Honda Engine

F1 Fanatic wonders if Honda threw away a double-championship season?

Earlier this year I asked a Brawn engineer whether he thought the team would have been as competitive if its cars were still using Honda engines instead of Mercedes.

The response came back firmly in the negative, and various disparaging remarks were made about the quality of Honda’s engines and their inability to remove the skin from rice pudding.

Interesting reading.

My view has been that the Honda engine wasn't impressive, but still somehow wasn't impressively bad enough to justify being re-balanced as the Renault engine was. The Mercedes engine is clearly the powerplant to have, given the success of Brawn, McLaren, and even more amazingly, Force India.

Based on that I conclude that while the double-diffuser would give the Honda an edge at the beginning of the year, the team would be quickly caught as the rest of the pack developed similar pieces, and we would probably have been left with a Red Bull championship in 2009.

Podium at Home

Ferrari comes away with a podium at their home Grand Prix, albeit one gifted them by a very strange mistake made by Hamilton. I seriously wonder why McLaren permitted Hamilton to keep charging with only two laps to go -- the extra two points on offer were not risking the six points already in the bag. The rate that Hamilton was closing on Button left me with little doubt that while the two cars would probably cross the line nose-to-tail, the McLaren would not be able to pass the Brawn. It was out of reach.

Raikkonen did what he had to do, although for the second race in a row he found himself trying to fend off a Force India car. Unfortunately for him the car was much less happy on the last set of tires than previous sets, and that let Sutil stay closer than perhaps anyone at Ferrari cared to see. But until then the Ferrari had more than enough to keep the Force India behind.

Speaking of which -- hey whoa, those Force India cars really are fast. Sutil didn't feature in Belgium, but he got the job done here this weekend. I can only wonder what might have happened had Fisichella stayed with Force India.

Fisichella himself sees a bit of a redemption -- ninth is better than dead last, and knocking on the door for points. I doubt he will get on terms with his new teammate this year, but extra points will always be a good thing.

Overall though the race was a bit of a tactical procession, save some Toyotas trying to bang wheels at the end. I must say that I still don't see anything that gives me hope for an improved quality of racing next year. The KERS cars can occasionally pass non-KERS cars, but straight-up there is little passing unless someone makes an error or has a problem of some sort.

Button: Man or Monkey?

F1Fanatic ranks this year's drivers, ending with Jenson Button as number one. But the telling quote is the reader-supplied quote on Button:

It’s all well and good having a good car, but Barrichello has proved that its not just about the car. Button has driven superbly this season, and completely outdone Barrichello in the same machinery. --Claire MSJ

The thing is, I still don't rate Button very highly, for the same reason that I never rated Villeneuve highly -- his success only came when he was in a car which had a huge advantage over the rest of the field.

In Villeneuve's case, my description is usually Williams built a car that a monkey could win the world championship in. And in this case, there is a compelling argument that this is precisely what happened.

When Villeneuve's career was winding down, he found himself in the BAR with Button in the opposite car. While the car flattered neither driver, neither driver particularly covered themselves in glory while driving it.

The way Button's season has suddenly appeared to sag at the seams just as everyone was warming up the Button Becomes World Championship headlines gives lie to the suggestion that while he is certainly a competent driver, he is hardly exceptional.

The excuses have been convenient -- the Brawn can't deal with the cooler temperatures which prevailed at Silverstone or Nurburgring. The KERS cars had a technological edge in Hungary. But the fact is that those same KERS cars where overwhelmed at Monaco, where the Brawn put on a clinic of domination.

Brawn walks a tightrope as a team right now, balancing the need to strike the Championship now, while the fire is hot, and building a team which will compete reasonably in the future. Given their financial state, and the almost total lack of visible sponsorship support, one would think that the short-term thinking of maximizing performance potential today would be the best thing they could do; otherwise, their performance could drop off before a big-money sponsor is committed for next year.

But all that aside, if Button is going to promote himself from the ranks of the truly adequate, he's going to have to bring something special to the second half of the season.

