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A New Year

Happy New Year!

I am looking forward to the 2010 racing season, it’ll be a good one.

F1 has the return of Schumacher, the uniting of the last two World Champions at McLaren and Alonso moving to Ferrari, with the added interest of Sauber’s return to independent status, Toro Rosso building their own car, the addition of the new teams and drivers, and watching to see if Williams and Force India can capitalise on all of these things.

IndyCar has a new title sponsor which should really help the series grow domestically, which in turn should help it internationally. Ganassi and Penske will be the teams to beat again and it’ll be interesting to follow the Andretti team’s progress after their restructuring, can they challenge as they once did?

Sportscars features the new Intercontinental Cup and I hope we’ll see several teams attempt all of those rounds despite the economic downturn. It could be the prelude to something big and that should excite us all greatly!

It looks like rallying is on the road to recovery now that the FIA is starting to realise it was killing WRC, and along with the IRC we should see some good competition this year.

Touring cars… is shot to pieces, sorry. Manufacturers pulling out and fields of independent teams, not really a great selling point. I’m sure it’ll be bumper-to-bumper as always, but will anybody care?

I don’t know what’s going on in MotoGP, WSBK, NASCAR or DTM, I’ve fallen behind on news. Then there’s the new GT1 World Championship, which might be good or it might not be. We’ll see.

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Moving on to this blog, I’d like to thank everybody who reads and comments here, it really does mean a lot and I hope you stick around into 2010. I plan to blog even more during this season!

I am planning to spend January reviewing the 2009 IndyCar and GP2 seasons race by race as part of the ‘Race Review’ feature. These entries are heavily delayed, initially by studying preventing me from watching them and then by other work or racing news getting in the way, however I should now have time to complete these posts albeit probably in a shortened form. I may well throw some other races in from time to time although we are quickly running out of off-season!

I am persisting with these despite the delay because I would like to refine them into a workable format ready for the coming season, and the best way to do that is to just keep knocking them out. Eventually they will be at the sort of length to get across the information without being overly long which they have been in the past, this in turn will mean I can cover more races.

Towards the end of the month and into February I will move into ‘Preview’ mode and cover the F1 car launches and tests, as well as any other interesting car launches and team news from elsewhere in racing.

I hope you join me on the journey of the 2010 season!

Happy Christmas

Have you ever known an off-season as busy as this? I haven’t! A plea to all the racing people: if you could just hold any more news until Jan 4th, that really would be appreciated.. It isn’t that I don’t love it, I do, I just think we all just need a rest! Since the season ended the news has been relentless.

I am going to be busy enjoying much turkey, presents and alcohol I’m sure. While I may be a godless heathen and as cynical as the next person I do enjoy Christmas for the family aspect and all that it brings, and it is a national and family tradition, after all. While that may make me a slight hypocrite at least I don’t go around calling it ‘Winterval’ as one city council attempted to do a few years ago!

Have a good Christmas everyone, should you celebrate it, and I’ll see you in a couple of days.

An Aside With Joe #16

Today the latest ‘An Aside With Joe’ podcast was released and amazingly they are up to no.16 already. It doesn’t seem long since the first one.

These chats with journalist and author Joe Saward are always very revealing and in this edition you can find out about:

  • making Grands Prix green;
  • a Grand Prix for electric cars;
  • Silverstone’s deal;
  • an update on the Motorsport Business Forum, not the Monaco one like much of the F1 media but the Orlando event (and the reasons why he went there);
  • hydroplanes – yes, really;

I’ve said it before and it is ever true – after listening to Joe speak for just under an hour you come away feeling a lot wiser about motorsport and you look at it through different eyes – plus you can impress your friends with the knowledge. Of course, your friends don’t care about motorsport and they still think Button is called Jason, hah, what do they know, nothing.

Thanks to Sidepodcast and especially to Joe for making the time to produce these, and particularly this episode which was an unexpected addition.

I know it is Christmas but you should make time for this one, LISTEN HERE.

Schumacher’s Return Isn’t So Bad

It became official this morning: Michael Schumacher has departed his advisory role with Ferrari to take a race seat at Mercedes GP, where he will be reunited with Ross Brawn.

I’m surprised at this news, in the beginning I thought it was a ploy by Mercedes to extract a better deal first from Jenson Button, and then Kimi Raikkonen. It looks like they were serious all along!

I am not a fan of Michael Schumacher. He has a known history of “bending the rules” (I’m being charitable, it is Christmas) at both Benetton and Ferrari and the FIA consistently let him off with weak penalties or none at all. He is the man who took Senna’s swerving and weaving to a new level, to the extent that all the young drivers in lower formulae starting doing it, thinking it was normal. Yet I find myself excited at his return. Why?

