Pat W

New F1 rules for 2009 – quick and dirty

This CGI video appeared online at the weekend. Sebastian Vettel from Red Bull Racing explains the differences between the 2008 and 2009 cars in an idiot-proof manner! The ‘exploding car’ graphics are a huge help too.

http://www.itv-f1.com/VideoWorldwide.aspx

If you haven’t seen it yet go and check it out. If you saw it on YouTube go to this ITV link instead because it should be of a higher quality.

I’ll summarise the changes in March in the run up to the first race of the year, but if you only have a passing interest in F1 you should watch this 2 minute video instead of wading through a chunk of text.

EDIT – hit Sidepodcast’s F1 Debrief #93 for a full-on techie explanation of KERS as well as a roundup of the latest news in F1. You can play on-site or download the MP3 or M4A version, you can even get it via torrent if that’s your thing. I get the MP3 edition to play at my convenience – it even scrobbles in Last.fm, how cool is that? The podcast lasts one hour precisely, which is an ideal size (the full hour isn’t all about KERS).

Launch Season: Peugeot 908

Peugeot 908 HDi FAP

The 2009 edition of the Peugeot 908 was launched yesterday.

The car looks substantially the same as last year, albeit with a rear wing 400mm narrower per the ACO’s regulations for this season. Pug’s engineers say they’ve been working on the engine mapping, cooling and traction control systems. Partly this is due to the new rules cutting power by 10% on last year, and partly this is because Peugeot really struggled with overheating last year. It cost them the win at Le Mans because the airflow when it was raining wasn’t sufficient to cool the engine. There were other factors as well of course, like their crazy tyre decisions and inexperienced drivers (many were new to sportscars, anyway), but the cooling was a major factor.

Also in ‘cooling news’, the roof sports a ‘reflective chromelike aluminium covering’ according to Olivier Quesnel.

A surprise announcement on the driver front, to me at least, was the unveiling of Sebastien Bourdais and David Brabham. Bourdais was rumoured on Thursday night, which was a surprise to me because nobody has dovetailed a full F1 season with an attack on Le Mans for many, many years. The last to try the F1/LM crossover was Franck Montagny (fairly recently too, say 4 years?) but he was just an F1 test driver. at the time.
Brabs wasn’t on my radar at all for this, maybe I missed a comment on Midweek Motorsport (I’m still an episode behind) or other sources. I had thought he was still signed to drive the Acura and perhaps he is, which is why he won’t appear at Sebring.

The full driver line-up:
S Bourdais, D Brabham, M Gene, C Klien, P Lamy, N Minassian, F Montagny, S Sarrazin, A Wurz.

It’s still a fantastic-looking car.

Peugeot confirmed their plans for the first half of 2009: they will take two cars to the 12 Hours of Sebring in March, and three cars to the 1000km of Spa-Francorchamps in May before sending all three to Le Mans. There is no word on what will become of the team after Le Mans. In my opinion they’ll see what Audi does, and how they perform against Audi (and Aston!) in the big race.

Drivers confirmed for Sebring:
Car 7: Minassian / Lamy / Bourdais
Car 8: Montagny / Sarrazin / Klien

This leaves Gene, Brabham and Wurz for the 3rd car if the line-ups remain the same. Line-ups for Spa will be confirmed at a later date.

Photo credit: Peugeot Sport

PS – yes, I know I didn’t post about the new Acura. They aren’t going to Le Mans. Yet..
PPS – I’m begging you here, PLEASE get the name right. “Le Mans”. There are TWO WORDS. Writing “LeMans” (or “Lemans” which is worse) really does annoy me! I don’t mind it on Twitter because of the character limit. A pet peeve of mine, just like hyphenating ‘F1’.

Launch Season: Red Bull RB5

Red Bull-Renault RB5

This morning Red Bull Racing became the 7th Formula 1 team to launch their 2009 car. (See links to the other launches at the end of this post.) As is the fashion these days the car was unveiled in situ in the pitlane of an Iberian race track, in this case Jerez in Spain.

The car completed 14 laps before running was halted to investigate a temperature anomaly. No lap times were released.

