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Archive: Nelsinho Piquet

Thoughts on the Renault punishments

25 September 2009 00:24

Categories: Opinion

Apologies I’m so late on this one. I have had a busy and tiring week.

On Monday, before the outcome of the WMSC meeting was known, I decided to think about what the outcome might be. Was there any punishment — even zero punishment — that I could not imagine the FIA handing out?

I couldn’t think of a scenario that was outside the realms of possibility. I suppose we are so used to the FIA Random Penalty Generator that you genuinely might as well have a lucky dip.

For the same reason, it is difficult to get too angry at the state of affairs. Because the other question I asked myself before the verdict was delivered was: is there any punishment that anger me? Honestly, I could not think of one.

This case is so complex, with so many factors, and there are a lot of ways to look at it. Particularly given that everyone involved in the conspiracy had already been dispensed with through natural business decisions, it’s difficult to see what further punishment is necessary. At the same time, there is an understandable need for the FIA to send some sort of message that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated.

As it was, when the penalty was announced, I was certainly interested. But there was nothing to get too angry about. Many journalists felt that Renault got off lightly. I noticed a few in the media pointing out that just two years ago McLaren were hit with a ONE HUNDRED MEELION DOLLARS fine after one staff member’s wife went to a shop and photocopied the Haynes Ferrari manual.

Deliberately crashing a car is no mere intellectual property theft — it is a major safety issue. It goes without saying that someone could have been killed. So there does appear to be a mismatch between McLaren’s “espionage” fine, and this relatively light punishment for Renault.

That just further underlines the ridiculousness of the McLaren fine. It was the McLaren punishment, not the Renault punishment, that was wrong.

I am a believer in individual responsibility. I am not keen on the idea of an entire team being punished for the acts of one or two rogue individuals. If there are repeat instances, and there appears to be a culture of bad behaviour within a team (and by that I don’t just mean that the FIA President slightly dislikes the team boss), then you can go and punish the team. But for a one-off crime carried out by an individual, it is right to punish that individual.

In that sense, it is right for the FIA to focus on the individuals involved in this case, even if the media wanted to report on an embarrassing punishment for the Renault team. The fact is that there are hundreds of good people working for the F1 team, and countless people working for the manufacturers, who are just as badly let down as anyone else. Renault’s defence in the WMSC meeting was that it was as much a victim as anyone else, and it is an argument I have some sympathy with.

As one British politician might say, Renault have been tried in “the court of public opinion”. They have already been found guilty and paid the price. The penalty already handed out to Renault as a car manufacturer has been an unimaginable amount of bad publicity which could well have an impact on its sales. After all, even for people who know nothing about F1, they are bound to have heard something about this story and the one name they will remember in relation to it is “Renault”. Anyone buying a car just now may well have this influence their decision, even if it is subliminally.

For the Renault F1 team, not only have they lost two of the most important members of the team, they have also lost two of their most important sponsors, including their title sponsor. Okay, so ING only had four races left anyway, and going by previous history Mutua Madrileña will follow Alonso wherever he goes. But anyone thinking of inking a deal with Renault will be having second thoughts, and will almost certainly be able to pay less for the privilege of having their logos displayed.

In relation to this, I note that during the WMSC verdict, Max Mosley declared that this was nothing to do with Renault the company, only Renault the F1 team. Given that the team faces a permanent ban, suspended for two years, I wonder exactly how the “F1 team” is defined.

Perhaps there is already an official answer for the FIA (though knowing them there probably isn’t). But if, say, someone like David Richards came along and bought the Enstone-based team, is that still Renault F1? If there is a Brawn-style scenario, is that the same team? It today’s Renault team the same team that entered as Toleman and competed against Renault in 1981?

As for the three people implicated — Nelsinho Piquet, Pat Symonds and Flavio Briatore — I would be surprised and disappointed to see any of them involved in motorsport again. The punishments for Mr Briatore and Mr Symonds seem fair to me. Although Briatore’s lifetime ban is, on the face of it, draconian, if he was implicated as the WMSC appear to believe then I see no reason why he should be allowed to work in F1 again.

Reaction to this has been mixed. Different drivers have different views. I find it interesting that the drivers who are sceptical of Briatore’s involvement have all been closely involved with Briatore in the past and are sure to know his character and if he is capable of plotting such a scheme. Fisichella and Trulli have both driven for him, while Mark Webber is positively glowing about his experience being managed by Briatore.

Jarno Trulli’s comment is, in a way, a backhanded compliment: “Briatore knows little or nothing about strategy, it’s weird that he would be the one who paid the highest price.”

