F1 (Not So) Silly Season 2011

As the teams left Budapest to enjoy a four week summer break, it was notable how little speculation there had been about which deals may be on the horizon concerning next season’s driver line-ups. The reason that this year is different is pretty simple really, the teams at the sharp end of the pit lane have, by and large, all got their personnel signed up for next term, whilst the teams further down have got more pressing issues on their minds, namely trying to secure their budgets for 2011, so that they can start to plan for which power units to deploy in their cars and which nuts they want to hold the steering wheel. These teams though, are where the majority of the intrigue will play out in the driver market, once the more pressing issues have been dealt with, not least who will pilot the entries of the new team (whoever that may be) that will be announced sometime around the resumption of the season at Spa.
Here we take a look at each team, considering announcements that have already been made, contracts which are in the public domain and what each of their options include for 2011 (we will probably throw in the odd bit of wild speculation and gossip for good measure).
Vodafone McLaren Mercedes
With both drivers already signed on deals that will keep them at the Woking based squad until the end of 2012, along with an ongoing deal for Mercedes-Benz HWA engines, it only leaves testing duties to be decided, which will likely continue to be performed by Gary Paffett, possibly rejoined by Pedro de la Rosa, should he find himself without a drive.
Mercedes GP Petronas
Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg both have Mercedes deals for 2011 and beyond, and while many people have plenty to say about the merits of Schumacher’s comeback, the man himself has recently reiterated his desire to continue next season. Regardless of the critics, his employers are highly unlikely to try and push him out after the resources used to acquire his services. Nick Heidfeld is also on the books and may be farmed out to a Mercedes customer team.
Red Bull Racing
Red Bull were in the fortunate position of having tied Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber to deals for 2011 before the recent implosion, with rumours abound at the time that Ferrari were ready to offer the Australian a drive next season. Renault will be retained as an engine supplier, with reliability issues seemingly resolved, Red Bull seem to be content to favour the driveability of the unit at the expense of the power of some of its peers.
Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro
Felipe Massa has been retained to partner (or support) Fernando Alonso through until the end of the 2012 season.
AT&T Williams
With Rubens Barrichello’s 2011 contract just waiting to be signed and Nico Hulkenberg almost certain to be retained, the team should continue to improve as they grow accustomed to each other and the Cosworth engine.
Renault F1 Team
Having secured the services of arguably the most impressive performer of all in 2010, Robert Kubica, for another two years, Renault look as though they have been creating an exit path to send Vitaly Petrov down at the end of this season, although he has so far delivered on the goals which he has been set. Should the second seat become available, the speculation around who will occupy it will be huge, as it is already, due to it being probably the only available seat in a car which could win races. Timo Glock, Heikki Kovalainen (as part of a Renault engine deal for Lotus), Adrian Sutil and Heidfeld have all been linked, whilst Kimi Raikkonen (staying in WRC), Sebastien Buemi and Mark Webber (signed new deals) have ruled themselves out. The team are also looking to add a title sponsor for next season, with Mastercard seemingly best placed to do a deal.
Force India F1
Adrian Sutil is yet to pen a deal for 2011, and both the crash prone German and Italian team mate Tonio Liuzzi (who has a deal for 2011, but will be lucky to last until the end of this season) may be seen to have taken the squad as far as they can. Paul di Resta should have proved himself quick enough in Friday outings this term to be tried in ’11, and should Sutil also leave, expect Heidfeld to be linked, whilst Karun Chandhok should not be discounted, despite Vijay Mallya turning down previous opportunities to run his compatriot.
Scuderia Toro Rosso
Both Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari have been announced for 2011, and the deal to run Ferrari engines again has been agreed, with the Faenza based outfit also running the Ferrari KERS system, due to its integration within the unit.
Sauber Motorsport
Neither of the Sauber drivers have yet signed a deal for 2011, but while Kamui Kobayashi’s recent performances must make him a likely candidate to stay on, they must make it harder to justify keeping Pedro de la Rosa for another season especially due to the fact that the team is going to need either fresh investors or well backed drivers to plug the gap which will be created by the withdrawal of BMW’s financial support. Drivers linked with most of the seats who require this sort of backing include Telmex backed Mexicans Sergio Perez and Esteban Gutierrez and state oil company (PDVSA) backed Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado, who incidentally also recently commented that controversial President Hugo Chavez, “is pushing” to get him an F1 seat.
Lotus Racing
With both of its experienced drivers, Jarno Trulli and Kovalainen signed for 2011, Lotus seem to be quite settled. However, if they wish to get out of their Cosworth contract and move to a Renault supply as rumoured, it has been suggested they may be forced to swap Kovalainen for Petrov as part of such a deal.
Hispania Racing Team
Plenty of uncertainty surrounding their existence in 2011, let alone their drivers. HRT will need to build their own chassis and judging by the way they have shuffled their drivers of late to accommodate the slow but well financed Sakon Yamamoto, trouble is on the horizon. The team will need to secure some major financial backing if it is to have any freedom to choose to stick with Bruno Senna and/or Chandhok. If they were really serious about car development, giving tester Christian Klien a chance in the car could only be a positive thing.
Virgin Racing
Virgin will be hoping that Timo Glock honours the terms of his contract which lasts until at least the end of 2011, although Lucas di Grassi is believed not to be signed for next year. Virgin haven’t thrown money around in their maiden season, but that is due to the team’s philosophy, by the same token they are not in a position to have to sign pay drivers, and may choose to give di Grassi the chance to build on his experience.
We will have to see how it plays out over the coming weeks and months, I would be grateful for anyone to leave any comments or suggestions about omissions or rumours that I haven’t picked up on – or even if you just think I’m wrong. A piece will follow later in the week on the subject of the new teams bidding to get an entry for 2011, their possible line-ups and what their chances of survival will be in the cut throat world of F1.
Be sure to follow me on twitter:@daimccann and @ifitsgot4wheels.

