sofaF1

As Alonso sat behind Schumacher to begin yet another lap of the 2006 San Marino Grand Prix, I believe his thoughts were probably echoing what Randy had said in last week's episode of My Name is Earl: 'Damn it! I can only think of things I can think of!'. Could Alonso have passed him? This was the closest he got, I believe, up the hill out of Tosa:



Their wheels almost touched. Alonso had to back off otherwise they would've crashed out - the track was narrowing all the time into the tight Piratella. I'm betting Alonso was sat there phenomenally frustrated, only able to recall what he had done to Schumacher the year before, only capable of thinking of things he could think of, and what he knew Schumacher had covered.

By the way, what was James Allen saying the moment this picture was taken, at one of Alonso's best chances of making a move? Something like 'in fourth place is Raikkonen, in fifth place Montoya, and in sixth place Massa...'

So predictions please?

Is this a classic of Alonso mind game tactics in saying that it will be hard to beat Ferrari here?

Is Ferrari talking a big game by saying that the improvements have been genuine?

Was Button's retirement last race a sign that Honda really do think that they can win here?

Or do you think McClaren have been quietly getting the job done?

The title to this post comes from the latest edition of the Scary Movie franchise, and is in fact the only good line in an otherwise awful film. I think, however, that it neatly identifies the problem Rubens has at the moment: incompatibility. He is trying all the wrong things, in the wrong order, to get himself back up to speed. He is compromising himself too much, then aiming at the wrong targets, with the wrong weapons: trying to squash maggots by throwing wolves at them whilst riding atop a dragon. He needs to let his own legs carry him, and stamp on the maggots with his own big shiny boots...

Peter Windsor has summed all this up for us: "the sooner he goes back to right-foot-braking the better".

Why are drivers, managers, teams etc. always described as 'bullish' before the next race/season? I thought this was just a joke in the F1 Manager game, but journalists really do use it, all the time (the latest: Schumacher feeling bullish). Note that the people involved never used the word, e.g. 'I'm feeling vaguely bullish today', it is always and interpolation added by the writer, i.e. 'they're feeling bullish'.

It's an utterly horrid word, completely inappropriate to the sport (I also hate James Allen describing the cars as thoroughbred horses - they're cars, not animals), and I vote for a veto on it.

In other news, the answer to 'Guess the Race': Hungary. I think it was Massa avoiding Klien.

Indy Racing League star Danica Patrick says she does not see herself crossing the Atlantic to race in Formula 1 any time soon.
http://www.itv-f1.com/News_Article.aspx?PO_ID=35595&PO=35595

Danica may have been put off by the big farore that took place at the American Grand Prix last year. No not the one that caused nobody to race but the one that was overshaddowed by the fact that nobody raced. A couple of days before the American Grand Prix Bernie was quoted as saying the following to the press about Danica:

"She did a good job, didn't she? Super. Didn't think she'd be able to make it like that. You know, I've got one of these wonderful ideas that women should be all dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances."

Charming.

Ayrton Senna interviewed by Jackie Stewart:
Jackie Stewart asks Ayrton Senna about his frequent contact with other drivers.

Senna: If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver.

In an article in a US website a guy has won a prize for having the longest commute.

Cisco engineer gets prize for longest commute:
Mariposa resident Dave Givens makes a 186-mile drive -- each way -- five days a week to his job in San Jose.

Another peice of evidence of bad timing for Toyota. Mike Gascoigne used to fly out to Cologne every day to go to work from home back in England.

If only Toyata hadn't fired him last week they might actually have won something!

No, not me (I had always assumed it was boring) but Toyota* driver Ralf "The boot's on the other" Schumacher here:

itv.com/f1

* yes, that's my team...

If, like me, you resort to projectile vomitting when you hear the new itv-f1 theme tune, and attempt to pluck your eyes out with matchsticks when you see the new intro sequence, perhaps you'll agree it's time for a change.

Of course, the old Fleetwood Mac would be good, and the previous tune was not so bad. My recommendation, however, is some variation of a remix of Cake's 'The Distance', which you can, in a bizarrely illegal feature of this website, download here:The Distance

I think what we need is the guitar and drums of the chorus, certainly without the trumpet, and maybe not the vocals (although maybe just a different vocalist). I'm sure there might be better ideas out there though...