That is interesting when you consider that Pat Symonds still maintains that it was Nelsinho Piquet who came up with the idea to deliberately crash a car, something which is backed by the mysterious Witness X. F1 Wolf points out:

Graham Stoker questioned Mr. Piquet about this “discrepancy” during the hearing (about 19min25sec mark of the recording). Nelson Piquet replied in line with his previous statements and then Mr. Philips, his lawyer, came to Piquet’s defense ridiculing the possibility that 20 something guy, a junior driver in a team could have come up with such strategy. And that was it, no more questions on this topic.

Well, the question is not about who came up with the strategy. We know the strategy came from Mr. Symonds, nobody seems to dispute that. The question is, who came up with the idea to deliberately crash the car.

It seems very possible that Symonds may have mused that Alonso’s only chance to win the race was for a Safety Car to come out early in the race. Who is to say that Piquet did not at this point suggest crashing the car?

Whatever, I am disappointed in the fact that Piquet was given immunity. For me, he is the biggest criminal in this situation. Neither Symonds nor Briatore had the power to crash the car. Piquet was the driver. The steering wheel was in his hands; the throttle was underneath his foot. Piquet was the man with the power to say: “no”.

Caron Lindsay argues that Piquet deserves some sympathy because of the amount of pressure he was under. No doubt his situation was unusual, not least because his team boss also happened to be his manager.

But as I have pointed out in a previous article, Martin Brundle (another person who has driven for Briatore) is not convinced that Piquet was under an inordinate amount of pressure. Piquet’s main defence appears to be that he was worried he was going to lose his job. How many drivers has this applied to in the past? Even this year, Sébastien Bourdais was on the verge of losing his job all season until it finally happened, and he managed to avoid deliberately putting other people’s lives at risk.

I would also suggest that if Piquet can’t handle pressure, racing in Formula 1 is probably not the right profession for him. It seems as though Piquet is a fragile character, and you can’t criticise him for that. You can’t really help this sort of thing. But if you are in such a poor mental state that you decide it would be a good idea to crash, you can’t really have that in F1.

Maybe his heart wasn’t in it. Piquet is a proud name, and the events of the past few weeks have clearly been conducted in large part by Senior. It seems to me as though Piquet Jr was as much a victim of pushy parenting as anything else.

5 comments

Now we know the truth about "crashgate"

15 September 2009 23:39

Categories: Opinion

With the most recent revelations about the allegations surrounding Renault, all is becoming clear. It is just another one of Max Mosley’s power games — his parting shot, if you will. Having dispensed with enemy number one, Ron Dennis, earlier on in the year, Mosley has moved on to target number two: Flavio Briatore.

This is the inescapable conclusion one reaches when digesting the fact that Pat Symonds has been offered immunity if he “tells the truth” or, perhaps more accurately, in return for landing Flav in the shit whether it’s true or not. The scheme seems particularly odd given that most of the evidence thus far appears to implicate only Nelsinho Piquet and Pat Symonds for concocting any scheme that may have existed.

Even Piquet himself in his statement to the FIA seems reticent to directly accuse Flavio Briatore of concocting a conspiracy. Piquet only talks about Briatore’s presence in a meeting in which Symonds and Piquet discuss the crash strategy:

The proposal to deliberately cause an accident was made to me shortly before the race took place, when I was summoned by Mr. Briatore and Mr. Symonds in Mr. Briatore’s office. Mr. Symonds, in the presence of Mr. Briatore, asked me if I would be willing to sacrifice my race for the team by “causing a safety car”.

Instead, Nelsinho Piquet’s ire for Briatore is based on the fact that Briatore was reluctant to renew his contract. Boo hoo! Martin Brundle isn’t terribly impressed with that line of reasoning:

His rationale is that his contractual option hadn’t been taken the previous month so he was stressed and wanted to please the team. Try waiting the whole winter to sign a race-by-race contract days before the first grand prix of the season — that’s stress, but still not enough to crash a car intentionally.

I must agree with this. Normally, I would think that the normal course of action for a driver trying to renew his contract would be to improve his performances, not go around deliberately crashing.

For me, the only smoking gun we have seen so far is the reluctance of Pat Symonds to answer some of the questions the FIA investigators asked him. He was very reticent to discuss any plans he may have made with Piquet, while at the same time the idea was discussed. Symonds says it was Piquet who came up with the idea, while Piquet alleges that Symonds went as far as to specify on which lap and corner Piquet should crash.

