Fernando Alonso

Indian GP Review: Newey to Ferrari? Less races for Europe? Bernie’s birthday bash, Alonso’s dig at Vettel

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The news stories together with post race thoughts following the interviews. First some news…

Less races for Europe: Whilst Bernie is usually newsworthy and highly entertaining, he is either actually becoming senile – or I am just sick and tired of his monotonous monologue on a certain subject. The race calendar and new circuits. We were told in an interview on SKY that Europe will be losing another 3 races on Friday, and then on Sunday according to Mr. E France and the Paul Ricard is close a 7 year deal.

Then after Nurburgring telling us they have a contract for an extended race deal, Ecclestone  contradicts this, “Yes, there are negotiations with Hockenheim about the race in 2013,” (Wirtschaftswoch).

I’m getting really bored with the silly track in/out game.

Bernie’s birthday bash: There was an unassuming gathering for champagne at breakfast on race day. Most team principals were there but only 2 drivers popped in – Grosjean and Hamilton.

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Caterham: Is Gascoyne leaving? NY 2013 – No, maybe.., Lauda unveils Mercedes new ‘concept’ for 2013, DRS zone altered for BIC, Ecclestone gets $400m bill

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Daily News

Indian GP, Race Strategy: For a full track characteristics overview and Indian GP race strategy report, no one does it better than James Allen on his F1 News site (http://connect.jamesallenonf1.com). Includes: form guide, weather forecast, likely tyre perfomance, pit stop strategy, chance of safety car, start performance table and pit stop table plus comment from one of F1’s most experienced specialist observers.

DRS zone strategy: The FIA have made changes to the Buddh International Circuit DRS zones. As well as having the original zone that runs along the maximum distance of the start-finish straight, there is a second DRS zone that runs from Turn 3 to Turn 4 and this has been extended by 80 metres.

It appears the FIA are getting to grips with DRS zone lengths. The tracks where the racing is less exciting is where they have taken gambles on going long on the zone lengths. The extended zones this year have been predominantly after tight hairpins/very slow corners. (Canada, Valencia, Korea, India), so it could be the first zone in Abu Dhabi is also extended. If this is the case then Austin is also likely to have a fairly extensive zone on the long straight.

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New Jersey out, Turkey in?, Schumacher to receive ‘Legend of Sport’ award, and other F1 News and comment

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Great to see contributors coming up with news I’ve not yet found. Thanks to madmax for this one (23:36 18/10/12).  By the way madmax, you gave us this about 7 hours before the mainstream media reported it. Probably something to do with my permanent state of insomnia too.

New Jersey: Unlike most new circuits who run the approval gauntlet with Mr. E, it appears New Jersey have declined to participate in the 2013 calendar. “The race, scheduled for June 16, 2013, will be pushed back a year in order for track organizers to finish the permitting process needed to complete the 3.2-mile road course along the Hudson River in Weehawken and West New York, N.J. Among other things, track officials are waiting approval from Corps of Engineers to take control of property along the Hudson River where grandstands will be erected” (Speed).

11:40 (19/12) Interesting that Mr. E isn’t saying the usual stuff about no money, in fighting or contractual matters being the problem. They just ran out of time to get everything organised” (Reuters). Interesting how in the developing world the legalities of Health and Safety and a whole host of other bureaucratic red tape don’t affect a new venue as much as in Western Society.

The judge13 did suggest in “A shrinking calendar for 2013” (link – published Sept 15) that, “unless some real sweetheart deals are done, and that 2013 will could well have fewer races than 2012”. Ecclestone’s problem is he can’t be seen to letting his grasp slip on the calendar; particularly as he has negotiated with the teams that they will participate in up to 23 races each season. On this basis to keep the momentum it must be highly likely Turkey, a track owned by Ecclestone and co., will make a return to the calendar. This is one of the better Tilke venues and has always provided a race that’s no procession.

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Monday Post Korea Blues: Mercedes woeful slide continues, BBC story panics Red Bull and more…

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Funny how from week to week the Monday morning feeling following and F1 weekend can be quite different. With Japan and Korea being back to back the contrast is stark. Last Monday, I was still buzzing from the Japanese GP. not that the battle for the win was great, but there was a lot of good racing down the pack, the fans were amazing, Kamui getting his podium at last before he loses his F1 seat, Grosjean’s latest incident…lots of stuff to think about and write about.

Today…Zzz…I’m struggling. Part of the reason is I think my post race thoughts posted yesterday for Korea was more comprehensive than the one from Japan, so there are fewer loose ends to tie up today. Another the reason is that the F1 circus is battling its way back from the remote part of S. Korea and today is a quiet news days. Any way let’s see what’s going on.

BBC – Old News and Wrong News

You can spot quiet news days, for example, today the BBC F1 story is a re-hash of something we have known about for months – Vettel/Ferrari possibly/maybe 2014. Even so, someone at Red Bull just told me the team have been forced into action and brought forward their post race debrief from Tuesday to today 3:30pm – to quash the rumours.

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Korea GP review: Alonso and Kobayashi know the game is up. More poor marshalling ruins the race

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The rather limp wristed waft of the chequered flag by Psy, of “Gangnam Style” fame, probably encapsulated the event that was the 2012 Korean GP.

