Team Lazarus

They say it’s best to make a clean break, but Honda’s exit from F1 seemed indecently hasty. No one suspected until the racing team turned up at its factory last December to find a note on the mantelpiece and all of its favourite LPs missing.

Honda’s thinking? You don’t lavish hundreds of millions on a racing team when you’re closing factories and laying off auto-workers. The F1 organisation, based in Brackley, Northamptonshire, had three months to find a new backer or face closure. So, no pressure.

Their top asset was Ross Brawn. Brawn had masterminded Michael Schumacher’s seven drivers’ world championships; he’d won with Benetton F1, restored Ferrari to greatness and disappeared into the sunset, clutching his fishing rods and a bag full of trophies. Honda lured him back then pulled the rug out with the job half done. He could have walked away, but he didn’t. F1 had a new team: Brawn GP, with Ross cast as the eponymous, if reluctant, hero.

With the start of the season fast approaching, Brawn GP still didn’t have an engine – an element perceived by most racing folk as being quite important – but finally a deal was done with Mercedes. It wasn’t exactly a perfect fit in a car designed around a Honda powerplant but, given sufficient gaffer tape and a really big hammer, racing engineers can achieve great things.

The outfit turned up in Australia with a car bereft of sponsors and testing mileage. The message was, ‘We’re just happy to be here’ – then that message shot off into the distance, leaving everyone else trailing in its wake. Jenson Button won the race and his Brawn team-mate, Rubens Barrichello, was second. For good measure, Button won five of the next six races and was bestowed the designation of World Champion-elect before the season reached half distance.

And as for Ross the Boss? At Ferrari he’d received a papal blessing. Now, thanks to a couple of miracles and an unlikely resurrection, the media were treating him like the Second Coming.

Liar, liar, pants on fire-gate

What started out as a coda to the Australian Grand Prix turned into a full-blown rock opera when F1 got to Malaysia for round two.border-bottom:1px dotted #000; Toyota driver Jarno Trulli finished third in Oz, only to have the stewards penalise him post-race for making an illegal overtaking move, passing McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton during a safety-car period (when everyone is supposed to hold station). The hapless Jarno claimed Hamilton had pulled over and let him through. The stewards summoned Hamilton and McLaren sporting director Dave Ryan. They denied everything.

Their strategy had two very minor flaws: Hamilton had already told the whole world he’d let Trulli through, and his car-to-pit radio confirmed it. McLaren had committed the ultimate sporting sin – they got caught.

The media went ballistic. The fallout had McLaren team boss Ron Dennis – an F1 fixture as venerable as Bernie Ecclestone or the Monaco Grand Prix – exiling himself to concentrate on McLaren’s latest road car project. Meanwhile Ryan – universally regarded as an honest man in a sport of scoundrels – fell on his sword. Hamilton somehow emerged as the innocent pawn of evil machinations. He hinted at inner turmoil while bravely soldiering on. Poor lamb…

Red Bull Rising

It’s been a good season for Red Bull Racing, a truth sometimes obscured by the fact it could easily have been a great one. The car designed under the direction of Adrian Newey, F1’s boffin-supreme, has been the only rival to Brawn. When it won, it won easily but, like a racehorse, only on ground it liked, excelling on fast, sweeping circuits. Whenever F1 got away from the modern, slow, TV-friendly tracks, it looked the business.

German prodigy Sebastian Vettel won Red Bull Racing’s maiden victory from pole position in Shanghai, then did it again in Britain and Japan. He hates being referred to as ‘the new Schumacher’ but does a very convincing impersonation. Meanwhile Mark Webber, the bad-luck magnet, raced the first half of the season with a leg looking like a bag full of hammers after losing out in an off-season bike-versus-SUV altercation. Still limping, he won after utterly dominating at Germany’s Nürburgring. Legend.

There’s something about Suzuka…

After a couple of years at the Fuji Speedway, F1 came back to it’s traditional Japanese home at Suzuka. Despite a few cosmetic alterations, the Beast in the East remains the ultimate test of skill and courage, thanks to the looping, soaring figure-of-eight layout that has endeared it to generations of petrolheads.

Somehow, this particular narrow, twisting ribbon of tarmac always brings out the animal in every driver. Thanks to a washout on Friday, the field went into the serious business of the weekend without having purged it from their system, and the carnage that followed was spectacular

Mark Webber destroyed his chassis in the morning, then the Saturday afternoon qualifying session claimed Jaime Alguersuari, Heikki Kovalainen, Sébastien Buemi, Timo Glock and half a dozen near-misses. Bonkers! Brilliant! A modern circuit wouldn’t be allowed to get away with a 290kph sixth-gear corner inches away from a hulking big wall, but history is always with F1 – and if the Degner Curve was good enough to catch out Nigel Mansell, it’s good enough for the modern generation. You don’t mess around with a classic.

