F1 – Page 41 – I Watch Too Much Racing

Launch: Force India VJM02

Force India Mercedes VJM02

The new Force India had a soft-launch over the weekend, with pictures first appearing a day ahead of Sunday’s official release. Today these studios shots were joined by a whole host of Q&As from the FIF1 press office which you can find on the usual news sites, as well as pics from Jerez.

The big news is the switch from a Ferrari customer deal to an agreement with McLaren-Mercedes for the full powertrain – that is the engine, gearbox and KERS systems, as well as technical co-operation in other areas. Simon Roberts of McLaren is now the Chief Operating Officer at Force India as part of a personnel shake-up. Mike Gascoyne and others have left the company.

The basic theme running through all of the Q&As is that the new McLaren/Mercedes deal frees up FIF1 engineers to work on other aspects of the car, such as aero and internal packaging. It means that as other teams cut back, Force India don’t need to worry about that and can concentrate on the task at hand: working their way from the back of the field to regular points-scoring positions.

The first chassis was shaken down at Silverstone last week and Fisichella took it for a test at Jerez today. Liuzzi will shake down the second car during this week before the final big pre-season group test in Barcelona.

It’s a good looking car, quite aggressive with another high nose. The late launch means the car has spent longer in CFD and in the wind tunnel than their competitors, many of whom will need to do an (expensive) upgrade for the first race of the season.

I hope they are able to close up the remainder of the gap to make the midfield a close fight. They made some big gains in lap time last year even if that wasn’t represented in positions, in qualifying they used to be 3sec off the back and last year they were about 1 – 1.5 sec back. A long time in F1!

The downside here could be the decision not to run KERS until very much later than everyone else. Some reports suggest they won’t run it until May – that could prove to be a mistake. Still, at least they’ll be ahead of whatever Honda becomes..

Photo credits: http://www.forceindiaf1.com/

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Tomorrow Williams will launch their Formula 2 car powered by Audi, I’m not sure if I’ll be around but I’ll put a short post up about that some time this week as well as something on the Le Mans entry list.

BBC F1 coverage announced

The BBC officially revealed their plans for the 2009 Formula 1 season today, confirming much of what has been rumoured over the last few months (particularly on the F1 thread of the DigitalSpy forums). This is the most comprehensive coverage of Formula 1 ever seen on free-to-air TV in this country, and rivals the pay-monthly options in Germany and Italy.

Note: This is UK only. There will be no live coverage on BBC World or BBC America.

Sources:
Announcement here and press pack here (4 pages, remember to click through!).

First the broadcast team. This was announced in November and I posted short profiles in my post at the time (not to mention a video of The Chain). This is a recap of the line-up:

Television
Anchor: Jake Humphrey
Pre/Post-Race Analysts: David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan
Commentary: Jonathan Legard and Martin Brundle
Pitlane: Ted Kravitz and Lee McKenzie

Coverage switches from ITV1 to BBC1. Humphrey brings a different style to the anchorman role, while Legard coming from radio is a much more laid back presence in the hot seat than his two predecessors. Brundle brings his lengthy F1, Sportscar, and now TV experience back to the commentary box. Kravitz also joins from ITV with McKenzie coming from coverage of A1GP and GP2. DC and EJ should be a hoot in the post-race analysis whenever anything controversial happens!

Radio
Commentary: David Croft and Anthony Davidson
Pitlane: Holly Samos

BBC Radio 5 Live continues on from last year. Croft and Samos continue as before while Maurice Hamilton (no relation to Lewis) is replaced by the excellent but out-of-work F1 driver Davidson, who lost his drive when Super Aguri went under and ended up guesting for BBC Radio coverage last season. To be honest I rarely listen to this coverage as I’m watching the TV.

Online
Blogs from the commentary legend that is Murray Walker, current driver Mark Webber, the current on-screen team and their producer(?) as part of an overall relaunch of the Motorsport section of the website, which has been pretty poor over the last couple of years.

Next… the details!

Sessions
(I’ll recap how you can receive these channels at the end of this post.)

– Every F1 race of 2009 will air live on BBC One and Radio 5 Live.

– Every qualifying session will air live on BBC One and 5 Live, except for Brazil which will be on BBC Two due to the time zones interfering with the beginning of primetime.

– Every race and qualifying session that happens before 10am UK will get a repeat showing that afternoon. ITV has done this for some time.

– There will be a highlights show on BBC Three every Sunday evening at 7pm (not Brazil). ITV last year showed highlights at midnight.

– Each race will be available on BBC iPlayer for up to 7 days after the event. Once downloaded you can keep it for up to 30 days. I think the BBC3 highlights package will also be available if you’re short on time.

– Every Friday and Saturday practice session will air live on the BBC Red Button and online, and 5 Live Sports Extra. No word on whether the TV will feature radio commentary, for the moment I am assuming it will. ITV last year did not have any commentary on their online feed.

Red Button
BBC Interactive’s Red Button service for Freeview, Freesat, Sky and Virgin customers will feature some special delights:

– A choice of commentary: either the TV or Radio feed. Hell of choice between Brundle and Davidson, as well as being quick drivers they are both natural broadcasters.

– All practice sessions will be on the red button, not on BBC 1, 2, 3.

– After qualifying and race coverage has finished on BBC1 there will be an ‘Interactive Forum’ on the RB. This is a phone/text/email show with talk from DC and EJ.

– During the race there will be a choice of screens:
1) The main BBC One feed with choice of commentary;
2) Split screen featuring the main feed in one window, onboards in a second window, and a leaderboard;
3) Rolling highlights of the race so far;

Those on the DigitalSpy forum think #2 will be similar to Premiere in Germany, which looks like this:

(with thanks to whoever I stole that from)

Um. Can I just say? Ultra-cool!

No word yet on whether this will be extended for qualifying, or jut race-only, but it’s pretty cool either way.

I am seething a little here because I don’t get the interactive service until Digital Switchover occurs in my region in May. Luckily those streams are online! They’ll be geo-locked to UK-only but I’m sure the techies among you will figure out a way around that. And it means my first Red Button trials will occur during the Monaco Grand Prix – kick ass!

Other
There is a very high degree of likeliness that we will see a Top Gear F1 Special sooner rather than later. Lee McK has already done the lap! I’m having visions of the TG team wandering around the F1 paddock, not during race coverage but as a part of the next series.

5 Live will have a preview show on Friday nights of race weekends, as they have done for a while now. Also continuing is the post-race Chequered Flag podcast featuring driver interviews. I have to say I’ve completely missed the boat on both of those shows, I will try and catch up with them this year. All you international readers should be able to download the podcast freely.

NO COMMERICAL BREAKS DURING THE ACTION!

Okay I think that’s everything, but I’m sure to have missed something – please let me know in the comments!

How To Get These Channels

TV:
BBC1 and BBC2 are obviously available everywhere, if you don’t know how to get those you aren’t in the UK so none of this post applies to you…
BBC3 and Red Button are on digital TV only. You should be able to find BBC3 easily enough on Freeview, Freesat, Sky and Virgin Media. To go Interactive just hit Red during any F1 broadcast.

Radio:
5 Live is on 909 and 693 Medium Wave, DAB and online.
5 Live Sports Extra is on DAB and online.

I’m not sure the online feed for radio will work , it’s historically been blacked out during F1, so use the TV feed.

I’m sure any American/Canadian/other readers will be turning to our mutual friend Justin for a little help if they don’t like their own domestic feed..

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PS – Meesh sez the USF1 announcement was a washout so I’ll not recap that today, head over to her blog instead.
PPS – Got my tax exam result last week. Pass. *Yay*

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: 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