Allow me to explain. Despite all the jibes about Luca Badoer struggling, it occurred to me that he may now have another unusual record to add to his list.

Here is the official lap chart for this year’s Belgian Grand Prix, as published by the FIA. Do you spot anything unusual about it?

Despite the fact that he was last of the classified runners, Badoer was only 102.1 seconds behind the race winner, Kimi Räikkönen. “Only?”, I hear you say. But he was still on the lead lap. In fact, the lap chart reveals that there was no lapped traffic for the entire race.

I wonder if this is a first. There are a few things that lead me to believe this is the case. First of all, it is commonly believed that Formula 1 cars have never been as close in terms of performance. Surely the amazing speed of the Force India in Belgium is testament to the idea that there are no longer backmarkers in F1 like there used to be.

Luca Badoer, the slowest man in qualifying, was around 2.5 seconds off the quickest time. Although in F1-2009 style this invites derision, even five years ago this would have been a creditable performance. Read a grid from the 1990s, and it is routine to see cars a dozen seconds or more off the pace.

Furthermore, Spa-Francorchamps also has the longest laptime of any circuit currently in use in F1, which in itself makes it less likely that cars will be lapped during the race. I have checked some previous Belgian Grands Prix to check, but all have had lapped cars, apart from this year’s. For this reason, it is also possible that some races at longer circuits used in history (notably the Nordschleife) may not have seen any lapped traffic, but with more reliability problems and poorer driving standards back then, I wouldn’t count on it.

(Update: I have checked all Formula 1 Grands Prix to have been held at the Nordschleife, and each race had classified runners not on the lead lap according to Wikipedia.)

Against that argument is the fact that since 2007, lapped cars have been able to join the lead lap behind the Safety Car. This makes it much less likely that there will be lapped cars at the end of the race — but there will still have been lapped cars during the race.

I asked on Twitter if this was the first time none of the classified runners had been lapped. Amazingly, Alianora La Canta set to work and used her awesome research skills to find out that the last time all the classified runners finished on the lead lap was at the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix.

However, this was one instance where a Safety Car allowed lapped cars to join the lead lap. The official lap chart (PDF) reminds us that there was indeed lapped traffic during the race.

So it looks like I may be right in my hunch that Badoer is the only person ever to finish in last place, yet not have been lapped during the race. So does anyone know if Badoer’s achievement truly is a first? I would love to know.

As ever, Keith at F1 Fanatic provides us with a list of interesting facts about the race. I wonder if Badoer’s fast last place is one to add to that list.

The final part of the factory tour was the chance to see the simulator. It is an impressive piece of kit. The driver sits in a cockpit, surrounded by a massive screen that curves round to take up his entire field of vision.

Little wonder it has been known to induce sickness. Drivers are advised that they may want to close eyes if they spin in order to avoid reacquainting themselves with their lunch. Apparently drivers have been known to be sick all over the place while driving the simulator. Come to think of it, I’m slightly suspicious because I remember that the cleaner was leaving the room just as we were entering it. We were told, though, that Kazuki Nakajima is amazing in the simulator and can spend all day in it with no ill effects.

The circuit models are said to be very accurate indeed, albeit some more accurate than others. For instance, someone else has exclusive rights to the best map of the Nürburgring. The maps are constructed using lasers. A van drives slowly around the circuit emitting laser beams at multiple angles, creating a map of millions of dots. This means that every bump on the circuit is accounted for.

An aerial image of the circuit is then overlaid on top of these dots to create the environment. But if you look at the circuit, some of the landmarks are not very accurately reproduced. In fact, some of it looks like bad virtual reality graphics. The idea is to reduce any confusion that might be caused by too many cues. If they don’t think something will give a driver an accurate cue, they won’t implement it.

Some teams have more sophisticated simulators. In some simulators the car will be on a moving platform to give the impression of movement — something clearly lacking from the still Williams cockpit. It is said that some simulators even have belts that tighten up to give you some impression of g-forces. Williams shun such devices, which they regard as off-putting.

