Tag: Formula One 2011

So tires are the story (3 Softs, 3 Hards for Qualifying and Race), along with the flexible front wing.  Red Bull was so confident they pulled their drivers out of the cars and saved the tires.  Everyone else did 2 laps on a fresh set of softs and now have only 1 set left.

Will this be significant?  Who knows?  Rain is not expected.

GP 2 will rubber in the track, barring catastrophic failure, tactical miscalculation, and aggressive driving they’ll finish the way they start.

So is Formula One boring?

Not the way Turn Left Bumper Cars are boring.  There you might as well ignore everything except the last 5 laps.  

Massa didn’t turn in a time for Q3.  Kobayashi may or may not start under the 107% rule since he coasted into the pits during Q1 with fuel problems.

• F1: Istanbul Park Qualifying
• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast

Re-broadcast at 1:30 pm ET.

Pretty tables below.

In Europe (yes, Turkey is a part of Europe) for the first time this year after a 3 week layoff.

There are some off track developments.  Ecclestone turned down a buyout bid saying that Formula One is not for sale, yet.  At least not to Murdoch’s News Corp.

Tomorrow will be the first race of the GP 2 season.  They keep them in Europe to reduce the travel expenses.  I can hardly keep the teams and drivers of Formula One straight, but it you have an interest they kick off Speed’s coverage at 6 am ET.  The actual race starts with the hype at a relatively civilized 7:30 am ET with the green flag at 8 and a repeat at 1:30 in the afternoon, so Richard can sleep in if he wants to (Dad seldom does the 3 am thing like I do anyway).

This break is traditionally used by the teams for technical development, so the cars you see in Europe are hardly the ones you saw in Asia at all, but with the new rules designed to make things “fairer” they’re not allowed to do as much of that any more.  Most teams have tweaked their aero, but they do that all the time anyway, the big news is Scuderia Marlboro UPC’s hydraulic dampeners.

You see Red Bull has been making everyone else (except McLaren) look pretty slow and apparently a big reason for that is their front wings flex a little closer to the track improving downforce.  Red Bull has been subjected to extensive ‘scrutineering’ and found legal because there are rules about how close to the ground you can get.  It’s tough to tell because their system is totally mechanical and it’s difficult to duplicate race conditions.

Marlboro UPC is attempting to counter with a hydraulic system to ensure they don’t exceed the limits and spent a long time at the end of practice getting examined.  I say it’s just something else heavy that can break so I see no real advantage, but the orders from Maranello are to start winning or they’ll take their toys and go home.

Frankly, outside of Vettel, Red Bull doesn’t look nearly as dominant as they did last year anyway and he hard parked during the second practice tearing up everything except the tub.  Not that it makes much difference, if they can’t fix it he’ll just have to drive the spare.

It rained heavily during the first practice and a lot of other people parked too.  McLaren never made it out of the pits because of clutch problems.

Istanbul Park is known for the 3 or 4 apex Turn 8, but most of the twisted metal yesterday was at Turn 11.  The surface is very rough so there will be lots of tire wear and again we are hearing rumors of back markers running unorthodox tire strategies.  They took over 1000 pounds of rolled up rubber off the track in China, Mark Weber has been changing tires more than anybody with little to show for the effort.

It’s also a Turn Left circuit, one of 4, but at least you have the 151 feet of elevation change to keep you amused.

As usual I’ll note the surprising developments, if any, below.

About tire strategy

It was odd last night to watch pretty much everyone except McLaren and the one Red Bull left sit in the pits until there was only 2 minutes left in Q3 (time enough for one warm up and one hot lap).

They are very concerned about having enough Soft Pirellis and those are going off quickly, particularly if abused from the start which is, unfortunately, typical.

Tyre allocation has been reduced for 2011, with 11 rather than 14 sets of dry-weather tyres available to each driver per race weekend. Drivers will receive three sets (two prime, one option) to use in P1 and P2 and must return one set after each session. A further eight sets will then be at their disposal for the rest of the weekend, although one set of each specification must be handed back before qualifying.

So in total you have eight sets of Softs to get you through the final 2 practices (one before the Qualifying and ‘Warm Up Laps’ pre-race) and 3 rounds of Qualifying and then the race.  Some desperate soul sometime is going to make themselves famous by running an all Prime strategy but it hasn’t happened yet though some of the also rans have attemped it.

KERS you!

Mark Webber is pretty pissed off today.  In a car supposedly identical to pole sitter and Championship leader Sebastian Vettel’s, his KERS software is sucking power like a broken air conditioner at all the wrong places.

