F1 Season 2011 Predictions

Following on from my review of last years predictions, I thought I’d better get this year’s out of the way before the season kicks off (as that’s just cheating).

1) Alonso will be champion.

The Red Bull looks fastest again, but you can never write of Alonso if he has a half decent car, and the Ferrari looks to be almost up there.  A few bad finishes by Red Bull or some inter team rivalry between Webber and Vettel is all it’ll take for Alonso to sneak in.  Plus there’s the spectre of team orders hovering over Massa again.

2) HRT will be last

There have been virtually no driver changes this year, but one team that’s got a new look is HRT.  Surprising many by actually turning up last year and making it onto the grid in Bahrain, they managed to work miracles through the year and even beat Virgin Racing in the championship table.What’s more surprising is that with virtually no car development through the year, they were closer to Lotus and Virgin at the end of the year than the beginnnig although that could be attributed to the former teams focusing on their 2011 efforts.

Again surprising many by actually appearing at the Barcelona preseason test this year with a real car and not just a CGI model on the internet flaunting a funky paint job, perhaps there is some hope? 

No, I don’t think so.  By all accounts they have zero budget and a couple of average drivers.

3) Williams will be fast but unreliable.

Of all the new car designs (and there are many interesting efforts), Williams and it’s tiny pert rear end looks to me to be the simplest and best option.  The retro Rothmans-esque colour scheme won’t hurt them either because as everyone knows, if it looks fugly, it’ll be slow. 

However I think their lack of experience with a battery powered KERS is going to cost them and prevent any meaningful championship charge.  I expect Rubens will be up in Q3 most of the time and at the front in quite a few races mixing it with the big boys.

4) Quite a few races will end up with a comical number of pitstops. 

The limited numbers allowed per weekend and the much decreaased durability of the new Pirelli tyres will mean that teams will start to run out during the race, much like Williams did during the 1993 Donnington Grand Prix when then used all their new sets of Wets and had to start re-using old ones.

The one upside is that the forced tyre change rule is probably going to be irrelevant (hopefully they’ll just quietly drop it next year).  “The show” will be more interesting certainly, but there’s a limit and I think we’ll find it this year. Personally I just want to see drivers free to choose whatever they like, and Pirelli just building a “durability cost” into their quickest tyres.

With a bit of luck though, we’ll see the return of the LAST 10 LAPS NEW TYRES MANSELL CHARGE!!!!

5) There will be alot of overtaking, and that’s bad m’kay?

Combining KERS, the new rear wing and the big differences in tyre performance between new and used tyres will make overtaking much too easy.  Whereas in the last couple of seasons, the top overtakers like Kobayashi,  Button and Hamilton have shown they can make great passes, those who are slightly less adept *cough* Vettel *cough* will find they don’t need to worry any more.  Lets not forget Montoya seemed able to overtake anyone, anywhere (when they FIA didn’t hand him penalties for his efforts)

Yes overtaking is impossible at some circuits, but making it too easy doesn’t help either. If the cost of adding one overtake in Abu Dhabi is ending up with 500 overtakes at Interlagos, then count me out!

Overtaking should be hard but not impossible, and only track design changes will really make a difference.

6) Heidfeld or Rosburg will break their duck (or both).

I think of the two, Rosburg is most likely, but if the Renault trick exhausts are as good as they are hoping, they may steal a march on the other teams in the early season.  I suspect though the Red Bull will just be too quick for everyone.

7) Brundle will make an excellent commentator (but he’s still the wrong choice).

I wasn’t as offended by Jonathan Leggard as many people on the internet because I was just grateful James Allen was off our TV with his “I told you so” self congratulating screams (when Kimi’s wheel fell off at the Nurburging). The obvious candidate was David Croft from 5Live, who we got a glimpse of during the Japanese GP last year when the BBC feed went down.  Completely oblivious he quoted Leeroy Jenkins to cement his place as the best modern generation F1 commentator.

Top 5 overtaking moves

With the talk of 2011 now the prospect of more overtaking courtesy of adjustable rear wing and KERS, I thought I'd present my top 5 "vanilla" overtakes without the need for gimmicks.

In ascending order:

5. Alonso vs Heidfeld at Magny Cours in 2007. Perfectly judged by both drivers, absolute commitment and jaw dropping to watch.