I have to confess that I have been slightly sceptical about the Williams simulator in the past. McLaren’s is said to be amazing, but it is jealously kept under wraps from outsiders. Williams have no such qualms however. It is the only simulator that I have seen on television. See, for instance, this ITV video with Mark Blundell and this BBC video.

We were lucky enough to be in the room when occasional Williams tester Daniel Clos was driving it. He was there to acquaint himself with the Hungaroring in preparation for the GP2 races which were being held just a few days later. I have to say he didn’t look very good while we were there, and he even spun at one point. But those must have been his very first laps round the circuit and of course I am in no position to pass comment. In the real thing, he finished 11th in both races.

It is presumably a service that Williams are happy to offer young drivers in the hope of developing them into a Formula 1 star of the future. Whether Daniel Clos is one remains to be seen. But surely on his way to F1 stardom is another Williams tester, Nico Hülkenberg. Simulator Engineer Jeff Calam is adamant that the simulator is a worthwhile piece of equipment to invest in, pointing at Hülkenberg’s highly impressive GP2 results at circuits he hasn’t driven at before. This fact puts to bed my doubts about the quality of the Williams simulator.

Once the factory tour was over, we had a Q&A with Sam Michael. He was largely very open in his responses, and came across very well to me. I was impressed that he took the time out of his schedule to talk to a bunch of bloggers. You can hear audio of the Q&A session over at Brits on Pole once again.

After that, we went for a tour of the fabulous Williams museum. Here, we were expertly guided by Scott Garrett from Synergy, the company that arranged our visit on behalf of Philips. Although he now works for Synergy, he was previously Head of Marketing at Williams and now has links with a number of F1 teams. This makes him a highly knowledgeable speaker on Formula 1, and Williams in particular. It was a real pleasure to have this sort of insight.

For obvious reasons, photography was strictly forbidden in the factory, but we were free to take as many photographs as we wanted in the museum. And boy did we take the opportunity!

The museum is impressive, with a range of cars from the full history of the Williams team’s existence. The first car you see is Alan Jones’s FW06 with its Ford Cosworth engine peering out the back. Cars are displayed, more or less a car for every year, right up to 2007’s FW29 — the very car that the competition winner will be driving.

All-in-all, the museum contains over forty cars. We are told that Frank Williams is a hoarder. The team still owns 106 chassis, while it only makes around six per year. Most of these cars are well looked after and can theoretically still be driven. The main exception is the Honda-powered cars, because they asked for the engines back!

For the most part, the cars are laid out in chronological order, and as you make your way through the museum videos are played telling us about Williams during the period of the cars in the vicinity. The relevant cars are lit up while the video is playing.

Unfortunately, this means that they are plunged into darkness once the video is finished, and you are supposed to move along to the next section. It is a pretty clever device to get us to keep moving and get rid of us quickly, but quite annoying for those of us who would have liked to have done it at our own pace. One person sarcastically remarked under his breath, “you have a lot of great cars, then put them in the dark.” It is for this reason that the lighting is not very good in some of the photographs.

Despite the chronological layout of the museum, there is still a fairly clear centrepiece. Two cars in particular are displayed on a higher plinth — the FW18 and the FW19, the team’s latest two championship-winning cars from 1996 and 1997 driven by Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve.

A great moment of F1 geekery occurred when Mr Garrett pointed out that the FW19 on display is the actual car which Michael Schumacher famously crashed into at Jerez in 1997. Everyone went “oooh” and inquisitively gathered to look at this particularly historic Williams F1 car. The damage is still evident. I had heard that Patrick Head liked the car to be displayed with the tyre mark still there, but it has since been restored and now just looks like a couple of holes have been punched in the corner of the sidepod.

“We never got on very well with Michael Schumacher,” Scott Garrett noted, just in case we didn’t get the clue. This prompted a cheeky question from someone else, “How did you get on with Ralf?”

There is a notable omission. The most distinctive F1 car in the team’s history, the FW26 with the “walrus nose” is nowhere to be seen. It is perhaps not the team’s proudest design.

