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Archive: Monza

Fisichella, Badoer and the hard-to-drive Ferrari

12 September 2009 23:52

Categories: Opinion

No-one can have failed to have spotted the irony. Giancarlo Fisichella has realised his childhood dream. Like any Italian driver, the opportunity to drive for Ferrari at all — never mind at Monza — is a real dream come true for Fisichella. But as with Luca Badoer, that dream has not quite gone to plan.

At least Badoer did not have a former team for him to compare. But Fisichella must have particularly mixed feelings as he struggles in his Ferrari while his former team Force India threatens to have the very fastest car in the pack.

A strong Force India showing at Monza was always on the cards. On the back of an excellent performance at Spa-Francorchamps, where Fisichella got pole position and finished 2nd, it was clear that Force India’s car was handy in a low downforce environment.

Force India were particularly bullish in the run-up to this race too. Knowing they may have had an advantage for Spa and Monza, Force India booked one of the few straight-line tests that are allowed per year for this week in order to maximise their advantage. It also gave their new race driver, Vitantonio Liuzzi, a chance to familiarise himself with the car (albeit not on a racetrack).

Liuzzi will probably be driving the very same car that Fisichella excelled in at Spa. It is little surprise that he has hit the ground running, qualifying a solid 7th for his first race since 2007. I have long felt that Liuzzi wasn’t given a proper chance in F1, and it delights me to see that he may now get a prolonged spell at a stable team. There have been strong rumours for a while that Liuzzi had a 2010 race contract with Force India in the bag already.

Meanwhile, Fisichella’s former team mate Adrian Sutil has his tail up, and appears to be adapting well to becoming Force India’s de facto team leader. He was probably fast enough to get pole position today but a mistake on his quick lap put paid to that notion. Nonetheless, Sutil must fancy his chances for a great result in the race, despite the fact that he is surrounded by kers-equipped cars on the grid.

Meanwhile, Fisichella, having chosen to move to Ferrari, is struggling to adapt to his new car and qualified 14th on the grid. He must be scratching his head a bit over the fact that his old car is seven places in front, and his former team mate is a massive 12 places in front. Fisichella says he is far from unhappy, and even takes pride from the fact that he helped develop that Force India to become a front-runner.

You certainly can’t blame him for deciding to move to Ferrari. Which would he prefer — a good result, or the chance to say he’s driven for Ferrari. He has three career wins already. Balancing the chance of getting a fourth victory in a Force India, or getting a moderate result for Ferrari, you can see even then why he might prefer the latter option.

What his performance so far this weekend shows you don’t have to have been out of racing for ten years to struggle to get to grips with the Ferrari F60. Yes, Badoer’s performances were not great, but I felt very sorry for him being expected to perform straight away in a car that is said to be difficult to drive.

Giancarlo Fisichella’s performance has not been quite as bad as Badoer’s. But given that he is fully race-fresh and fit, you would expect that. Fisichella will probably have expected to do better than this. It has been a slightly lacklustre weekend. He was 20th in both Friday Practice 2 and Saturday Practice. On Saturday he further underlined his difficulties by crashing at the Parabolica. Indeed, I found myself wondering what oh-so-hilarious nicknames the journalists might like to come up with now that a different Ferrari is struggling at the back.

Following Badoer’s struggles in Valencia, Ted Kravitz revealed that the F60 may be a particularly tricky car to master. The driver is required to do lots of hands-on switch-flicking and knob-twisting throughout the lap.

This is also Fisichella’s explanation for why switching to a Ferrari has not brought an immediate improvement in his pace as a driver.

It’s a different car so there is different reaction going into the corners. You work much more with the steering wheel and the switches compared to Force India. With Force India I was just concentrating on the driving, here I am quite busy.

As for his crash during Saturday Practice, that is said to be due to Fisichella adapting to the behaviour of the car under braking while it is harvesting its energy for kers. Kers was another worry that Fisichella did not have to deal with at Force India, but it is fundamental to the performance of the F60.

These insights about the Ferrari F60 remind me of the received wisdom about Ducati’s MotoGP bike. There are many parallels between Ferrari and Ducati, and this appears to be another one. The Ducati has long been famous for making previously-good riders look poor. Only Casey Stoner appears able to extract the full potential from it, while other Ducati riders tend to struggle to find any pace at all. The suggestion is that the Ducati is a very difficult bike to ride and that only Stoner has tamed it. Perhaps Felipe Massa had a similar magic with the Ferrari. (In yet another parallel, both Stoner and Massa are currently not racing in order to convalesce.)