Anyone else think this stinks? I thought so.

If you cut through the bluster and navigate your way around the blasé attitudes of the battle hardened members of Formula One’s travelling circus, the underlying feeling among the stakeholders of the sport must be that events at Hockenheim on Sunday marked a dark day for its integrity.

Let’s disregard the fact that I have a vested interest owing to the fact that I attempt to make a living from writing about it. I am one of the millions of people around the world who share a passion for Formula One, and the question I have found myself agonising over in the wake of Ferrari’s antics is this: Does this passion outweigh all feelings of what is right and wrong? Does it blinker me in such a way that I shrug my shoulders, seemingly in unison with many paddock insiders, and accept that this is how it goes? The short answer is that no, it doesn’t.

I was annoyed when I realised that Ferrari were engineering a situation that would lead to a manufactured change of leader. I cringed while Fernando Alonso, Stefano Domenicali and the team’s press office treated the entire F1 world like fools with lie after pathetic lie as they squirmed in front of the media. These feelings were to be expected after what had happened, what I didn’t expect, however, was having to watch respected experts from the paddock, notable members of the racing fraternity, attempt to justify it. Yes, they said, the team had contravened article 39.1 of the sporting regulations by instigating team orders that interfered with the result, but it didn’t really matter. This is just the way it goes in the “business” that is modern Formula One. This ridiculous attempt to justify what in any other sport in the world would be called match fixing, was the aspect that disturbed me the most.

The BBC received a number of scathing emails from various members of the public on its F1 forum. David Coulthard, a man who I hold in the highest regard for his usual no nonsense attitude in the face of his excitable colleagues, brushed off the concerns of the correspondents by advising us not to get “all tabloid” about a situation that “has gone on for years”. Was he being serious? The overwhelming majority of fans of the sport felt that they had been cheated, the fans who not only pay the wages of the pundits, but also of every other person involved at any level of the sport. These people, if they felt anything like I did, felt as though Ferrari had violated their rights as fans to watch a fair battle between two evenly matched drivers. The viewers wanted the people who are paid to enhance their viewing experience to listen to these concerns and take note. What they got instead was a verbal pat on the head from a bunch of analysts acting as if they were telling their younger siblings that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. As for the ridiculous assertion that it is ok because it has been going on for years, so have assault and fraud, and yet I don’t ever recall ‘it’s been going on for years’ being used as a successful defence for either.

