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2014 rules expose ‘huge safety risk’ – Stewart (GMM)
Mercedes upped budget to succeed in F1 – Lauda (GMM)
Renault still ‘a month’ behind – Taffin (GMM)
Last Year’s Rate the Driver and Race results
Sport is ‘formula engine’ now – Lauda (GMM)
Mercedes have discussed team orders in Melbourne (GMM)
Vettel sees bright side to unlucky 13 (GMM)
The month of March
In the 70s and 80s March was practically everywhere. Formula 1, Formula 3, Formula 5000, Formula Atlantic – you name it, they built a car for it. They also built the March 817 for the 1981 CanAm series. Only two were built and bought by Paul Newman Racing for Al Unser and Teo Fabi. Fabi took 2nd in the championship, the team won the team title.
Newey’s dastardly plan
A lot of noise came from the bleachers yesterday, mainly because folks were po’ed about Red Bull not failing as hard as they had hoped. The Austrians have gone from being unable to run a single lap with Vettel on day #3 of the second Bahrain test to driving the most laps of all teams in FP2 at Melbourne with little hiccups and the reigning world champion even sneaking into 4th position. But the real genius of Adrian Newey and his design team showed with their decision to house the onboard cameras under the vanity panel.
Newey and his team have exploited a loophole in the regulations… again! The aerodynamic benefit from taking the camera out of turbulent air may be there, but there’s a second benefit that’s much more important. Externally mounted cameras can be installed facing forwards or backwards. Auto Motor & Sport’s Tobi Grüner reported this:
RB was not happy with rearward camera last year. Revealed too much. New solution comes with aero benefits – AMuS: http://t.co/KuVBJqmm8T
— Tobi Grüner 🏁 (@tgruener) March 14, 2014
The nose-mounted camera can only face forward and the regulations don’t say that a cam has to be able to face back. Last year’s rear-facing cams showed the splitter – much to Newey’s displeasure. Well, not anymore.
Ade, I’ll buy you a beer 
2014 rules expose ‘huge safety risk’ – Stewart (GMM)
Sir Jackie Stewart on Saturday admitted he has a “very, very big” safety concern about F1’s revolutionary new era. “I see a very, very big problem,” the F1 legend told German newspaper Die Welt in Melbourne.
Indeed, it is believed the very sort of concern raised by Stewart, F1’s safety-pioneering driver of the 70s and a triple world champion, was also raised by experienced current drivers including Jenson Button in the FIA briefing in Australia.
The worry is that the new 100 kilogram per driver race fuel limit could mean some cars are aggressively saving fuel at the very same time as others are still racing flat-out. “Drivers who are six seconds slower than the fastest cars is a huge safety risk,” 74-year-old Stewart said.
“And when you’re talking about safety in formula one, it is the question of life and death,” the Scot added. “If I understand the problem, I cannot understand that others seem to have thought so little about it,” he said.
Mercedes upped budget to succeed in F1 – Lauda (GMM)
Niki Lauda has admitted Mercedes upped its F1 budget in the quest to chase down the sport’s top teams. As the German marque looks set to dominate the 2014 season with a superior ‘power unit’ for the new era, paddock rumours indicate Mercedes might have spent a staggering EUR 500 million on the development of its turbo V6.
The German newspaper Welt said that figure is wildly wide of the mark, but team chairman Niki Lauda admits Mercedes did make a decision to spend more. “The budget under the dictate of the RRA (voluntary resource restriction agreement) was the first major stumbling block,” said the great Austrian, “because in practice it was not respected.”
“The Mercedes executive board understood that we were fighting a losing battle with the resources we had available, because McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull were not respecting (the RRA limits),” added Lauda. Welt newspaper claims Mercedes still spends less than Ferrari and Red Bull, but a more even playing field has allowed the Brackley team to step towards the front.
The result is the new car for 2014, the W05, which according to McLaren’s Jenson Button is at least a second per lap faster than any rival circulating this weekend in Melbourne for the season opener. “They’re very quick,” Button told reporters late on Friday. “We were two seconds off them in the test and I think everyone’s about a second off them here,” Button added.
Button said the similarly Mercedes-powered Williams cars are next best, and the Grove team’s Valtteri Bottas agrees that Mercedes are all alone at the front. “Those times that Mercedes did (on Friday) … it doesn’t matter how much fuel they had in the tank, they were really fast,” the Finn told Turun Sanomat newspaper.