The headlines are, Vettel takes the lead in driver’s WDC from Alonso for the first time since Valencia, and Red Bull extend their lead in the constructors’ table, with Ferrari significantly overtaking McLaren for 2nd place.

Marshalling ruins another race

As I suggested following Singapore, the marshalling of the event had a significant impact today and  robbed us of what could have been a very exciting race. How it took until lap 10 to move Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes is beyond me, particularly when considering where it was. Races with high tyre wear are often fascinating in strategy and can produce exciting finishes. By lap 2 when the DRS was available, the cars were still tightly bunched any number of drivers may have been able to have a go at Vettel and a number of position interchanges would have occurred.

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Lauda to sack Brackley personnel, Nascar mother of all pile ups, Lola closes doors, Tooned will be ‘racey’

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After battling with F1 and global finance until gone midnight on “Ecclestone to load a mountain of debt on F1“, then the day so far has been spent with lawyers – so we’ll start with a News Links post and see if I’ve got enough time and energy for an in depth article later. (Anything in wite on this page is a URL link to the original or pic or video).

Quick thanks to someone on German site MotorsportTotal.com who posted a link to thejudge13 and we’ve had over 50 new German visitors today from their site. Great work.

  1. Last week I did a couple of articles on Niki Lauda, suggesting there may be fireworks at Merceds F1 now he’s the big boss (a position he couldn’t help refering to on TV at the weekend I noticed). Niki’s inability to “suffer fools gladly” is legendary. So today, our favourite German publication Bilde has the following, “Schumi’s car builders are fired”. (I always put the link to prove the source, but be careful with any translation software – particularly verb tenses). Anyway Christian Danner RTL expert pundit and ex F1 driver of note (I’ll come back to this) says today that Niki Lauda needs to fire the designers of this years car. He suggests that after 9 months the car is performing like a Torro Rosso and heads must roll. He urges Niki the hatchetman on, “He is responsible to make the next decision. And the next decisions will be primarily personnel decisions”. RTL commentator Danner, a little bit like Mr. J Herbert for SKY, drove in Formula 1 over 4 years. 2 of those he was not classified with any points and had a career best P4 in USA 1989 when he also had his best season scoring a total of 4 points. WATCH OUT ROSS

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Japan GP review: Kimui enjoys more pressure, Massa’s 1st podium for 36 races, Grosjean hounded again

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We’re pretty fortunate in the UK in the amount of TV coverage we now have. Many UK fans were distraught last year when it was announced that the BBC would not be getting more than 10 races live and that SKY TV (subscription) would be covering all the races.

Of course having to pay a few hundred pounds a year to watch F1 for some is too much, but if we just look at coverage SKY F1 now provides, it is of the highest quality.

Of course most countries get the official podium interviews and some of the press pen interviews the drivers are compelled to provide. Yet where we are fortunate is we get many post race unofficial interviews with the various SKY (and BBC when they’re live) presenters from team principles, race engineers, drivers and many others.

In these informal chats away from the pack of photographers and mass microphones, the F1 players are often emotional, positive or negative, and can be very, very revealing

The main reason for me saying all of this is that when I’m fortunate to be at a race, I get to spend several hours after the chequered flag has fallen pouring through the race and post race footage.

So for those of you without SKY here’s some stuff I picked up.

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Montreal promoters go bust, Schumacher gives Mercedes 5 mins warning, Perez must stop fibbing, Kingfisher employee family suicide

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It’s race weekend, and for those of you who have only joined us since Singapore, thejudge13, is often a little quieter over race weekends – as the focus of the F1 world is on reporting breaking news – who said what to who – who was fastest in which session, so Friday (or is it now Saturday in Japan) before a race is a good time to try to tie up any loose ends that are worthy of note, but not a full article.

A bit of housekeeping first.

Please, please leave comments to the articles, even if you think I’m talking rubbish – tell me. I’ve only had to moderate 1 comment so far for use of the f-word – it still got published but with “[mod]” replacing the offending  euphemism.

Also, if you enjoy thejudge13 follow us. This will help us further down the line get live F1 twitter/site guests to come and debate with us and answer our questions. You can follow on twitter and/or email. The buttons on the  vertical bar to the right of the screen. If you click for email, you will ONLY receive email when a new article is first published. Retweets and favourites are very good for getting us ranked higher in the busy twitter #F1.

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Schumacher Retires – Really?

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So Michael announces his retirement in Suzuka. Adam Cooper has the full and rather emotional speech here, so I won’t publish it all. What surprises me is that Schumacher has been driving pretty well this year, here’s some head to heads

Head to Head – Schumacher/Rosberg/Massa

Ave grid position                     Ave qualifying time outside poll position

7.5     Schmacher                    0.936secs    Schumacher

8.5     Rosberg                         1.145secs    Rosberg

10.8   Massa                            1.095secs    Massa

Ave finish position                 Head to head qualifying

7.1      Schumacher                Schumacher/Massa       10 to 4

8.1      Rosberg                       Schumacher/Rosberg    8   to 6

9.8      Massa

Finished ahead of (completed races)

Schumacher/Massa        3 to 4

Schumacher/Rosberg     6 to 1

People have criticised Schumacher for not finishing enough races, 7 in fact, but If you consider the list of problems Schumacher has had, his contribution has been minimal (in bold)

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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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