The experience of watching drivers attempt to get to grips with a tricky car under the intense spotlight of a race weekend, rather than the relative privacy of a test session, has at least put a few myths to bed. Certainly, the idea that results are more down to the car than the driver was given a boost when Jenson Button seemed unable to stop winning at the beginning of this season. But it was dealt a blow when Luca Badoer stepped into the Ferrari, and finished last in Belgium when his team mate won.

Now we see Fisichella with his hands full and we are presented with a yet more complex picture. A driver needs to grow into his car. He needs to learn how to drive it and gain in confidence with it. It is also true that a car needs to suit a particular driver’s style. Arguably Badoer wasn’t given enough time to adapt, and Fisichella will need more leeway too. Here’s hoping the tifosi have patience with him if he is unable to score a good result during the race.

2 comments

Crikeynen! Kimi wins again at last

1 September 2009 13:33

Categories: History, Report

What a grand prix weekend that was. It just goes to show you what a decent circuit can do for racing. Boy, can Spa do it for racing. It also clearly does it for Kimi Räikkönen, who is always mesmerising in this most inspirational of settings.

Räikkönen confuses people a lot of the time with his apparent indifference. Often he simply does not seem to be bothered. But he always goes well at Spa. Indeed, he is the only current driver to have won there. His record includes a remarkable fight to the front from 10th on the grid in what was an otherwise barren 2004 season for him.

There are some parallels between that victory and this year’s one. Like McLaren in 2004, this year Ferrari began the season with uncompetitive machinery, but have developed the car into a winner for Belgium. This victory ends a 25 race drought for Räikkönen; the 2004 victory ended an even longer one.

In a lot of ways, Räikkönen’s victory was among the least surprising things to happen during an extraordinary weekend. The Finn usually gives a good performance in Belgium, but despite winning the race he was overshadowed by Giancarlo Fisichella, a man who would have been sacked at the end of last year if I had any say in such matters.

Question marks remain over a victory margin which perhaps ought to have been longer than one second. Then some say he wouldn’t have won were it not for kers — this is probably true. Others say that he gained an advantage by running wide and taking the run-off at La Source on lap 1.

However, David Coulthard says that Räikkönen will have gained no advantage from running wide, a fact which is apparently corroborated by the fact that Button took a similar line and lost places. It’s more likely that Räikkönen gained those spots by deploying his kers, the exit of La Source being the ideal spot to unleash that kers energy on lap 1 rather than the start itself. See Axis of Oversteer for a good debate on this matter.

Even so, the plaudits are going to Giancarlo Fisichella for his stunning drive to second place in the Force India. Is it a coincidence that he should up his game so much when there is a sniff of getting a Ferrari drive? I don’t think I have ever been so impressed by Fisichella, who I have always seen as a mid-grid sort of guy who only just about deserves his continued presence in F1.

Some of the upsurge can be put down to the car, which the team also expects to do well at Monza. In the sister Force India car, Adrian Sutil looked especially good through Raidillon, giving him an enormous advantage through the Kemmel straight, capitalising too on the grunt of the Mercedes engine, no doubt the best in F1. This led to him making a few impressive overtaking manoeuvres, though sadly for him it came to nothing and ended up in 11th.

Force India weren’t the only backmarkers to rise in Spa though. BMW, for the first time since Australia, looked quick. Both drivers scored points, and indeed Kubica did well to finish fourth despite picking up a substantial amount of damage in the lap 1 mêlée at Les Combes.

Lap 1 was an eventful lap all round, with Fernando Alonso’s race effectively ending at the start. But we were not to find that out until his first pitstop, when the Renault mechanics were unable to satisfactorily change his left front tyre. Renault didn’t want another controversy involving badly fitted wheels, so he toured into the pits to retire. A clever replay from FOM revealed that Alonso’s wheel was actually damaged in a turn 1 collision with Sutil at the start.

It is yet more bad luck for Alonso. Renault will not like the fact that in the Constructors’ Championship they are now behind BMW, a team which has been lamentably poor for most of the season. With the announcement that the FIA is investigating the unusual circumstances behind their victory in the Singapore Grand Prix, all-in-all it’s been a pretty torrid time for Renault. The move to the red car cannot come too soon for Alonso.