After a disastrous winter, it appears world champions Red Bull have taken a major step forwards for Melbourne, but team boss Christian Horner thinks there is still “quite a gap” to the front-running “Mercedes and Ferrari” cars. Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg, however, thinks Red Bull is in even better shape than that. “For me,” he is quoted by Speed Week, “Red Bull are (only) behind Mercedes and pretty darn fast.”
“It’s not a real surprise,” said the German, “as Daniel Ricciardo showed in Bahrain that the car is fast when it’s working on the track. Now it seems like they’re getting their problems under control. “That should be expected with a team such as that,” added Hulkenberg.
Renault still ‘a month’ behind – Taffin (GMM)
Renault is still “about a month” behind its rival F1 engine suppliers. That is the admission of the French marque’s Remi Taffin, despite the fact premier partner team Red Bull has taken a big step forwards in Melbourne after a disastrous winter.
Asked if Renault have been surprised by the superiority of Mercedes and Ferrari with the very same revolutionary rules, he told the French-language news agency AFP: “No, we are not surprised. “This (Mercedes and Ferrari’s level) is what we wanted, and what we imagined we would achieve.”
“We’re not there yet, because we’ve had reliability problems and that caused a bit of a delay. We are about a month behind,” said Taffin. Mercedes’ F1 chairman Niki Lauda said no engine supplier is currently giving full power to its customers. “Not even Mercedes,” he told Kleine Zeitung newspaper.
Last Year’s Rate the Driver and Race results
This year, as last year TJ13 will be running a “Driver of the Weekend” poll as well as a “Rate the Race Poll”. Having had some time to mull the results over here is what you said last year, some surprises in here.
Rate the Race – 31.25% of TJ13 readers gave the Bahrain Grand Prix a vote of 8. This was the race where Checo got his “elbows out” and we heard Button squeal into the radio – the race was won by Vettel, flanked by Raikkonen and Grosjean.
28.38% said the Chinese Grand Prix was worth a 7. This was the first win of our Spanish Samurai in 2013 and his first since Germany a year before. He was joined on the podium by a recovering Raikkonen and Hamilton. A number of penalties for on track and pitlane action were also the order of the day.
27% said last year’s Australian Grand Prix was an 8. I suspect this has something to do with the popular win from Raikkonen. He was followed home by Alonso and Vettel in 3rd. Here it dawned on us that McLaren was in serious trouble and Red Bull was hard on their tyres.
Spot the trend – all three races that scored high for entertainment featured Raikkonen on the podium 😉
| Rate The Race | ||
| Race | Poll Option | Overall |
| Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix | 8 | 31.25% |
| UBS Chinese Grand Prix | 7 | 28.38% |
| Rolex Australian Grand Prix | 8 | 27.00% |
The story for the drivers.
Nico Hulkenberg leads the way for the most votes for a race (60%), the Korean Grand Prix. This was for his superb drive to fourth keeping Alonso behind him in the early stages as well as Hamilton in the closing stages of the race.
Romain Grosjean is second (will he ever win?) with 59.48% he scored at the Japanese Grand Prix. A great start and finishing on the podium for a second consecutive time and outscoring his team mate Raikkonen.
Third place is Lewis Hamilton with 52% of the votes for his drive in the Hungarian Grand Prix. Rather unsurprisingly this race was won by Hamilton, his first of the season and for Mercedes, just before the winter break. Some aggressive driving by him in the early stages secured him the race. It was good to see Hamilton have a spring in his step before the somer break.
| Driver of the Weekend – Individual | ||
| Race | Driver | Overall |
| Korean Grand Prix | Nico Hulkenberg | 60.00% |
| Japanese GrandPrix | Romain Grosjean | 59.48% |
| Hungarian Grand Prix | Lewis Hamilton | 52.00% |
And our winners from last year with the highest share of the vote overall is….
drumroll
| Driver of the Weekend – Season | |
| Driver | % of Total |
| Sebastian Vettel | 15% |
| Kimi Raikkonen | 13% |
| Fernando Alonso | 12% |
Tomorrow we kick off a new season of racing so watch for the polls coming out just after the race and Monday morning.
Sport is ‘formula engine’ now – Lauda (GMM)
The sport might now be called “formula engine”, at least in the early phase of 2014, according to Mercedes’ Niki Lauda. The German marque has got a jump on its rival suppliers Ferrari and Renault after the revolutionary switch from normally-aspirated engines to the significantly energy recovery-boosted turbo V6s.