Speaking of Red Bull, Scuderia ‘I’ll have a cigarette with my espresso’ will start surprisingly strong.  Michael Schumacher once again under performs, his team mate Nico Rosberg is driving a contender.  Scuderia Marlboro UPC is over rated.  Paul di Resta impresses, Petrov couldn’t even put it back on the track.

It’s still very early in the season, this is only the third race of 19 and there are lots of points out there, but like The America’s Cup and Le Tour, Formula One tends to magnify advantages.  As a die hard McLaren fan I’m really satisfied with their performance this year, but Red Bull doesn’t seem to be suffering from their hardware failures.

• F1: Shanghai Qualifying
• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast

Re-broadcast Monday at noon.

Pretty tables below.

Once again I have unfortunately skipped the meaningless except for gossip Practice so I have little to report except for the scurrilous rumor (as always impeccably sourced) that Hamilton is dissatisfied with the McLaren hardware which as far as I can see is ahead of last season’s Red Bull chase that he almost won except for software (brain fart) failures by McLaren race management.  If he’s really decided to be a diva he’s lost my allegiance, does he expect Red Bull to dump Webber?  Nobody else is close.

Vettel dominated as predicted.

So we don’t know anything we didn’t already and the Shanghai circuit is equally a mystery except that the sinking has evidently passed inspection.

Tomorrow’s race at 2:30 am will not be preceded by anything special and will not be repeated until noon on Monday so Richard will just have to wait until then to read though I’m sure Grandma’s nurse will call him long before that to spoil it anyway.

I’ll spare you my insights from Sepang since they haven’t changed much, nor do I expect many surprises but if there are any I’ll document them below.

Once again I used up most of my good material yesterday for Qualifying, which is ok I guess since unless there are surprises or someone blows up or parks there’s just not a lot to talk about; and if you’re not going to cover all of Qualifying and cut it so you can carry your lame Scuderia Marlboro UPC suck up fest and repeat everything everybody knew 2 weeks ago there’s hardly any point at all.

Pick any random race from last year and you have almost exactly the same Starting Grid.  Michael Schumacher once again underperforms and Kamui Kobayashi does better than expected.  Everyone made the 107% limit so we start a field of 24.

As we approach the actual race there are 2 scenarios- rain and not rain.

If it doesn’t rain then the drivers and teams who waited in the pits until the last 2 and a half minutes of Qualifying (warm up and hot lap) may have done themselves a favor in terms of tire wear since Sepang is notoriously tough because of the heat and cornering.  On the other hand everyone might start a fresh set of Wets which will be exciting racing.  If dry they are predicting 3 or 4 pits.  The bottom 14 get a chance to start Hards (weather permitting) and run some tire strategy.  Right now the forecast is for temperatures in the high 80s, 70 – 80% humidity, and a 60% chance of scattered Thunderstorms (if there is lightning they Red Flag the race because it’s just not safe).

Nothing I’ve seen yet has changed my overall opinion, which is that it’s McLaren and Red Bull and everybody else.  Hamilton and Button will be running handcrafted Titanium underwings that they’re running their exhausts back to front over to improve downforce.  The exhaust direction is not unique, all the other teams are doing the same thing but their wings are Carbon Fiber.

• F1: Sepang Qualifying
• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast

Pretty tables and discussion below.

Well, if it’s 4:00 am it’s Formula One somewhere.  This week is Sepang in Malaysia.

Sepang is hotter than Albert Park this time of year and there’s also a history of afternoon downpours that shortened the race in 2009.  This could effect tire strategy, though Jenson Button reports the McLaren team is getting excellent wear from the designed to deteriorate faster Pirellis.

Speaking of go fast technology, because of the long straights Red Bull is not shunning KERS the way they did in Australia.  In practice the 2 McLarens split Webber and Vettel and everyone else was pretty much an also ran.  Considering the results from Albert Park this very much reminds me of last season where Red Bull had a clear speed advantage in the early races that tightened up over the course of the season, except that this year is much closer.  Hamilton finished second despite major damage to his under carriage aero.

We also know now that they’re going to be strictly enforcing the 107% rule for qualifying (though it only applies to the Q1 ETs).  The split spoiler is only activated for the trailing car and only in certain sections of track and within a certain distance of the car you’re attempting to overtake.  It was no apparent advantage in Melbourne.

