Overwhelming

So from today we can conclude that the Mercedes engine is a huge advantage.  I rate the Ferrari engine next, and the Renault bringing up the rear.  I think the Red Bull chassis is in the same ballpark as the Mercedes chassis, with the Ferrari probably next -- but Mercedes power covers a lot of sins. 

The way the two Mercedes romped away from everyone else over the last ten laps -- three(!) seconds a lap faster than anyone else -- was awesome.  Dispiriting to everyone who isn't driving a Mercedes, and even more so to anyone who doesn't have a Mercedes engine, yes, but still an awesome display of power.

2014 is going to be a long year for Ferrari.  Points today is entertain no points, but really the title looks like a "next year" prospect.  The list of teams beating Ferrari today is depressingly long and includes a bunch of teams which really shouldn't be there.  Force India?  Williams?  Really?  Yes, really, and we just have to ride this season out and hope that next year is better. And it feels terrible to be writing off 2014 just three events into the season but frankly without engine development being permitted I don't see any chance for significant improvement.

I think that the engine homologation rules are really going to work against Formula 1 for a while.  Freezing engines after the formula had been in place for a few years and everyone had done some real-world development was one thing.  The resulting engines were reasonably equal, with some trade-offs -- yes the Mercedes was more powerful, but the Renault was lighter and easier on fuel.  But now that there is clearly an engine disparity and no chance to make it up in-season, Formula 1 risks becoming a one-make series.

Quiet Day Of Racing Down Under

So the fans in the stands were not terribly impressed with the noise, and frankly after listening to this I don't blame them:


I suppose that the bottom line for Ferrari is that we have to be reasonably pleased that both cars got home at the end.  Alonso looked reasonably quick as compared to the mid-fielders, so this car likely won't be struggling with the back-of-the-packers.  There's clearly still much to do to make this a competitive package.

Your overwhelming winner on the day was Mercedes, powering four of the top five places (and five of the top six), with Alonso being the only outlier.

Renault has to be the overwhelming loser, between problems for Vettel and the total Caterham collapse and Lotus' problems.  The highest place non-excluded finisher was a Toro Rosso back in 8th.

The honorable mention for being the loser has to be Red Bull, with Riccardo's car being excluded at the end -- one can only assume that had Vettel made the flag he would have had similar problems, Red Bull never being shy about doing what they think is right even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise.  At least the car wasn't slow and illegal.

Bottas showed that the Williams can be fast in the right hands, promising for them.

However over all the racing felt very dry to me.  Now this has been a common complaint for me about Australia, something about the circuit does not seem to be conducive to generating entertaining racing.  So I'll reserve judgement for now on the new rules.

Another complaint I had was that the safety car period felt like it went on for ever and ever, and TSN piling on commercial after commercial didn't help that feeling.  You can say a lot about the old CART days, but one thing they knew how to do was a safety car period.

Swing And A Miss

The facts of this dispute are fairly straight forward:

• That Mercedes did undergo a private test during the season with a current car; and
• That the regulations specifically prohibit testing during the season with a current car.

Frankly, anything else is muddying the waters.

Mercedes may suggest that they undertook this test at the behest of Pirelli -- the fact that a third party enticed them to break the rules does not remove the fact that the rules were broken.

Mercedes may suggest that Ferrari conducted a similar test, but with a 2011-spec car -- the rules are quite clear that once the car is two seasons past, owners can do what they want, where they want, however frequently they want, so this objection has absolutely no relevance to the dispute.

Mercedes may claim that they gained no advantage from this test.  While this may possibly be so, there is A) no reason to believe this, and B) to conduct such a test and not gain an advantage from it proposes a stunning level of incompetence on the part of team management.

That said, the penalty of being forced to miss the young drivers test at years end is not so much punishment for the team as for Formula 1 as a whole, since there will be correspondingly less seat time available to groom future talent.  It is a joke.

Pirelli's argument that there needs to be a mechanism to test tire changes is a valid one, however the whole issue of messing with tire compounds in-season is another issue.