You have to say this wouldn’t have happened had Ross Brawn not been involved with the team. The two have enjoyed a lot of success together and I for one am not looking forward to the kind of dominance they so frequently displayed. Schumacher and Brawn’s unique combined skill was to do things with fuel strategy that no other driver/strategist combination could. Schumacher has the ability to drive the car to a target laptime, relentlessly. It was this ability that allowed Brawn’s to put into play fuel strategies that just wouldn’t have otherwise worked. The combination of the two was dominating.

The rules have changed now. There is no more in-race refuelling, so this advantage no longer applies. The most they can do is be creative with tyre strategies while managing the weight of the car. It will be very interesting to see how this pairing copes under the new rules, probably more so than anyone else.

We have a level playing field again and one in which the driver has more say – and we know Schumacher prefers an open track to wheel-to-wheel racing. Over a lap he is better than nobody but he doesn’t like the wheel-to-wheel, where he panics. This is where Alonso beat him before, and I believe will again – even better, he’ll be driving Michael’s red car! Then there’s Hamilton and we know he’s not scared of a fight either, with Button, Vettel and hopefully Massa making life interesting too.

2010 will feature one of the strongest grids in years among the ‘regular’ runners, then add in the new teams who will almost certainly be getting in the way for much of the year as an added distraction (and possible Safety Car enabler) and we have the recipe for an amazing season. It was shaping up to be so anyway, and now everybody will have just one man in their sights.

I am looking forward to Schumacher attempting to best this new generation of racers, many of whom have never raced him in F1 – and the ‘new Button’, the champion Button, could surprise him too.

I feel relieved for Rubens Barrichello who could easily have played the role of Schumi’s Lapdog once again, Williams may be a step down but he is team-leader at last and it’ll suit him well, and he can now play a role similar to that of his good friend Tony Kanaan.

I feel bad for Nico Rosberg who may have expected to be sitting alongside Nick Heidfeld next year and now faces the inevitibility of being No.2 in a team revolving around Schumacher, for it is clear even before it has been mentioned that MS will be the de facto Number One.

I even feel bad for Heidfeld who is probably going to be stuck with Sauber again, the Merc seat was probably his last shot at a race-winning drive.

In summary then, I fully expect Schumacher to play his old tricks again but the other aspects of his return outweigh that for the short term at least, and the sudden jump in media coverage and internet discussion is testament to ability to draw fans back to F1 – perhaps his return will see a rise in TV ratings and race attendances once more, after 2009’s dip.

The thing I’m really not looking forward to is dealing with the pro/anti MS arguments again, the bane of internet discussion for the bulk of this decade. Twitter is going to be a nightmare.

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I promised to update my entry list after every driver annoucement, here is the first update:

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes
McLaren Mercedes MP4-25
1. Jenson Button 2. Lewis Hamilton T: tbc
Mercedes GP Petronas
Mercedes Mercedes tbc
3. Michael Schumacher 4. Nico Rosberg T: tbc
Red Bull Racing
Red Bull Renault RB6
5. Sebastian Vettel 6. Mark Webber T: tbc
Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro
Ferrari Ferrari tbc
7. Felipe Massa 8. Fernando Alonso T: G.Fisichella
AT&T Williams
Williams Cosworth FW32
9. Rubens Barrichello 10. Nico Hülkenberg T: tbc
Renault F1 Team
Renault Renault R30
11. Robert Kubica 12. tbc T: tbc
Force India F1 Team
Force India Mercedes VJM03
14. Adrian Sutil 15. Vitantonio Liuzzi T: tbc
Scuderia Toro Rosso
STR Ferrari STR5
16. Sebastien Buemi 17. tbc T: tbc
Lotus F1 Racing
Lotus Cosworth tbc
18. Jarno Trulli 19. Heikki Kovalainen T: F.Fauzy
Campos Meta 1
Campos Dallara Cosworth tbc
20. tbc 21. Bruno Senna T: tbc
US F1 Team
US F1 Cosworth tbc
22. tbc 23. tbc T: tbc
Virgin Racing
Virgin Cosworth VR-01
24. Timo Glock 25. Lucas di Grassi T: A.Parente
T: L.Razia
Sauber
Sauber Ferrari C29
26. Kamui Kobayashi 27. tbc T: tbc

There is also the Stefan GP team waiting in the wings to get an entry either in 2010 or 2011, they say they have signed drivers already, the buzz says one of those drivers is likely to be Vitaly Petrov.