2012 Predictions Revisited

This is a monster post that has taken me two weeks to write because I've been busy with other things and have not had the time to get it done.  But we should get on with the laughing and pointing, because that's what is important in life, right?

So let's have a look at those half-assed predictions I made for the 2012 season:

Prediction: McLaren wins the Manufacturer's Championship.

Verdict: Wrong.  Red Bull wins again.  McLaren clearly had the faster car for most of the year, but reliability problems -- mostly in the pits -- and Button's continued lack of results ended up weakening the team to the point that both Red Bull and Ferrari finished ahead of them.

Prediction: Button or Vettel as Driver's Champion.

Verdict: Half right.  At the time I wrote that I really thought Button would be the one, so because I hedged I'm not claiming full marks.

You can't really argue with Vettel as Champion -- despite some uninspired drives early in the season, his two results in the last two or three races were champion's drives, coming from the back (in Abu Dhabi, twice).  And Red Bull (or, more likely, Renault) kept letting him down in potentially race-winning circumstances.  At the end of the season, though, the cumulative result was enough.

Button though reverted to his long-term trend of uninspiring drives.  He scooped a couple of wins in changing conditions that made him look like a genius, but when the conditions were good he, frankly, wasn't.  Years ago when he was a team mate of Jacques Villeneuve someone said that because he and Villeneuve were roughly equivalent you could argue that Button was as good as Villenuve was at the time.  However I've never rated Villeneuve highly, considering him only capable of winning in a car that is exceptionally good.  Button's only real success came in the overwhelming Brawn, since then he's been an adequate driver that doesn't get from his car what his team mate can.

Prediction: Ferrari will finish 2nd or 3rd in the Manufacturer's Championship

Verdict: correct.  The tone of my prediction was a lot more negative than what happened.  In Alonso's hands the Ferrari was routinely capable of scoring podiums and good points; and while I don't think Massa is a great driver I think his results more closely show what a typical driver would get from the Ferrari.  Overall the year was much better than I thought it would be.

Prediction: Alonso two wins and a handful of podiums.

Verdict: three-quarters right because I was, again, too negative.  Alonso finishes the year with three wins and was mechanical in his reliability through the year.  He was well placed to pick up positions and points when his rivals encounterd problems.  His two non-finishes were both due to collisions.  Alonso's results given the car he started with are nothing short of awesome, and the fact that he was still mathematically within reach of the title through most of the Brazilian Grand Prix incredible.

Prediction: 2012 will be Massa's last year at a top F1 team, possibly his last year in F1 at all.

Verdict: wrong.  Massa turned his season around in a very big way once the knives came out in late summer.  That, combined with a weak selection of available alternates (and I'm sad to include Micheal Schumacher in that group) meant that renewing Massa for 2013 was a no-brainer.  Hopefully Massa can continue the momentum he showed at the end of last year; hopefully the Ferrari will be easier to drive and more competitive in the early season.

Prediction: Mercedes may win one race, but it won't be Schumacher.

Verdict: totally right.  The only race where Mercedes was dominant was China, and Schumacher threw away a competitive positioning.  Rosberg kept his car on the island and walked away with the victory.  Apart from China, the Mercedes never really looked competitive, and faded quite dramatically towards the end of the year.

Prediction: There will be no replacement Concorde Agreement signed in 2012.

Verdict: dunno but probably wrong.  There has not been any formal announcement of a signing, but the press has stopped yammering about the Concorde complaints and gossip, and we're definitely going racing in 2013... so I guess one has been signed.

Prediction: 2012 will be Bernie Ecclestone's last in F1.

Verdict:  Well it is technically 2013 and he hasn't quit or been drummed out yet... so we'll be charitable and call that a wrong.  I think lots of people will be predicting that 2013 will be Ecclestone's last year, but that's low-hanging fruit now.

Deadpool predictions:

• Bernie Ecclestone (wrong, see above)
• HRT (correct)
• Marussa ownership change (hard to follow but I think so)
• Lotus cash flow (I'm going to call that correct)
• Torro Rosso to get sold (wrong)
• Not Force India owner (correct)

Final score: for the predictions, I have 3.25 out of 8.  I did better in the deadpool, scoring 4 out of 6.