Somewhere else on Sunday, I was listening to another expert explaining the pressure that was placed on a modern day Grand Prix team to attract sponsorship. This was being cited as a justification for the Scuderia's actions, a statement which was both factually correct and ridiculous in equal measure. Of course, teams need to raise huge sums from sponsors to keep themselves afloat, but a “modern” company places huge emphasis on corporate responsibility, and aligning any brand with a team that have been labelled cheats, whether rightly or wrongly, has become a huge turn off for marketing departments around the world, just ask ING.

In terms of Ferrari, it is evident from the blank spaces on the car, that they are not an organisation which faces the sort of budget constraints which mean that they need to convey a squeaky clean image. However, surely even Ferrari cannot afford to alienate the whole of the watching public who reside anywhere but Italy and Spain. It seems that they have learnt nothing from the battering that their reputation took in the fallout from the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, a race which saw Rubens Barrichello forced to move aside for the Schumacher express to take a similar hollow victory. Michael himself was on hand yesterday to offer his support to his beleaguered former employers, insisting that he would have done the same, as it’s all about winning the World Championship. Erm, yes, we know you would Michael, you already have.

The real irony of the day of course is that while one half of the team made itself look pretty pathetic, the other side, particularly Felipe Massa, covered himself in glory. The way that he handled himself in the face of an impossible situation was full of class. It would have been career suicide for the likeable Brazilian to have disobeyed the order to let Alonso by, but the way he conducted himself afterwards only strengthened the betrayal felt by the neutral observer, especially on a day which marked the anniversary of his horrific accident at Budapest.

I have always found Domenicali to be one of the more likeable characters in the sport, and whilst I’d like to think that Alonso’s incessant whinging had led to yesterday’s call, there is obviously a greater degree of structure around the arrival at such decisions at an organisation the size of Ferrari. How the decision was actually made is pretty immaterial, the whole team lost a lot of respect this weekend, and not just by the decision to make their drivers switch places. Their biggest mistake was thinking that the viewing public were stupid enough to believe that they had not just witnessed them doing it.

My seven year old son watched the race, he is mad about F1. Even if he doesn’t realise his dream of competing in it when he is older, he will at least be one of the fans who will be propping up the next generation of superstars with his hard earned. He asked me after the race why I was cross about Alonso winning, and he genuinely didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I thought hard about the best way of explaining the events without dampening his enthusiasm, and I couldn’t think of any way to dress it up. “Because they cheated, son” I replied reluctantly, and from the look in his eye at that moment, it was as if I had told him that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. That is why I will struggle to forgive Ferrari for this sorry episode, and also why I think that the members of the F1 paddock who shrugged their shoulders and brushed it off should be ashamed of themselves.

Formula One is not a business, it’s a sport, and while it is of course undeniable that teams must generate the revenue with which to operate, this should never come at the expense of the enjoyment of the fans. There would be no Formula One without them and make no mistake, the fans are angry about this, mostly because of the human element surrounding Massa. Not only were we deprived of a fair result at Hockenheim, we had one of the greatest feel good moments in the modern era of the sport snatched from under our noses and replaced with a stench of rotten stallion.

