The Missing 2010 F1 Car

F1.Fanatic has pictures of the unraced TF110, built by Toyota and supplied to StefanGP which hoped to race it.

There has obviously been some development work done on it as the front wing shows more complexity than the other 2010 cars did at the beginning of the year. Generally it has smooth and uncomplicated lines.

With Toyota's engineering behind it, one suspects that it would not have started the season in dead-last place, and perhaps might have been faster than some of the established teams.

The question as to if StefanGP could have financed the operation properly, and set the stage to make more progress in 2011... this is the larger question that remains unanswered.

Success

The Itallian press is demonstrating its calm, steady, measured approach to covering Ferrari's escapades in the Formula One series:

Ferrari 'heads will roll' after title loss

"Some things will change and, sure, some heads will roll," said the authoritative Italian daily La Gazzetta dello Sport.

...yeah, not so much.

I don't think that there is any way for Ferrari to view 2010 as anything other than a run-away success. The fact that Alonso was still leading the championship going into the final event beggars comprehension considering how fragile the Ferrari engine was through the rest of the season.

The rest of the team organization, though, fired on all cylinders when it counted. The principle example of this was Monaco, where Alonso wrote off a car on Friday, and the replacement turned a wheel for the first time on the shake-down lap Sunday afternoon, and the car ran flawlessly for the entire race distance -- that's a Ferrari accomplishment to be truly proud of.

For all my dislike of Alonso as a person, I think he is one of the best drivers on the grid today. Performances like Singapore, where he held off Vettel's visibly faster car for the whole event, stand up well beside events where the Ferrari cars had the edge on the rest of the field.

To suggest that Ferrari faltered at the end is too easy a Monday-morning quarterback call to make. Alonso had a devil's choice: stay with Vettel and risk Webber passing him before the pit stops; or cover Webber's stop and hope Vettel had to follow suit immediately.

I thought it a strange choice to cover Webber. At the very least I would have left Alonso out another lap to look at Webber's sector times after he got the new tires going; waiting that long would have cast doubt on the viability of the strategy.

But Ferrari made their choice.

Massa I think was a study in disappointment through this year. From visibly holding his team mate up in the early races, to suffering mysterious failures here and there, Massa's engagement seemed to be reduced by what happened in Germany. I still think Massa is a capable driver, one fast enough to help Alonso achieve a Manufacturer's title for Ferrari, but head-to-head Alonso is going to be the faster man more days than he's not. If Massa can accept that his days as a title contender have passed, he can still enjoy the success that a Ferrari can bring him. However I suspect Massa is too much the competitor to let that aspect of racing go, and he will continue to be less engaged in 2011, to both his and Ferrari's detriment.

For the team overall, this has been a huge year. This was supposed to be a building year, getting the personnel and experience together for a proper run at the titles in 2011. While Ferrari's presence near the front owes much to the mistakes made by the other teams and drivers, Alonso and Ferrari were good enough and consistent enough to take advantage.

To expect 2011 to be an improvement is extremely optimistic.

Sebastien Vettel, World Champion 2010

So after all is said and done, Vettel finds himself holding the Driver's World Championship for 2010.

2010 has been a weird year in this respect, in that there hasn't been a single worthy driver who's claim on the title has been irrefutable throughout the whole season. Not that I'm claiming that Vettel, or his competitors, were un-worthy. But the fact of the matter is that everyone seemed to depend on other everyone else making mistakes or having bad luck.

And mistakes in the end is what sealed the deal for Vettel. True, Vettel won from the front going away, but had Alonso not pitted to cover Webber's gamble, he likely would have finished far enough up that the title would have been in the Ferrari driver's hands instead. Ferrari's mis-step was Vettel's gain.

Vettel's talent still seems a bit wild at times, but he should settle down; assuming he doesn't crater his own career with foolish team choices, this probably won't be his only World Championship. Now that he is a legitimate title winner, he should find this goes a long way towards having a team built around him rather than him being built into a team.

Massa Courts Disasta

In some ways, I pity Massa after this weekend.

