F1 pre-season testing provides poor guide to form

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on Feb 22nd, 2012 | 0 comments

So, after four days of testing and nearly 3,500 laps of running at Jerez in sunny southern Spain, what has the first Formula 1 pre-season test revealed about the season to come?

The simplest answer – as ever – is “not much”. Testing – or the “winter world championship”, as McLaren chairman Ron Dennis famously described it – is a notoriously poor guide to form.

Or at least it is if you look only at the headline lap times. At the end of last year’s test in Jerez, the fastest man was Williams driver Rubens Barrichello – and his team were about to embark on the worst season in their once-illustrious history.

Likewise, if anyone thinks Lotus driver Romain Grosjean is going to win this year’s world championship after setting the pace in Jerez this week, they will be waiting a long time for those pigs to fly in front of that blue moon.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that Jerez has revealed nothing.

First of all, it has become clear the teams dislike the look of the new cars as much as anyone.

For them, the ugly step on top of the noses of all cars apart from the McLaren is an unfortunate necessity in the pursuit of the best possible aerodynamics, following a rule change requiring lower front noses.

“Performance comes before aesthetics,” as Red Bull design chief Adrian Newey put it.

The teams head back to their factories with a mountain of data, on which decisions will be based about the direction in which to take the development of their new cars.

These gleaming machines are prototypes for their entire lives, but in terms of maturity right now they are still in the post-natal stage.

Nowhere, it seems, is that more true than at Ferrari, whose decision to start with a clean sheet of paper after a chastening year in 2011 has left them with a lot of work to do.

Fernando Alonso may have left Jerez with the fastest time from the final day – and the second fastest overall – but no-one was fooled by that.

Ferrari were clearly struggling to understand their new F2012 and spent most of the four days doing aerodynamic assessment tests.

The car, they said, was behaving inconsistently in the corners, and so far fixing its behaviour at one stage – the entry, say – messes it up at either the mid-corner or exit, or both.

This is not an especially encouraging sign for a team whose 2011 season came off the rails at the final pre-season test, when new parts that they expected to bring a chunk of speed actually made the car worse.

It turned out this was a result of a lack of correlation between the results that were being created in the wind tunnel and the actual performance of the car out on the track – a major problem in a sport where aerodynamics are critical to performance.

Ferrari spent most of last season trying to get on top of this, and by late summer they insisted they had. Yet when they introduced an update to the car at the Belgian Grand Prix in August, that too did not work.

Were they not concerned about this, I asked an insider a little later in the season. No, he said, they knew why it had happened – the wind tunnel correlation was fine.

Yet on Thursday this week, there was technical director Pat Fry admitting that there was still a small problem in this area. “There’s reasonable correlation,” Fry said. “I certainly wouldn’t say it was perfect.”

Despite that eye-catching lap time from Alonso, then, Ferrari’s potential remains unclear.

“That time was on soft tyres,” a source close to the team said. “It was not so special. The feeling is they are waiting for a lot from this car – but they don’t know how to get it. It is impossible to say what will be the future.”

But it is not just Ferrari. Over at McLaren, Lewis Hamilton has said his first impressions of the car were “all positive”. But the more he talked, the more you wondered.

They had not found the best set-up yet, he said – unsurprising, perhaps, so early in testing.

“It feels like an evolution of last year’s car in many ways but also there are some things that are not so good,” he added. “The downforce on the rear for instance, is not as good through the high-speed corners as it was last year, but I’m sure we’ll get that back.”

Again, this was to be expected given the ban on exhaust-blown diffusers, from which all top teams gained huge amounts of rear downforce last year – and Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel also noticed a similar experience in his car.

But perhaps Hamilton’s most revealing remark was this: “You never know what fuel loads people are on. I think we’ve been quite aggressive with our fuel loads.”

A translation of which seems to be that McLaren are running with less fuel on board than they might normally be expected to – which will make their lap times look more impressive.

Despite that, the car looked as if it was not quite as fast as the Red Bull, which Hamilton effectively admitted. “I think you can see the Red Bull looks quick,” he said.

