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Archive: wets

Sayonara Bridgestone

4 November 2009 22:39

The end of this season has not been a particularly healthy one for Formula 1. Two major names have left, and another has had an emergency meeting to consider if it should leave too.

First of all, the sole tyre supplier, Bridgestone, has announced that it will quit F1 at the end of 2011 when its current contract ends. This came as a shock. With the spotlight on car manufacturers, it doesn’t seem to have entered anyone’s mind that a company such as Bridgestone, which has been so incredibly loyal to the sport, would consider upping sticks.

I can remember a time when Bridgestone were not in F1, but only just. When I started watching Formula 1 in the mid-1990s, Goodyear was the sole tyre supplier. But Bridgestone entered in 1997, beginning the “tyre war”. When Goodyear left soon afterwards, it was not long until Michelin came in to begin an even fiercer tyre war.

I wasn’t a big fan of the tyre war. Mostly, one tyre was a major advantage over the other, so we were essentially left with two championships — a Bridgestone championship and a Michelin championship. Considering Bridgestone practically tailor-made their tyres to suit Ferrari, this essentially made Ferrari a shoo-in for the championship every year. That was until the 2005 regulations — which banned mid-race tyre changes — handed the advantage to Michelin in a big way.

2005 was the year when the tyre war well and truly jumped the shark. In the quest for the competitive edge, both companies had made their tyres softer and softer. The resurfaced banking at Indianapolis bit, Michelins exploded all over the shop and we were left with a farcical race in which only the six Bridgestone-shod cars competed.

On the back of the problems, the FIA decided that a sole company should supply the tyres for all the teams. The problem with this was that it had the potential to severely reduce the amount of exposure that tyre company got. With no tyre war to talk about, people might not talk about tyres. For this reason, Michelin refused to have any further part in F1.

The upshot was that Bridgestone and the FIA colluded to concoct the maddest new rules and gimmicks in order to contrive some interest in the tyres. One has to paint green lines all over the tyre in a crass attempt to pretend they care about the environment. Of course, the green on the tyres clashes with teams’ liveries, making the scheme not only nonsensical, but also damn ugly.

Teams are also forced to use a sub-optimal tyre compound at some point during the race. While this may have superficially “spiced up” the action, it is artificial. Drivers are critical of it, and Fernando Alonso even said that he would rather race with wet tyres on a dry circuit.

Moreover, there is a sense that Bridgestone may have deliberately made their tyres behave strangely in an attempt to get drivers and teams discussing tyres with the media. Nick Heidfeld has said that the tyres could be “ten times better”. Joe Saward expanded:

The Bridgestones react differently on each car and finding the tricks that make them work is not easy. Some drivers can do it at some tracks and not at others. Even World Championship challenger Jenson Button has struggled with this…

Bridgestone seems to have concluded that it is better to have people talking about the tyres rather than not talking about them – even if a lot of the references are negative.

I rejoiced when it was announced that a “control” tyre was to be brought in. But it has brought the wrong sort of control. I am not too sure that the current dark behaviour is an improvement over the honest competition of the tyre war.

If you have reached the stage where your marketing strategy is to have people make negative comments about your product, it probably is time to call it a day.

In many ways, Bridgestone get a huge amount of brand exposure through their involvement in F1. As noted in this week’s Formula1Blog.com podcast, you simply cannot watch a Grand Prix without learning that Bridgestone supply the tyres. Yet, after thirteen seasons (fifteen by the time they leave), the marginal returns to their investment must surely have diminished to almost zero. And As Keith at F1 Fanatic has pointed out, their costs are set to soar as they now have to supply twelve or thirteen teams rather than ten.

Nonetheless, it is a shock and a surprise that Bridgestone, a company that has stuck with F1 through thick and thin since 1997, has so abruptly pulled the plug. Now the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone will have a big headache trying to find someone to take Bridgestone’s place. With bridges burned with Goodyear and Michelin, and Pirelli uninterested, options seem thin on the ground.

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The state of play after Sepang

7 April 2009 21:23

Categories: Opinion

For my thoughts on the issues surrounding the suspension of the Malaysian Grand Prix, see my post on F1 Fanatic: Unravelling the mayhem in Malaysia.

Here is a quick look at some of the stand-out talking points as I see them.

First of all, the “Brawn supremacy” is not quite as extreme as it seemed in Melbourne. Most observers posited that Brawn had extra pace in the bag in Australia. That may have been the case, but it seemed to almost evaporate in Malaysia.

The Achilles’ heel of the car appears to be its starts. After Rubens Barrichello’s anti-stall kicked in at the start in Australia, Jenson Button suffered from a sluggish getaway in Sepang. We have also seen a number of slow getaways from pitstops. Presumably this is a consequence of the late change of engine supplier. It could be important for Brawn because until the first set of pitstops Jenson Button had to make do with 3rd place when he seemed to have a car capable of winning.