Max Mosley is trying to get a standardised Electronic Control Unit (ECU) put into the cars. This seems to me to be a good idea as a) it's something that not many fans care about, b) it will be lots cheaper and c) it returns some of the need for skill back to the driver. Which all seems pretty good. Also it would be really interesting to see how much of the Renault's starts is software related and how much is physically due to the car (my guess is 50:50).

Anyway while Max was talking about this he mentioned the following thing:

This debate goes back to the early 1990s, and I still have a Christmas card from Ayrton Senna containing a handwritten message saying that we must get rid of electronic aids in F1.

Which made me think: Wow Senna was really committed to F1. He couldn't just send a Christmas card, he had to get in a political point too.

btw. He was almost certainly talking about the Benneton ECU which was suspected of helping Schumacher. As Benneton have become Renault and also stand to loose most this casts Flavio Briatore in an interesting light. He mustn't be such a Neanderthal after all.

Formula 1 has never really been successful in America. Even in the beginning of the sport the American round was always the Indianapolis 500 which required a completely different car and therefore hardly any of the European participants ever took part.

There is a rule about American sport and it is that it is different. Different than the rest of the world. And although football might now be making inroads in the states it’s still different there too (if only because it’s called Soccer) and it also still hasn’t become hugely popular.

But Bernie is determined for F1 to break America, he really is. The problem is that it’s very difficult to change the national viewing habits. It’s difficult anywhere but it’s especially difficult in America. There is one sport that has recently broken there though. And that is cycling. In fact the part of cycling that has specifically broken in America is the Tour de France. And why has it broken? Because of Lance Armstrong. Just look at Formula 1 in Spain to see if this holds for Formula 1. Since Alonso joined the sport it, viewing there has gone through the roof. The real testament to how important the World Championship now is that they are even talking about moving the European Grand Prix (which is Germany’s second grand prix) being moved to Spain. Apparently the Schumacher luster is already waning.

Bernie is very smart and he knows that the prize for breaking America is huge. It means the final piece of the jigsaw for teams being able to be the only place where you can buy an annual global sponsorship deal (the Olympics and the world cup are the only sporting events watched by more people than F1 and they only run once every four years).

And so Bernie got talking to Dietrich Mateschitz (owner of Red Bull) and convinced him to start the Red Bull Driver search which was designed to do one thing and one thing only which was to get an American driver back into F1.

And this year it’s come to fruition in the amazingly named Scott Speed. Scott has the name, the nationality and the boyish good looks which make him the ideal kind of person to make advertisers take out their cheque books.

The only problem with Scott is that he’s apparently about as friendly as an orange. James and Ted have been dancing around the issue all season, and Martin was pretty bold about it during the race. He said something along the lines of “not that he’s a terribly easy person to get on with as far as I can tell”. Which coming from the usually affable Martin was a bit of a surprise.

After the race just gone Red Bull challenged Torro Rosso (their own junior team) about the way that Scott had passed David Couthard under yellow flags. And the challenge was upheld stripping Speed of his points (and passing them to Couthard). After this apparently there was a bit of a confrontation between Couthard and Speed at the weigh in and Speed swore at Couthard in front of a martial and has been personally fined.

So while this may throw Martin’s comments into relief – it’s possible that Speed and Couthard have just had a personality clash and Martin as Couthard’s manager has just been hearing one side of the story.

But even so the fact that the martial fined Speed says it must have been a bit of a vindictive attack and that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that a major sponsor would want. A foul mouthed uncouth face of their brand?

Also the story puts paid to the idea that the Red Bulls and Torro Rossa would effectively work like a four car block. Not only do team orders stop that from happening within one team – it would really be frowned on between two different teams. And as this situation proves there is too much at stake for the individual teams they both have too much to prove on their own to start helping each other.

...Tony Blair make a good Formula 1 driver?

Too much spin.

I am sorry

Hello.

I used to think that Formula One was extremely dull. There, I've said it. Twenty-odd ultra-flash, mega-rich playboys whizzing round bits of major cities in tobacco-stickered supercars, lap after tedious, repetitive lap, broadcast mostly in the middle of the night, with Murray Walker shouting incomprehensibly over the top of it all.