Other evidence is inconclusive. The telemetry, which reveals that Piquet instinctively lifted but later applied full throttle while his rear wheels were spinning during the crash, is described by Symonds as “very unusual data”. But Piquet was no stranger to crashing. Meanwhile, the pit wall communications reveal little interesting, apart from an anxiety on the part of Piquet to know which lap he was on, and the fact that the team was concerned about Piquet’s condition following the crash.

So the evidence so far is that Piquet claims to have deliberately caused a crash. Symonds has acknowledged that a discussion took place, but refuses to talk any more about it. So where does Briatore fit in with all this?

We are now in the ludicrous situation where the two people who appear to be implicated the most have been offered immunity. Of those accused, that leaves just Briatore, against whom there appears to be very little evidence. It is surely not a coincidence that Max Mosley sees Flavio Briatore as an enemy.

There are other interesting aspects about the FIA’s behaviour over this scandal. Despite Max Mosley’s claim that he is greatly concerned about the leaks, The Times‘s Ed Gorman reveals that all of these leaks have come from the FIA! That newspaper would know — it is a common leaking outlet for both Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone.

Surely, Ed Gorman suggests, it is no coincidence that this entire scandal has overshadowed Ari Vatanen’s campaign to become FIA President. Mosley has made no secret of the fact that he would prefer his ally Jean Todt to replace him in the role, plumbing even his already-extraordinarily low depths to endorse Todt on FIA letterhead.

Vatanen has struggled to make headway in the media against the weight of the Mosley/Todt machine and recently his efforts to have his voice heard have been drowned out by leaks on the Renault case, widely thought to be from the FIA, and by strategically placed FIA announcements on the scandal.

I have to confess that I am not convinced by Ari Vatanen. To me, he seems like a failed MEP who is seeking attention and looking for a new purpose in life. His campaign has seemed ill-prepared in comparison to Jean Todt who has clearly been waiting to fill this role for a very long time. But what Todt has going against him is his anti-sporting record while at Peugeot and Ferrari, and the fact that his campaign has been unfairly advantaged by the FIA, which appears to be corrupt from tip to toe.

This is all turning out to be very convenient for the Mosley–Todt camp. Mosley has spent much of the past year trying to edge the manufacturers out of F1 (mere years after he lambasted the Williams-style model which he now apparently thinks is the life and soul of the sport!). He is clearly not good friends with Briatore, and is doing his very best to bring Briatore down. Very interesting that this comes mere months after he successfully brought Ron Dennis down, as though Mosley realised that this year was his last chance to do it. The Todt advantage is the icing on the cake.

I really am sick of the FIA. If an actual government behaved like this, there would be riots on the streets.

21 comments

Piquet's Singapore Sling — yet another F1 scandal

4 September 2009 21:58

Categories: Opinion

Up until now, I have refrained from writing about the latest scandal to envelop F1 — allegations that Nelsinho Piquet’s crash at last year’s Singapore Grand Prix was engineered in order to fix the race so that Alonso could win. Now that Renault have been summoned to an extraordinary meeting of the WMSC (sound familiar?), it seems as though there is some substance to the allegations. At least there is enough of a suspicion that the FIA feels the need to take the situation very seriously.

Suspicion about the result has hung around since immediately after the race. Fernando Alonso’s strategy was unusual, though by no means unheard of. He was filled very light at the beginning so that he could pit a few laps before everyone else and hope for a Safety Car within those few laps to make up the places. How convenient, it was widely noted, that the Safety Car Alonso badly needed was brought out as a result of his team mate Piquet slinging his car into the wall.

Up until this week, though, I had always suspected that if there was any conspiracy on Renault’s part, it was to tell Piquet in the heat of the moment to push hard in the hope that he might crash. The way the situation is framed now, it seems as though the allegation is that the whole thing was premeditated. The thinking appears to be that the plan was formulated by Renault personnel and discussed with Piquet before the race began.

If these allegations are true, they should be taken very seriously indeed. It would surely be the biggest scandal ever to have hit Formula 1 (and that is saying something). This is no little sex game. It is not mere pilfering of intellectual property. The concern here isn’t even just about race fixing, though that is a serious charge in itself.

When you talk about deliberately crashing a car, that is a major safety issue. First of all there is the safety of the driver who is being asked to crash a car into a wall. Despite the high safety standards for drivers today, it is obvious to see how this plan could have had terrible consequences.