Easter Weekend at Oulton Park: Monday

After a day in the real world on Easter Sunday, followed by an early night, it was up at sparrow-cheep on Monday, and off again to Oulton via McDonalds. I had decided to be bold and not use Jane (the name given to our SatNav); although after completing the 50 mile trip quite a few times I should really be able to manage it by now. This backfired as I took a wrong turn a few miles shy of the circuit, at which point Jane was duly removed from the glove box to provide assistance. We arrived just as the GT cars were completing their warm up, it’s a great feeling when you cross the road bridge over the circuit at Oulton’s main entrance, especially when you have Ferraris roaring around underneath. We were directed to park on the infield overlooking Cascades, and when we parked we were amazed, we had undoubtedly the best parking space anywhere in the history of the world. Ever. In the front row, high on the bank, with panoramic views of probably half a mile of the track, encompassing two of the best overtaking areas it has to offer; I didn’t want to get out, but I did.
Christian had decided that he wanted to watch the first race of the day, the reverse grid F3 sprint race from the start line, so we watched the VW qualifying from Lodge, and crossed the track as the session ended. We arrived opposite the pits just as the teams were starting to assemble on the grid, and I tried my best to be as inconspicuous as all the other men as we ogled the Cooper Tires grid girls. It was actually quite an eye opener watching some of these young kids going through their pre race routines, especially Daisuke Nakajima, who had his engineer stick some duct tape on the barrier, presumably as a marker to show him where to stop after the formation lap. I listened as two particularly dull sounding chaps dissected the previous day’s Malaysian GP, “They’re going to have to just dump a load of water on the track half way through each race” was countered with “They need to go back to having cars like these (Formula 3), there’d be loads of overtaking”. I wonder if they noticed that only James Calado overtook anyone after lap 1 in the main F3 race, from the whole of the top 10, they were probably too busy looking for a hosepipe. After the cars left for the parade lap, we legged it down to Old Hall to watch the start, which was impressive if uneventful, apart from Nakajima taking over from Gabriel Dias at the front, lap 2 was more eventful as Dias tried to reclaim the lead around the outside, off the drying line and entered into a predictable, but well saved 360, which left him at the back of the pack. The next lap saw impressive young Brit Rupert Svendson-Cook relieve the Japanese of the lead, again on the run out of Old Hall, a lead which he held to claim his maiden F3 win, at only the second attempt.
We crossed back to the infield after the race and watched the Formula Ford race from Druids, totally the other end of the circuit for those unfamiliar with OP, due to Christian’s constant wanderlust, and by the time we arrived there most of the expected frontrunners were missing from the action, although I never did find out why. We crossed the bridge to watch the first British GT race from the outside of Knickerbrook, my personal favourite spot, where we amazingly managed to stay for the duration of the one hour race. Let me give you some background on my son, Christian. Christian always manages to take a shine to an unexpected driver over the course of a race weekend, it was Michael Caine at the BTCC meeting last year who became the object of his obsession. This time it was his namesake (probably for that reason), Ginetta G50 driver, and Oulton Park race instructor Christian Dick, who would go on to take 1st and then 2nd in the GT4 class in Monday’s two, one hour races. Imagine my embarrassment, and everybody else's confusion, as, during a quiet moment after his Ginetta had roared past us and up clay hill, when Christian loudly exclaimed, “Dad, I absolutely love Dick”. Even the super sensible ear defender wearing family sat next to us turned to give a disapproving look.
After an extortionate lunch and a trip to the stalls for some discount Lewis Hamilton merchandise (which I craftilly got away with buying as this seasons as Lewis is #2 again) we stumbled across one of those 1990's simulators that looks like an airliner cockpit, which was playing a flying lap of Silverstone with Michael Schumacher (in a manual Benetton, so not exactly cutting edge), Christian persuaded me to take him on it, during which we were nearly reacquainted with my hot dog, although I'm sure I enjoyed the ride more than the small boy in front of me who ended up face down in the footwell.
We took advantage of the pitwalk, where we met some more F3 drivers and the now almost legendary Christian Dick (right), and got some rather nice free stuff from the United Autosports Audi team, before heading off to cascades to watch a great Abarth 500 race, in which Benny Simonsen, brother of GT ace Allan, confirmed what we thought on Saturday, that he is a hugely talented young man. Amazingly, we stayed at Cascades and watched Jean-Eric Vergne dominate the 40 minute F3 feature race, before heading back to our car, in cooling conditions, for the second GT race of the day. We saw the Barwell run Aston Martin crash head on into the tyre wall right in front of us, although that was the last action we did see from our fantastic vantage point as some fool in an orange VW transporter drove around the cordon and parked his tango'd monstrosity right in our eye line. We manoeuvred around the emptying embankment and found a spot which was almost as good to watch the MTECH Ferrari team take their second win of the day, and to witness the evergreen David Ashburn drive the wheels off his GT3 Porsche to take a great third place, rivalling Benny Simonsen for the drive of the day.
All in all another great day's racing at one of the best circuits the UK has to offer, we will be back here in June for the BTCC, but our next adventure of note will be to watch the GT1 World Championship at Silverstone in early May, I'll keep you posted.
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2010 British GT Championship Preview