In such a situation it helps for the boss of your team to be a renowned master tactician. After the race, Barrichello bemoaned “strange tyre choices” that thwarted his race. But Button banging in a couple of scintillating laps in clean air just before his pitstop to allow him to leapfrog to the front was pure Brawn. It was very reminiscent of the Schumacher days.

Schumacher himself wasn’t performing so well on the Ferrari pit wall. Rumour has it that he was the person who made the decision to put Kimi Räikkönen on wet tyres while the circuit was still bone dry. By the time the rain came, the furious Finn was on the radio: “my tyres are completely destroyed!!”

To rub salt in the wounds, it seems as though the Ferrari car is generally underperforming. They don’t seem to be in as bad a position as McLaren, but they are not much better. Now the teams to watch are Brawn, Toyota, Red Bull and maybe Williams. Ferrari need to improve and quick.

It would take a heart of stone not to be amused by the fact that Ferrari are currently bottom of the Constructors’ Championship, behind even Force India. Given that McLaren are supposed to be the team in the doldrums, it’s amazing that Ferrari have fouled up the start of this season so badly.

If McLaren hadn’t gone into self-destruct mode, they would have 6 (or 7) points and be lying 3rd in the Constructors’ Championship! Putting aside the unsavoury events in the stewards’ office, you have to pay tribute to Lewis Hamilton’s ability to get on with the job. By all accounts, the McLaren car is a shithouse, but the World Champion is doing a creditable job with it, especially when you consider the storm that currently surrounds him.

Hamilton had a spirited battle with Mark Webber. The Australian’s Red Bull was clearly superior in the wet (and it was such a joy to watch too!), but Hamilton was able to use kers to great effect, providing a good spectacle for the viewers for a lap or two. That is one good side of the introduction of kers, but the effect would be neutralised if all the cars were to run it.

Toyota are looking like major contenders now. I have to say I am beginning to feel like a massive pillock for writing them off back in January. Glock was another driver who benefited from an excellent strategy in Sepang, and it has to be said he did a great job ploughing through the field, maximising his advantage as one of the only drivers on intermediate tyres. I haven’t taken much notice of Glock before, but maybe it’s time to start paying attention.

Nick Heidfeld also had a good strategy, pitting just once. He spent more time on the racetrack, meaning that he finished the race in 2nd place. He didn’t actually have all that good a race though. He fell off the island while under pressure from Sebastian Vettel and allowed Hamilton through in the process too. After that he was in 11th place. In a way, though, that makes his progression all the way back up to 2nd all the more commendable.

More ominously, for a BMW supporter like me, Robert Kubica had to retire after just one lap with engine trouble. BMW may be 3rd in the Constructors’ Championship, but it is quite a distant 3rd. The first two races have not brought much cheer for BMW. Fingers crossed it is just a blip and the team will get it together.

Williams were promising, and it was notable that Nico Rosberg led the race for a considerable portion — on merit. It looks as though, if ever Williams have a chance to become front-runners again, it is this year. I sense that their drivers don’t have the talent to feel the heat at the sharp end of the field though. Looking at the lap chart, it is clear that Rosberg suffered more than most when the rain came down.

All-in-all, despite the curtailment of the race, I think the Malaysian Grand Prix was an absolute cracker. Brawn’s advantage appears to be slipping away, and the teams snapping at their heels are not the usual suspects. This is what we endure years of Ferrari dominance for.

10 comments

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.

8 comments

The return of Hamilton's impatience

24 September 2008 01:15

Categories: Opinion

I have been so busy that I have not yet properly turned my attention to many of the notable events of the Italian Grand Prix.

Apart from Sebastian Vettel, the star of the show was probably Lewis Hamilton. He was severely compromised by yet another odd McLaren tyre strategy call. Hamilton took a risk that he certainly did not need to take. In Q2, you only need to finish in the top ten to progress. Goodness only knows why in this situation Hamilton and his engineer decided to take a risk to put on intermediates when it was far from clear that the circuit was dry enough.

Hamilton was trundling around on inters while everyone else was setting the fastest times of the session on extreme wet tyres. By the time Hamilton managed to get onto the desirable extreme wets (and after losing a lot of time by being randomly called to get weighed), the track had become wetter and he was no longer in a position to set a fast time. Game over. 15th on the grid.

Not that that was an excuse, mind you. Even while he was on wets, there were people setting faster times than him. But clearly for some reason — brake temperatures, whatever — his car just wasn’t coping well enough with the conditions. At least Kimi Räikkönen was just one position ahead of him.

It promised to be a mouthwatering midfield battle, with two of F1′s biggest stars making their way through the field in wet conditions. In the event, Raikkonen yet again disappointed. He did climb a few places, but Hamilton made a few more and made those passes with more style and bravery. Kimi seemed his (nowadays) usual sleepy self. Up until the last few laps, that is. Ho hum.