Then there is the safety of other drivers. Even though Piquet’s crash happened when there were no other drivers near him, this is not really the point. (Update: Actually, looking at the replay, there are other drivers near him, and indeed he is overtaken while the crash is still happening.) His crash left debris spread across the track. A driver could easily pick up a puncture and end up in his own serious accident.

This year we have also had bad experiences of debris causing serious injury to Felipe Massa and the death of Henry Surtees. In Hungary, the spring from Rubens Barrichello’s car was bouncing around for four seconds until it hit Massa’s helmet with disastrous consequences. How would anyone setting out to deliberately crash their car know that there won’t be any knock-on effects to the safety of other drivers?

That is before we even consider the safety of the spectators. In the video we can see that they are actually sitting very close to Piquet’s accident right next to the circuit. If shards of debris made their way into the crowd, we could be looking at injuries there too.

Comparisons with rugby union’s “bloodgate” scandal understate the nature of these allegations. Piquet’s crash could have involved real blood.

Yes, motorsport is dangerous. Everyone knows that. But everyone takes part under the assumption that safety comes first, and that no-one is deliberately setting out to cause danger. Let us be clear. If it is true that Piquet was instructed to deliberately crash the car, we could easily be looking at manslaughter charges rather than just race fixing charges.

That is why I find it so difficult to believe that the Renault team or anyone else involved in motorsport would actually consider concocting such a scheme. The allegations against Renault are very serious and as such there needs to be cast-iron evidence if any action is to be taken.

It seems unbelievable that Renault would leave behind any trace of their plan in the form of, for instance, their radio transmissions (although that didn’t stop McLaren from inexplicably trying to pretend they didn’t exist back in Australia this year). A secret code phrase is not inconceivable though.

I can easily envisage such a code phrase being something like “Fernando has been in for his stop”. It is, after all, not unusual for a driver to be told how his team mate is doing, and that simple piece of information would have told Piquet all he needed to know. I imagine the FIA will be studying the radio recordings of the Singapore race and other races to see if there is anything unusual at all about the Singapore transmissions in the run-up to Piquet’s crash.

Then comes the question of where exactly the new evidence has come from. The assumption seems to be that it has come from camp Piquet (either Jr or Sr). It is easy to see what Piquet’s agenda might be. The clear mission just now is to discredit Flavio Briatore — that is clear from Piquet’s incredible statement after he was sacked by Renault.

One thing makes me doubt that Piquet is the whistleblower is that this whole thing would show him up to be the sort of dummy would go along with such a dangerous scheme for his own short-term gain. If the allegations are true, Piquet is just as liable as the Renault team. If he thinks he will save his career by blowing the whistle, he really is a few marbles short.

The only way this calculation can work is that Piquet thought that his career was ruined anyway (which I suppose is likely), and he has nothing to lose and at least can bring Briatore down with him. Otherwise, Piquet’s only hope will be that he is looked upon favourably for being the whistleblower. But I think anyone who is happy to deliberately crash their car in a premeditated scheme ought to be set for a lengthy racing ban.

Amid all this, it is worth asking the question: is Renault the sort of team that would do this sort of thing. A certain constituency would say that it is in the nature of competitive drivers and teams to exploit loopholes in the regulations, and that creative interpretations of the rulebook are to be expected and, in some cases, celebrated.

The Benetton / Renault team which has been run by Flavio Briatore for most of the past twenty years has certainly seen its fair share of scandals over the years. This was particularly the case while Michael Schumacher was driving for them. In 1994 it seemed as though Benetton were never far away from trouble.

But the team has been reticent in pushing the regulations in recent years, probably having learnt its lesson from previous controversies. That was particularly noticeable when Renault stuck to the spirit of the engine freeze principle, while every other engine manufacturer upgraded their engine in the guise of improving reliability.

There was a smaller spygate-style scandal when team members were found to be in possession of McLaren intellectual property. But overall, the picture is mixed. Most of the team’s biggest examples of cheating happened fifteen years ago. As such, it is difficult to say if Renault is the sort of team that would willingly manipulate events in the manner which is alleged.

The FIA will want to consider the facts of the incident in question though. Or will they? It is interesting to consider if this might be Max Mosley’s parting shot. Given the political shenanigans from earlier this year, it is probably fair to say that Flavio Briatore is not Max Mosley’s favourite person. Is this another invention of (or inflation by) the FIA, as with the Stepneygate issue of two years ago?