One unusual design does proudly feature though. Williams were never able to race with their FW08B six-wheeler. It was banned by the FIA before the season started over fears that it would be too dominant.

Go up the stairs, and you will see two cars that are clearly very special to the team. One is Ayrton Senna’s test car from 1994. The other is the record-breaking FW10, in which Keke Rosberg was the first person ever to set a lap at a speed of 160mph in 1985. The record was set at Silverstone and remarkably stayed in place until 2002!

All-in-all, it was an absolutely fantastic day. Although Williams are not among my favourite teams, they have got to be admired for being so accommodating to us. If you ever get the chance to attend such an event, I would highly recommend it. A massive thank you to those who organised it and invited me.

Below is the full slideshow of photographs from my visit to Williams.

Yes, yes, I know. This is a race that happened almost two weeks ago. Sorry. You should see the list of articles I still haven’t written yet but need to get round to!

In the intervening period I have received an email asking me what I think of Renault’s ban from the European Grand Prix. Now I have been accosted in the comments by Becken for failing to review the Hungarian Grand Prix. So I’d better do it then!

First of all, you have to give massive amounts of praise to McLaren for their stunning comeback. It was clear at the Nürburgring that this was a team very much on the comeback trail. At the time I said that they could be challenging for wins in the second half of the season. But I didn’t expect it to be so soon, or so emphatic when it happened.

I am not Lewis Hamilton’s biggest fan, but I was delighted to see him winning in Hungary. It is a testament to the huge amount of effort that the McLaren team has put into developing their car — what quite frankly looked like a hopeless task just a couple of months ago. The achievement is all the more incredible when you consider that testing is banned, removing a vital tool to track how the car is developing.

Hamilton’s run at the front was not down to luck. Nor was it with someone climbing all over his gearbox. Indeed, who could even have predicted that the second-placed car running 11.5s behind would be the Ferrari of Kimi Räikkönen? Are McLaren and Ferrari now once again the front-runners? It could be that kers has come of age.

At times, the grand prix had a very retro feel about it. This season has been all about a new order. But for the first phase of the race the leaders were Alonso and Hamilton, with Räikkönen in 4th. Three names we should be familiar with seeing at the front, but it was most bizarre to see it happening this year.

I can’t help but notice at the same time that the unusual stewards’ decisions have come back just as the old guard have returned to the front. During the first half of this season, the stewards were noticeably quiet (with the exception, of course, of Australia). Not now. Is there something about McLaren, Ferrari and Renault that makes the stewards just lose their minds?

As you might be able to tell, I am not very impressed with the decision to ban Renault from the European Grand Prix for Fernando Alonso’s wheel coming off. On one hand, you can understand why they did it. In the week which saw the awful death of Henry Surtees in a Formula Two race after he was hit by a wheel, and a day after Felipe Massa was hospitalised after driving into a piece of debris, seeing a wheel bouncing around the track was absolutely the last thing anyone wanted to see.

But the decision to ban the entire team from the next race feels like a complete overreaction, leading to the suspicion that it was a knee-jerk reaction. I could have understood a heavy fine, or some kind of suspended ban. But the FIA’s justification for the ban seems quite odd to me. They say that the Renault team “knowingly” released Alonso from his pit box with the wheel not securely in place. Seems a bit odd to me. Which would deliberately release their car in such a state?

Nonetheless, the fact is that the team apparently took no action after that. They neglected to inform Alonso — who thought he had a puncture — what the problem was. That seems pretty incompetent to me, if not downright negligent.

That is why I think a fine would be justified. But to ban them from the race, when we have seen countless instances of wheels falling off cars going unpunished (including a similar incident involving Alonso driving a Renault in Hungary in 2006!), is over the top in my view. That’s especially the case when you consider that the next race is in Valencia, where much of the crowd will be wanting to see Fernando Alonso in action. Sometimes you think Formula 1 likes to shoot itself in the foot.