All through the weekend he struggled, and despite turning more qualifying laps than other drivers who managed to get into Q3, he ended up stuck in the mid-field.

At the start he managed to out-guess himself, and... well...

At the start, Rosberg, who was in front of me, got away poorly and at first I tried to move to the left, but Sutil was coming there. Then I moved to the right, but in so doing I found myself on the grass and the kerb. At that point the car took off on its own, I was unable to make it through the first corner and I ended up colliding with Liuzzi’s Force India.

Really, this kind of move was never going to be on, and Liuzzi just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Again, if you happen to believe Martin Brundle.)

But the big problem with this kind of move? If he had managed to stay on the grass to the corner and resumed under control, he would have demonstrably cut the corner, ie "shortened the track to gain an advantage".

Tears were inevitable.

Massa's season has really had the lungs gutted from it since Germany, where he learned that he was in no way to trouble his team leader's charge for the title. Before then he might not have been as quick as his team leader on most occasions, but he was certainly luckier. Personally I think that his performances have dropped off because of Ferrari's favoritism, not due to any lingering effects from his injury last year.

Massa really needs to get it together in a big way through the rest of the season to justify his continued presence in the team -- ie come in tracing his team-mate's wheel tracks big. Ferrari has demonstrated on multiple occasions that they are willing to buy out drivers who are perceived as not doing the best that can be done.

The problem is that I don't really see that kind of improvement happening under the increased pressure that these requirements are going to bring.

Alonso's Engine Situation

Reports James Allen:

He has two engines which have both done one race each – Spa and Monza. These will be used across the remaining four races.

So that is a slightly better spin on things than otherwise could be. Rather than one engine having to do the remaining races, he has two which will have to do two more, each, for a total of three each.

Still a long way to go for an engine which has been fragile thus far this year..

Four Wins

I'll say it up front: maybe I was wrong about Monza being the peak of 2010.

To be sure, Alonso's taking of his third fourth win of the year shows that neither he, nor the Ferrari F10, is merely adequate to the task of competing in Formula 1.

And while Vettel might have claimed he wasn't pushing his car hard, he never seriously looked like troubling the F10 on the track. If he had stayed out for a lap or two at pit-stop time things might have been different... but he didn't.

Thing of it is, Massa's woes illustrated my point exactly: engines are going to turn out to be Ferrari's weakness down the stretch. Ferrari took advantage of a horrible situation to swap out Massa's used engine for a fresh one at effectively no additional penalty, putting them on their ninth engine for the year. But in my opinion, four races (plus Sunday in Singapore) is a long way for one engine to go.

Ferrari will have to chose now between trying to reduce optional track time running (ie free practice) with the associated loss of time to do setup and new parts evaluation, or push through with the full program and risk a blowup which requires a 10-place grid penalty.

If they are really unlucky, the blowup will happen during a race on Sunday, meaning they'll lose the result for that Sunday plus effectively give away a huge advantage to the rest of the championship contenders for the next race.

Even though Alonso has brought Ferrari so close to the titles, my feeling remains that the engine situation means Ferrari is not as much in play as the points table indicates.

Highlight of 2010

I'm not a fan of Fernando Alonso, but when he came out of the pits and was side-by-side with Button going into the chicane I was yelling at the TV to encourage him on. Both Button and Alonso delivered precision drives today, with the Ferrari in the right place at the right time to turn in the victory -- and at the end of the day, Ferrari winning is more important than my feelings for the driver in the car.

Ferrari's 1-3 finish today at Monza will be seen as a capstone on the 2010 season for Ferrari -- the high point that in retrospect will be seen as the last step before the decline as the season rolls on. While Ferrari and Alonso both made good jumps up their respective championship tables today, I just can't see them continuing to hold their positions -- let alone continue to advance.

Why? Engines.

Both Alonso and Massa are currently using their eighth engine of the year. Lest we forget, the rules state that each driver has a maximum allocation of eight engines for the entire year; if more are required, they result in a 10 place grid penalty the first time each are used. To think that engines which have to date done an average of just less than two races each (7 engines used up in 13 races) will now do the five remaining races is, on the face of it, ludicrous.

