sofaF1

McLaren have always seemed to be the thinkers of Formula 1. But for a while they seem to have had their mind on other things. Much as Ron likes to protest it he was distracted by first the McLaren motorhome and then the McLaren headquarters. In fact the running of the McLaren group as apposed to the racing part seems to have been his focus ever since Kimi arrived. A terrible shame as I hope Kimi will prove at Ferrari this year.

Taking his eye off of the ball like this meant that Adrian Newey couldn’t stay. And actually it was impossible to keep him. He’d done winning at McLaren, so why would he be interested in more of it. McLaren probably wasted time by keeping him on when he was desperate to do something else (he even considered designing racing boats at one point so he was pretty desperate).

But things started changing at McLaren just over a year ago. Personally I think Ron decided not to bother really competing in 2006, he didn’t expect to not even win one race but he did know it was a transition year before the start. He signed Alonso, he had a chance on Hamilton (at the beginning of the season he couldn’t have known how well Hamilton would settle over the course of the year). He finally knew what was happening with Adrian Newey so he could work out the new strategy. And probably the most important thing of all McLaren group finally made a profit last year. This has probably freed Ron from one of his personal challenges.

So what does this all mean? I think McLaren are going to come out next year all guns blazing and full of promise. Why? Because Ron’s started making proper decisions again. It was a ballsy move to hire Alonso out from under the noses of Renault, it’s another one to put a rookie alongside him and finally the move to hire Mika as a test driver is genius.

They know that every second you can get of testing is vital, and the testing you get earlier is even more vital to the cars development. And we know that Lewis Hamilton and Gary Paffett don’t have any F1 racing experience. And while we know that Pedro is a great tester and has some racing experience it is hardly the kind of thing that’s going to get a championship car ready. There’s been a lot of talk from McLaren that this is a one off thing and it came from Miki etc. But there was one quote from Ron which said something like “with Alonso unavailable and with Kimi and Juan-Pablo disinclined to help us we needed to turn to somebody else” which makes me feel that they are making the right decision. Mika will be able to tell very quickly how the car is hanging together. He won’t be able to tell them things like is this bit better than before or whatever that’s the other testers jobs. He’s going to talk to them about the raciness of the whole car and that’s really important.

For a while I really have felt that Ron has lost his ability to make a single decision. McLaren have a very complicated system using Bayesian Logic to basically make decisions for them (I’m going to talk about this in another article). And it would make the “right” decision but would it ever make the “ballsy” decision? This lead to McLaren having heavy fuel loads and putting the cars in the middle of the pack which lead to McLaren not winning. But this set of decisions of late remind me more of the Ron of old. The whiley fox who would say, “you just wait” and actually mean it.

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Hamilton gets 2007 McLaren drive: "Englishman Lewis Hamilton will drive for McLaren in Formula One next season.
The 21-year-old, the reigning champion of the GP2 feeder series, will be the first black driver to race in F1. "

He truely is a bit of a throwback to the playboy drivers of the past I guess.

We are currently in that period of formula one in the year where basically nothing is happening.

The journalists have finished reviewing the season and voting on the best and worst aspects. But the testing of next years cars hasn't started yet so they can't talk about next year yet.

It's a tough one to deal with for them all and they've basically gone for one of three options. 1) The proper write ups of non-story rumours that they wouldn't print in the rest of the year 2) In depth interviews with random back markers who are the only people who are still looking for a job 3) articles about sponsors which really aren't that thrilling.

Well the way I see it we can do better than this lot. So I hereby lay down the gauntlet. All the replies to this article should be in the vein of one of those types of article, should be funny (or at least an attempt at funny) and completely untrue. Good luck.

This may be one of the craziest stories of the winter season, or it may be the most prophetic. Somehow it doesn't seem possible, but then something about it rings true: a steady, old hand to guide McLaren through their troubles whilst Alonso gets the hang of things. But, does Alonso really need that? If anything, he may be quite angry at the idea that he needs help from someone.

In other news, the civil war is over. The car manufacturers and the FIA have shaken hands. Did anyone ever really believe the war wasn't anything other than a bargaining tool anyway?

Browsing through and deleting old text messages on the last train home last night, I had an entertaining time trying to guess what races certain messages between Alex and me referred to, and I thought it would be almost as entertaining to post some here for other people to guess. Here are four, classically vague, examples:

1. surely he can't have done it deliberately?

2. Indeed. I watched it live. Bad luck for kimi. I did really think they might swap schu and massa. James seemed more annoying than usual and excited. Weird.

3. how bad are those michelins?

4. I've finally caught up with events. I do like it when Michael wins.

Alonso has recently talked of his feelings during this year's championship, evocatively comparing Ferrari and Michael Schumacher to a wolf hunting him down. In the end, he said, the good guys won. Now, I think Alonso is a pretty great driver, but I do have a few problems with him. One of them is this righteous attitude he seems to have. It came out over the mass-damper affair, and especially after his penalty in Monza. In truth, I found it a little annoying, his under-dog, martyr-like, stance. He seemed to be whining a bit much for a Grand Prix driver. This is especially so when you look at the facts: all those incidents did was to level the playing field. Michael never went ahead on the points table. Ferrari were never given the lead in any way, all that happened was Alonso's was cut. Then, the only reason Alonso won was due to Ferrari's failures in the last two races. To say that Renault 'deserved' to win is really quite silly. Still, when you think about it, Alonso's only 25...