Overall, 2012 was a pretty good year, where we had seven winners in the first seven races, and Raikkonen/Lotus scored a surprise win before the end.  That's a huge percentage of the grid as race winners, and when you are looking for suspense and unexpected results, you look for this kind of turn-over.

Tune in in February for the 2013 edition of "half assed predictions".

Charmed Life

Red Bull drivers led a charmed life on Sunday.

While no one can dispute that Vettel got his act together when it mattered and managed to be in the right place at the right time, much of his spectacular result can be placed at the feet of profiting from the Safety Car periods that happened when he did. Further, while all the chatter about him passing a car while outside the white lines on lap fourteen, I counted no fewer than four changes of direction while he vigorously defended his position.  Vettel comes away very fortunate that he was permitted to continue without a sterner penalty than just giving back the position.

Webber, on the other hand.  His first collision I can excuse as a racing incident.  The collision with Massa similarly I would be willing to write off as a racing incident.  But my view is he caused Massa to spin -- the long-lens footage is inconclusive, but the in-car camera from Massa's car clearly shows Webber charging back on-track in front of the Ferrari, causing Massa to take abrupt avoiding action.

Massa was right to be incensed that no action was taken.  I wonder how the stewards would have ruled had Massa failed to take avoiding action and clobbered the Red Bull instead?

The comentators gleefully claiming that Webber had "frightened Massa into a spin" didn't help, either.

Frankly when Webber happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often and got clobbered by Grosjean's avoiding action, I thought it was merely karma.

It isn't in Webber's history to drive like this.  I hope this is merely a one-off performance, and not an indication of things to come.

A Championship-Affirming Result

Quick thoughts from Britain:

• Alonso was right after the race -- it is disappointing to run at the front all afternoon only to be passed shortly before the end by a car that's doing better on its tires.  But had things gone the other way -- had Alonso been digging around in third and managed to bag second only laps from the end, we would all be ecstatic.  At the end of the day, Alonso extends his Championship lead over everyone except Webber.  So while a win would have been nice, this result is the sort that can lead to championships.
• Nice to see Massa have a decent day and end up with fourth.  That makes this weekend the most successful for Ferrari yet this year.
• Not cool: TSN pre-empted live coverage of F1 for Wimbeldon tennis.
• Also not cool: the TSN-main channel broadcast the F1 race at 11PM Eastern on Sunday night.
• So I ended up taping, and watching, the french RDS coverage of both qualifying and the race itself.  Since I'm not french-speaking, it was harder to follow -- although the only thing I was totally lost on was the translations of the itallian Ferrari transmissions.

Flavor Of The Month

I'm constantly surprised that the media is quick to proclaim some driver or other the next great driver based on one result.  This week's coming man is Sergio Perez, who's fine second place in Malaysia now has him all but occupying Massa's Ferrari seat for the GP in China.

Remember the last flavor-of-the-month, Nico Hulkenburg?  His shock pole  position in Brazil a couple of years so turned heads that he wasn't in F1 at all last year, and this year is pedaling a HRT.  And the media, for the most part, has already forgotten him.

I'm guessing this is more about the need to write something to fill those empty pages that get served across the internet.*

---
* Ironic, I know.

Unexpected

A win is a win is a win.

One can be less than charitable, claiming that Ferrari only won because

• The changable conditions caused a restart, which
• Made everyone start the restart on wets, but
• Everyone dove into the pits to get their tires changed, but
• Button went a lap early, meaning he ended up behind Hamilton and Alonso, and
• McLaren inexplicably bumbled Hamilton's stop meaning he came out behind Alonso as well

...and while all that may be true, the bottom line is that you have to be fast enough to be present enough to take advantage of both mis-steps.  Even with the Hamilton mis-step, Alonso only came out scant seconds ahead of Hamilton.  And while the Ferrari was clearly faster than the McLaren, I'm not sure Hamilton wouldn't have been able to defend successfully.

That day, those conditions, Alonso and the F2012 were fast enough.  And combined with his results from Australia, Alonso even leads the Drivers' championship.

I'll take it.

I worry for the near future, though -- the F2012 isn't fast enough in qualifying.  Both outings so far suggest that race pace is adequate, at least in Alonso's hands.

Massa again I'm not sure about, he definitely needs better results --immediately -- if he's even going to last the season.  I don't see him being dropped any time soon, but unless things improve there will be someone else in that car come September.

Roll on China.