By way of comparison, the two Renault drivers are on their 5th engine for the year. And Ferrari customer Sauber is using their 9th engine for one of their drivers already.

This means that, everything else being equal, both Ferrari drivers can expect at least one 10-place grid penalty each before the end of the season in order to install their 9th engine; and possibly more. Their competitors for the various titles are much better situated in terms of engine counts; I expect that Red Bull will be running tighter on Vettel's car than Webber's, but McLaren should be well placed for the run to the end of the season.

Given that Ferrari will likely have to effectively give away a good result over and above the racing incidents (whether self-inflicted or not) that will inevitably happen, I think that their 2010 title charges are effectively over at this point.

I think Monza is a great place for Ferrari's season to peak, and that the team probably should be focusing on 2011, as well as trying to sort the engine problems that have effectively blunted their 2010 challenges. I also hope that we see more competitive results from both drivers this year.

But titles?

I think the titles really slipped away earlier in the year and nobody has really noticed yet.

Force India Raw Speed

Interesting note of the weekend: straight-line speed does not solve all problems:

On a side note, both Force India cars at Spa were still 6km/h quicker down the straight than any of the title contenders.

Dangerous Driving

Micheal Schumacher seems hell-bent on destroying his own legacy.

Yesterday, Schumacher defended his position against Barichello by chopping right as the two cars went down the main straight. Barichello kept his foot in it, and the only reason why the two cars didn't end up in the wall was the fact that the wall didn't extend as far as Barichello had to go in order to avoid the collision.

How close was it? Go look at this picture. Damn.

(Update: here's a better, high-resolution photo of the incident. Schumacher left Barichello room, but not much.)

This is the second race where Schumacher's positional defense was... let's say excessively vigorous. Back at the Canadian Grand Prix, Schumacher chopped both Kubica and Massa. Kubica blotted his copybook with an excessively aggressive pass on the pit-in, and Massa further confused the issue by speeding in the pit lane. Schumacher got a pass on his transgressions.

But this time there wasn't anything else to confuse the stewards. Schumacher's act was investigated, and he was awarded a 10-place grid penalty for the next event.

Schumacher's return this year hasn't been exactly covered in glory. He is consistently out-qualified and out-raced by his younger teammate, who himself is not exactly tearing up the scoresheets.

Pedro De LaRosa has provided a defense for Schumacher's lack of form. De LaRosa, who is also returning to F1 after an absence, claims that with the lack of testing available to drivers it will take someone at least a year to get to grips with the cars now. Not that De LaRosa was ever particularly on fire in the standings.

This whole return was supposed to be a ready-made triumph. Mercedes had aquired the championship-winning constructor who had won with the Mercedes engine. Having two German drivers, one of them being arguably the greatest F1 driver of all time, was Mercedes' dream.

Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way.

I speculated last year that Brawn was going to find it tough to repeat their title-wining form. Their season of dominance came courtesy of Honda's total abandonment of 2008 very early in the year, and Brawn was permitted the luxury of time and Honda money on a scale that was not available to any other team. When combined with the Mercedes power plant, the result was a car that was far and away the class of the field.

Lacking both the time and money spent the previous year, I think that 2010 was always going to be lesser. I don't think Schumacher really counted on it being this much of a come-down from 2009.

So I think that between the lack of results and the driving incidents, Schumacher really has no choice but to soldier on in 2011. He needs to point to this year as a learning year, and hope that Brawn can get the team's act back together to provide a competitive car that can win, and then win with it.

If he quits without winning (which is the increasingly likely result of the 2010 campaign) it will provide a blot on his record.

...of course this all assumes he doesn't get himself hurt by vigorously defending a single point or something stupid.

Team Orders Should Be OK

F1Fanatic has an article saying that the no-team-orders rule in F1 needs to stay. While one could make the case that fans want to see drivers in contention for the world championship be free to pursue that, the defense of the rule is ultimately hypocritical:

It’s clear from the vehement reaction to Austria 2002 and Germany 2010, and the muted response to Brazil 2007 and China 2008, that fans have far less objection to team orders being used when one driver is out of the running for the championship.

