Get Out Your Map of Tassie

The V8 circus currently has its big top pitched at Symmons Plains, Tasmania, a track you can see on the new Google Maps right here (the tilt function especially makes it a bit more real - the geography lets it down a bit, sadly, but Mount Panorama is a mountain, so it looks fantastic. Doesn't quite give the full impression of what a rollercoaster ride it is, but gives you a much better idea of the contours of the thing than a flat overhead shot).

Anyway, since its Symmons Plains, I thought I'd take the opportunity to dust off a favourite video of mine, also from Symmons Plains. It's only short, so stop and have a watch.

That's Jim Richards...

You know, this bloke.

...in a JPS-sponsored BMW M3 powered by an all-new 2.3-litre motor, racing Peter Brock in a Mobil-sponsored VK Commodore powered by a 5-litre V8 that was brand new in omigod 1969!  This is the side of Group A we don't remember today. Mention the era now and all you'll get is grumble-grumble-Godzilla-bloody-forrin-cars-scratch-me-Holden-grumble-grumble. But in fact, in the early years, it was a fantastic example of racing regulations gone right.

CAMS initially adopted the Group A rules in 1985 because they were sick of all the argy-bargy involved in making the ATCC a fair fight (with five manufacturers on the grid and protests about Volvo's aero package already kicking up dust, it's a situation AVESCO might soon be intimately familiar with). One of the main attractions of the international Group A rules - in force in Britain, continental Europe and Nippon since 1982 - was that all the performance concession-whoring would be the FIA's problem. CAMs gave themselves an eight-year breather that lasted until, oh, what's the date today? (It's not often mentioned, but to this day V8 Supercars is a "pirate" series with no official sanctioning, like the Indy Racing League and NASCAR. Just one of the reasons it's not called "the ATCC" anymore).

Anyway, in Group A you started with a normal road car, a mass-volume seller with four seats and over 5,000 registrations per year, welded in a roll cage and started speccing up the standard engine block it came with. The rules were amazingly lenient, almost formula libre by modern standards: virtually all components could be upgraded and heat/chemically treated. That was acceptable to the FIA because they'd specified all the intake stuff could be no bigger than the road version, so you could make it rev but you couldn't make it breathe. In a time when every part in a V8 Supercar engine has to come off an approved "control list" available to everyone, that's almost unthinkable - in today's world of Inconel, beryllium and DLC coatings, leaving the engineers with so much freedom would cost a figure high enough for a Wall Street trader to retire, satisfied. Even in the Gordon Gecko 80's, it wasn't exactly cheap: a normal BMW 635 would set you back only $60,000, but for the model that won the '86 ATCC, you'd better have a spare $225,000. In the Eighties.

By comparison, a pack of the cigarettes it was advertising cost only $2.35. Moving on...

But the real core of Group A was its equivalence system: a bigger engine incurred a higher minimum weight, but was allowed a larger fuel tank and wider, grippier tyres. In theory, that would equalise performance across a number of different models. In practice... go watch the video again. Two sports sedans from opposite corners of the world, racing door-to-door.

1987 was the last time Group A worked like that. The FIA had already stumped themselves by allowing the Jaguar XJS to compete (a car that almost certainly never reached 5,000 production examples per year), and they were seemed to have had the wool pulled over their eyes regarding turbocharging. Originally the rules said a turbo car found its equivalence by multiplying its engine capacity by 1.4 (putting the 2-litre Sierra in the 2.8-litre class) but honestly x2 or x3 would have been more realistic. Turbocharging was a gigantic loophole, and by the time Bathurst came around the grid had become a sea of Belgian Fords, and next year Dick Johnson would have the boost sorted on his blood red Shell Sierra and be ready to turn the series into a DJR benefit. And Nissan was hard at work behind the scenes polishing their next-gen Skyline concept...

But that was all still in the future. Right now, in 1987, it was all still working beautifully. And for any kids reading this, "JPS" stands for John Player & Sons, a cigarette brand, because in those days you were allowed to advertise ciggies on the telly. No, really! And they were even allowed to colour in the packs, which is why Jim's car is that sexy black and gold. With the recent efforts of the Australian government, though, it isn't hard to imagine what a modern JPS team car would look like.