Meanwhile, both of the teams that are battling for this season’s championship will be worried for different reasons. Brawn must now be worried about the drop in their car’s performance. There is no hiding behind explanations about the temperature. Jenson Button’s bewildered radio transmission, “How — HOW? — can this car be so BAD?” sums it up. Brawn have put something on their car to destabilise what was an awesome package.

It is not a complete disaster situation. Jenson Button finished 7th. But it now looks like Brawn are behind at least five teams: McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull, Williams and Toyota. Their journey is the opposite to McLaren’s, and their challenge will be all the more difficult with testing banned.

Button actually only lost four points of his lead, which is still 18.5 points. And that is the reason why Red Bull should be worried. Because if they are to have a hope of challenging for the Championship, they need to stay at the sharp end, and they can’t afford to have the third fastest car. They need to be at the front, collecting 18, 16, 15 points when they can. Their tally from Budapest was just six.

It must be remembered that Hungaroring is a rather unique circuit, and many of the following circuits are very different indeed. But if McLaren and Ferrari are able to leapfrog Red Bull in the long run, Red Bull need to rely on staying ahead of Williams, Toyota and Brawn if their championship battle is to come to anything.

In this sense, despite only scoring two points, Jenson Button now looks like even more of a shoe-in for the championship. I’m sure he doesn’t feel like it. I can’t wait to find out how the rest of the season unfolds.

When I published my mid-season driver rankings a couple of weeks ago, Pink Peril rebuked me for not placing Mark Webber higher. I explained that Webber was yet to win an F1 race in his career, and winning is the bottom line.

Well he now has that win. And it was a truly dominant win at that. His car was clearly majestic at the Nürburgring, but he also comprehensively outclassed Sebastian Vettel all weekend. Not only that, but Webber did this even when his typical bad luck hit him.

Webber’s drive-through penalty did seem a bit harsh. He clearly made a move across into Barrichello’s portion of the track, so there was the potential for there to be a nasty accident. But both drivers were in control of the situation. Plus, Michael Schumacher did this sort of thing on a race-by-race basis without the FIA so much as raising its eyebrows.

You would never have guessed he had a drive-through penalty, because it didn’t seem to affect his race in the slightest. This was helped by the fact that the Red Bull team cleverly kept him out for as long as possibble before he had to serve his penalty, ensuring that he had time to build up more of a gap. This is a signal that Red Bull as a team is maturing too.

It’s worth remembering too that Mark Webber still has a chunk of metal in his right leg from his bicycle accident over the winter. It is easy enough to imagine how much of a hindrance this is in terms of confidence in the cockpit and the physical pain that may be present. But the metal also adds a load of weight to the driver. This is real hindrance particularly to someone like Webber who, being tall, is one of the heaviest drivers on the grid even without lumps of metal in his leg.

All-in-all, this makes it a big, big win for Webber. Despite all the woes that hit the Brawn team over winter, this win was more hard-fought than any of Button’s this year. A straightforward lights-to-flag victory wouldn’t be Webber’s style, but I guess that makes it all the more rewarding.

This makes both Red Bull drivers now major title contenders. If it comes to crunch time towards the end of the season, the team faces a tough choice between which of the two drivers to rely on the most — the ostensibly quicker Vettel, or the more experienced Webber? An internal Red Bull battle will play into Jenson Button’s hands.

After all, it is not difficult to guess which driver Brawn will favour. It might be strange for them to think of that given Barrichello’s extraordinary post-race outburst. I doubt the team is interested in further antagonising a driver who is clearly paranoid. But maybe if they sit him down and give him some more “blah blah blah blah blah”, he will understand that it makes no sense for a team to forfeit Button’s races in favour of a slower driver.

It is true that Barrichello led into the first corner (sort of) but on his light fuel load he was never going to be a favourite for the win here, and neither was Button. A fuel rig problem, outwith the control of the Brawn team, of course did not help matters.