But they expect teams to allow their drivers to compete for the championship as long as both are in contention. It’s clear F1 needs a rule to enforce that and I see no reason why the existing article 39.1 can’t be updated to do so.

Such an update to the rule would make it unwieldy. How are you going to make the update? Based on points behind the championship leader? Wins? Some kind of sliding scale that changes based on the number of races remaining?

There is also the semantic difference between a race result being "fixed" as a result of the team's orders, and a race result being "fixed" as a result of two drivers conspiring. As in: I don't really see one. Both results are "fixed", yet because one came from an order from the pit wall, it is somehow bad.

I've written on team orders before. Even though I was very disappointed to see Massa be ordered to yield to Alonso, I think that team orders should remain. I noted that McLaren spends a lot of money to have two race cars run on Sundays, and if it should please Ron Dennis (at the time) to have one car run in front of the other, then I see no reason why he should be denied.

Well Played, Sir.

Seems like bad luck is following Alonso around this year the way good luck is following Hamilton.

Yesterday's result, however, can be laid at Alonso's feet almost entirely. He claims he had an issue with the clutch at launch; whatever actually happened, Alonso fell backwards through the grid in the run up to the first corner. He found his feet ahead of his team mate, however in my view he defended his line rather aggressively against Massa, triggering a collision with the result that Massa had a tire go down and was forced to pit at the end of lap one. Thus ended Massa's day.

Later on Alonso got tangled up with Kubica, engineering a situation where he allowed himself to be forced wide, cutting the corner -- after which he went charging off into the distance.

At that moment I said Alonso had cut the corner and should hand the place back. To do so now would mean a loss of 5 seconds; if Alonso stalled long enough, the FIA would force him to make a drive-through which would cost him 20 seconds.

And isn't that more or less exactly what happened?

The fact that Alonso's penalty was assigned just before a Safety Car period was just bad luck, but with all the bad-mouthing of the FIA and stewards that has been coming from Ferrari over the last two weeks I don't think anyone in the stewards' room felt terribly bad for Alonso.

The net result was Ferrari's worst event since something like 1988. Well done, sir.

(Update: I stand corrected, it was the worst finish since 1978:

But Ferrari suffered their worst two-car finish since the 1978 French Grand Prix, when Gilles Villeneuve and Carlos Reutemann finished 12th and 18th respectively.

Worst result in 32 years. Outstanding.)

The whole weekend makes me think about going back and looking through the other incidents of Alonso having bad luck to see how many of them he actually engineered for himself.

Somehow I don't think this is the kind of result envisioned by the Ferrari team directors when they ousted Raikkonen and had Alonso join early.

Update: Hamilton vs. Safety Car

F1.Fanatic has a post which includes video of Hamilton's safety car transgression. Worth watching. Seems as though Hamilton could have made it through if he had not hesitated -- the difference at the line is about a third of a car length. Not sure if Alonso would have also made it through had Hamilton not hesitated.

Rubber Side Down, Mark

So as much as Mark Webber's brief flirtation as a test pilot was hugely scary, there are actually some things we can take away from it.



Firstly and most importantly, Webber hopped out of the car right away. Even though the car came down on the roll bar assembly, Webber appeared to be shaken but otherwise unhurt by the accident. This alone is a huge endorsement for the work that the FIA and the teams have been doing to make the cars as safe as possible. Formula One racing will always be a dangerous sport, but the people in charge are trying to avoid it being unnecessarily dangerous. We can only hope that this won't shake his confidence the next time he steps into a car.

But secondly. While the safety car was droning around, Martin Brundle treated us to a lot of blather about how the problem was the huge closing speeds and the increased closing speeds are what makes incidents like that so dangers. He carried on by saying something to the effect that next year's movable wing idea is only going to aggravate the situation and that the people in charge will have to think very hard about this.