Formula Topsy Turvy

It’s been a bizarre year. At the Turkish GP, Brawn were so superior that Button was in the EasyJet Speedy Boarding queue before the rest had finished. At the next race, at Silverstone in Britain, Vettel was a minute clear and humming the theme music from The Archers. Hamilton then dominated in Hungary for McLaren and Nico Rosberg’s Williams was easily the fastest car in Singapore. But the most surprising thing of all was Force India taking pole position at Spa-Francorchamps. Minnows just don’t do that.

Fortunately sanity was restored when Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen woke up from his torpor to win the Belgian Grand Prix. You could give Kimi a milk float and he’d somehow win at Spa. With the exception of last year, he’s never finished lower than first.

Crashgate

Last year Nelson Piquet Jnr splattered his Renault all over the Marina Bay grandstand during the Singapore Grand Prix. There were jokes about the fix being in. It was funny because a) no team would actually go down that route and b) as Piquet had hit pretty much everything else that season, it didn’t seem inconsistent. We now know better and, once again, the reputation of F1 has been dragged through the mud.

A few former drivers, safely retired and with money in the bank, snorted and said ‘so what’s new?’ but for the rest of the world it was a big deal. Team boss Flavio Briatore received a lifetime ban. Pat Symonds – the man who did most of the work while Flavio was busy squiring supermodels and buying football teams – has been banished for five years. Quite what it’s going to cost Piquet has yet to be determined; he was granted a whistleblower’s immunity, but don’t expect to see him driving an F1 car anytime soon.

Junior’s replacement was a young Swiss robot called Romain Grosjean who, displaying a previously unsuspected genius for slapstick, crashed his Renault at exactly the spot in practice for this year’s Singapore Grand Prix. He received an ironic standing ovation from all in the media centre while Renault’s acting team principal, Bob Bell, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end he opted for the former.

Tech trouble

This year F1 has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into new, overtaking-friendly bodywork that hasn’t improved overtaking, moveable front wings that nobody moves and, of course, KERS – the Kinetic Energy Recovery System. It was F1’s hybrid sop to the green lobby. Oddly, it involves a series of non-recyclable volatile chemical batteries that make cars heavier and – because it’s used to improve acceleration rather than economy – is actually less fuel-efficient.

Even the teams at the forefront of hybrid car design said it was a waste of time, but F1 ploughed on anyway, though in a half-arsed manner than meant only seven drivers used it. The technology was difficult to get working: it started fires and electrocuted mechanics, but mostly it just didn’t work. It came good in the end, particularly for Mercedes, who received just reward for their effort and multi-million dollar investment with a winning second half of the season. They’d probably have a big advantage next year, except that now everyone’s agreed not to use KERS any more. How very F1.

Politics!

The typical F1 season is nine months of wrangling, occasionally interrupted by a motor race. The arguments don’t change, but 2009 at least had some new factions. There’s still the FIA and President Max Mosley in the blue corner and the gestalt commercial rights holder, fronted by Bernie, in the black. But the new player is FOTA, the Formula One Teams Association. They can’t agree on what colour their corner is, but for once they have agreed it’s theirs.

It isn’t uncommon for the teams to unionise, but usually they fall out after 20 minutes and start throwing dung. Surprisingly it hasn’t happened this time. They’ve found common cause through the indignity of having new rules bulldozed through without their input. They’ve also expressed their displeasure at the commercial rights holder taking 50 per cent of F1’s income for doing approximately none of the work. When Bernie was running everything no one begrudged him his cut, but now it’s a group of shadowy bankers who are leaching the sport dry to service the debt they ran up buying it, so things are different. The teams decided to pull out, form their own series, keep all the money and race anywhere they damned well pleased.

Then it turned out the FIA and the commercial rights holder could be reasonable after all…

Of course the fallout – or not depending on who you believe – was Mosley’s decision to step down. In the election of a new president, he’s backing former Ferrari boss Jean Todt over former MEP and World Rally Champion Ari Vatanen. Though this might be a mind game; Vatanen is the spitting image of Mosley – quite possibly a clone – and maybe this is a plot to ensure Max remains president for eternity. Mwahahaha!

