Silly Season 2012

We’ve once again reached that part of the Formula One season when speculation as to which drivers are heading where traditionally becomes rife. While some of the championship’s biggest names are contracted to their existing teams next year, a number of big hitters are yet to have their destinies decided.

The most significant of these is Lewis Hamilton, whose contract with McLaren expires at the end of the year. A number of costly blunders on the part of the Woking-based team have cost him numerous points so far this year, prompting speculation that the Brit could opt to leave the team with whom he has driven since the start of his F1 career five years ago. Red Bull had been mooted as a potential destination for Hamilton, but the recent confirmation that Mark Webber would stick with the Anglo-Austrian team for at least one more year has ruled such a move out.

Of the race-winning outfits, that leaves potential vacancies only at Ferrari and Mercedes. The former is generally regarded as a no-go for Hamilton as long as Fernando Alonso is at the team (the Spaniard is under contract until the end of 2016) due to their tempestuous relationship as teammates at McLaren. Mercedes meanwhile are seemingly keen to retain Michael Schumacher alongside the contracted Nico Rosberg should he choose to continue, which seems likely as 2012 has been by far the seven-time champion’s most convincing season of his comeback yet.

The smart money is therefore on Hamilton sticking around at McLaren, although a potential sticking point could prove to be the length of a new contract. The team will no doubt be eager to secure Hamilton’s services for as long as they can, but the Brit would do well to avoid commiting himself beyond 2013 as the new engine regulations that come into force for 2014 could well mix up the competitive order – McLaren could find itself at a distinct disadvantage without a works engine deal in place, though a revival of its once-dominant alliance with Honda remains a possibility.

Felipe Massa is another driver whose fate remains uncertain. In the wake of some dire early season performances, the chances of the Brazilian retaining his Ferrari seat seemed non-existent. However, a recent upturn in his form means that there is now a distinct chance he could yet stay at the Maranello team for an eighth successive season. Ferrari Academy member Sergio Perez had marked himself out as a likely candidate to replace Massa with his second place finish at Malaysia, but Ferrari president Luca di Montezemelo is on the record saying that he thinks the Mexican lacks sufficient experience to be offered a Ferrari seat just yet.

If the rumour mill is to be believed, Sebastian Vettel has an option to jump ship from Red Bull to Ferrari in 2014, meaning that any replacement would be signed in all likelihood for just a one-year deal. As well as Perez, other possible candidates include Heikki Kovalainen, who has impressed many onlookers with his performances at Caterham, and Adrian Sutil, who despite having been left on the sidelines for this season is working hard on a return. Massa’s former employers Sauber would probably represent his only chance to remain on the F1 grid should he be shown the door at Ferrari, but emulating compatriot  Rubens Barrichello and competing in IndyCar could prove a more attractive option.

Either way, it appears as if Kamui Kobayashi is in danger of dropping off the grid for next season. The Japanese driver has been largely outshone by Perez so far this season at Sauber, and his lack of sponsorship dollars unfortunately does not make him a particularly interesting prospect for any other team. In addition to Massa, former Toro Rosso driver Jaime Alguersuari is a candidate to replace Kobayashi, who will have the advantage of having been one of Pirelli’s test drivers for this season as well as a considerable sponsorship package. Should Perez be offered a Ferrari drive, Sauber may also find it beneficial to sign their current test driver, Esteban Gutierrez, in order to maintain their myriad of Mexican sponsors.

Another potential avenue for Alguersuari is Force India. With Schumacher likely to stay with Mercedes for another year, there appears to be little chance of either Paul Di Resta or Nico Hulkenberg securing a better drive for next season; Hulkenberg thus runs the risk of being replaced either by Alguersuari or by test driver Jules Bianchi, whose chances of being promoted to a race seat have been recently played up by team boss Vijay Mallya. Bruno Senna is another driver who could find himself in the cold at the end of the year, as he has failed to extract the same pace out of the Williams car as teammate Pastor Maldonado. Test driver Valtteri Bottas has reportedly impressed the Grove-based outfit during Friday practice sessions, and thus stands a good chance of partnering Maldonado if Senna fails to lift his game.

Caterham could offer a reprieve to one of the aforementioned if Kovalainen is indeed selected to partner Alonso at Ferrari next season, though test driver Alexander Rossi is also a contender by virtue of his potentially lucrative American passport, while Vitaly Petrov has probably done enough to stay on board notwithstanding the copious number of rubles he brings to the team. At Marussia, Timo Glock is in theory under lock and key for the next two seasons, whilst positive noises are being made about Charles Pic chances of retention, although the same applied for Jerome D’Ambrosio last year before he was quietly dropped by the team – the Frenchman’s fate will probably boil down to sponsorship. The same goes for HRT’s Narain Karthikeyan, with Pedro de la Rosa under contract in the sister car and test driver Dani Clos in the frame to create an all-Spanish line-up for 2013.

With so many drivers with F1 experience on the sidelines this year – including Sutil, Alguersuari, D’Ambrosio and current Red Bull reserve Sebastien Buemi to name a few – there is a risk that, particularly in the era of no in-season testing, that up-and-coming drivers will be unable to make the illusive final step into the ranks of F1. The rules cater for an extra team and thus an additional two seats, which the FIA should be making more effort to realise in order to help ensure that none of the promising talents from GP2 or World Series by Renault, of which there are many, find their paths blocked.