Perhaps a more pressing concern to the Brawn team will be the fact that they now genuinely look like they do not have the best car. Like Britain, the German GP was particularly cool, which favours Red Bull and disadvantages Brawn. But notably, both Brawn cars finished behind a Ferrari and a Williams, two teams that had a pretty torid start to the season. The advantage they had at the start of the season has been whittled away.

It remains to be seen if the warmer races will see the pendulum swing back in Brawn’s favour. But one thing seems certain: the second half of the season won’t be nearly as easy as the first half for them.

Rubens reckons he led into the first corner, although another driver who could claim to have been leading in the first corner is Lewis Hamilton. Unfortunately, in the scramble for the first corner, he was tagged by the front wing of Webber’s car and had to trail round for the whole lap with a puncture before being able to pit. The tyre damaged his car further, meaning that his race was effectively over in turn 1.

I think Hamilton and McLaren can take a lot of heart from the weekend’s events though. Who knows how the race would have unfolded had Hamilton emerged as the leader for the first stint. He did have the third lightest fuel load on the grid, but he was heavier than the Brawns.

Fuel-adjusted, Hamilton was the third fastest in qualifying, 9 tenths ahead of Heikki Kovalainen who didn’t have the upgraded package. It looked so unlikely just a few weeks ago, but McLaren could be challenging for wins in the second half of this season.

The other major surprise up the grid was Adrian Sutil. He managed to qualify 7th which was stunning enough, but my jaw hit the floor when I saw that he had the heaviest car in the top 10! Sadly, it didn’t come together for him during the race with yet another racing incident involving Kimi Räikkönen. These things happen.

You sense that Force India are very close to their first point. In truth, a bucketful of bad luck is the only thing that has prevented them from scoring so far. Even Giancarlo Fisichella is in good form right now. During the first stint he looked very pacey indeed, overtaking a number of cars. All in all he gained nine places before making his first pit stop.

Another driver who had a great first stint was Nico Rosberg. He gained six places on lap one alone (as did Kubica, indeed, not that he could make much of it in that dog of a BMW). Rosberg continued to steadily climb throughout the race, and ultimately finished a very well-deserved fourth. Rosberg continues to impress me this season.

The Hungarian Grand Prix will be an important one, not so much for the racing (which probably won’t be very good on that circuit), but as a signal of what to expect for the rest of the season. Is Brawn’s slump more permanent, or was it a blip caused by cool conditions?

I had planned on my next post being the second part of my driver rankings. Unfortunately, real life events have intervened. In the meantime, events have overtaken me as Formula 1 was hit by a huge news story on Friday — Honda’s sudden withdrawal from the sport.

Now, normally such an announcement wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. Ever since I started watching Formula 1 in the mid-1990s, I have watched teams and manufacturers come and go on a regular basis.

I saw Renault withdraw from the sport as engine supplier to Williams and Benetton in 1997, only to return as a fully-fledged constructor when they bought the Benetton team just a few years later in 2000. Ford came to the party when they bought the Stewart team in 1999, only to leave the sport entirely a few years later in 2004. Peugeot left the sport in a huff at their own lack of success in 2000, having only joined the circus in 1994.

I learnt quickly, therefore, that manufacturers’ interest in F1 is almost always transient. For every Mercedes that appears fully committed, there are a handful of Renaults and Hondas who will enter and exit the sport according to the wind direction.

Honda’s announcement was shocking partly because of its suddenness. The speed with which the decision was taken is made clear when you read James Allen’s account. There is also the fact that at the start of this year Honda owned not one but two F1 teams. Now they have dramatically trimmed right back to zero, and will not even offer an engine supply to any teams next season.

There is also the fact that Honda were massive spenders in F1. This appeared to signify a magnificent commitment to the sport, despite the relative lack of success. But the flipside of this is that it made Honda an absolute laughing stock within the sport.

The huge amount of money the Honda F1 team spent also made it more vulnerable to the red pen of the bosses. No other manufacturer will save as much money by axing their F1 team. It may be true that Honda’s withdrawal is for political reasons, as former BAR-Honda driver Jacques Villeneuve posits. But it is Honda’s huge costs, coupled with the utter lack of success, that made it vulnerable to such political manoeuvring.

