike grooves because of their reduced grip and the safety issues this entails. Grooves also reduced the role of mechanical grip which in turn put the emphasis on aerodynamics. This has led to a perceived reduction in the amount of overtaking.

Jacques Villeneuve was particularly outspoken about the introduction of grooved tyres.

Later on that year he said “the new rules are bluntly shit.” For those comments, Villeneuve was punished by Max Mosley (whose vanity project grooved tyres was) through the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council.

It was always rather strange that a driver would come through the ranks from an entry-level series through to F3 then F3000 / GP2 always using slick tyres, then be expected to use grooved tyres when he reaches F1. Given that Sébastien Bourdais feels that he has not been able to show his true potential without slicks, has the past decade been a lost decade for top-level grand prix racing?

Which other F1 drivers might have been awesome if only they had slicks?

Would Pizza Boy have been the best thing since flattened bread? Not likely given that he even struggled in other formulae with slicks.

But perhaps a decent case can be made for some other drivers. Perhaps Robert Doornbos would have been slick on slicks. He did well in F3000 and even scored a couple of wins in ChampCar. Maybe Justin Wilson couldn’t get into the grooves. He has also had a strong career in the USA where slicks are the norm.

The reverse seemed to happen for Mika Häkkinen. When grooved tyres were introduced in 1998, Häkkinen’s hitherto dormant career exploded into action. His first win did come in 1997, on slicks, but that was effectively gifted to him. On the other hand, Häkkinen’s talent was plain for all to see even before 1998.

Do I think Sébastien Bourdais will improve on slick tyres? My feeling is that tyres have a small role to play. But it’s not a very significant role. I think it would be closer to the truth to say that the standards of driving in ChampCar are much lower than in F1 and Bourdais simply doesn’t have the talent to hold his own at the highest level.

3 comments

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.

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?