My NASCAR Experience

I'm writing this now because I missed the boat on Clipsal 500 commentry (AWOL at my brother's wedding - congrats, bro!) and the F1 in Melbourne doesn't get started for another couple of days. So this will probably be my last chance to write it down before November, and by then the memories will have faded. Since I don't want that to happen, and to record this for posterity, here's my experience of life in a NASCAR stock car.

For anyone who doesn't know already, in November 2013 I took a weekend off work and headed to Melbourne, having booked a NASCAR ride with Adrenaline/Fastrack Racing, or whatever it is they call themselves. My reasons for choosing NASCAR over the more common "V8 Race Car" ride & drive package were four: firstly, everybody chooses the V8 drive, and I like to be different; secondly, on closer inspection those "V8 Race Cars" are just normal Commodores with lots of racing parts glued on; thirdly, having had a fair bit of fun with stock car racing on rFactor, I wanted to see what the real thing was like; and lastly, it was the cheapest thing they offered.

In retrospect, that's quite weird: in the briefing, the people in charge revealed the whole reason they started the business was so they'd have a way to run their race cars occasionally. The V8 Race Cars on the road circuit are just a way to pay the bills; NASCAR's where their hearts are really at (they even admitted that if they'd waited until today to bring NASCAR to Australia instead of trying in the late 80's it would have taken off a lot better - but of course now they have no money).

Anyway, the cars: the white #1 was patterned after a Holden Commodore and the orange #8 a Chevy Lumina, both ex-racing cars that saw plenty of action in the Thunderdome's 90's heyday ("This place used to rock," they told us. "We'd have 40,000 people here every Saturday night."). The engines were both racing-spec 358ci Chevy V8s; surprisingly, when I asked if they detune them to make them last longer, they said no, they just don't take them above 5,000rpm anymore. So there's probably still over 500 kW on tap there, if you hold off changing up... something to think about.

Walking up to the cars made me feel a little bit light-headed, buzzing. They're surprisingly small when you see them with your own eyes - on TV, dressed as they are in flashy sponsor colours, they tend to look larger-than-life, especially when the only people you see standing next to them are racing drivers. But racing drivers are short-arses like you wouldn't believe. Of the two drivers we had that day, only one of them - my driver, Mal Rose - actually stood taller than my shoulders. The other - George Elliot, who was actually Aussie NASCAR champion over the summer of '91-'92 - was about an inch shorter, and they were both kind of dwarfy dudes with pot bellies. But in their full racing gear, they were still pretty intimidating - think Kerry King, minus the beard but wearing a fireproof suit, and you get the idea.

Getting into the car is frankly humiliating if you're my size. I'm not a small guy in any dimension (ladies), and stock cars have no doors. They're just an aluminium skin draped over a roll cage, so the only way in or out is through the window. And it's not until you try to squeeze in that you realise these cars aren't built full-size, but about 80% scale. The "Holden Commodore" George Elliot was driving actually had a wheelbase about the same as my Corolla hatchback, would overhang maybe 200mm at both ends, and had a lower roofline. Squeezing down and twisting around the roll cage is the only way to get in, so if you're built like an NRL player I recommend taking up contortion as a hobby (alternatively, thankyou so much Dad for being a truckie who drove car-carriers and giving me a childhood of getting in and out via the window. The practice came in handy!).

Once you're in, the first thing you notice is the heat. It wasn't an especially hot day that day - high-20's maybe, with a cool breeze - but once you're inside the car it's nasty. You know how it is when you first get into your car after it's been parked in the sun all day? It's like that, the kind of heat dogs die in. Within seconds my forehead was beading with sweat. The difference is, there's no AC on a racing car, so it stays like that all day, even when you're doing 200+ with the window down. "Like sitting in a sauna with your overalls on," is an old cliche, but it's stuck around because it's accurate. Sweltering.