The Red Bull indeed appeared to do its times with relative ease, both in the hands of Mark Webber and, later in the week, Vettel.

Just as much of a concern for their rivals will be that pictures suggest the car seems to have retained what most believe to be its crucial secret.

That is getting the front wing to run closer to the ground than any other car, a critical aerodynamic advantage.

This is despite design chief Adrian Newey saying they had had to reduce the rake on their car following the ban on exhaust-blown diffusers and despite the introduction of a tougher front-wing deflection test.

And yet even Red Bull clearly have work to do. After three pretty much trouble-free days, an electrical fault appeared on the final morning, and Vettel lost an entire morning’s running while the team fixed it.

In summary, then, Red Bull again look like the team to beat, and there is a mixed picture from McLaren and Ferrari.

Just as it did in 2011 when the team were Renault, the Lotus has left a good initial impression.

Toro Rosso and Williams also appear to have decent cars, while Force India fell back after a promising start, almost certainly because of losing a day to reserve driver Jules Bianchi’s crash on Thursday.

There follows a 10-day break before the teams reconvene at Barcelona on 21 February.

The Circuit de Catalunya’s mix of long corners of varying speeds have long been the ultimate test of an F1 car’s all-round capabilities, so more pieces of the jigsaw should fall into place there.

Jean Pierre Jabouille Jimmy Jackson Joe James John James Jean Pierre Jarier

Bayne relieved to make 500 field

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on Feb 22nd, 2012 | 0 comments

Last year’s Daytona 500 winner Trevor Bayne said securing a spot in the 2012 field without having to rely on a Duel result was a huge relief – and now hopes he can find more sponsorship to prolong his 2012 season. The Wood Brothers driver did not have a guaranteed Daytona start as his car was not within the top 35 in last year’s Sprint Cup owners’ points standings.

Kasey Kenneth Kahne Matthew Roy Kenseth Alan Dennis Kulwicki Travis Wade Kvapil Robert Allen Labonte

D?Aste returns to Wiechers BMW

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on Feb 22nd, 2012 | 0 comments

Stefano D’Aste will return to the World Touring Car Championship full-time with Wiechers-Sport this year.

Hans Herrmann Franзois Hesnault Hans Heyer Damon Hill Graham Hill

Heikki Kovalainen: ?We?re closer than we?ve been before?

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on Feb 22nd, 2012 | 0 comments

Caterham caught the eye at Jerez on Wednesday when Heikki Kovalainen ran more laps than any other driver, the new CT01 showing impressive reliability as the team got to grips with KERS for the first time. The Finn ? who … Continue reading →

Patrick Gaillard Divina Galica Nanni Galli Oscar Alfredo Gбlvez Fred Gamble

Is Raikkonen worth the risk?

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on Feb 21st, 2012 | 0 comments

Kimi Raikkonen’s return to Formula 1 next season creates a field with as much depth of talent as any in the history of the sport.

Six world champions will be on the grid at the start of 2012, with a total of 14 titles between them.

There are also multiple race-winners in Mark Webber and Felipe Massa, plus what I believe are certain future winners in Paul di Resta and Nico Rosberg.

But while Raikkonen’s return will add another fascinating thread to an already rich tapestry, will Lotus get the driver they think they are getting?

There is no doubt that Raikkonen at his best would be a powerful addition to almost any F1 team, but can the 32-year-old reach again the sort of heights that led to victories such as that at the Japanese Grand Prix in 2005, when the Finn claimed victory for McLaren in arguably the greatest race in Formula 1 history?

Having battled up through the field from 17th on the grid, Raikkonen won with a stunningly audacious move at the start of the final lap, overtaking Renault’s Giancarlo Fisichella around the outside at 160mph going into the first corner.

Although Raikkonen would go on to win the world title in 2007, the race in Japan was in many ways the pinnacle of his career. He was certainly never as consistently great again as he had been in 2005.

By the end of the 2005 season, it was widely known Raikkonen had signed a contract to move to Ferrari in 2007 as a replacement for Michael Schumacher.