As such, the withdrawal of Honda is not such a shock when you think about it, even though I wouldn’t have predicted it. Moreover, Honda is not a fixture of Formula 1 like Ferrari, or even Mercedes. The current incarnation of the Honda F1 project only got the nod in 1998, and even then it was quickly reigned in to become a mere engine supply deal with BAR. Honda bought the team when tobacco sponsorship left the sport just a few years ago. Despite having run a team in the 1960s, and the huge success of the corporation as an engine supplier in the 1980s, an F1 institution it is not.

What makes people worried, though, is the economic climate in which this news has come. Whereas Ford found a buyer for Jaguar Racing easily enough in Red Bull in 2003, buyers for Honda will be thin on the ground due to the lack of credit that will be available to interested parties.

Next season’s Formula 1 calendar has already lost two races — Canada and France — and China and both German circuits currently in use have recently warned that they may not hold races for much longer. Again, it all comes down to money, with circuit owners being unable or unwilling to pay Bernie Ecclestone’s fast-increasing costs of staging a grand prix at the same time as attendances are tumbling.

Meanwhile, car sales are in freefall on a global scale, with a number of large car manufacturers seemingly in serious financial danger unless drastic action is taken. In the backdrop of these events, participation in motorsports looks like an extravagance. Even if the old “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” mantra holds true in normal times, right now western consumers are tightening their belts meaning that any increase in sales may be too small to be justifiable.

As such, Honda’s withdrawal is seen as just another sign that Formula 1 faces a crisis. We have a slimmed-down calendar that relies increasingly on flyaway races away from the sport’s European heartland to help pay CVC’s bills, and no races in the vitally important North American market for the first time in five decades.

Now there is a slimmed-down grid of just 18 cars — a number that is getting smaller. When you consider that the 2008 season was originally destined to contain 24 entries, F1 has essentially lost a quarter of its teams in a matter of months. Formula 1 is beginning to look like a shadow of its former self.

Now the question everyone is asking is, “who is next?” Initially the finger pointed at Toyota. Many pointed out that Toyota are only really in F1 because Honda were there. Toyota are also, like Honda, huge spenders with little to show for it.

But Toyota quickly put the lid on the speculation by issuing a statement that appeared to affirm their commitment to F1 — although, as James Allen pointed out, the word “currently” in front of “committed” looks like a carefully worded way to give them an easy exit should things take a turn for the worse. After all, if Honda’s decision was so sudden, why would a decision from Toyota not be?

BMW and Mercedes-Benz have both also affirmed their commitment to F1. But one manufacturer has spoken with a deafening silence.

I always suspected that the first manufacturer to go would be Renault. Its CEO, Carlos Ghosn, is said to be sceptical of motorsport participation, and there has been a question mark over the team’s future ever since he joined Renault in 2005. Besides which, Renault’s history in F1 has shown that it will come and go as it pleases.

Even though some news websites have reported that Renault is committed to F1, I have seen no quotes which the other manufacturers have been happy enough to provide. Was the media palmed off with a stock answer from a Renault spokesperson?

Meanwhile, rumours circulate around Red Bull. Dietrich Mateschitz recently re-bought Gerhard Berger’s 50% stake in Toro Rosso, but many think he did this so that he could sell it more easily. But with billions to play with and no car sales to drop off a cliff, I see little reason why he would pull the plug on both teams.

Williams has been perceived to be in a vulnerable position for a few years now. It is the last brave privateer team that is in it not to sell cars and not to sell drinks, but purely for the love of racing. It has been hit hard, but it doesn’t have to be seen to be reducing costs for political reasons like the manufacturers have to. Ironically, Williams may be safer than some of the manufacturers now.

We will just have to wait and see. It’s clear that Formula 1 is currently undergoing a massive change. Could the ground be being laid for a return to a privateer era? If so, you won’t find me complaining too much, no matter how painful the current events are in the medium-term.