Despite the heat though, the cockpit was a surprisingly cozy place to be. Both cars that day were built by a guy named Marshall Brewer, and clearly he knows how to play Heavy Metal - you have four-inch thick steel piping all around you, some of it wrapped in the foam they make pool toys from. The seat felt like it was made of particle board and moulds to your back very nicely, even though I'm not really... erm... identically shaped to a real racing driver. Maybe that seat was made just for civvies. Anyway, all the solid steel and the way everything's so cramped makes you feel nicely cocooned, like you're wearing the car more than riding in it. But at the same time, it makes you nervous - like, gosh, there must be a reason they made the car this strong, right...?

When they fire the engine up, it sounds absolutely wicked. The engine note on an Aussie V8 is a bit too polite, a bit soulless (although Mercedes and Volvo seem to be doing their bit to fix that). Not on these. They snarl and crackle on the overrun and you get the distinct impression there's nothing between you and the cylinders - the exhaust pipe would barely be a metre long. The driver revs it like a pit bull straining at the leash, and for a second you decide that no, you don't want to do this after all... but then the spotter gives the cars a final visual check, and gives the drivers the thumbs up - and you're off.

The launch is surprisngly gentle - I've ridden in cars that should come with a neck brace, and this wasn't one of them (or maybe being hard up against the seat already took a lot of the shock out of it). The difference was, these guys didn't stop accelerating. All down pit lane they ran it up through the gears and the speed just kept building. The fastest you can go on Victoria/NSW roads is 110km/h: I'm guessing we were past that landmark in, oh, about three seconds. And we didn't drop below it again until we were safely back in pit lane.

So there I was, finally seeing the Calder Park Thunderdome as it should be seen. The sensation of speed was impressive, but not overwhelming... until we hit Turn 1.

The turns are where the experience went from "exciting" to "oh God, get me out of here!" For starters, in the middle of a race, I'm pretty sure you could lick a NASCAR brake disc and still enjoy a Mr Whippy afterwards, because the brakes will be stone cold. Yes, the drivers do slow down for the turns, but they consider themselves slowed down enough just by backing off the power. In NASCAR, the brakes are mostly decorative.

Next, the tyres. If you've ever been karting you'll know what I'm talking about already. For the rest of you... good God, you have no idea what slick tyres are like. They're nothing like the tyres on your car, which are really just to keep your rims off the tarmac and maybe clear some rain. Racing slicks are different, they hang on hard. Like you're welded to the track at all four corners, like you're hanging from the tyres but right-side up (I had a guy in a jobseeker class tell us it was a weird feeling, like the chassis was ready to slide but the tyres wouldn't let it. This is absolutely correct). The product of this is a simply incredible amount of G-force. The Fastrack page I linked above claims 2 or 3g, and I wouldn't dispute that, because for me it was only just below the pain threshold. You can feel your brain squishing against the inside of your skull and your left-hand lung trying to emigrate over to your right side. The closest thing to it is riding a rollercoaster - a rollercoaster that's constantly slipping off the rails and jumping onto some more.

That's the other thing about the turns - they're bumpy. Part of that is neglect (the 'dome never gets used anymore) and part is that racing cars simply don't believe in ride quality. Put together, the sensation is kind of like a speedboat bouncing from wave to wave. Every bump triggers another half-inch slide, and the driver's going at a speed that just allows him to land, grind out another slide and bounce to the next bump without losing control and careening into the wall.

I remember years ago reading a journalist who got to try out Sebastian Bourdais' title-winning ChampCar, and came away saying, "the faster you go, the higher the concrete walls seem. At full speed, it feels like you're driving in a squash court." Weirdly, I didn't get that feeling. In turns as steep as this, the wall is sort of hanging overhead, like the barbed wire section at the top of a security fence (in fact, it's so steep it almost feels like the turn is rising before you, like the tunnels in a waterslide). It never felt especially close because these guys hug the low line all the way around - but at the same time, it was what made the whole experience so thrilling.