4. Villeneuve vs Schumacher, Portugal 1996. Needing a win to stay in contention will championship leader Hill, Jacques found himself behind Schumacher in traffic. Taking full advantage of backmarkers, he got a run into the final corner and sat it out around the outside. Later Schuie told Jacques he shouldn’t have even attempted the move, and in an echo of James Hunt vs Mario Andretii at Zolder 2 decades previously, Jacques told him he’d damn well overtake wherever he liked.

3. Mansell vs Piquet, Silverstone 1987. A classic Mansell LAST 10 LAPS NEW TYRES MANSELL CHARGE, he made it all the more special by doing it in front of his home crowd.

2. Senna vs the world, lap 1 Donnington 1993. The embodiment of driver at one with his car, he made everyone else look like they were parked on the track. No matter how much I dislike most of his other “let me through or we’ll crash” overtakes, this was 2 minutes of pure genius.

1. Mansell vs Berger Mexico 1990. On fresh tyres, Berger caught and passed Mansell (himself on very worn tyres) with big lunge at the end of the straight which Nige did well to see coming. Having been woken up from his pretty average pace, our Nige proceeded to put on one of his famous late race charges although uniquely on used tyres. On the penultimate lap he sold two dummies and sold one up *the outside* of the 160mph banked final corner. Total fighting spirit.

Why driver aids are killing F1

  Driver aids are banned in F1 right?  Wrong!  In fact there are still alot of driver aids in F1 and they all work to spoil the racing by taking away the opportunity for the ture greats to really shine.  Let me explain…

Car data

Currently the teams have a massive amount of data logging and processing equipment.  From tyre temperatures and pressures, to suspension movement over bumps and cornering forces, it’s just mind boggling.  The teams crunch the data and work out the optimal setups.  When everyone knows the minutest detail about everything, is it a surprise they run at the same speed through the race and there’s not much action unless the rain throws a big variable into the picture?

The old days of the driver and his mechanic setting up the car from just the feeling the driver gets are long gone.  Although they still have the final say, their input is much diminished by the banks of computers and complex software, which in this age of cost saving can’t be cheap. 

If sensors on the car were banned except for the engine and gearbox (to prolong life) that would mean no more infra red temperature sensors for the tyres, no more gps tracking for telling the driver where he’s going wrong.   It would be up to the driver to talk to his team and feedback data from his seat-of-the-pants sensor.  This will separate the good from the great and improve the racing by having more change for a driver to get it wrong.  Wear out a set of tyres too quickly? Pit and get some more, but then you’re behind slower cars so you have to overtake them on the track.

Car radios

Although some drivers still make the pit stop calls, usually a team will look at the pace of other cars to optimise track position after pit stops.  They feed the current lap times into computer simulations and crunch the likely outcomes of the races.  Again this knowledge and over-analysis means that pretty much everyone does the same thing and it’s a stalemate.  

If the car radios were made one way only (driver to pitwall) the team could be made aware of the driver’s intentions, but the ball would firmly in the drivers court.  Again the good would be separated from the great and racing improved by introducing more variables into the equation.

The regulations

These days, nearly everything is tightly controlled by the rulebook.  From car design to strategy, there’s very little a driver (or team) can do to stand out from the crowd.  This is the easiest thing to alter because it’s just words in a rulebook.

Refuelling:

Again drivers doing different things is key to excitement.  Some would say that refuelling allowed this, but all it did was encourage drivers to overtake in the pits rather than on the track, and each track had an optimal strategy which nearly all drivers followed and was chosen by the simulations rather than the driver.  The refuelling ban is a step in the right direction moving the skill away from pre-prepared plans back to the driver deciding on the fly, but the tyre regulations have worked against it providing proper racing.

Tyres:

First the regulations regarding which tyres they can start the race on.  While starting on qualifying tyres isn’t a necessarily a bad rule, to only apply it to the first 10 cars is wrong.  It’s an artificial construct which penalises faster cars, the logical extension of this is ballasting and reverse grids, which make a mockery of other categories so should be avoided at all costs.

The other tyre regulation is the requirement to use both compounds of tyres.  Working in conjunction with the qualifying rule, it takes away driver choice.  Everyone will automatically choose to qualify on the optimal softer tyre to get the best grid slot (even when they have a straight line speed advantage for overtaking like the McLaren with their F-duct).

Once they’re on the soft tyre, they are forced to pit to the harder tyre as early as they can (once the computers have calculated that they can rejoin clear of traffic).  Now on the harder tyre, they can cruise to the end of the race and avoid losing track position, as was seen at Bahrain and from the Ferraris and Renault in Australia.