British Grand Prix 2012 - Round-up

First of all, allow me to apologise for the lateness of this post – my girlfriend and I were among the thousands of mud-soaked campers at this year’s British Grand Prix, where the torrential downpours had delayed our return until this afternoon as our campsite became a veritable cesspool.

On the upside, we were fortunate enough to enjoy the incredible sensory experience that is having 24 Formula One cars circulating one of the greatest motor racing tracks in the world before our very eyes. Armed with a reasonable vantage point in the grassy bank between Stowe and Vale corners and a handy-dandy ‘Fanvision’ device, we were able to keep abreast of all the action in another intriguing and rather eventful contest.

Red Bull and Ferrari emerged from the 90-minute rain-induced delay in the middle of qualifying to emerge as the most competitive teams, with Fernando Alonso on pole position from Mark Webber. Sunday was essentially a two-horse race between the top two contenders in this year’s championship, and it was a superior tyre strategy that gifted the Aussie a popular ‘home’ victory – he does, after all, live just down the road from Silverstone in a village near the town of Aylesbury.

With soft and hard tyres on the menu for what was miraculously a completely dry race, Ferrari opted to start Alonso on hard tyres and Red Bull softs for Webber, with all the Q3 men free to choose their tyre compound for the race with their qualifying times naturally having been set with intermediate tyres. It was the hard tyre that proved the quicker over a stint, Alonso duly making a good start and quickly building a gap with his faster rubber.

Alonso began his final stint, for which he had to equip soft tyres with fourteen laps to go, with a buffer of around five seconds over Webber. The Red Bull driver however began to eat into the Spaniard’s advantage at an alarming rate with the help of the hard tyres, and found himself sitting on the championship leader’s gearbox with around seven laps to go. It became clear that it would merely be a question of when, rather than if, Webber would find a way past and claim the win.

Sure enough, the move came with the help of DRS at Brooklands on lap 48, and the best efforts of Alonso were insufficient to keep his ailing Ferrari in the lead of the race as the pair went toe-to-toe around Luffield. Webber held on for the remaining laps to take his second Silverstone win in three years, with Alonso seemingly content with second place and a marginally reduced championship lead of thirteen points.

Third position fell to Sebastian Vettel, who made use of an early first stop to jump ahead of the queue that formed in the wake of Michael Schumacher in the opening stint. The reigning champion however was never a factor for the win having damaged his front wing by clipping Felipe Massa on the opening lap, and was forced to settle for the final step on the podium.  With fourth place, Massa took his best result since finishing third in the 2010 Korean Grand Prix, and was even catching Vettel towards the end of the race in an assured drive.

The Brazilian was chased home by his former teammate Kimi Raikkonen, whose scorching pace only became evident in the final stint when he set fastest lap with the benefit of clear air having previously been held up by Schumacher.  Romain Grosjean meanwhile recovered to a sixth place finish following an off in qualifying that left the Frenchman tenth on the grid and an early collision with Paul di Resta that put the Scot out of contention on lap one.

Schumacher’s wet-weather brilliance allowed him to qualify his Mercedes higher than it had any real right to be in third place, but reality bit beneath the sunshine on Sunday as the German slipped to a more representative seventh-place finish. Nico Rosberg on the other hand was ineffective all weekend, making a poor start from a mediocre grid slot of eleventh and failing to make any real progress thereafter en route to a dismal fifteenth place finish behind both Toro Rosso drivers.

Another team that was left scratching their heads over their lack of form was McLaren. Neither Lewis Hamilton nor Jenson Button qualified especially well, the former starting from eighth and the latter sixteenth following a disastrous Q1 exit. A long opening stint gave Hamilton a brief lead in front of his adoring home fans, but a strategic error by McLaren – making Hamilton run the slower soft tyre for just seven laps in the middle stint – compounded a simple lack of race pace on the part of the Woking-built cars. Hamilton finished where he started whilst Button made a good start and kept his nose clean to steal the final point of the day as a number of his other rivals hit trouble.

Chief among these was Pastor Maldonado, who got himself embroiled in yet another on-track collision. Sergio Perez was was attempting to pass the Venezuelan around the outside at Brooklands having pulled clear along the preceding straight before Maldonado outbraked himself and piled into the side of the Sauber, putting the irate Mexican out of the race. Maldonado was able to continue, but the damage he sustained limited him to a sixteenth place finish while his teammate Bruno Senna drove a decidely more steady race to ninth place between the two McLarens.

To complete a wretched weekend for the Sauber team, Kamui Kobayashi was running well inside the points until he mowed down several members of his pit-crew during his final stop in his over-exuberance. The Japanese thus could do no better than eleventh, ahead of the sole remaining Force India of Nico Hulkenberg who lost places with a late off-track excursion at Stowe as he battled Senna in the closing stages of the race.