Normal people, you see - me, you, anyone not-crazy - drive our cars according to consequences. We approach a corner at such a speed that, if we do get it wrong, we know we can recover or, at worst, hit that tree slowly enough that we'll emerge unharmed. The thing is, I didn't realise this was how I drove a car until I climbed in with someone who doesn't think like that. This was the real crux of the experience for me - all that G-force means you can feel how hard you are going to hit that wall when that monstrous grip finally does run out. And a racing driver doesn't care. Mal Rose barrelled into those turns like that concrete wall wasn't even there. While I was hanging on, fighting just to hold myself upright against the G's, he was giving it a bit more throttle and sliding through the rest of the turn - because he thought it was fun.

By this point the car was starting to seem less approachable than I first thought. You want to know the difference between a normal car and a racing car? It's that a racing car hates you. It's kind of like that scene in Avatar where Sam Worthington is trying to find a dragon-thingy to ride: "How will I know which one's mine?" "It will try to kill you." The impression I got from being in the cockpit at racing speed is that road cars are demure, helpful things that sort out a lot of stuff without you even noticing, like a good butler. A racing car is a pissed-off dragon you have to wrestle to the ground with sheer talent before you can make it behave. If you haven't got the talent, well...

On that note, Mal definitely had the talent. It never made sense to me that the career ladder for NASCAR starts with Saturday-night dirt oval racing, like the kind we have even in my home town Gilgandra. It does now: on a couple of laps, Mal (or as I shall call him from now on, Sir) held that car in a perfect four-wheel drift from the entry of the turn right through to the exit (and for the other laps, they were imperfect drifts, meaning he had to correct it with the steering wheel or, as to borrow Mr McLaughlin's phrase, with some jandal). Dirt-tracking on tarmac. With slicks, and concrete walls at arm's length. That is brave. Oh, and the banking sits lower than the straights as well, so you have to drop into it. In the photo the gradient seems gentle enough; at full speed it feels like a BMX jump. Remember all those times your dad ramped the family car into a sudden drop and left you dizzy with your heart in your mouth? Yeah, that, twice a lap.

So overall, you do a BMX jump and ramp the car into the turn, land with a thump, go sliding dunk-dunk-dunk across the bumps, trying to keep your insides from coming out while your driver deliberately provokes more sliding to find more speed, then do another BMX jump onto the straight. Where you'll get at most a few seconds' rest before it starts all over again.

The joke about NASCAR is that it stands for, "Non-Athletic Sport Centred Around Rednecks." I'm never making that joke again, because if that's the non-athletic version of racing then I'd hate to try the others. It's physically draining just holding yourself up against the G's, never mind all the strain of actually driving the car (we'll get into how incredibly heavy a brake pedal is another day...) especially in that 45-degree heat. Four laps is all they give you, but for me, four laps was enough. I was knackered, ready to get out. God only knows what it's like to do it for three and a half hours, with 40 other cars crowding you out. Afterwards I drove back to the motel with my brain ringing like your ears after someone slaps them, and had a good ten hours sleep. And the punchline I usually give is that these old blokes - in their late 50s, both of them - had both been in the car for over an hour by the time I got in, and the first thing Sir Mal said to me was, "I've gotta get back to Charlotte, they still let over-50's have a steer there!" These old guys are tough, tough like old leather, or a truck tyre. And they have absolutely no fear, none at all. God only knows what hard bastards they were back when they were in their prime.

And the next day, as I drove back home, all I could think was: "Do it. Hit the treadmill. Start karting. Get yourself a CAMS license. Get a car and go racing." It's an adrenaline rush like you wouldn't believe. Like Fight Club, after being in a racecar, everything else in your life gets the volume turned down. For the first time, I understood Maurice Trintignant's famous words: "Racing is life. Anything that happens before or after is... just waiting."

The waiting is killing me. I need to do it again.

Race Relations 23/02/14

At this very moment Formula 1 is busy testing in Bahrain, NASCAR is gearing up for the 500 at Daytona, and V8 Supercars are in the gooch weekend between their first and only test for the year at Eastern Creek and the season opener in Adelaide. The storm is about to break and I can not wait.