Some people will always suspect the FIA’s motives, particularly why Max Mosley is in charge. Checkpoint 10 goes as far as to “blame the rules” for Renault’s alleged actions. I agree to an extent. The FIA’s rulebook is famously convoluted, and it was the ridiculous Safety Car rules that led to this situation in the first place. I draw the line at saying that such actions should be “commended” though — as I say, there could have been far more serious implications than mere race-fixing.

Joe Saward has a good overview which I would highly recommend reading.

14 comments

2009 mid-season driver rankings: part 1

1 July 2009 23:41

Categories: Opinion

I can hardly believe it — this three week break marks the mid-point of the season. As such, it is a good opportunity to take stock, have a little look back and see how the drivers are doing.

20. Sébastien Bourdais

Last year he asked us to wait to judge him, and see how he performs on slick tyres. They were supposed to suit them better. But there is no real perceptible improvement in his performance. In fact, he may even be worse than last season. Bottom of the pile for me.

19. Adrian Sutil

This is his third full season in Formula 1 and we still haven’t seen what the hype was about. Sutil has not really come close to repeating the few flashes of promise we have seen during his career. The one moment was during the Malaysian Grand Prix when he was running as high as 6th — before spinning off (admittedly in treacherous conditions). After three years, I think we should have seen a bit more by now.

18. Kazuki Nakajima

The disappointment of the season. He spent much of 2008 within touching distance of his fancied team-mate Nico Rosberg in the Drivers’ Championship. You might have expected him to improve this year. Instead, we are seeing a more lacklustre Nakajima who has failed to score a point. Indeed, he is yet even to finish in the top 10 all year.

One of the real head-scratchers of Nakajima’s season include successfully completing 77 laps at Monaco, only to crash on the final one. A chink of light was in sight when he qualified 5th at Silverstone, only to drop like a stone through the field during the race, eventually finishing 11th (which is still his best of the season).

17. Nelsinho Piquet

Nelsinho Piquet’s season is unfolding in much the same way as last year did — a bit lacklustre in general, but with a couple of half-decent results here and there. This year’s Renault does appear to be a bit of a shed, but he has once again been comprehensively beaten by his team mate.

But given that Alonso is, in my view, the best driver since Schumacher, it’s an unfair comparison. Maybe it’s better to note that Piquet has indeed beaten Alonso once (albeit in Britain, where Alonso was chronically held up by an ailing Heidfeld). But Piquet has more to do if he wants to remain in F1 for a third year.

16. Sébastien Buemi

We should be careful when judging Buemi just now. He is the only rookie in the field. And we have seen some stunning rookie performances in recent years — Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Robert Kubica. So in that sense, at the moment Buemi looks a bit more plain than he may turn out to be in the long run.

In fact, I would say that it is a good thing that Buemi’s season so far has consisted of anonymity rather than idiocy (although crashing into Piquet in Monaco can be filed under ‘idiocy’). Plus, he has collected a few points, though we should bear in mind that he inherited two of them in Australia thanks to the joined-up brain-fade of two drivers in front of him. One slightly worrying thing is that he seems to have become worse as the season has progressed, but that may be a blip.

15. Heikki Kovalainen

Kovalainen races this season in difficult circumstances. His car is among the worst on the grid, and to add insult to injury his team-mate is a well-hyped World Champion. Even taking this into account though, Kovalainen’s performances have, in general, failed to meet expectations.

He started the season off with a first-lap crash in Australia, then unaccountably spun off on lap one in Malaysia. At the other end of this half of the season, he has been involved in a silly scrap with Sébastien Bourdais in Britain, and an unforced spin into the barriers at Monaco. A relatively good performance in China hasn’t made up for the rest of his poor season.

14. Timo Glock

Glock is another driver whose season began well, but has rapidly faded away towards the mid-point of the season. Unquestionably, his Toyota car has lost any advantage it had at the start of the season. But his team mate Jarno Trulli continues to make the most of the situation, and Glock’s season has been oddly anonymous.

He can be relied on to collect a steady haul of points when the car is up to it, but signs of his talent are reticent in revealing themselves. A super performance in treacherous conditions in Malaysia is the only notable moment of his season that I can think of.

13. Nick Heidfeld

Nick Heidfeld’s season has been greatly constrained by his poor equipment. On the plus side, he has scored more points than Kubica, mostly thanks to a haul gained at the shortened Malaysian Grand Prix. He finished 2nd there but if the race ran to full distance he certainly wouldn’t have been that high up. Indeed, he was lucky to even be there after what was, in truth, a flaky performance.

At least this year, unlike last year, he is beating Robert Kubica. But the design of the car does not disadvantage him as much as it does Kubica.