As for the sharp end of the championship, yet again three of the major Championship contenders failed to score a good result. This time, Vettel was the only one of the four challengers to have a good race. This makes Red Bull’s decision over whether it should start favouring one driver over the other yet trickier. Vettel now leads Webber in the Championship. But he still faces a massive 19 point deficit with only five races remaining.

Vettel actually had a strong race. In his analysis of the race, rubbergoat reveals that, when you consider competitive laps only, Vettel had the fastest average lap time of all the drivers. But he was hindered in the vital first stint due to being heavy on fuel.

Jenson Button had a DNF as he crashed out in that Les Combes pile-up. It is his first DNF of the season, making his sixth bad race in a row. Yet again, he has gotten away with it relatively unscathed. Another disastrous race, another two point dent in his lead which remains at 16 points. His main challenger is Rubens Barrichello who, with all due respect to the Brazilian, is not the most threatening of his three main challengers — not least because he is in the same team.

This has been a most strange season. Jenson Button couldn’t stop winning in the first half of the season. Now he can do nothing to help himself win. But his Championship chances remain high because the last six races have had six different winners. In stark contrast to the early Brawn dominance, you just don’t know who is going to be strong at a race and I would be a mug if I tried to predict what would happen in Monza. I daren’t even predict which car this week’s second placed man will be driving — I don’t want a wrap on the knuckles like Ian Phillips!

4 comments

Ruby on Rails!

25 August 2009 21:28

Categories: Report

This year’s European Grand Prix was not the best race we’ve seen so far this year — but at least it wasn’t the utter snoozer we had last year. There are at least a few interesting talking points.

First, of course, is the performance of Rubens Barrichello, which was truly masterful. For once, the most experienced driver in the history of F1 has shown that the statistic doesn’t just mean he’s old — it means he can do the business as well. It is his first win for five years, and who would begrudge him this one?

Brawn were forced to spend Friday experimenting with set-up in an attempt to get to the issues that have prevented them from being competitive since Turkey. Despite this, Barrichello put all the car’s troubles behind him and didn’t seem to put a foot wrong all weekend.

I heard someone say that an emotional Rubens is a quick Rubens. It appears as though Felipe Massa’s injury has had some kind of impact on Barrichello’s form, not least because Massa has apparently been giving Barrichello tips on which lines to take in Valencia.

Certainly, not all of the performance can be put down to an improvement in the car because Jenson Button was thoroughly outclassed. In fairness, Button’s race was immediately compromised by a disastrous first lap — fatal on a circuit like Valencia. Even so, the Championship leader was strangely off the pace compared with Barrichello.

Barrichello even seemed to have the upper hand before the race started, as he was heavy on fuel and could pit later. It was marginal though, and it took until the third stint for the advantage to finally be realised.

There is a slight debate over whether McLaren’s bungled pit stop handed Barrichello the lead on a plate, though most agree that Barrichello would have ended up ahead anyway. Who knows how he would have coped under pressure from Hamilton though if that pacey McLaren was closer to him.

Hamilton and McLaren must count this as a lost victory, not a good second place. After the race, Hamilton’s words said he wasn’t disappointed or upset about the team’s mistake. But for me, his tone of voice said it all. This wasn’t the relaxed and happy Hamilton that we saw after the race in Hungary, and I detected more than a bit of tension in his voice in the post-race interviews.

I think Hamilton thought he had the race in the bag. I remarked at one point during the first stint that it sounded like he was taking it easy. Soon afterwards, Martin Brundle said that Hamilton was nowhere near his limit. For much of his first stint he was lapping in the high 1:39s or low 1:40s. In both his second and third stints he ended up consistently lapping rather faster, in the mid 1:39s.

It’s strange, because Hamilton has traditionally been criticised for not being conservative enough. But this is one instance where I think if he had pushed harder he would have won. His lead was indeed fairly comfortable during the first stint, but I feel he could have pressed home his advantage further.

Kimi Räikkönen scored his second consecutive podium in a row, and it was another relatively bland yet quick performance. He was barely on the television and there was apparently nothing interesting about his race, apart from the fact that he finished third.

This is interesting bearing in mind all the silly season issues, particularly while a question mark remains over the future competitiveness of Felipe Massa. People constantly say they struggle to understand Räikkönen, and many speculated about how he’d react to having Michael Schumacher as a team mate. On the current evidence, you have to say that he appears to have reacted rather well to no longer having Massa as a team mate. Räikkönen’s oft-predicted move to rallying in 2010 seems less likely now.

