Lewis Hamilton

Jenson denies following Lewis but deletes the evidence!

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Its Monday and I’m all Grosjean, Kimi and ALonso’d out – time for a bit of fun and where best to turn but to Lewis and his Twitter machine.

Whilst lying on the couch, watching TV last night, I had my lap top open and twitter rolling away. A tweet from Lewis arrived and I was expecting him to be competeing with guru Alonso who had sung, (@alo_oficial) “5 great races coming! If the enemy thinks in the mountains, attack by sea, if they think in the sea, attack by the mountains”.

I sat up quickly. Maybe Lewis would give us another Martin Luther King quote from the book he’s been reading for most of this year.

Twittergate #2

But no, we got this from @LewisHamilton, “Just noticed @JensonButton unfollowed [me], thats a shame. After 3 years as teammates, I thought we respected one another but clearly he doesn’t.”

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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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Jenson says, “I love Sombreros’, Kimi on Sushi – ‘tastes like raw fish’, Pic future uncertain, Lewis goes wrong way on qualy setup

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Race weekend and its time for quick news and links. In depth articles back next week. Since signing for Mercedes, Lewis has reportedly been asking quite a lot of technical questions of team garage members about important aspects of the McLaren design of the car he drives…… 4 Wheels – check, steering wheel – check, … Read more

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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Whitmarsh: It was all about the money

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James Allen reports Martin Whitmarsh speaking today at a Vodafone phone in (say that after a few drinks) when discussed his feelings over losing Lewis Hamilton, his lack of regrets on the matter and the matter of Ferrari’s complaint to the FIA of the McLaren front wing being too flexible.

On the matter of Hamilton and sans regret, Whitmarsh words are, “The offer that we made was higher I believe than any driver in Formula 1 is currently receiving or will receive next year.”

Ok, thanks Martin that’s all cleared that up then… or does it?

I’ve read this carefully constructed sentiment a number of times over the past week and Whitmarsh has repeated it on a number of different occasions, not a single occasion merely reported differently by different sources.

“We made a very, very big financial offer, bigger than I believe any Formula One driver is enjoying today,” (Reuters)

And in a different interview reported in the Mail,

“‘We made a financial offer which is better than anyone in Formula One, other than Lewis himself, receives today, and that is something I am comfortable with.” (Daily Mail)

I try at times to resist my instincts, but after a semester of textual and literary criticism that has never been fruitfully employed in over 20 years, it’s time to dust off the text books.

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How Lauda got the top job in Mercedes F1

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It’s the old tale of ‘not what you know, but who you know’ that matters in life. I was extremely puzzled when I read about Niki Lauda’s involvement in mediating between Mr. Bernie Ecclestone and the board of Daimler Benz.

As I’ve previously documented, Daimler and Ecclestone were at loggerheads following the draft Concorde agreement as published before the start of this season. Such that Mercedes the car manufacturer was seriously threatening to pull out of F1 for good, or until Ecclestone was gone. (link)

Ecclestone in turn dismissed them as having “done nothing in F1” which poisoned the chalice further.

Such was the heated animosity between the parties you would think it was time to call upon one of history’s enigmatic peacemakers; one who had attained Alfred Nobel’s greatest honour; the like of Mother Theresa or Mahatma Gandhi.

As these 2 are unfortunately no longer with us, we must look to the land of the living and would probably settle on someone with the political nuance of Kofi Annan and the humility and wisdom of the Dalai Lama.

Enter the dragon’s den – Niki Lauda!

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Lauda: Ross Brawn’s new boss

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In the last thejudge13 article, ‘Schauber or Ferrari’ we looked at how successful Michael has actually been this year, and why it would be very strange for him to quit driving now. It was this that puzzled me most during the breaking story from Eddie Jordan about Hamilton moving to Mercedes.

Surely after coming out of retirement and investing his wealth of experience to the development of the fledging Mercedes works team, why would he step aside for Hamilton, and surely after all the years together, Ross Brawn wouldn’t push him out. It was also reported the consolation for Michael was that he was to be offered a job in the senior management of the team.

But why has Schumacher been left out in the cold? James Allen has written an excellent piece today, which in brief suggests Schumacher just missed the boat. (link) James argues that Michael Schumacher felt his position was secure enough to delay decisions until October before making a commitment, and the Hamilton events simply overtook Schumacher’s timetable.

I seem to remember there being some talk in the summer of Michael being offered a 1 year contract by Mercedes taking them up to the new engine launch in 2014. Allegedly, Schumacher wanted 2 years to reap any benefits many expect the team to have from the new technology. Maybe it was this negotiation point that cost Schumacher his seat.

We then heard over the weekend that Niki Lauda has been given an ambassadorial role with Mercedes AMG F1. No mention again of Schumacher which appeared a little strange.

Tomorrow morning, Bild (A German newspaper) is running an article entitled, “Off with Schumacher, on with the Lauda cap”. I guess the headline looses a little in translation, but to many of us the rapid escalation of Niki Lauda’s profile during the last week has come somewhat from ‘left field’ – a sporting Americanism that means ‘has come from nowhere’. Enough of the translations and onwards and upwards.

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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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