However, now that Mr Andronov has explained some of the team politics, the driver history and the genius that is Bernie Ecclestone, I shall approach the whole thing with fresh eyes.

So, as the newcomer to sofaF1, I shall almost certainly be lurking in the wings whispering "What's the 10-place rule? Why is Sato driving backwards? Hasn't Raikkonen got nice hair?", that kind of thing. But I may well try to chip in to the discussions and I hope you'll treat me gently when I make a dreadful faux pas. As a starter, my chosen team for 2006 is Toyota*

Cheers for now,
Adrian (fourstar**)

* It seemed like a good idea at the time.
** Long story

In what could become a regular feature (?), here is a dramatic photo from last year's championship: can you guess which race it was, and which two drivers are involved? A Sauber is flicked on to full lock in order to avoid a violently barrelling car.

So this season and last Formula 1 engines are supposed to last two races. This decision has been made as a cost saving measure which is clearly in opposition to decisions of making the racing more enjoyable.

Max Mosley seems to have been obsessed with cutting costs in the last few years which is almost certainly admirable, as I mentioned in my post the other day
22 teams apply for 2008 entries which can only be because sport has become cheaper. Especially as several of the teams applying are from people who used to be in the sport.

However Max has always suggested that he's trying to advance cost saving and also entertainment in the sport. This can be evidenced by his plan for the new experimental wing that they are still talking about bringing in to F1 in the next couple of years. This new wing is supposed to make overtaking much much easier which clearly is going to add to the entertainment aspect of the sport. But designing a brand new and very complicated wing technology will cost the sport lots and lots of money.

But what's happening with the two race rule for engines is clearly about cost and not about entertainment. The penalty for having your engine changed is that you have to go ten places back at the start of the next race from wherever you qualify. This is a huge penalty.

The thing about the ten place penalty is that I can see exactly why it was designed that way. It should be entertaining. In many ways it does cause entertainment. The penalty does something very exciting in that we have fast cars behind slow cars which means there will be more overtaking at the race. The problem last year, and starting again this year, is that we're seeing a guy like Kimi trying to run his season with one arm tied behind his back. He's blindingly quick (just ask Montoya how Kimi beat him in the first race of the year) and yet he didn't win the championship last year.

Formula 1 is a team sport in many ways, but there are supposedly two championships: A driver's and a constructors one as well. With the cars as they are these days basically the difference between the two has been diminished. And you could even be as brutal to suggest that it doesn't matter if Kimi is faster on the track, part of being world champion in F1 is not only being fast but being smart and Alonso was smarter in picking Renault over McClaren.

The problem is that the people running the sport have heard the problems of the people watching the qualifying and said "we need to fix qualifying", they've heard problems about the race and said "we need to fix the race", but what we've not heard is the problems with the championship as a whole. The ten place penalty might make the race more exciting but devalues the championship I think.

I'm going to stop here without a solution because I think I need to lay out my views on qualifying before I can really decide what I think I want as an alternative. All I know at the moment is that the ten place penalty feels slightly artificial and definitely unfair.

This site has found all of the grand prix circuits on google maps. Some with much higher detail than others, so if one of them is bad quality then persevere.

http://www.mergetek.com/grabmap.aspx?CategoryID=33

One of the strangest things about Formula 1 is how little the fans seem to care where their driver is from.

During the time of Damon Hill when there was a chance a British guy might win the championship there was a lot of support but in many ways it was caused by the rivalry with Schumacher who was German and therefore the jingoistic elements were stirred into action.

Now we seem to have a similar thing happening with Jenson Button. Jenson is one of the most overrated drivers of all time. He sometimes has amazing moments. He sometimes pulls something really great out of the bag. Whether it's a flawlessly smooth qualifying lap or an overtaking move where nobody else would consider one but I remember in his first year a Williams when at Monaco he hotheadedly tried to overtake de la Rosa in Monaco. There was almost a massive and very dangerous crash, he was very lucky. But even so he did cause the race to be restarted.

He's still never won a race so what's the fuss about?

During the intervening years between Hill and Button we had Coulthard, Irvine and Herbert who all won races. Irvine was robbed of winning the championship even. And Button still hasn't won a race.