The milder tones of the engines got the thumbs-down from the Melbourne punters on Friday, who pined for the old days of earplugs over these ‘sewing machines on wheels’.
Mercedes’ Toto Wolff is unapologetic. “This is modern technology, this is where road cars are going,” he said on Friday. “Downsizing is the motto and I think we just need to accept that the formula has changed.”
It is not just the sport’s noise that has changed. Lauda said that even though the drivers are still in the spotlight, F1 is effectively now ‘formula engine’. “For the first five races we’re not going to see formula one, but a ‘formula engine’,” he told the Kleine Zeitung newspaper. “Only from the sixth, seventh race will the drivers again be driving (as before),” he explained.
What he means is that the drivers are now operating very much under the control of the engineers, who are carefully monitoring fuel consumption levels and battery recharge rates.“You can’t overcharge them (the batteries), nor undercharge them,” Lauda said. “Not too slowly, not too fast.” And he said a big job-list in the practice sessions is not car setup, but careful calculations to determine how Sunday’s race can be run with just 100kg of fuel. “Without engineers there is no driving at the moment,” said Lauda.
McLaren’s Jenson Button, the most experienced driver in the field who has raced throughout the transition from V10 to V8 and now V6, said: “You are more an engineer than a racer these days. But this is reality,” he is quoted by the Times newspaper. “It’s not my favourite era and I’ve been worried that the racing will not be exciting, but we’re not going back to V10s,” said the 2009 world champion.
Mercedes have discussed team orders in Melbourne (GMM)
‘No team orders’ is too simplistic a headline in the intricate world of formula one.
Earlier, we reported that dominant Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg’s charge for victory this weekend would be unfettered by team play. “We are going to try and avoid such measures,” German Rosberg said, while chairman Niki Lauda added: “They can race against each other”.
But when also asked on Friday if ‘conversations’ about team orders have taken place behind closed doors in Melbourne, team director Toto Wolff admitted: “Yes, we had those conversations, and I think it’s important to have those conversations.” Wolff said Hamilton and Rosberg are not only fast but “very intelligent.They treat each other in a very fair way. We went through some scenarios and I think we’re in a good place,” he added.
So what exactly does that mean?
Last year, Rosberg was unhappy when he was ordered to stay in third place behind Hamilton in Malaysia. “We got caught out by surprise last year,” Wolff said at Albert Park, “and we don’t want this to happen again. It’s just very good discussions we’ve had.”
So, Wolff suggested to Germany’s Bild newspaper that the pair will not necessarily have a free hand to go wheel-to-wheel in Melbourne. “Their first opponents are not their teammates, but everyone else,” he said. “We have explained to them how to respond in more than two dozen scenarios, for example if one of them is ahead but suddenly has a fuel problem. They have to be clear what to do.”
Vettel sees bright side to unlucky 13 (GMM)
Although visibly annoyed, even Sebastian Vettel late on Saturday could see the bright side under gloomy skies in Melbourne.
The reigning world champion is unlucky 13th on the Melbourne grid, while his teammate Daniel Ricciardo delighted the partisan crowd by driving through Red Bull’s crisis and splitting the dominant Mercedes cars with P2.
“This shows what our car can do,” Vettel told German television RTL. Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko agreed: “Our car is good, as we have seen (with Ricciardo). Again we have had a software problem with Sebastian, so the poor performance, it was purely a software problem,” he insisted.
The engineers at Red Bull must get well pissed off with Newey taking the credit for everything that appears on that car!!
He leads the design team and is the only one known to the wider public. That’s why he gets all the credits, but also all the flak if things go wrong. After all, everyone blamed him for the extreme packaging during winter tests, with no one knowing if it was perhaps Podromou who had the idea. He takes the credit, but also the beating. Fair deal, is it not?
Hippo, you really are on on my wavelength today, I’ve read some solid comments off you today, which is nice. Sometimes I feel you can get ‘s little highly strung’ when in debate, it appears mega early mornings have a calming effect.
I always take the time to read your comments and articles, even if I’m not ‘down’ with the logic you apply, I always enjoy the read.
It was a shame Vettle couldn’t push really hard today.
Well they are solid animals after all…..;-)
Good point
Exactly.
Good point! Not only should the verbose master of unpleasant anal metaphors, Mr. FH, buy Mr. Newey a beer, but it would be appropriate to buy for much of the fabulous team that is today’s Red Bull.