Just don't tell me this will be Ambrose's breakout year. I've been hurt before (image via Speedcafe).

The goss coming from F1 has been varied and interesting - there's relief from the drivers that the new turbo F1 cars aren't as slow as second-tier GP2 cars after all, which is good. Old fogies were also sent into raptures when Martini-branded merchandise arrived in online stores - surely that meant the iconic racing colours would be seen again in 2014? I was less enthused, it always seems to me that these people are so busy mourning the past they miss the legends being created now. And I maintain the Vodafone McLarens and Telefónica Renaults will go down among he sport's iconic liveries. Wait and see.

For a while, though, the big news was will the Red Bull even leave the garage in Bahrain? Vettel has faced the press and done his best impression of Legolas by admitting: "We still have lots of problems - large and small - that we need to fix." That's kind of worrying, because the Bahrain circuit gives the cars a very different workout to Jerez. The Spanish circuit's many high-G corners mean it's all about downforce, whereas the Middle Eastern autodrome is all long straights and hairpins, making it about minimal drag and brutal braking zones. In theory a car that has trouble at one should be okay at the other, unless something has gone wrong on a very fundamental level. Red Bull, we're all starting to get very worried about you.

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I'm betting F1's dry running was envied by the V8 Supercar crews. Their only pre-season test at Sydney Motorsport Park (I don't know why they changed the name, it'll always be Eastern Creek to me) was rather spoiled by drizzle, meaning kind of the only thing the test proved was that the cars actually run - not a huge concern when they run on the best cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology of 1993. Actually that's not quite fair - the metalwork has barely changed in 20 years, but the technology for controlling ignition timing and compression has improved out of sight, which is why a 1993 touring car had 335kW where a modern V8 is pushing 490 - without any increase in capacity or revs. That's progress for you.

Anyway, despite the rain we got to see the cars in action and see what liveries they'll be running this year. No real changes for FPR or Red Bull Australia, same Pepsi/Red Bull colours as last year; in contrast, HRT seems keen to prove they're a whole new beast, with the Holden red and white backed up by SP Tools and Mobil 1 colours. That's kind of a weird mash-up: to me SP Tools still means the #9 Mercedes from last year, while Mobil colours are associated with the Group A cars driven by Brocky - both VN Commodores (one of which he shared with Allan Moffat) and - no, really - a BMW M3 he shared with Jim Richards. Yeah, you can see why Brock fans would rather forget those days. But on this year's HRT Commodore, it has a kind of "greatest hits album" effect. We'll have to see if the reborn HRT can become an icon in its own right.

Oh, and Robert Dahlgren has a Swedish flag on the roof. Lol and good on him, I say. At least we'll have no trouble picking he and Scott McLoughlin out of the pack: just shut your eyes and listen.



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It seems I have to eat humble pie regarding my gearbox analysis from January 28. I complained that eight speeds gives the engineers too much room to fine-tune the car to the circuit; I should have read the rulebook properly, because then McLaren posted this in their Facebook feed:

Yep, it's not eight ratios per weekend, it's eight ratios for the entire season. Now that is interesting...

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And if you objected when I referred to NASCAR's biggest race as "the 500" and still insist "the 500" will happen in May, good on you, I'm glad hard times haven't taken the fight out of you IndyCar fans. I for one would love to see Indy come back, because I can really see it working as a rolling laboratory for the Big Three to develop the kinds of engines we need right now. Speedways are usually won on fuel strategy, so a turbocharged, small-capacity, highly-efficient IndyCar motor that could give Ford, GM and Chrysler some sex appeal and street cred would go a long way to bringing Indy back to the forefront where it belongs. It'll be a long war of attrition while NASCAR stands in your way, but I sincerely hope you guys can do it. Just don't make the mistake Tony George made and try and keep it all-American: the 500 can be a great race or it can be an American race, but not both. We don't live in that world anymore.

Kaboum

Poor Renault. The Jerez F1 test turned out to be quite a memorable one for le géant jaune, and for all the wrong reasons. Whereas Mercedes and Ferrari left with over a thousand kilometres covered by works teams alone, Renault's combined customer base barely managed to break five hundred, with favoured sons Red Bull suffering most of all. Sebastian Vettel managed just 11 laps in the first two days.