It’s time to free up the tyre regulations and allow any tyre to be used at any time (preferably all 4 compounds at the same race).  This would allow drivers to pick tyres suited to their driving style rather than having to adapt their driving style to the tyres and confirm to the standard strategy.  

Some will choose a Alesi tactic of using the hardest tyres, making few or no stops and being the tortoise (Button springs to mind for this role).  Some will choose to change tyres more often, probably onto ultra soft, ultra fast tyres in the last 10-20 laps of the race and do a LAST 10 LAPS MANSELL NEW TYRES CHARGE!!!™.

Tyre warmers:

Something that’s been proposed for a long time but never actually acted on is a tyre warmer ban.  Giving drivers good-to-go tyres significantly reduces a very valuable driver skill, namely managing tyre temperatures.  Drivers that have a deft touch for feeling the amount of grip on cold tyres thrive in Indy Cars where tyre warmers aren’t used.  Anyone seeing Montoya in his pre-F1 days can’t help but marvel at his speed on cold tyres.

Blue flags:

Blue flags used to mean there’s a faster car behind you, but there was no requirement to move over.  Getting through traffic was a driver skill not to be underestimated, of which Senna was a master of his time.  These days backmarkers have to jump out of the way, even if it disadvantages them and sometimes the penalties are applied far too harshly 

Aerodynamics:

Cars much conform to specific dimensional requirements and thanks to the double diffusers being allowed, there is still a massive amount of downforce on the cars despite the rule changes last year.  With the cars sliding less the drivers have less work to do. Eau Rouge is now described as an “easy flat” and not the challenge it used to be.  

Another downside is that the suspension is ultra-stiff to counteract the downforce, meaning use of lower profile tyres closer to road dimensions (something favoured by tyre companies such as Michelin) would be difficult to introduce because currently the tyres play the role previously fulfilled by suspension travel, but that’s another story… 

Perhaps the FIA should introduce standard or even neutral profile front and rear wings such as the Handford Wing.  That would have the effect of slowing down the cars, give them an easy outlet to control speeds and allow a tyre war without fear of escalating speeds.

Other beneficial side affects of reducing 

downforce is that the spectacle is much increased with more chance for cars to run close to each other and when fitted with skid blocks, sparks can really fly!

While I believe F1 should be the pinnacle of motorsport, it shouldn’t be at the expense of driver involvement.  Anything that can give more freedom for innovation and choice should be embraced as usually it improves the show at the same time when the inevitable human error creeps in.

BBC Classic F1 – Australian Grand Prix 1990

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/2.18.13034_14207/9player.swf?revision=11798

via news.bbc.co.uk

Mansell might not have been the best, and might have been a moany git, but when he was on a LAST 10 LAPS NEW TYRES MANSELL CHARGE by god was he spectacular to watch!

Silverstone 1987, Hungary 1989, Portugal 1989, Mexico 1990, Australia 1990, Portugal 1991 to name but a few highlights.

Another dull GP, what went wrong?

So why was it a very dull race in Bahrain?

1) The track.  With such a long layout, traffic didn’t come into play and Bahrain has hardly produced exciting races in the past.  Being a very open modern track, it also makes the cars seem like ants on a driveway and there’s no involvement for the viewer.  It’s high time F1 went back to the tracks that consistently give good racing and even make processions seem interesting.  Barcelona is going to be horrendous!

2) Rules.  With the refuelling ban I was hoping for some decent tortoise vs hare racing, yet because everyone had to use 2 different compounds there was no real room for teams to try something different.  Everyone pretty much did the same thing and as a result it was dull.  And as for the starting the race on quali tyres, what’s that about.  Lets stop artificially arranging the order and lets have some pure racing.

3) The teams.  They were very cowardly with their tactics, possibly fearing looking silly by being brave, but I think they missed a trick, which I shall call the LAST 10 LAP MANSELL CHARGE!!!!!  At the end of the race, the cars were lapping at 6seconds off qualifying pace on new tyres, yet with a pitstop costing 24s from entry to exit it would only take 4 laps to catch up that time.  OK they’d be caught in traffic, but at such a performance difference (more than the difference between the injured Vettel and the Ferraris when they overtook him) I’m sure overtaking would be easy.  Perhaps the teams had run out of tyres thanks to the silly 11 set restriction, but I think those further down the order (Schuie, Button) had nothing much to lose by giving it a go.

I still preferred seeing an ontrack procession to the procession pretending to be exciting by interrupting it by pitstops which make no difference at all but get the commentators frothing at the mouth.