Fernando Alonso was another one who had a relatively uneventful race. But he and the Spanish fans will take the three points over the lap one retirement he suffered last year in Valencia. Alonso still does what I expect him to do in mediocre machinery, but is not yet showing enough of his double World Champion class which we saw last year.

BMW Sauber will be relatively pleased with how their weekend unfolded. The upgrade seems to have worked, with the team having its best qualifying of the season and Robert Kubica scoring a point. They are no longer the underachieving tail-enders, though you would still expect more.

As for the other big-name underachievers, Toyota, they are scratching their head over the fact that they were actually quite quick during the race, but were neutered by a poor qualifying performance. This year’s Toyota has always been bad round twisty places (such as Monaco and sector three at Barcelona), but despite its supposed “street circuit” status, Valencia isn’t actually all that twisty.

True enough, Timo Glock set the fastest lap during the race. Pascal Vasselon says that all of Glock’s laps during the race were fast. Looking at the raw lap times it doesn’t seem that way, but Glock’s slow times in the early part of the race are said to be down to a heavy fuel load. All told, it must be pretty frustrating to be fast, yet finish a dismal 14th, ahead of just the three new drivers.

There is one big team I haven’t yet mentioned. Red Bull — could you get a much more disastrous race? Webber was off the pace all race, never looked like scoring a decent result and ended up finishing behind a BMW. Meanwhile, Vettel’s brand new Renault engine rasped its way into an escape road just a day after another one spewed all over half the circuit. That’s not good for Renault’s engine department, but more on that in a future article.

Vettel wondered aloud if he is a “killer” of his engines in his post-race interviews. He has now used up seven of his eight engines, and with Spa and Monza coming up he is almost certain to take a grid penalty at some point in the next few races. If his Championship chances weren’t severely dented already, this near-certain penalty surely hammers a sturdy nail into the coffin.

Red Bull’s capitulation this weekend means that yet again Jenson Button has got away with a dire weekend virtually unscathed. Despite only finishing 7th, his Championship lead decreased by just half a point. Yet again, Button looks as likely as ever to become World Champion despite not having any good results. In Turkey his lead was 26 points. But after four dire races, his lead has only been cut by less than a third of that amount.

Since his last win four races ago, there have been four different winners. The lack of any real challenger gives Button breathing space. And for the first time in a while, Barrichello has moved up into second place in the Championship, hammering home the fact that Red Bull have not quite done enough to prove they can win the Championship.

But Spa will be a very different race, and conventional wisdom suggests that it will suit Red Bull. But do they have enough in the tank? Webber needs to overcome a substantial 20.5 point deficit to Button.

1 comment

Forza Minardi! Bravo Sebastian!

15 September 2008 01:24

Categories: Opinion

After the controversy of Spa, which I described at the time as being among the darkest days of F1, the Italian Grand Prix has provided the sport with its best day for a very long time. It’s the good news story F1 craved.

Sebastian Vettel has become the youngest ever Grand Prix winner at a scandalously young 21 years and 74 days. He is so young, he is the first person younger than me to ever win a grand prix. He becomes the sixth race winner of the season, and the third new winner. It’s a rich year for new talent.

What’s more, unlike the other first-time winners this year, Vettel did it on sheer skill. There was not a hint of a fluke about this. The normal front-runners were out of contention after they messed up in qualifying while Vettel sat his Toro Rosso on pole.

Heikki Kovalainen should have been able to challenge from second place in the vastly superior McLaren. As it was, the Finn never came close to challenging for the lead. On the podium, Kovalainen had a face like he was chewing a wasp, and quite rightly. He’s got a lot to be ashamed about. He was trounced today on merit.

But it wasn’t other people’s mistakes that allowed Vettel to win. The young German was simply mesmerising on the challenging Monza circuit, the fastest circuit on the calendar. In treacherously wet conditions where most other drivers slipped up, Vettel only deviated from the circuit once as far as I could tell, and it was just a harmless little trip across the chicane.

Vettel was absolutely in the groove. His composure just astounds me. When you think about his age, so many other people would have chucked it in the wall. But Vettel maintained a laser-like focus on the racing line and never looked in danger of losing this race.

Without a doubt, this has been one of the most impressive drives I have ever seen since I started watching Formula 1 almost a decade and a half ago. The magnitude of what we have seen at Monza can scarcely be described. It is a true giant-killing in every sense.