Ricciardo, just as he realised Webber saw this coming.
(image via Skysports)

Daniel Ricciardo was still on his first-ever lap in a Red Bull when he had to pull over with smoke coming from the back of the car. PR man Remi Taffin must have felt like a toe in a pool of piranhas when the press corps swarmed in.

"The RB10 rode back to the pits on a flatbed truck. As the tow truck came down the pitlane, the transponder in the racecar triggered the official lap counting system. The timing and scoring TV screens duly recorded that Ricciardo had completed his first lap.

"Ricciardo later managed two more laps and came back to the pits. There was a slot - measuring about 12cm by 3cm - cut in the bodywork near the floor just ahead of the left rear wheel. Whatever was behind the slot was glowing red hot and sparking and sending off little shoots of flames. A mechanic aimed a fire extinguisher at the slot and gave it a couple of squirts.

"That was it for Red Bull on Day 3." - Dan Knutson, Auto Action #1577

That's a little more whimsical than Dan's usual style, which tends to conform to the industry standard tone of, "the facts, but with a smirk." I guess that's what happens when reality follows a screenplay. Anyway, the word is that Renault misunderestimated the difference between the dyno where they did all the R&D and the actual cars they were for. Unsurprisingly, it's Red Bull who've copped the worst of this, since as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Adrian Newey has always been a designer who takes Porsche's Maxim - that the perfect racing car crosses the finish line in first place and then falls to pieces - strictly literally. His extreme design philosophy once led him to convince team boss Christian Horner to get rid of the Ferrari engines his team were using and do a deal with Renault instead, an odd decision at the time because Renault's engines were known to be down on power, but there was method to Newey's madness: Ferrari's engines ran too hot and needed too much radiator to give him the trim sidepods he wanted; Renault's wimpy but cucumber-cool V8s offered a better aero profile. Is it any surprise that cars built to the same philosophy are running into trouble when it turns out the power unit needs more cooling than the manufacturer originally quoted?

Overall this ranks somewhere near the middle of the sliding scale of engineers' headaches. At the top of the scale are problems they'd love to have, like the drivers hating each other's guts because they're always taking wins off each other. Fantastic: the car's winning races and the biggest headache is the moaning of whoever finished second, which isn't your problem anyway. Below that are problems like "The car's really fast, but it keeps breaking all the time" - meaning some re-engineering is needed, but at least the car is fast so you can trade some speed for reliability. If you can talk the accounts department out of a bit more funding maybe you can just upgrade to a stronger material. At the very bottom of the list is when the driver comes back and says "The car feels fantastic, engine's great, handling is beautiful. Why are we two seconds off the pace?"

The current problems with the Renault Energy F1-2014 (dumb name, Renault) seem to be issues with "turbocharger and boost control systems with knock-on effects on the associated engine management systems." That could be a sideways jab at a rival, since the black boxes controlling the engine are still made by McLaren Electronic Systems, a part of the McLaren Group but sworn to be independent of the McLaren F1 team (originally brought in to get rid of traction control, but the other teams have never been happy about a rival getting a look at their technology). But it could still mean a software tweak is all that's needed. Alternatively, the entire back of the car could need to be rebuilt to get some cooling through, but at least they know what they have to fix. It's just that the compromise will be a painful one for Newey personally, since he'll have to give up - or at least seriously rethink - most of his pet aerodynamic ideas for this generation of F1 car. That will make the car slower than he originally hoped. It's too early to say whether the RB10 enjoys the same huge performance edge as its dad and great-grandad, but it's entirely possible that after Newey re-sculpts the airflow to suit his prima donna new powerplant, the result is a car that's only as fast as its rivals. As the Zen master said, we'll see.