Raikkonen was expected to take over the role of team leader, with Felipe Massa a dutiful number two, but the Finn’s performance fell short of what was expected.

His low-key personality was always going to make it difficult to dominate a team in the way Schumacher did - or Fernando Alonso has done at Ferrari in the last two years – but more of a surprise was Massa’s ability to match him on the track.

Raikkonen did take the title in his first year at Ferrari – but it was a somewhat fluky win.

Firstly, title rivals McLaren went into meltdown after the partnership between Alonso and rising star Lewis Hamilton soured.

Secondly, Ferrari engineered the victory Raikkonen needed in the decisive final race in Brazil by swapping positions on the track with Massa, who was dominating.

Having won the title, many thought Raikkonen might step up a level in 2008, but Massa became the de facto team leader. This was not what Ferrari expected of Raikkonen, whom they paid a reputed $50m a year, the highest salary in the history of F1.

Midway through 2009, they’d had enough and decided to terminate his contract a year before it ran out. After paying Raikkonen at least a full year’s retainer not to drive for them in 2010, Ferrari took on Alonso in his place, despite not knowing whether Massa would make a full recovery from an accident in Hungary that left him with a fractured skull and forced him to miss the rest of the season.

The difference between the relative performances of Alonso and Raikkonen at Ferrari could barely be more stark. Whereas Raikkonen had been evenly matched with Massa, Alonso has destroyed the Brazilian in the last two seasons.

So many questions arise from this comparison.

Was Raikkonen never as good as some thought he was and Alonso simply in a different league? Has Massa been affected by his accident in 2009 in a way neither he nor Ferrari are either aware of or will admit?

Was Raikkonen increasingly demotivated at Ferrari and therefore performing under-par? Was his legendary ‘partying’ affecting his driving? (There is a famous YouTube film of him falling off the roof of a boat with a drink in his hand and landing on the deck on his head)

Has Massa been unable to cope alongside the dominant personality of Alonso, but was able to give his best alongside Raikkonen, a man who paid no attention to ‘working the team’ and simply believed his job was to get in the car and drive?

So damaged had Raikkonen’s reputation been by events at Ferrari in the last five years that any return to F1, after a humbling couple of years in world rallying, was never going to be with a top team.

There are too many other good drivers out there, without Raikkonen’s baggage, for that to happen. So Raikkonen finds himself in a midfield team struggling to rebuild itself and a long way from finding the form that took Alonso to his two titles in 2005-6.

In theory, Raikkonen could be just what Lotus need. If he returns fully committed, as he says he will, with a raised tolerance of all the things he grew to detest about F1 – the media and PR work – he could be a valuable addition.

But will that motivation remain once the reality of midfield life hits him, when he realises just how much of a struggle he is in for, how far away he is from the top teams where he used to reside?

And will he really help the team progress? On that subject, there’s a joke doing the rounds. It’s set in the Lotus engineering office at a race some time in 2012. It goes like this: “How was the car, Kimi?” “Good.” “How was the car, Vitaly [Petrov]?” “Good.” “OK. Debrief over.”

On the other hand, put yourself in the shoes of Lotus team owner Gerard Lopez and team boss Eric Boullier. Robert Kubica, who any team would want if he was fit, is still months away from being able to drive an F1 car again – and may never be able to do so.

Having ruled out Rubens Barrichello because there are too many questions about his age – he is now 39 – and motivation, your driver choices are Petrov, Bruno Senna and Romain Grosjean. Good, solid drivers all – and Senna, particularly, has shown these last few races that he has potential.

But then you remember Suzuka 2005 and other great drives. You remember Raikkonen’s championship challenges in 2003 and 2005; his clinical, error-free consistency; how he was always at his best on the great ‘drivers’ circuits’; the way he grabbed victory by the throat in Belgium in 2009, the only race that year where Ferrari had any chance of a win.

You remember that great drivers just make things happen and you think what Raikkonen could do in your car, how much of a difference he could make.

Then it becomes easier to see why you might take the risk.

Leslie Johnson Bruce Johnstone Alan Jones Tom Jones Juan Jover