I visited Oulton Park last Easter for the opening round of the British GT championship, and although suitably impressed, it was a little disappointing to see just 13 entries spanning both classes. The Rollcentre Mosler dominated proceedings, before it was later disqualified from the championship as an ineligible entry. We watched Astons, Ferraris and a Viper battling against the Jones brothers Ascari, which would go on to take overall GT3 honours at the final round at Brands Hatch, and a clutch of Ginetta G50s battling for the GT4 class win, but it could not quite compensate for the depleted grid. In fairness, the recession was at its deepest and these machines don’t come cheap, although this may make the fact that this year’s entry list is bustling with new names even more remarkable, as most of the 2010 entrants will have been putting their budgets together for this campaign against the same, bleak economic backdrop. What then, are the factors attributable to the rise in numbers, with some 23 cars showing on the provisional entry list which was released by promoter SRO last week?
There has been a tweaking of the classes, leading to more cars being eligible to compete in GT3; due to the fact homologated models of superseded FIA GT3 spec cars are now permitted. GT4, whose 2009 winner Jody Firth has not yet committed to a 2010 programme, will now incorporate the Supersport cars from last term. 2010 also marks the return of the Cup class, where amateur drivers get the chance to participate in the UK’s top GT series in either a Carrera Cup spec Porsche 911, or a Ferrari Challenge standard 430. Only two Cup class entries appear on the provisional list, including Carrera Cup GB star Glynn Geddie, however expect greater fluctuation of the numbers in this category due to teams and drivers dovetailing programmes with other series’.
SRO has also concentrated this season on attempting to avoid any clashes with other top series, something which has hindered its turnout in previous campaigns, and a comprehensive, delayed highlights package will be shown on Channel 4 and Motors TV in the UK, making sponsorship a more attractive proposition.
Last seasons front runners will all be chasing glory in the GT3 class, alongside champions Team Preci-Spark, the Viper of Aaron Scott and Craig Wilkins will again be near the front, as will the eye catching US entered United Autosports Audi R8’s, which are entered into a part programme, including the season opener in Cheshire this weekend. Leading the GT3 Ferrari charge will be the Rosso Verde entry, again teaming up Hector Lester with Danish GT stalwart Allan Simonsen, MTECH’s Duncan Cameron and Matt Griffin, and Chad Racing, whose three car 430 squad features some of the most competitive driver line ups that the series has ever seen, while the Barwell-Cadena entered Aston Martin DBRS9 will expect to be in the mix.
Nine confirmed entries in the GT4 class will include a two car works Ginetta Cars squad, whose drivers are as yet unconfirmed, along with another five G50’s, whose drivers include G50 Cup graduates, 2009 champion Nathan Freke, and regular front-runner Christian Dick. The category will also feature a KTM X-Bow and a Lotus 2-Eleven.
So lets look forward to Oulton and the prospect of a good grid, there is no sight, or sound, in British motorsport quite like that of a good field of supercars roaring around one of the UK’s top venues. The fans and drivers will be hoping for a dry one, however, so there is no repeat of the carnage that wiped out half the field in the 2006 rain soaked meeting. A dry weekend is probably too big an ask, you can’t have it all.
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