The funny thing is that Renault used to be the kings of this sort of thing. I was there for their glory days in '05/'06, when they won both titles convincingly, and, well... do you realise how hard it is to win back-to-back World Championships like that? Car development stops for most teams in the last third of the year when it's clear they're not going to make up the difference, and they sensibly switch to next year instead. But for the teams in the title hunt, development of this year's car actually gets ramped up - no team is going to sacrifice a minor shot at the title next year when they have a major shot at it this year. The result is that development of next year's car gets put off, like a uni student's homework, until holy crap it's due at 10am tomorrow and the team has to put some coffee and a bag of noodles on because they're going to have to pull an all-nighter. With that in mind, consider that a Renault-mounted Alonso won the last F1 World Championship to be contested with a 3-litre V10 engine, and also the first one with a 2.4-litre V8.

If you know your maths you'll have spotted already that 3 divided by 10 is the same as 2.4 divided by 8, so a lot of components could have been shared between those engines. But still, a V8 - any V8 - requires different timing than a V10, meaning lots of new bits have to be made. Moreover the V8s had to be overbuilt to a new 95kg minimum weight, so it wasn't a simple matter of taking a hacksaw to the RS25 and cutting off the last two cylinders. Throw in the shortened timetable all the teams had to get those V8s rolling and Renault's achievement seems quite incredible.

But still, it's kind of heartwarming that even a engineers as experienced as the crew at Viry-Châtillon can make a rookie mistake like forgetting the difference between a dyno and the racing car. Next time an older racing fan complains that motor racing just isn't the same as yesteryear, you can tell them that actually yes, it totally is.

Meeting His Destiny In Quite A Similar Way

Meet Robert Dahlgren.

He's a Bloody Volvo Driver ®, and he's come to Australia to drive a Volvo S60 in the V8 Supercar Series for the team formerly known as Garry Rogers Motorsport. The long-time Holden faithful have done themselves a nice deal to become the Aussie branch of Volvo's expanding motorsport programme, so as of Clipsal this year they're no longer GRM: they're Volvo Polestar Racing.

We'll skip the irony of using the Polestar name in the Southern Hemisphere and go straight to who they are; Polestar are to Volvo what AMG are to Mercedes and FPV are were to Ford, in-house performance specialists that build hot Volvos for consumption and liaise with the racing teams. Polestar have made a moderate splash in this country with a tuned, limited-edition Volvo S60, predictably called the Polestar, and the word is it's pretty good - just not quite good enough to take on AMG, HSV and the M-Division. The engine isn't quite exciting enough and there's a tad too much understeer to call it a true sports sedan, but overall it's a decent first try for a company that's always been the very antithesis of performance motoring. For the first time Volvo have built a car enthusiasts might actually want to drive, instead of one they wish they were driving when the inevitable crash happens.

Enough sarcasm: I for one welcome our new Swedish overlords, packing up your whole life and moving to Australia as Dahlgren has deserves serious respect, regardless of how much success results (yes, I'm sending some good will to Alex Prémat, GRM's last Euro import, who by "mutual agreement" has decided to return to Europe rather than continue making up the numbers here. Sorry it didn't work out, Alex: brofist for even trying). But Dahlgren isn't exactly a stranger to the V8 paddock, having raced British Formula Ford against our own James Courtney and then British Formula 3 against Will Davison, taking the title in '03. Weirdly, he won his big prize - the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship - the same year as Courtney too, in 2010.

That's one more top-level touring car title than Scott McLoughlin, the kid who's almost certainly going to make his life absolute holy hell this year. Scott's already shown he has a knack for these machines, which are nothing like European-style touring cars Dahlgren's used to, which make their laptime under braking and turn-in. By contrast, NASCAR star Kurt Busch tried an Aussie V8 in Austin and found it reminded him of a GT car, but with vastly more power and deceptively fast mid-corner speeds. His summary was: "It's a muscle car, but it's a sports car at the same time."