2011 Ferrari Summary

Well, that's done. Ferrari comes away from 2011 with 3rd in the Manufacturers' title, and drivers Alonso and Massa end up 4th and 6th in the Driver's title. This was somewhat less than was desired, let alone expected -- Ferrari was very big on the goal of winning this year.

Based on the way the car performed, this result is more or less what could have been expected. Alonso has been extremely rapid, and downright brilliant at times, yet could only win once, in Britain when Vettel got held up and McLaren for some reason had lost the plot -- possibly due to the on-again, off-again rules about exhaust handling which for that race were on-again.

Overall the story has been of repeated, constant, machine-like consistency from the Red Bulls in general, and Vettel in particular. This is the season that 2010 should have been like for Red Bull.

One can also point fingers at the car. The F150* demonstrated excellent race pace on option tires, but never got the best out of the primes. This is possibly related, as the car was very gentle on the option tires, meaning there was more performance for longer than other cars were capable of delivering -- the flip side of this was that both drivers --especially Massa -- constantly had trouble putting heat into the primes because the car was just too gentle on them. This meant during the prime stints, the car just couldn't live with its competition. Giving up on development in September didn't help either, as the other teams continued to bring improvements.

Nevertheless, in order to profit from others misfortunes you have to be there or there abouts, and when McLaren stumbled Ferrari was usually there to take the advantage.

Alonso has continued in appearing to get the best available out of his car at all opportunities. Being able to run with, and occasionally ahead of, healthy Red Bulls (albeit those driven by Mark Webber) and McLarens showed that he hasn't lost any skill or drive. He seemed to have more visible mechanical issues over the year (several DRS and KERS failures) than his team mate, yet somehow managed to stay well ahead of him most of the time. Alonso is one of those drivers who can win the championship without having the benefit of the best car on the grid.

Massa, on the other hand... I somehow feel that he's never really come back from his accident in 2009. Although I wonder how much of his poor performances has been the car (vs his just not being an Alonso-caliber driver), I somehow feel that a younger, hungrier driver might stay closer to Alonso than Massa has. I never doubt the sincerity and commitment of Massa's effort... I just think perhaps it isn't enough any more.

Overall this year was what I expected -- a Red Bull technical demonstration. McLaren comes and goes, and this year they were on more than I expected. But I never expected anything better than 3rd in the manufacturer's, and possibly 3rd in the driver's.

So now we pack everything away and await the new car introductions in January.

---
*= th Italia blah blah blah

What We Learned: Malaysia 2011

Quick commentary which boarders on incoherence:

• DRS worked better here than it did in Australia. I think there were two differences between here and Australia. First, the placement of the "determination" point just before the last corner was at the end of a long straight run with only the final corner between the "determination" point and the "active zone", meaning that cars which were faster through the curves than their pursuers were unable to get away as much. So the cars which were faster in a straight line than their targets ended up closer to their targets than they did in Australia. Second, the pit straight is longer and wider than it was in Australia, giving more time and space for the DRS advantage to be realized. DRS still seems gimicky to me, and I suspect the Australia experience will be closer to the norm than Malaysia. That said, DRS will probably work better in China than Australia.
• Ferrari has some qualifying speed, but at Malaysia they were clearly slower than the McLaren and Red Bulls.
• Ferrari's race pace looks much more promising. While still not challenging for the lead, the Ferrari can dice with the Renaults and pick up anything that the McLarens and Red Bulls drop.
• Ferrari's DRS failure on Alonso's car is frustrating. This is a pretty simple system all things told. I point at this failure as the principle cause of Alonso's driving into the back of Hamilton. The collision threw away the podium to be sure.
• Massa had a steadier race, but still doesn't look like he's on Alonso's pace. If the Ferrari was on pace with the McLaren this wouldn't be as much of an issue, but really Ferrari needs both cars coming home higher up than they have been.
• At this point the championship looks like Vettel's to lose. Two wins in dominating fashion, the Malaysian one with KERS unavailable to him. If Red Bull can keep consistent, he'll be uncatchable except perhaps around some specialist courses like Monaco or Spa.
• Nice to see Heidfield back on the podium. It is just hard to hear it over the sound of Kubica weeping.
• Petrov does his audition for the Dukes Of Hazzard sequel. Scary stuff to see the steering assembly come apart in his hands on landing, but not really surprising since the cars are not designed to be bounced over anything. That's the picture of the year so far.
• The current car rankings look like Red Bull, then McLaren, then Ferrari, then Renault. Lots of distance to go, and I think Renault will fade as the year goes on.