Half-Assed Predictions for 2012

With the 2012 season gearing up, here are my predictions, such as they are, for 2012:

• Your manufacturer's world champion: McLaren.  Just watching the testing buzz I think that Red Bull is vulnerable this year for some reason and that the McLaren will have an early, run-away advantage over the field.
• Your world champion: Either Jensen Button or Sebastien Vettel.  I think that Vettel is the real deal and if anyone can overcome the challenges that I think Red Bull will have in the early going it will be him.  If he can't, my view is that Hamilton will be easilly rattled early going and Button will be the one with the lead. The question will be "can Vettel catch him before the end of the season".
• Ferrari will have a miserable year.  Maybe two wins maximum, both for Alonso, both when the McLarens and Vettel are sidelined or held back for some reason.  Possibly regular podiums.  The car will be reliable rather than fast and the team will struggle to find speed.  Ferrari will be best of the rest this year -- possibly a distant 2nd or 3rd in the Manufacturer's title behind McLaren but on the approximate order of Red Bull.
• Alonso will collect maybe two wins and a handful of podiums, but the car will be reliable rather than fast.  Alonso will deal with this reality better than Massa does.
• 2012 will be Massa's last year at a top F1 team, possibly his last year in F1 at all.  Massa is a quality driver, no doubt -- he just isn't an elite driver and the car won't be able to make up that difference.  He'll be in around the Mercedes and Webber and achieve a reasonably reliable record.  It won't be considered enough and Ferrari might be decent enough to wait until the end of the season to announce a replacement -- but more likely it'll happen before September.
• Mercedes may win one race, but it won't be Schumacher.  It will be Rosberg and he'll do it on merit -- not through "changeable conditions".  Overall they may hound Ferrari but my view is they'll be 4th overall.
• Politically: FOTA will continue to implode as the FIA uses Ferrari's absence as a wedge with the rest of the teams.  There will be no replacement Concorde Agreement signed in 2012.  There will be some talk about the teams buying an interest in the commercial side of F1 but I expect this will be blocked by the smaller teams on the grounds that buying an equity position into F1 as a requirement for participation will blow affordability out of the water, and the alternative (the grandee teams owning an interest while the smaller teams don't) would be construed as the fox guarding the hen house.  Besides, any and all negotiations will be thrown up into chaos because...
• Shocker: 2012 will be Bernie Ecclestone's last in F1.  I don't know if he's gonna die or have a stroke or get sent to prison or something, but my gut tells me we'll be dealing with the chaos of his sudden absence rather than his continued presence.  And chaos it will be since he won't be around to manipulate the Concorde Agreement negotiations or help take care of whatever regulations interpretation firestorm blows up.  There will be a ton of opportunists who streak in either to "take control" or make a money grab.  If the courts are involved and the various shell and holding companies Ecclestone uses have to be liquidated then control of the sport will be in doubt.  It will be a very tense winter in the run-up to 2013 with lots of people wondering if F1 will survive into 2014.

My 2012 Deadpool predictions:

• Bernie Ecclestone (see above).
• HRT will change ownership at least once if not expire completely.
• Marussia (formerly Virgin) will change ownership at least once but probably survive into 2013.
• Lotus Cars will experience ownership problems that will result in the Lotus team (formerly Renault) having catastrophic cash flow problems.  Whether or not the Lotus team survives is up to whomever buys Lotus Cars (unlikely) or the team's ability to find a large quantity of alternative financing in a hurry.  The results of the early season will be critical in terms of finding that finance.
• Red Bull will have another go at selling Torro Rosso but be stymied again by the global economy and the fact that HRT will always be a cheaper buy.
• I think the Indian billionaire financing Force India will stay ahead of the hounds for 2012, but the team will be fundamentally owned by someone else for 2013.

Tune in again in November for the laughing and pointing.

Engine Rebalance?

F1Fanatic wants to know if the currently available engines should be equalized. Currently Red Bull is whining that the Renault engine they are using (to lead the Driver's championship with, natch) is down 20 to 30 horse power when compared to the Mercedes engine, currently the benchmark for power.

Like all issues in Formula One, the answer to this depends on what the FIA and the constructors want Formula One to be.

If Renault is permitted to boost their horsepower, then Mercedes will be put out because the Renault engine is lighter then theirs. Cosworth will be put out because the Mercedes is smaller. Ferrari will be put out because the Renault is more fuel efficient. Or whatever. The point is: whenever you have different engines, there are going to be pros and cons to each one. Some will excel some areas while being deficient in others; other engines will offer a balance of all criteria[*].

If you give legitimacy to this complaint, you are opening the door to validating the rest of the complaints, and this road leads to... a spec engine. If every manufacturer is making the same engine, you might as well just have one make the engine and save everyone some money.

Formula One is slowly sliding down the slope to a spec series, or a might-as-well-be-a-spec-series like CART used to be.