But while many of Hamilton’s overtaking manoeuvres were damned impressive, yet again Hamilton’s driving came under the spotlight. I have been critical in the past of Hamilton’s overly-aggressive driving style and the Italian Grand Prix brought up three major examples of this nasty side of Hamilton’s character.

First of all, there was an incident during his move on Fernando Alonso which the Spaniard complained about after the race. I have to admit that I saw little wrong with Hamilton’s move on Alonso. What concerned me more was the other two major incidents.

Towards the end of the race Hamilton made a breathtaking blocking move while Mark Webber was lining up to pass him in the run-up to the first chicane. At first I thought that Webber was being too optimistic. But when I saw the replay from Webber’s on-board T-cam, I found myself becoming much more concerned about the way Hamilton appeared to barge Webber straight onto the grass. Hamilton says he was just going for the better line into the corner, but that doesn’t matter. Barging someone off the track — especially when conditions are as damp as they were — is a big no-no in my book.

But it was his swipe on Timo Glock earlier on in the race that really took the biscuit for me. Hamilton’s initial move (again, into the first chicane) on Glock was brilliant, but the Toyota driver got better traction coming out of the chicane. Glock was catching right back up to Hamilton and was just coming side-by-side with the Brit along Curva Grande when Hamilton swiped straight across and forced Glock onto the grass.

At that point of the race, conditions were still quite horrrific and Hamilton’s move seemed at best reckless and at worst downright dangerous. It was suggested at the time by ITV commentator Martin Brundle that Hamilton may have been unable to see Glock in his mirrors due to all the spray, and I can only hope that that was the case because it is not nice to see a driver playing dirty like that. I criticised Michael Schumacher for this sort of thing, and I will criticise Lewis Hamilton for it.

You can see a video of the controversial incidents over at Axis of Oversteer, with whom I agree on this matter. All-in-all I think Hamilton’s driving may even have been worthy of a punishment. Certainly, his incident with Glock could well have earned him a drive-through penalty if different stewards were in place. We can’t forget that all of this was happening in the immediate aftermath of the controversy surrounding Hamilton’s penalty at the Belgian Grand Prix.

No doubt the stewards were slightly wary of punishing Hamilton for fear of another backlash or yet more accusations of the FIA’s pro-Ferrari bias. For me, though, the fact that he escaped punishment for dangerous driving at Monza goes a long way towards making up for the injustice of his penalty in Belgium.

A lot of people have been talking recently about how Hamilton appears to have matured in recent races. He now knows when to settle for second rather than needlessly go for the win. But he has only matured to an extent. I have long argued that Hamilton’s greatest flaw is his impatience — his inability to pace himself and know when to hold back. His swipe on Glock was an instance where he could have done with relaxing a bit more and letting the situation unfold in its own time rather than forcing the issue.

Craig at Craigblog has speculated that Lewis Hamilton’s attitude could end up costing him the world championship. I certainly think this is an aspect of his racing that he needs to have a serious think about. If it doesn’t stop him from winning the championship, it will stop many fans from being able to support him. Reminds me of a certain M. Schumacher.

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Renault's pit stop calls

11 September 2008 18:43

Categories: News

I have done so much blogging about that incident that I still haven’t got round to writing a full race review of Belgium yet, which I feel I should do. So that will have to wait until after the Italian Grand Prix.

In the meantime, I have just listened to the post-Belgium Renault podcast. As always, it was a great listen. Pat Symonds really is a joy to listen to. He is opinionated without being ranty, and he is usually forthright and honest in his opinions, even when it reflects badly on the Renault team.

I was interested in what he had to say about how the team decides when a driver should come in for a pitstop. It was reported immediately following the Belgian Grand Prix that Fernando Alonso was very frustrated with the Renault team. He claimed he wanted to switch to wet tyres earlier and that if he did he would have won the race.

I was therefore quite surprised to hear what Pat Symonds had to say about how the team decides when a driver should switch to wet tyres when it is beginning to rain.

…with what we had to deal with at the end of the Belgian Grand Prix [i.e. when a track is going from dry to wet conditions], we leave it entirely to the driver. He is the only guy who can really judge what it’s like. He’s the only one who knows if the car is aquaplaning, he’s the only one who knows whether he thinks he can keep it on the track and out of the barriers.

So if a car is on dry tyres and it’s raining and the driver feels he needs wet tyres, he comes in. He comes in as quickly as he can. He doesn’t even have to give us a complete warning. We have a system on the car whereby if he presses a button on the steering wheel it sends a signal to the pits. It’s superimposed over the TV picture that the mechanics are watching, saying which car’s coming in and how far away it is in seconds from the pitstop.

So [it was] Fernando’s decision there, and I think a very good one.