The problem with this logic is that it is totally divorced from what Formula One has become today. Today you can have a car that is demonstrably one or two entire seconds per lap faster than the car it is stuck behind. If you combine this with the current fasion of gerbil-maze courses that don't give the cars behind any reasonable chance to close up with the car in front, you are going to be in a situation where the only way a pass is going to get made is if the car behind is much faster than the car in front.

Fiddling with tenths here and there, which is what the movable-wing proposal is doing, isn't going to get it done.

We have seen on occasion brilliant racing this year. The most spectacular so far has to be Montreal, where the tires were so bad that the drivers were skating around on them. Now I'm sure that Bridgestone isn't keen on being the source of so much griping, but it does show that Frank Dernie was on to something last winter.

But the bottom line is that F1 has to look in the mirror and decide what it really wants. Tricky, aero-addicted high-traction cars on meandering road circuits isn't making for a formula that encourages passing. And if F1 really wants passing, something fundamental is going to have to change.

Hamilton Skates Again

So once again Valencia managed to produce more in controversy than outright racing. Although I will say that someone has been working very hard on either the track or the TV cameras -- there appeared to be acres of space available on the track, a far cry from the gerbil maze of the first year.

Lewis Hamilton continued his charmed 2010 career, bobbling the Safety Car transition. Ferrari is predictably incensed, although in retrospect the only difference Hamilton's behavour would have made would be his leading Alonso home in 9th place instead. Ferrari had extremely poor luck with this Safety Car, as drivers ahead could continue at racing speeds while Ferrari tooled around behind it, and drivers behind managed to pit before getting caught up in the train.

Even the penalties which were liberally handed out after the fact were a whopping five second each and had little practical effect on the result. Even though Hamilton's drive through had a total of zero effect on the running order due to the stewards' waiting so long to assign a penalty and the Sauber holding up the rest of the pack, one can make a compelling argument that the drive-through time penalty meant Hamilton was in fact penalized the most strongly for the Safety Car transgressions. While the stewards had a lot of things to think about, they clearly didn't trouble themselves too much about any of it.

That's racing. Ferrari drew the bad luck this time. Get over it.

Clarity

Three rules clarifications from the FIA.

First, courtesy Mr. Schumacher in Monaco:

With immediate effect, no car may overtake until it has passed the first safety car line for the first time when the safety car is returning to the pits. However, if the safety car is still deployed at the beginning of the last lap, or is deployed during the last lap, it will enter the pit lane at the end of the lap and the cars will take the chequered flag as normal without overtaking.

Secondly, courtesy Mr. Hamilton from Malaysia:

With immediate effect, any car being driven unnecessarily slowly, erratically, or which is deemed potentially dangerous to other drivers, will be reported to the stewards. This will apply whether any such car is being driven on the track, the pit entry or the pit lane.

Thirdly, courtesy of McLaren's behavior in Canada:

With immediate effect, if a sample of fuel is required after a practice session the car concerned must have first been driven back to the pits under its own power.

Keep your heads up and the throttles down, gentlemen.

Charmed

Hamilton added another "reprimand" to his 2010 resume this weekend in Canada when McLaren told him to stop on the circuit following his pole-position lap at the end of Q3. The car was going to run out of fuel, and that would have prevented McLaren from making available a fuel sample to the FIA should they have desired it. Such a strategy is a competitive advantage as the car ends up running lighter than its competitors; with each lap's worth of fuel carried, the impact on a car's time is of the order of a tenth of a second or so, which is not a trivial amount of time these days.

Now while this is a result of the team short-fueling the car for the qualifying lap, it is interesting that it happened to Hamilton and not the other car.

This adds to the odd results of stewards inquiries in Malaysia and China.

Mr. Hamilton is certainly leading a charmed life this year.

And Another Thing

...what does Martin Brundle have against Massa? Brundle was all over Massa for the first-complex collision with Liuzzi's Force India, going so far at times to say that Massa was repeatedly trying to have Liutzi off.

Let's look at it sequentially.