If I had actually watched Friday’s practice last night I suppose I’d know more, but I was busy examining my eyelids from the inside.  I totally understand if others feel the same about tonight, qualifying is only interesting if there are surprises and there haven’t been many so far.  Tomorrow though you get a rare chance to see the whole weekend in about 5 hours as Speed will be rebroadcasting the Friday practice and tonight’s Qualifying starting at 12:30 am before the race itself at 3:30 am.  I’ll try to have the piece up around midnight though I might nap after that for a while.  They’ll be repeating the race only at 2:30 pm Sunday afternoon.

Well it’s that time of year again when the sewing machines attack.  bmaz has his first Formula One Trash Talk up which covers many of the notable points including the political one that the season opener in Bahrain was canceled due to the jackbooted repression of the Sunni elite and their Saudi Arabian mercenaries.

Here is a season preview from The Telegraph and here is another one from the same source focusing on the drivers and teams.

I like Wikipedia for pop culture (since that’s hardly ever controversial).  Their description of the Albert Park course is here.

I can’t claim to have been paying a great deal of attention to last night’s Qualifying (results below) but my take away was that not much has changed.  Vettel qualified almost half a second faster than he did last year (as one commentator quipped- “Thank goodness they made the cars slower”).  The announcers are still way over rating Scudiero Marlboro which shows no sign of having improved at all.  Nor has Team Mercedes or any of the other ‘also rans’ from last year.

It was not known at the end of the broadcast if they would waive the 107% rule so it may be that HRT-Cosworth doesn’t start at all and we proceed with a 22 car field.  My interpretation was that they could start from the pit, but I’m not in a position to enforce that.  Ecclestone and I ceased talking well before his facist friend Mosley got caught with his jackboots on but his pants down.

In March of that year the News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper, released video footage of Mosley engaged in sado-masochistic sexual acts with five sex workers in a scenario that the paper said involved Nazi role-playing, a situation made more controversial by his father’s association with the Nazis.

Speed Racecast

I’ll assume everyone who cares already knows that the March 13th Bahrain Grand Prix, the opening race of the 2011 season, and associated testing has been canceled because of domestic unrest right?

You might not have heard about this one-

Kickback Probe Tests CVC’s Ties With F-1’s Ecclestone

By Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Karin Matussek and Alex Duff, Bloomberg BusinessWeek

February 15, 2011, 9:56 PM EST

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — Banker Gerhard Gribkowsky may have taken a $50 million kickback for engineering the sale of Formula One, the world’s most-watched motor sport, German prosecutors say. Who paid that suspected bribe, they aren’t saying.

That mystery has thrown a spotlight on the partnership between 80-year-old Formula One Management Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Bernie Ecclestone, a fixture of London’s tabloids, and the company’s buyer, CVC Capital Partners Ltd., one of Europe’s largest and most-private buyout firms.

…

The investigation is focused on the 2005 sale of a 48 percent stake in London-based Formula One to CVC by Bayerische Landesbank in Munich, which received a 10 billion-euro ($13.5 billion) government bailout following losses on U.S. subprime mortgages. That investigation is adding to uncertainties about Formula One’s future, making an exit more difficult for CVC, which manages 31 billion euros, including Europe’s second- largest buyout fund.

…

“According to the current findings, the suspect, in turn, received $50 million in payments disguised via two consultancy agreements,” Munich prosecutors said in the statement. A spokesman for the prosecutors declined to say who may have made the payments. No charges have been filed against Gribkowsky, who is being held while the probe continues. Ecclestone hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

…

The kickback case “has been a ticking bomb for at least a year now,” said Klaus Fleischer, professor of banking and finance at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich. “BayernLB is a money sink and is under enormous political pressure to clean up the whole mess of subprime, Hypo Alpe-Adria and Formula One.”

Gribkowsky didn’t run a competitive auction when BayernLB sold its 48 percent stake, two people with knowledge of the deal said. Kirch’s lawyers say the sale undervalued Formula One, according to a letter sent to the bank on Jan. 6.

…

Since the CVC acquisition, Formula One has been plagued by a cheating scandal, and the global economic slump led Honda Motor Co., Toyota Motor Co. and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG to quit. The average race audience fell to 44 million in 2009 from 52 million in 2004 as younger people watch less TV, according to London-based Future Sport & Entertainment.

The sport is betting on growth in Asia and the Middle East after France was dropped from the schedule because it couldn’t meet the costs and Italy and Germany lost one of their two annual races. This year, the championship has 20 races, including one hosted by India for the first time.