It’s a good looking car, helping by the great Red Bull colour scheme which looks even better on these cleaner cars than it did on the previous generation ‘aero era’ cars (Red Bull had one of the best paint jobs in the paddock last year, IMO). Like many of the ’09 cars the back end is very small and the bodywork ends quite early, leaving the rear exposed.

What interests me is the position and length of the nose, it’s like a spear! It seems remarkably high up and I’m surprised the FIA will allow it, if I were driving for another team I wouldn’t want to have one of these cars run into me.

RBR will again race with the Renault engine. Renault have been allowed to make some tweaks to their unit because they were the only ones not to do so last year, taking the regulation about “don’t develop your engine” to the letter unlike other teams. As of now no development may be done to anybody’s engine.

Red Bull also confirmed the location of their battery/capacitor KERS system, which is sited underneath the fuel tank for centre-of-gravity and weight distribution reasons. If I were driving I’d be a little bit scared for ‘large, predominantly untested electrical storage device next to 60kg of petroleum’ reasons. They’ve already been instructed to sit still in the event of an accident, until a marshal turns off he KERS. I wonder what Niki Lauda thinks about being told to sit in a car while it burns around you..

Mark Webber (AUS) and Sebastien Vettel (D) are the drivers. Webber will as usual be looking for an improved year where he’ll be able to demonstrate his undoubted speed without getting involved in stupid incidents or bad car reliability. Vettel is simply looking to kick his arse, simple as that! It’ll be a fascinating year watching these two. I think Vettel will nick it – but Webber will make him work hard for it. David Coulthard remains with the team in a consultancy and testing role, dovetailing with his new BBC analyst duties (more on that in a BBC announcement on the 24th – very exciting!!). The other key personnel remain the same.

I think Red Bull Racing have a good shot at moving up the order this year and fulfilling some of that latent potential we all know they have.

Scuderia Toro Rosso and Force India F1 remain the only teams not to have launched as yet. If the Team Formerly Known As Honda does make it to Melbourne then that will be the location for their team launch, much as Super Aguri did last year. A sad state of affairs.

I’ll be back with something tomorrow.

Photo credit: RedBullRacing.com / Getty Images

Previous car launches:
Ferrari
Toyota
McLaren
Williams
Renault
BMW

Weekend Preview: 7 & 8 February 2009

Weekend Preview: 7th & 8th February 2009

A quiet weekend this one, with one single solitary event in all of world motorsports and that’s a preseason non-championship NASCAR event. FORIX lists ‘indoor trials bikes’ which they’ve never had before, but I’m not counting that because I care even less about that than the roundy-round taxis. They don’t show the NASCAR presumably because it isn’t a championship event.

NASCAR [website]
Budweiser Shootout (non-championship)
Daytona International Speedway
Daytona, Florida, United States

I don’t think this falls under the Sprint Cup moniker, since it isn’t a championship event and thus doesn’t count toward Cup points. Anyway, there is apparently a lot of fuss in N-World because the format of the race has changed. Until now it was made up of last season’s pole winners plus past winners of the Shootout, but this year in a blatant attempt to keep the carmakers happy it will be based on the top six owner points for each manufacturer, plus a few wildcards. Hmm.. there goes another incentive to do well this year.

The Shootout is stupid anyway, it is just a high profile drafting test session with prize money, right? Do they other guys get at least a real test to make up for it? I doubt it. I guess they at least announce the competition yellow in advance, so that’s something.

This event will be aired live on Sky Sports Xtra at 1am Saturday night (or Sunday morning for the pedantic) – but don’t worry, there are three repeats on Sky Sports 3 and Xtra during Sunday, you lucky beggars. Those repeats are: 11am (SS3), 2.30pm (SS3) and 6pm (SSX).

In the US it will air live on FOX at 8pm ET. I don’t know about HD in the US, it isn’t in HD here.

Next week is more interesting with the Daytona 500 and support races, as well as GP2 Asia and World Rally.

**
Notes
Most of my small handful of readers reside in North America, so I’ll try to include US air times when I can. Most of the time I expect they’ll also apply to Canada. I will of course focus on the British broadcast times first and foremost, many of which will also apply to much of the rest of Europe.

I think the Red Bull F1 launch is on Monday so that’ll be interesting to see, and it looks like Bourdais will get the Toro Rosso seat.