F1 blog

Schauber or Ferrari? Schumacher’s options

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Considering the Hamilton and Perez moves were announced practically simultaneously, the mystery surrounding Michael Schumacher’s future remains. As usual picking the bones out of what the different parties say is not easy.

Schumacher’s manager Sabine Kehm (Bild), suggests Michael had opportunities with Mercedes and “could have been able to sign if he had wanted to earlier in the summer.” So, we are led to believe it is Schumacher’s indecision over whether he wishes to continue driving at all that has forced Mercedes hand in taking advantage of the Hamilton opportunity.

This may have been the case in the end. Michael’s maybe have been holding out for a 2 year deal instead of the 1 year deal Mercedes had on offer and it is this prevarication that has cost him the seat within the team he has been helping to build. But that does not mean he feels he is done with driving in F1.

Strangely there has been no talk of an offer for Michael to join Mercedes management team and they have already made the slightly inexplicable appointment of Niki Lauda last week to the board. It appears as though there is no room at the Mercedes table for the man who has surely helped build this team since Mercedes acquisition.

Suddenly in 2012, he is the fastest driver in Monaco qualifying and has out qualified Rosberg in 8/14 race weekends. He has only finished 7 races, but in 6 of those he finished ahead of Rosberg (Bahrain being the exception). His average time behind the pole time is (0.936 secs) against NR (1.145secs) and he has also qualified on average 7th and Rosberg has managed 8th.

So without a couple of crashes and some poor pit work meaning a lost tyre and without the numerous gearbox failures, Schumacher would be close if not ahead of Rosberg in the championship and that would be a big story.

Suggesting that Michael may want to retire again would have been more credible after year 2 of his comeback when he clearly struggled get to grips with the driving style required to maximise the off throttle engine blowing that dominated car design. But now?

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Hamilton: The tipping point for Whitmarsh

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It appears Martin Whitmarsh days may be numbered as Team Principle of McLaren Racing.

First a brief background of Martin and McLaren: He studied at Portsmouth Polytechnic attaining a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He joined British Aerospace and in his 9 years there, he had been promoted to Head of Manufacturing for the Hawk and Harrier airframes having a specialism in advanced composite materials.

He joined McLaren in 1989 as Head of Operations. On March 1st 2009, he assumed the role Head of McLaren Racing, when Ron Dennis stepped down to concentrate on developing McLaren automotive, the road car division.

Each of the 3 previous years under Whitmarsh, McLaren have trailed home Red Bull in the constructor’s championship. And whilst having built a reputation for being the best team during the season to advance their F1 car development, have also failed to deliver a World Driver’s Title in this period.

Whitmarsh clearly set his stall out to retain Lewis as a driver for the team at all costs to himself, but it seems obvious that he on Dennis were not on the same page (link to prev article). The whole twittergate and telemetry saga was quite ridiculous. I’m all for freedom in the social media of F1 personnel and with regards to the previous “WTF?” Lewis tweet – who cares?

The telemetry tweet was a completely different matter, a most serious breach of conduct imaginable. Lewis was criticising his own teams’ judgement call in public as well as embarrassing he whole team by publishing confidential internal documents. Ask any one of the senior team members how much they enjoyed the flood of fun poking taking texts they received from t other teams following Lewis’ action.

Yet Whitmarsh took no action. All we had was a slightly embarrassed, “we asked him to take that one down” comment and nothing else. No reprimand, no fine and I don’t think we even heard Lewis apologise in public for the very public embarrassment he caused.

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Lewis keeps Mercedes in F1

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Now the dust is settling following the Hamilton announcement, there are a number of threads to tidy up, but we’ll start with some housekeeping.

Firstly, forgive me for some of the Tabloid headlines which are presently being used and are designed to attract attention, but we are a new blog and it is a good way of grabbing readers who have not heard of us. I will get to the headline of this article shortly.

Also, there has been a certain amount of cynicism over whether we do in fact have access to ‘inside’ information at times, but this is not actually that important except from the fact it is helpful when trying to work out what will be the next talking point.

More fundamental to the articles being written is that we’re trying to address the issues and the questions the headline writers and mainstream F1 travelling media circus miss by chasing the breaking news.

This will hopefully mean that we will call things before the headline writers do. Feathers in the cap so far, Jake Humphrey leaving the BBC a week before it was announced. Further, today a number of high profile media commentators who travel with the F1 circus have now begun looking at why Lewis has actually left McLaren.

One example is Martin Brundle who said on the F1 show on Sky TV that if McLaren had really wanted to keep Lewis they could have done quite a lot more. Without using the word “pushed” he acknowledged McLaren had been feeling the need to move on from Lewis as much as Lewis did from McLaren. Others you will have seen have been saying similar things in reflection a day after the big announcement.

So that’s 2 strong predictions in the first 2 weeks of the blog – not too bad – but a weekly statistic that will be impossible to live up to I suspect.

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Lewis had no choice. He was pushed.

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The inevitable has happened! Nope, not Eddie Jordan being right again as he was 3 years ago when he called Schumacher’s return  – the inevitable is the angle of the stories which abound about Lewis Hamilton in the mainstream media.

“Hamilton is taking a big risk” (David Croft, Sky website).

Joe Saward, much respected long standing F1 writer says in his blog, “it will be a leap of great faith [Lewis has] in the German-owned operation, but may be a decision that the British youngster will one day regret”.

Martin Brundle tweets, “Statistics +gut feeling say Lewis has taken a big gamble”.

I could go on. These stories are the natural evolution from the stories written following the leak that Hamilton was in negotiations with Mercedes. The general themes of those articles back then were …that it was illogical to leave McLaren for Mercedes…surely Lewis would stay with a proven race winning team rather than take a risk…it’s all just negotiating rumours…it’s not about money.

Again, I could go on. Yet as I wrote last week (again getting lots of stick) I heard that Lewis was being pushed by McLaren. Of course no one was saying telling Lewis to “do one”, but the writing was on the wall in giant red letters 10m high.

Let’s also forget the “I heard” something (as I suggested in the last article) and look only into the scattered tea leaves.

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Schumacher’s Legacy: Legend? or just a cheat like Armstrong?

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After no news yesterday, it appears one of the big stories of today has been penned by a photographer. Some say all publicity is good publicity and Darren Heath, F1 Photographer – and now part time mud slinging journo biographer – certainly gets a tick for making waves. Darren writes off the career of Michael Schumacher who many consider F1’s greatest driver in a few paragraphs as just a cheat.

Let me say first up – everyone is entitled to their opinion and for that Darren Heath cannot be criticised. What we can critique is a writer’s presentation of the facts, deductive reasoning and I for one feel that a writer should be very careful about which analogies they use for comparative purposes.

The link is at the bottom to Darren’s article and one more matter for the record, I was no Schumacher fan during his career proper. Further, the absolute dominance of the Ferrari years meant my previous F1 obsession during was at times reduced to a passing interest, so I have no vested interest in defending the 7 times world champion.

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