Seriously, looking at three of the first few articles, (following the month of March article), we have Red Bull’s clever noise camera, Mercedes confessing that they’ve been forced to raise their budget, and Renault claiming to be a month behind schedule. What does that all mean?
Based on Friday and Saturday at Albert Park, it means that the Red Bull Renault has yet another strong chance to win at least one of the 2015 WC (drivers and/ or constructors).
The drunken Vortex Motio will confess that anything that makes Toto Wolff cry in his beer is a good thing… the sober VM would instead highlight the underdog nature (low budget) of another Renault powered WC.
Mind you… after several months of writing on non-current-GP related stories, we have the first qualifying of the 2014, a post is made and one hour later it becomes a sloppy second by a post with 6 stories: 3 from the outside (GMM – supposed to stir debate by bringing outside stories when there is nothing to talk about), one about the month of march of I don’t know which year, one about a survey about last year’s championship that could have been posted anytime in the last 5 months and generate some discussion and a properly interesting news about the camera in the RBs.
Well, it appears to be interesting enough to motivate you to write a lengthy comment – mission accomplished
Or point taken?
Were you here for Webbuary? The Judge’s month long send off to Webber (or spousal appeasement, possibly both). Since we’re in March now, he’s decided to continue the (oh, forgive me now) pun-ishment by doing one story a day about *March* in March. If you had that figured, please forgive, short on sleep here.. 🙂
I like the sound but it should be a bit louder. If you’re gonna use background music which is softer than the music you used before… Just pump up the volume!
Over two dozen team orders scenarios?!? I haven’t put my mind to it, but that does seem like a lot.
If they’re 1-2, and the leader car gets held up by backmarkers, would they issue a ‘hold station’ order b/c of that?
It seems to me that Nico is maybe crossing the “dick-ish” line when it comes to petty mind games. It seems he’s taken to not mentioning Lewis by name now … he just says “my teammate”, and from what I’ve read and seen, there was no post-quali handshake between the two, as they were getting weighed, etc.
Any driver wants to get that psychological edge over their teammate, but I guess what I’m saying is that there is a time and a place for that stuff.
Does anyone know when Nico’s contract is up? I know he inked a contract extension in Nov 2011, and some press then had it running through the 2015 season. A 4-year contract is not the norm for a driver like Rosberg (especially considering what Nico had achieved at the time of signing), so I would expect 2015 to be an “option” year, for the team to pick up. It would be a nice cudgel to have in case Nico has any recalcitrant episodes, like in Germany last year when he needlessly held up Hamilton who was in a different race.
Don’t see any issues here. Trying too hard to find something that isn’t there.
You never know, Nico may be pissed off because it may have cost some man power from his side of the garage to get Lewis’ car sorted for FP2 and feels it was a little harsh that any changes he wanted to make, may have took longer due to less hands and minds. It’s a possibility, of course I’m only guessing. Perhaps he feels the although the PR face of the team says “no 1 and 2” but the way it is on the ground may be different, Lewis gets paid more, everybody talks about him etc etc maybe it seems the mechanics are drawn to Lewis? Who knows, but something is rubbing him up the wrong way.
Off topic:- re missing airliner
I had a bit of a mad thought when I was watching the news, are the next 2 races not Malaysia and China……Kuala Lumpur and Beijing dare I say. My point being, can you imagine if this awful accident (or what ever it is) had happened say around 3weeks time, it’s possible that the drivers in the lower half of the grid, along with team staff, could have been on it. It doesn’t bear thinking about really…….although, dependent on which drivers it was, we may see some drivers who deserve a place get a chance (with lotus being so broke I expect Maldonado would be on the cheapest flight)
We used to “joke” about that type of scenario during bike race transfer flights: “imagine if this plane crashed now – the entire [bike race] field would be wiped out!]” – the same was true for the Tour de France riders until they finally started staggering some of the transport to ensure that all of the world’s best cyclists weren’t at-risk of dying in a single plane crash.
Frankly, I’m surprised there isn’t more terrorism (any terrorism, really) at either Tour de France or F1 GPs. GPs are harder to access (much harder, obviously) b/c you need a ticket for admission to grandstands, but you could still take out many, many spectators outside the venue. in the Tour, well…shit you could kill and injure the entire field w/ one roadside car bomb.
France in July is one place I’m glad that the domestic anti-terror police are hardcore.