If you want to let engineers try to have new ideas in an attempt to gain an advantage, you have to accept the fact that sometimes this advantage will put some teams ahead of others, and that sometimes these ideas are going to get it wrong, either in conception or execution. And this will happen in all areas of the car that are not "spec".

The engine freeze probably looked good on paper, but in execution it makes the manufacturers line up rather predictably. And this running order is rather rigid.

It also puts even more lie to the idea that concepts learned in racing are (or even can be) applied to road cars. Especially since aside from the last round of rebalancing, very little has changed in Formula One engines in two years.

From all that, I have this opinion. I think the engine freeze should be lifted in its entirety.

But failing that, I think that a "rebalancing" isn't appropriate, as it would lead to other complaints.

--
[*] = In the case of Cosworth, the only particularly important area this engine excels in is "availability", since most teams cannot get a Mercedes, Renault, or Ferrari engine for any price. But that's still a valid advantage for Cosworth.

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.

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.

Safety Car Lines

Micheal's back, and the controversy rolls on.

The most recent issue is about the post-safety-car, pre-finish pass of Alonso's Ferrari. Personally I find the Steward's findings to be the correct one, although I freely admit that I may be biased by the colour of Alonso's car.

There is a valid argument on Mercedes' part, in that the messages issued by Race Control and combined with the withdrawal of the SC boards, the green flags and and green lights do imply that the track was open for racing -- all, what 250 meters of it between the safety car line and the finish line. Given that, the Stewards' findings regarding a race ending under Safety Car provisions can be argued to not be in force.

However.

Opening the track for racing over all of two corners and all of 250 meters of track is a recipe for chaos. If everyone has a go at the car in front, someone somewhere is going to hit the car in front of him, and at Monaco especially this will result in a large chain-reaction that will probably prevent the cars behind from passing at all -- if they even manage to avoid being involved.

So while Mercedes' interpretations of the rules may be technically correct, opening up such a condition is in nobody's best interest in the long run.

The rules should be clarified so that races that end under Safety Cars are explicitly to end under Safety Car conditions -- something along the lines of "if the race is under Safety Car conditions at the beginning of the final lap, these Safety Car conditions will be automatically extended to the end of the race" or something equally unambiguous.

Alternatively the FIA could look at getting rid of the Safety Car line entirely and just use the Start/Finish line as the Safety Car line -- something which would make all this end-of-race-procedure discussion moot.

Valencia Test 2010: Day 1

More launches:

• Mercedes W01: The descendant of last year's title winner gets extra length, a Red Bull style kinked nose, and a conservative shark fin.
• Williams FW32: Williams didn't seem to do a 'proper' unveiling, more of just turning up and running the car as if it was just another day so the photos are a bit lacking -- Autosport's spy-shot from yesterday shows a much more detailed profile. Another high nose, although this one has a little T-bar near the upper point. Less pronounced (as in practically absent) nose kink than some other offerings. There's something interesting going on at the bottom of the leading edge of the sidepods -- but I can't see if there are any barge-boards there.
• Toro Rosso STR5: Turns out that those manufacturing facilities put in last year were to validate Toro Rosso as a proper constructor. Still it is interesting that Toro Rosso broke cover before their parent team Red Bull. Pronounced nose-kink; weird front wing connectors similar to those we saw on the BMW-Sauber yesterday. Full shark fin. You can really see the extra bulk behind the cockpit in this car that is hidden in others.

Miscelanious meaningless notes for day one testing:

• Ferrari finishes the day with the fastest time, Massa behind the wheel.
• Schumacher was faster than Rosberg.

F1 Engines

James Allen reports on comparative studies of 2009 F1 Engines:

Most teams reached the conclusion, based on acoustic analysis and GPS, that the spread of engine power from the best to the worst engines was less than 2.5% this year. This means that, if the Mercedes is believed to have had 755hp, the least powerful engine was 18hp down, which is worth just under 3/10ths of a second per lap.

I find that 0.3 second per lap penalty from 18 horse power to be suspiciously large.

Power wise, the ranking is Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault, and Toyota.

Efficiency wise, the Renault was the best engine, the Ferrari the worst. This will be important next year as refueling is no longer permitted.

For 2010, Cosworth is claiming 770 horse power. That is another 15hp up on the Mercedes. As Allen notes, the Cosworth has much less reliability testing and fuel consumption is an issue.