Toro Rosso are not supposed to win races. They are supposed to be the second string team. They are subsidised by the Red Bull team that is supposed to be further up the grid. They get Ferrari engines that are supposed to win races when they are placed in red cars.

Today Toro Rosso leapfrogged Red Bull in the Constructors Championship. And Sebastian Vettel comprehensively outperformed the Ferrari team whose cars could only finish 6th and 9th.

I am actually struggling to comprehend quite how Toro Rosso have pulled this off. Red Bull driver Mark Webber has talked about how they have the “new big red engine”. But Force India have a big red engine too. Heck, Ferrari have a big red engine. And Sebastian Vettel and his Toro Rosso team were the only people able to do anything with it in Monza.

The Toro Rosso team has been steadily improving as the season has continued. It has been slow but steady progress. Vettel’s team mate Sébastien Bourdais has also been performing well. He finished 1st in Q2 in Belgium and was on for a podium finish there until a disastrous final lap when he fell back through the field as conditions worsened while he was on the dry tyres. I felt very sorry for the Frenchman who struggled to hold back the tears when he was being interviewed about it.

I felt sorry for him today too as he stalled it on the grid having qualified 4th. He could only sit back and watch as Sebastian Vettel gave the world a demonstration of what the future of Formula 1 looks like. This man — who only has 22 grand prix starts to his name — has today shown the old hats and the young pretenders how it’s done.

The combination of national anthems that were played out on the podium today were familiar. The German national anthem followed by the Italian national anthem. That is the combination that greeted dozens of Schumacher victories for Ferrari. What an omen.

What is great, though, is the fact that Vettel is not a Schumacher. On the face of it, Sebastian Vettel is an unlikely grand prix hero. He’s not a bulky Webber or a square-jawed Coulthard or a 16-hours-per-day-in-the-gym Schumacher. Nor can I remember him playing one single dirty trick in his F1 career.

He is a lanky, gangly, goofy-looking kid. And despite his obvious raw talent, he doesn’t display a hint of arrogance. Of course he believes in himself. But he is polite and funny when being interviewed. Apparently he is very friendly in person. Unlike your Kubicas or your Räikkönens, charisma drips off this star. These people are not supposed to be so talented, they’re not supposed to have that drive to win.

In a lot of ways, it’s zero to hero in less than a year. In one of his first races he impressively ran in 3rd place before infamously crashing into his Red Bull team mate Mark Webber, prompting the Australian to launch into a foul-mouthed tirade on live British breakfast television.

Today, Webber and Vettel appear to get on very well. They will be team mates next year as Vettel is all set to move to the proper Red Bull team (whether this is the right choice for his career just now is debatable). And now Vettel is a race winner. An incredible rate of maturity.

Let us not forget the role of Mario Theissen in Sebastian Vettel’s career. The BMW boss gave the then-19-year-old his first shot in an F1 race in Indianapolis last year. Vettel ran across the chicane at the first corner, but otherwise stayed out of trouble and scored a point in his début.

Following today’s performance though, that other BMW protégé Robert Kubica now feels like old news. This even puts anything Hamilton has done over the past two years firmly in the shade. To win a race for a tiny team as Vettel has done is very different to winning a race in the fastest car as Hamilton has done.

Let us not forget that the Toro Rosso team is essentially the old Minardi team. They may be bankrolled by big Red Bull cash these days. But most of the team is still the same and it is still based at the same Faenza location. Every fan of F1 has a soft spot for these guys. They are an Italian F1 team that you can actually like.

You would dream of a Minardi win, but you would never believe it would happen. But today it has happened. Moreover, they did it in their home grand prix, the Italian Grand Prix, at that most historic of circuits, Monza. They’ll be dancing in the streets of Faenza tonight.

There is a lesson in there. Minardi were the bravest of the backmarkers. They have lasted for decades without winning a race. They could go for years on end without ever scoring a point. Yet they stuck at it and survived as a thousand and one other backmarkers came and went. And today, the years of hardship have paid off.

This is why we watch motor racing. These people do it for the love of the sport. Instead of dreaming of working for Ferrari, these guys dreamt of becoming Ferrari. And they were never deterred.

Thank you Giancarlo Minardi. Thank you Paul Stoddart. Thank you Dietrich Mateschitz. Thank you Gerhard Berger. And most of all, thank you Sebastian Vettel! Thanks for reminding us why we watch grand prix motor racing. Forza Minardi!

8 comments

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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