Into turn one, the cars are three abreast: Liuzzi on the inside, Massa in the middle, and Button on the outside. (Check it out.) So Liuzzi is steaming up the inside, while Button turns in around the outside. Suddenly Massa has nowhere to go, and he's going to hit somebody. Since Liuzzi is coming from way back (seriously, go look at it) you could argue that he was going to hit Massa even if Button wasn't there. So the initial collision can be blamed on Liuzzi.

Next stage: Massa's Ferrari pitches left, back into Liuzzi. Since the two cars have come together, there's a 50-50 chance as to which direction it is going to spin. Liuzzi got unlucky, Button got lucky.

Third stage: both cars try to accelerate out of the hairpin. Unfortunately for Liuzzi he's still too close to Massa, and his rear wheel gets caught on the Ferrari's front as he tries to get away.

(This very strange YouTube video is all I can find of the collision right now, and I'm sure that the FIA will get right on getting it canned due to a rights claim.)

Anyways.

Strange videos aside -- what part of that looked like Massa having a go at Liuzzi?

Liuzzi made a huge lunge at a hole which wasn't there, and bore the consequences.

Massa was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Schumacher On Thin Ice

Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I never particularly liked Micheal Schumacher. Right from the moment he moved over on Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in an attempt to grab a driver's championship I filed him under "suspicious". I had been more charitable about his collision with Hill, I presumed that post-crash his car was not as controllable as it should have been and the subsequent collision with Hill was an unfortunate accident. Schumacher was living up to the category I'd filed him in, that being "fast but crashy".

Well those unfortunate accidents seem to follow Schumacher around like a little puppy, and yesterday we saw a couple more.

The collision with Kubica? The Renault had the line, Schumacher just wasn't going to give it up. Unfortunately for Kubica, he later flushed his credibility with that move around Sutil that the stewards judged to be dangerous, and Schumacher got the benefit of the doubt.

Then Massa came up on Schumacher and in the final chicane they came together. Schumacher arguably made a second move when lining up for the chicane, and this move cost Massa his front wing. Again, Massa compounded his woes by speeding in the pit lane when coming in for the wing change, and again Schumacher got the benefit of the doubt.

Hopefully the stewards will not continue to be blinded by Schumacher's history of achievement and will dole out some suitable punishments in future should these incidents continue.

I'm quite sure that Micheal would not have permitted Ferrari to take these kinds of offences had they been committed by a mid-fielder against him.

Lucky?

It probably doesn't feel like it, but Alonso got lucky on Sunday. This picture shows the damage done to his rear left wheel in the collision with Petrov's Renault in the closing stages; Alonso is fortunate that neither the rim nor the tire failed.



Alonso got a lot of press for calling out Ferrari's seemingly glacial pace of car development this year. The car clearly isn't on terms with the Red Bull or McLaren cars, but behind that it is hard to tell. Massa was right there with Rosberg's Mercedes all day, and the Mercedes acted as a road-block for many cars following it for much of the race. Alonso puts the Ferrari on par with Renault. I personally think that the Renault is currently faster, but that mish-mash of cars in the Mercedes-Ferrari-Renault list makes it hard to tell for certain who is where.

Ferrari appears to be pinning hopes on a upgrade for Valencia, although the gerbil-maze nature of that event won't really showcase upgrades much, and we'd have to wait a few weeks before getting on to more traditional circuits.

Farewell to Turkey?

It seems disappointing that a circuit which promotes actual racing is now possibly to be dropped by the series.

Where else have we seen this much actual racing -- in the dry no less?

• Hamilton and Vettel off the start, and then back again;
• Button passing Schumacher towards the end of the first lap;
• Vettel having a go at Webber, even if it ended in tears;
• Button and Hamilton having a go at each other;
• Alonso passing Petrov for position.

And that's just the for-points passes.

Button's McLaren may have been up to a second a lap faster than Schumacher's Mercedes, but the point is that he was able to pass instead of being held up.

This circuit shows how a race course should be set up, both to let the cars run and to give them opportunities to pass.

It is too bad that is is out in the middle of nowhere and cannot attract sufficient spectators to make it a viable enterprise. This seems to be putting an end to the event, even though the track itself seems custom-made for actual racing.