BAR vs. Stewart

It occurred to me this weekend that the two teams at the top of the grid this year, Red Bull and Brawn, both have their roots in teams which were started about the same time. Red Bull has its genesis in the Stewart team started by Jackie Stewart in 1997, while Brawn's modern roots go back to British American Tobbaco's buy-out of Tyrell in 1998.

At the time there was a lot of back-and-forth in the media over whether it was better to start a new team from scratch, or effectively buy an entry from an existing team and throw everything else away.

In the end it was kind of moot as both teams went through a couple of metamorphasis to get to where they they are: Stewart -> Ford/Jaguar -> Red Bull and Tyrell -> BAR -> Honda -> Brawn.

But it is interesting to see two teams which were formed at the same time coming to prominence at the same time.

Contemplating the two teams, I am surprised that Honda bailed out when they did. While I am sure that the Honda board is kicking themselves for bailing out just before a dominant and successful season, I have serious doubts as to whether the team would have been as successful with a Honda engine in the car as opposed to the Mercedes. It also remains to be seen if Brawn can produce another competitive car for next year while pursuing this year's championship.

I am surprised that Red Bull managed to succeed at all. Their first year was flattered by the preparation done the previous year as Jaguar, and I really through they had bitten off more than they could chew when they immediately went out and bought Minardi as a junior team, and was unsurprised that by the end of the first year of Red Bull/Torro Rosso all four cars were circulating more or less together. The fact that Torro Rosso got the umbrella's first win (Vettel in Italy last year) only showed the ineptness with which the organization was being run. I had them pegged as an "all flash no dash" team and fully expected them to have divested themselves of Torro Rosso by now.

In a way both teams profited by the big two teams dropping the ball the way they did. However the fact is that they both had the means to take advantage of those mistakes by others.

Monaco 2009

I managed to watch some of the qualifying for Monaco, just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. And at the time, I commented that it was a measure of how bad the season had been up to that point that I was happy with Ferrari having the fastest time in Q2, and P2 in Q3.

Now that said the whole weekend was very kind to Ferrari when it counted. Both cars got into Q3, and Raikkonen managed to be less than three hundredths of a second slower than Button's Brawn. In the race both cars ran well and although were unable to make up places on the track, ran competitively and ended up "best of the rest" behind the Brawns.

And the result can be considered more or less legitimate, too. The only real absence during the race was Hamilton's McLaren after it was bounced into the barriers during Q1, effectively ending Hamilton's weekend right there.

Because Monaco is a strange event, I am not that concerned by Toyota's miserable showing. Monaco shows who can drive and who is flattered by horsepower. Which is fine, because next time out we can be flattered by horsepower again. I firmly believe that both Red Bull and Toyota will be back at the sharp end when we go to Turkey.

The event does highlight the stranglehold that Brawn has on the 2009 season. The car just seems to work well everywhere. And while I think Button may be more Jacques Villineuve than Micheal Schumacher, he definitely knows how to get the best from the car in more circumstances than his team mate does.

Diffusers Legal, For Now

BMW's protest of the diffuser design on the Williams, Toyota, and Brawn cars has been denied:

[...] the FIA issued a statement confirming that the stewards believe the cars are legal.

This decision will, of course, be appealed and there will be a formal hearing of the FIA's International Court of Appeal. Since that is not likely to happen for several weeks, the cars are likely to be protested again in Sepang.

There are two things that will happen from this: first, all the other teams will now prepare diffuser designs that are in line with Brawn etc's interpretation of the rules; however the teams which are on the record as protesting will not dare use them until after the hearing.

That's the tenth: Brawn GP car runs at Silverstone

Autosport has the early picture of the BrawnGP (formerly Honda) car running at Silverstone. We can't tell much from the single picture put up, but the car does have an unusual low nose drooping over the front wing; Autosport describes the sidepods as "highly sculpted", although we are yet to see photos of the overall car for ourselves.

The car is due to run at Barcelona next week and we will probably get a better look at the car at that point.