Now I never have thought that any of these people could win a championship. Not so with Hill. And that might make me sound like a glory supporter to a non-F1 fan but that does seem to be much more in the F1 spirit.

Some people do have certain drivers or certain teams that they love. There's something about them that they identify. I'd argue that the reason that they choose this driver or team is often much less to do with nationality than it is in other sports though. And these people will tend to support their driver or team through thick and thin.

But there is another type of supporter doing something else. Another type of supporter is watching the season more like a fantasy football season. I often think about who I think will win the race rather than who I want to win the race. It's more about trying to guess who's going to win. Perhaps this derives from the similarities with horse racing.

And I think that's why nationality plays much less of a part in F1 than in other sports. Although try telling that to an Italian, Spaniard or Brazilian.

Which I forgot to add:

* this reminded me of the incident involving Pedro Deniz, which lead to the fantastic Sun headline:

Deniz in the oven

This picture actually came from this site: http://www.gpracing.net192.com/ which hasn't been updated to even include the 2001 season but seems to have some interesting history of F1 on it.

The tire wars are going away from F1 very soon, and we'll be back to a single provider. Allegedly this is to cut down on costs but it will also cut down on confusion. People probably don't care (and definitely don't cheer) about a particular tire manufacturer. But simple economics will tell you that reducing competition won't drive down costs.

I suppose there is an argument to be made that you'd need less testing if there was only one tire manufacturer but I don't imagine that there will be any shared data between teams. I guess there might be a reduction in the cost of industrial espionage if you're all on the same tire there's less to modify in setup and so the winter testing stats might be easier to read. But none of this really makes me think that it's much to do with costs.

I'm glad that proper pits with tire changes are back in many ways. There was something rather interesting about last year when there was only a continuing degradation in the tire towards the end and you had a driver simply trying to hang on to the thing for grim death. This year we still have that kind of situation with the engines but with the engine it seems to be a bit safer for the driver (although there were more flames than usual coming out of the back of Jenson's car in Oz)*

So I emotionally think that a single tire supplier will be good for the sport. I think that nobody cares which tire you were racing on, and that it's often confusing as to which compound of which supplier each driver (let alone which team) is on.

But...

I think that a lot of the mixing up of the races that we've enjoyed so much in the last few seasons has been caused by the resurgence of Michelin. The fact that it's not clear who has the better compound, who is working the best on a given day etc has really spiced up the races.

Take Australia for example (I can't believe I haven't written a post just about that race yet) Toyota, Williams and yes Super Aguri all benefited from the Bridgestone tires flattering their cars I think. But why didn't Ferrari get a performance bump if that were the case? Because they didn't use the new compound. Ferrari don't trust Bridgestone anymore after last year so they decided to stick with what they know.

The tire wars have created an extra roll of the dice to the mix of F1 which I think we may miss more than we think we will in the coming years. I remember all too easily the years a few years ago when Martin would say "maybe the way to spice up F1 would be for Bernie to add sprinklers to all of the tracks and set them to random".

itv.com/f1 - 22 teams apply for 2008 entries
Twenty-two teams have submitted entry applications for the 2008 Formula 1 world championship, the FIA revealed on Friday.

Apparently the FIA are oversubscribed for the 2008 season but they are only going to let 12 teams actually run.

Wouldn't it be much better to actually allow all teams to run but re-establish the 110% rule. Therefore making it so that qualifying really means qualifying. Some people might not be able to put together a flying lap, so you'd end up with some events where the big boys not in the race.

That could really mix it up and make it interesting, but it will probably never happen because the cost of visiting a race where the only sponsorship airtime you'd get would be in qualifying would be too high for the little teams and they'd all go bust after one season.

This site, I hope, will be a discussion forum about Formula 1 (or F1 if you're in to the whole brevity thing). I want to discuss everything that's going on in Formula 1 with other people.

I often have discussions with my friends Nick and Stewart who I hope will join me in posting on this site.

None of us are connected with Formula 1 in any way. This site isn't about the latest announcements and news in F1 but is more about in depth thoughtful articles and also brief observations. We'll often actually talk about the coverage itself as well as the races and all of the other things about F1 that make it such a great and intriguing sport.

I hope you enjoy it.