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Archive: straight-line testing

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.

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The WMSC's decisions

17 March 2009 15:01

Categories: News, Opinion

Today the World Motor Sport Council met to make its decisions and already F1′s bloggers and Twitter users have been voicing their opinions. Here are some of my more in-depth thoughts.

Points

The points system for 2009 has been amended, and the result is a compromise between Bernie Ecclestone’s controversial ‘medals’ proposal and the current points system. Basically, the current 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 system will remain in tact, but the Drivers’ Championship will be awarded to the driver with the most wins.

I have long been in favour of a radical change to the points system, and I am quite receptive to a “medals-style” system. But many other fans were not so keen.

This compromise solution isn’t one that I have seen suggested before. But on the face of it, it seems like a fair enough compromise. I would still prefer a more radical change to the points system, rather than having the championship automatically going to the driver who has had the most wins. But this could have been much, much worse.

Testing

From now on, teams will be allowed three young driver training tests between the end of the championship and the end of the year. I believe that such tests were unlimited before (correct me if I’m wrong). This represents yet another barrier to the young drivers that Max Mosley purports to be helping.

Straight-line testing is also facing further restrictions. Between 1 January 2009 and the end of the championship, teams will be allowed only eight days of straight-line or constant-radius testing. As pointed out by @sidepodcast on Twitter, this could leave McLaren in trouble given the amount of straight-line testing they have already done this year.

I’m not opposed to limits on straight-line testing. It seems fair to limit it just as other testing is restricted. However, applying this retrospectively does seem to be rather underhanded, and is especially unfair on those teams that took advantage of straight line testing a lot over the winter. Is it yet another FIA anti-McLaren conspiracy? Don those tin foil hats! Say what you like about Max and Bernie, but they sure know how to stir up a fuss!

Qualifying fuel loads

The weights of all cars after qualifying will now be published. This will give the geeks (like me) a lot of interesting data to analyse on a Saturday evening. But I’m not sure how this will improve the show. Personally, the suspense surrounding a driver’s fuel load is the only good thing about having race fuel loads during qualifying. I quite like not knowing when the leaders are going to take a pitstop.

People talk about F1′s script writers. Well now we will have a “spoiler” long before the race has even begun. This is a shame.

I assume this is a response to those who lament the fact that qualifying no longer shows who the fastest driver is. But the real solution to this would be to get rid of the ridiculous race fuel load idea altogether. It has never worked, and it adds nothing to the show.

Tyres

Just a small one this. Wets are now officially “intermediates” and extreme wets are “wets”. This seems rather uncontroversial to me, because I normally refer to inters and extreme wets. Since inters became such good all-round wet weather tyres, this problem has existed, and it’s good that the FIA has tried to inject a rare bit of clarity into the regulations.

Media

Drivers will now have to make themselves more available to sign autographs. And there will be no running away in a fug of embarrassment after a poor performances. All drivers must make themselves available to the media for interview after the race or after they have retired.

Senior team personnel will also have to make themselves available to TV crews. Fota had proposed a similar idea anyway, and it’s a good idea to ensure that the fans get more out of the sport.

Changes to the 2009 Technical Regulations

You what? Yes, apparently the FIA have changed the 2009 Technical Regulations, details of which will be published later today. Haven’t they left it a bit late?…

The batshit-crazy zone

Mind your step. This is where we enter the realms of nonsense. It wouldn’t be the FIA without a nice dose of nonsense, and they certainly haven’t disappointed this time round.

From 2010 onwards there will be a budget cap of £30 million per season. But it’s a voluntary budget cap. So to give teams an incentive to stick to the magic limit, the FIA will allow these teams to have more technical freedoms. Essentially, there will be not one but two sets of Technical Regulations. Maybe from 2010 onwards the sport will become known as “Formulae Ones”, “Two Formula Ones”, “Formula One.1 and Formula One.2″.

In all seriousness, I think this is a recipe for disaster. For one thing, the FIA reckons it will be able to work out when “the cost-capped cars have neither an advantage nor a disadvantage when compared to cars running to the existing rules.”

Now I don’t know about you, but I quite like the idea that in F1 some cars are better than others. It’s called competition. It’s what sport is made of. And too often motorsports go down the route of trying to equalise performance between the cars by restricting the best cars. Then that series goes down the pan (hello, BTCC). That’s because people watch motorsport for the competition between teams and drivers. The moment you try to neutralise that, you start to alienate the core audience.

Besides, it’s all very well to do what they do in Touring Cars and add extra ballast to race-winning cars. But it’s a different thing altogether to try and work out how to manipulate cars when they are being run to separate sets of regulations. The FIA can’t even create one decent set of unambiguous technical regulations, never mind two of them, and with the aim of having the two types of cars performing equally!

For me, this just stinks. The FIA would be able to penalise cars for very little good reason, other than something vague about equalising performance. Decisions would probably be made in smoke-filled rooms, obscured from the fans’ view.

Believe it or not, F1 just got even more political.

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