The Tao of Flav…

Part I: Jenson Bollard
A rant from Flavio Briatore is always worth deciphering. The one he launched into just before the Chinese Grand Prix was a classic. A protest launched by his team and several others regarding the legality of the Brawn cars was thrown out. He wasn’t very happy and said this:

“The drivers in our teams have been and are world champions, while the championship is now fought between a pensioner [Barrichello is 37] and another who is a good guy but a paracarro. People want the fight at the top to be among the best drivers in the world.”

Somewhat confused, the British media all ran off to their Italian counterparts. A paracarro, it transpires, is a kerbstone. Basically Flav was likening Button’s pace to that of a concrete bollard.

II. Taxi for Brawn
Not content with having a pop at Button and Barrichello, Briatore – former mastermind of Benetton’s US chain of woolly jumper emporia – also went for Ross Brawn, casting doubt on the latter’s suitability to run the FOTA technical working group. “Anyone is better, even the first Chinese taxi driver you see in the street.”

Of course Flav wasn’t the only one shooting from the lip. Bernie decided the run-up to the German Grand Prix was the perfect time to express admiration for Adolf Hitler; “a man who could get things done.”

Equally cursed and blessed
So, was Felipe Massa astoundingly lucky, or terribly unfortunate? His collision with an errant suspension component at the Hungarian GP was a freak, million-to-one chance. Had it hit him a millimetre on either side, Felipe could have lost the sight in his left eye – or worse.
Of course, within approximately 0.7 seconds of Flippa being declared ‘stable’ the debate turned to his replacement. After 0.71 seconds Ferrari testers Marc Gené and Luca Badoer were discounted on the grounds of not being Michael Schumacher. But Schumi, it transpired, wasn’t match fit, so Badoer got the nod.
Luca’s last F1 race was in 1999, and he held the dubious distinction of being the driver with the most races (56) for zero points. Getting a turn in the shiny Ferrari would surely get that monkey off his back? No. Badoer was slower than glacial erosion. With no race miles and precious little testing recently, only very accurate scientific instruments could tell the difference between him and stationary objects. His tenure as a Scuderia racer lasted 10 days. And it took his zero-points race tally to 58.

The Future
So, that was 2009. What’s in store for 2010?

Well, we’re almost certain to get another cost-cutting initiative. If it’s anything like the last couple, it will be massively expensive to implement, ultimately ineffectual and end up being thrown in the spare room with the pilates ball and pasta maker. Lewis Hamilton will continue to express himself like a polite young man from the 1950s. Gee, Gosh and Darn will feature prominently. The four new teams – Lotus F1, US F1, Manor Grand Prix and Campos F1 – will generate massive attention at the first race, then trundle around at the back never to be heard from again. Bernie Ecclestone will finally announce a date for the Indian Grand Prix. He may also add dates for races in Russia, South Africa and Narnia while he’s at it. (He’ll probably also point out that Genghis Khan was very kind to his mother.) Drivers will continue to lie about the sheer, unrelenting tedium of driving in Monaco. A massive police presence will be conspicuous on the streets around Brazil’s Interlagos circuit… the day after half the paddock gets robbed at gunpoint (the track is right next to a gaggle of favelas). Organisers will continue to insist everything is going according to plan and Donington Park will be ready to host the British Grand Prix – meanwhile they’ll also be rearranging the deckchairs and asking the brass band to strike up Abide With Me. New Ferrari driver, the notoriously fractious Fernando Alonso, will finally achieve his life ambition and start a fight in an empty room. The trend of younger and younger drivers will reach its natural conclusion when their union, the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, demands Barney the Dinosaur wallpaper, the right to wear Heelys in qualifying and a bigger run-off at Monza’s Variante della Roggia. They won’t get the run-off. The Singapore Hotel Association will buy ALBERT II, the BMW supercomputer, to better calculate the chances of their room charges tearing a hole in the fabric of reality. They will also use it to play Minesweeper. Kimi Räikkönen will continue to imbibe, rather than spray, his champagne. He will also hibernate from April until the August Bank Holiday, then briefly wake up, win in Belgium, say very little in the press conference and prepare for another little nap. The spectre of Ron Dennis will be used to frighten young mechanics into behaving themselves and making sure everything is tidy. A celebrity girlfriend will mysteriously appear in the paddock. Just as mysteriously she will disappear again, shortly after her movie/album/range of exciting new fragrances is released. Despite being pointedly told he’s live on the BBC, Sebastian Vettel will be unable to resist mentioning his balls. One of the teams will have a revolutionary aerodynamic device in Bahrain. All the other teams will question its legality while furiously working to copy it. Robert Kubica will look more and more like a slightly bewildered owl.