Short week then China this weekend.

What We Learned: Australia 2011

What we learned from yesterday's GP:

• DRS isn't working in its current form. The only convincing DRS-enabled pass was Jenson Button blowing past a backmarker that he'd have blown past later anyways. When his McLaren was on even terms with Massa's Ferrari -- that is to say, the McLaren was visibly faster once released by the Ferrari -- DRS didn't help. Most of the other passes that happened could be attributed to tire degradation, in that cars with fresh tires are much faster than cars on worn tires. Watching one of the Ferrari's stalk Button before he peeled off on a tire change, you could see the DRS being deployed and it making almost no impression on the McLaren. Definitely not the go-faster tool that the FIA envisioned.
• Ferrari is probably the third-fastest car right now. Alonso had a terrible start, but even so managed to be making up ground on third-place Petrov at the end. If he had not had the terrible start, he probably would have been ahead of Petrov's Renault. However he'd also be behind Button's McLaren, so at this point there is work to do. The F150* will almost definitely win races and may contend later this year, but for now it is clearly best of the rest.
• Vettel still has it: a dominating performance in qualifying gave him the platform to convert to an almost uncontested win. This car/driver combination still looks unbeatable. What more needs to be said?
• I don't want to write off Massa, but this performance is just more of the same we saw last year -- much slower than his team mate and vague complaints of technical difficulties, this time "rear tire issues". It would be too easy to write him off at this point, we'll check back in after a couple more races before we polish the axe.
• Petrov impressed, but would Kubica have bettered that result? The year's worth of experience had done Petrov's performance a world of good, and a trouble-free run grants him his first podium. He probably is the beneficiary of Alonso and Button's poor luck. All things being equal, I don't see him regularly coming home in front of those two cars.
• Sauber stumbles: running the entire distance on one tire change, especially when others were having severe problems making them last, is impressive. To see both cars excluded due to a technical infringement that didn't grant them a competitive advantage is a shame.

---
*= ...th itallia blah blah blah, whatever. It's the F150 to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well That's 2009 Done

Ferrari really is pretty much done with 2009, aren't they? Now that Fernando Alonso has been confirmed to drive alongside Philippe Massa, the team is left in the situation of having two drivers who won't be back next year driving a car for which no further development will be done.

Makes one wonder what the point of the last few races will be.

If Raikkonnen can't get competitive pace out of the car, what hope does Fisichella have? Raikkonen circulated out of the top ten in Singapore, which means that Fisichella's target for the rest of the year pretty much boils down to "don't be last and don't run into anybody else".

If Singapore is indicative of the rest of the year, any points would be above reasonable expectations.

Given that situation, I doubt that Massa will risk a return to racing in 2009. Between his injury and the car dropping back in competitiveness, there's no reasonable way he can put up anything even close to a good race result. Massa will wait for winter testing to return to the driver's seat.

2009 ends on a sour note for Ferrari. Not that we really expected much in the way of results. Right from the word go this year the car was not a world-beater. Both Ferrari and McLaren have demonstrated what is possible if you have a lot of resources available to throw at car development. McLaren managed to do it better, demonstrated by the fact that their car was once of the worst at the beginning of the year and is now regularly at the front.

I sure hope this early focus on 2010 pays off, even if I'm not a fan of Alonso... but maybe more on him another time.

Massa's Impact

F1 Fanatic has a well put together entry examining the physics of the hit Massa took this weekend:

By the numbers above, Massa would have been 14 times better off being hit by Nolan Ryan fastball. He would have been four times better off letting Barry Bonds take a full-force swing at his head. For that matter, in terms of sheer energy, he’d have been better off letting Barry Bonds hit him in the head at the same instant that someone shot him point-blank with Dirty Harry’s gun.

Hmmm, a little hyperbolic.

But still, the point is that taking 800 grams to the head at 100 miles per hour could quite easily have been a tragedy and can still be a career-ending incident. The brain is an amazing construction but can still be damaged in ways we do not understand.

Filipe not only lives, but looks to have a strong prognosis -- this alone makes him very, very lucky. Anything beyond that is a bonus.