Although the standard of the television coverage in the modern era of the sport is second to none, nothing can beat the actual experience of being there to see, hear and smell the incredible machines that are Formula One cars amid an atmosphere to rival any world-class sporting event. For all the rain, mud, lack of showering and horrifically overpriced food and merchandise, a visit to the charming and rustic Silverstone circuit is one I could recommend to any F1 fan.  

Motorsport Euro 2012

Another major football tournament, another lacklustre performance from England – t’was ever thus. However, just as our even more dismal showing at the World Cup two years ago got me thinking about a similar tournament for racing and rally drivers representing a particular country, I have once again taken it upon myself to predict the outcome of a motorsport-based European Championship using a similar format.

Again, the assumption is that all the races will take place on a Race Of Champions-style crossover circuit, although I decided to limit proceedings to just two drivers per country as opposed to the three I used previously. In addition, I’ve spurned the rally drivers in favour of pairings comprised solely of racing drivers from a variety of disciplines, including Formula One, IndyCar, Touring Cars, Endurance Racing and the junior single-seater formulae.

I used the Castrol Driver Rankings to determine the seeds and thus the draw, and after working out the protracted result of the qualifying bouts I set about determining who would advance from the group stages. Spookily enough, as per reality England would be joined by France and Sweden in their group, albeit with Austria standing in for Ukraine, the latter seemingly lacking any suitable players for this tournament. I mean drivers.

First up would be England versus Sweden, with Lewis Hamilton and DTM champion Mattias Ekstrom the first to take to the track. This would be something of a grudge match after the Swede beat Hamilton during the 2010 World Cup, but once again the silky-smooth driving style of the Swede would ensure it would be he who would come out on top. Fortunately, Jenson Button would be able to make short work of France’s Charles Pic, before doing likewise to former Jaguar, Red Bull and HRT driver Christian Klien of Austria to book our place in the quarter-finals.

There we would meet Finland, who boasted current Formula One drivers Heikki Kovalainen and Kimi Raikkonen on their driving strength. The Finns’ challenge was nonetheless lessened by the absence of their rally stars, and Hamilton would be able to dispatch former McLaren teammate Kovalainen with relative ease. Button however wouldn’t quite have the pace to topple Raikkonen, but Hamilton would succeed in narrowly overcoming his predecessor as F1 champion in the deciding heat to take us to the semis.

An interesting challenge would await us in the form of Scotland, multiple IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti and rising F1 star Paul di Resta having taken out Sweden in the quarter-finals 2-1. First up would be Button against Franchitti, which would turn out to be a rather straightforward victory for the former with Franchitti hardly in his element in the tight confines of the stadium-based crossover track. Di Resta would do his utmost against Hamilton to take it to a decider, but would just fall short of the former champion's scintillating pace.

That would mean England would indeed reach the final, something English football fans have a habit of forgetting that we haven’t done since our home victory the better part of fifty years ago.  Standing between us and the trophy would be none other than Germany, Sebastian Vettel and Nico Rosberg having conquered Italy (Trulli/Liuzzi) and Spain (Alonso/Alguersauri) en route. A tantalising, titanic best-of-five tussle between four modern greats of the sport would thus await millions of nervous motor racing fans all over the continent.

First up would be Button and Rosberg, the Mercedes driver pipping the McLaren man across the line to give Germany a crucial one-nil lead. Just when all would seem lost, an extremely costly mistake from Vettel in his heat against Hamilton would allow England to score the equaliser, if you will. It would now be Rosberg’s turn to face Hamilton in the third race, but an extremely close contest would just about go the way of the latter to place England within touching distance of glory.

It would be down to Button to seal the deal, but he would have to overcome Vettel in order to do so. Determined to atone for his earlier error, the German would set a blistering pace that Button simply could not match, taking this most epic of sporting rivalries down to a winner-takes-all deciding race between Hamilton and Vettel, perhaps the two fastest men in F1 today. In what would be virtually a photo finish in a battle in which both men gave their absolute all, the winner, by a whisker, would be Hamilton. At last, England would have done it.

Group Stages

Group A: Spain (Alonso/Alguersauri), Italy (Trulli/Liuzzi), Russia (Petrov/Aleshin), Portugal (Monteiro/Albuquerque)

Group B: Germany (Vettel/Rosberg), Denmark (Kristensen/Magnussen), Switzerland (Buemi/Grosjean*), Czech Republic (Enge/Charouz)

Group C: Sweden (Ekstrom/Rydell), England (Hamilton/Button), France (Pic/Vergne), Austria (Klien/Wurz)

Group D: Finland (Raikkonen/Kovalainen), Scotland (Franchitti/Di Resta), Northern Ireland (Carroll/Turkington), Netherlands (Coronel/van der Garde)

Quarter-Finals

Spain bt. Denmark (2-0)

Germany bt. Italy (2-0)

Scotland bt. Sweden (2-1)

England bt. Finland (2-1)

Semi-Finals

Germany bt. Spain (2-1)

England bt. Scotland (2-0)

Final

England bt. Germany (3-2)

Failed to Qualify

Belgium, Estonia, Monaco, Norway, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Republic of Ireland, Wales, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Turkey

* Romain Grosjean is in actual fact Swiss-born, despite competing in F1 under a French licence.

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