12. Robert Kubica

How the mighty have fallen. From challenging for the Championship in 2008, today Robert Kubica languishes at the arse end of the table, having just scored his first points in Turkey. To add insult to injury, he has already used up six of his allocated eight engines. In fairness, most of it isn’t his fault. By all accounts, his BMW car is awful, and it’s not helped by the fact that it was designed around a kers that was always going to disadvantage a driver of his size.

My overriding memory of Kubica’s racing this season has been his fight with Vettel at the front in Australia. That was back when the future still seemed bright. Mario Theissen said he would have won if he didn’t get tangled up with Sebastian Vettel. There was good and bad in that performance from Kubica, which maybe says it all about his season.

11. Giancarlo Fisichella

I am not the greatest fan of Giancarlo Fisichella. Indeed, if I was in charge at Force India, I wouldn’t have given him a race seat. He started the year badly too, after embarrassingly missing his pit box in Australia, an incident that is said to have tried the patience of his team to the limit.

Aside from incidents like this though, you sense that Fisichella is squeezing the maximum out of the Force India car this year. Given that this is a team on the up, that could mean he will be scoring points soon. He has come close twice already this season (unlike Sutil), with commendable performances in both Monaco and Britain.

2 comments

Thoughts on Turkey

10 June 2009 21:59

Categories: Report

It was not the most entertaining of races, even though — somehow — I was kept interested in proceedings the whole way through. The race has produced little in the way of talking points though.

The Brawn rout continues, and Jenson Button looked more untouchable than ever. Yes, Sebastian Vettel took pole position, but yet again it was with a light fuel load. Matters were not helped at all when Vettel ran wide halfway through lap one, handing the lead to Jenson Button on a plate. From that point, the race was effectively won.

Increasingly, Red Bull look like a team not yet capable of winning races. After Vettel’s unforced driving error, the Red Bull’s tacticians failed to adapt and Vettel was kept on a three-stop strategy which was only ever going to drop him backwards. Time and again Red Bull have given Vettel an unworkable strategy, which is allowing Mark Webber to gain the upper hand by the end of the race. It’s difficult to know which to blame more between Vettel and the Red Bull team for their inability to take the fight to Brawn.

One possible explanation for keeping Vettel on a 3-stopper was that the Red Bull could not handle the softer tyres as well as the Brawn can. Mind you, Webber managed on a two-stopper.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Vettel’s race was the fact that he once again demonstrated an inability to overtake when it mattered. He got stuck behind Hamilton in Bahrain and Massa in Spain. This time in Turkey he failed to overtake Button despite having caught up with him quickly as a result of being on a lighter fuel load. Now we are told that the Red Bull car is bad in dirty air (so much for the FIA’s new aero regulations then). But I have to admit to losing a bit more faith in Sebastian Vettel every race now.

It’s not only Vettel who is managing to mess things up. Rubens Barrichello had an absolute nightmare of a race. The Brawn made another one of its occasional sluggish starts, and Barrichello found himself down in 12th at the end of lap 1, having started 3rd. He made a valiant effort at climbing back through the field, with some optimistic overtaking moves. This provided the main entertainment of the race.

He had a particularly brilliant battle against Heikki Kovalainen. But when Kovalainen “kersed” him back, Barrichello just got frustrated and ended up getting in a tangle a lap later. That only left him further behind.

Having dropped down in 17th, he tried to charge back through. He easily dispensed with Lewis Hamilton and totally spooked Nelsinho Piquet into making a mistake. But he was rather too optimistic against Adrian Sutil. I actually couldn’t believe that the most experienced F1 driver of all time thought that was even remotely a goer. Perhaps it goes to show how frustrating Rubens Barrichello is finding this season, despite the fact that he has the best car.

Perhaps it is a sign that Barrichello is past it. The picture that is emerging is one that is similar to what we saw with David Coulthard last season — an experienced driver whose mind is not quite as sharp and is unable to think on his feet as well as he used to.

Apart from that, it is difficult to know what to say about the race. The one other notable on-track battle was Piquet against Hamilton, where against the odds the Renault driver got the upper hand (albeit on a much lighter fuel load).

Ferrari’s resurgence has come to nothing, with Massa finishing 6th and Räikkönen 9th. Toyota looked better than they had done, but not enough to challenge at the front. And BMW also improved, but only to the midfield. Their pet project, kers, looks like it might be dropped for the remainder of the season.

Let’s hope that someone can make the British Grand Prix more of a challenge, but I don’t see it happening.

2 comments

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