It will be a big change, especially when I start racing. When you're at the point of overtaking, passing and start procedures, that will be the small thing. The big thing will be to adapt to the cars, the championship and getting used to the media around the championship. Everything is new. - Robert Dahlgren

Everything, including the car. GRM have lots of experience building V8 racecars, but until now it's been with Chevrolet's Holden's battle-hardened mechanicals. This will be the first time they've run with a Volvo engine, which didn't even exist this time last year. Amazingly, Volvo declined Mark Skaife's offer of a generic "category engine" and instead developed a new 4.4-litre V8 of their own, which they've stretched out to the 5-litre limit and say they're "very happy" with the figures it's producing. Aero testing is now done as well and the shape has been locked off by laser scanning and saving it as a 3D model, and if VPR deviate too far from the model they'll start attracting penalties. I sincerely hope they don't, because even in Westinghouse White the S60 looks properly beasty, like something the Stig would use for school runs ("Some say he actually drives a Volvo..."). Clipsal will have to tell whether it has the go to match the show, but like the Erebus Mercs, at least it'll have a soundtrack all its own.

Dahlgren has superstition on his side as well: last time a man named Robbie raced a Volvo in the ATCC, it won the championship and gave us our first Kiwi champion (that was 1985 if you're curious: the car was a square-ended, slab-sided geography teacher-esque Volvo 240 Turbo. Dick Johnson derided it as a block of flats on wheels, and even the team name sounded like a joke - keep a straight face and tell me "Volvo Dealer Team" doesn't sound like something made up by Mel Brooks. But they also had John Bowe and the team manager was John Sheppard, who'd managed HDT the year Brocky crushed 'em, so yes, they did win. That's also one more ATCC crown than Mercedes-Benz have ever managed, if you're keeping score, so this year it seems to me the Erebus Mercedes and Volvo Polestar teams have the clear goal of beating each other).

Anyway... unfamiliar car, unfamiliar circuits, a red-hot teammate tipped as a future champion: Robert Dahlgren has the world's hardest job this year. I wish you well sir, and hope your debut down under brings more encouragement than heartbreak. Our job as spectators will be almost as hard, though - we'll have to stifle the giggles whenever you talk to the press.

Formula Ugly

Here we go again.

F1's first four-day test at Jerez in Spain is now complete, and the implications are surprising and fascinating. While Mercedes managed a full race simulation, Red Bull are struggling to finish a full lap without the car coasting to a halt in a cloud of its own smoke. It would seem Jenson's prediction of a "hilarious" first test have come quite true, but it shouldn't really have surprised us: even before he joined Red Bull, Adrian Newey's cars were highly-strung glass cannons, and the fact that the Red Bull RB10 is breaking tells me he pushed it slightly over the razor's edge yet again. The relative ruggedness of the Mercedes W05 could just mean it is slow, even if they did start pouring resources into the turbo car a lot sooner than everyone else. If Red Bull can get the RB10 to hold together, I think it will give the rest of the grid a bit of a shock, but, as the Spartans pointed out to Phillip of Macedon, the key word is, "if." Too early to call, but at this stage it looks like we could be in for a tortoise-and-hare style championship, like '05. How fun!

But journos and Facebook experts are saying nothing about this. They've got smaller things on their minds - the crude and rather suggestive nose shapes most of the teams have emerged with. Williams were the first to debut their new car and, well...

The giggling started pretty much straight away. One Facebook page ran a caption comp (my entry being, "Why yes, I do drive a rather flash car, how did you know?" Didn't check to see if it got any likes), while others agreed Williams are just begging for sponsorship from a condom manufacturer, which I feel is just wrong.

Plainly it should be Lotus.

And that's why there hasn't been much analysis of the Jerez test yet; everyone's too busy moaning about how ungodly ugly the class of 2014 is.

I swear they do this every year. In 2012 it was the step-noses that so offended to their optical apparatus. Before that it was the new wings, which looked less like Grand Prix machinery and more like, "a Formula Atlantic car from the 1970s." The year before that it was all the aerodynamic furniture encrusting their sleek noses and engine cowls (Honda's "Dumbo wings" and Renault's "1950s land speed record fin" drawing particular ire). And there will always be a segment of the fandom upset the cars have wings at all.

Not to be rude, but you can't help noticing that the guys making this kind of talk tend to be of a... certain age. Auto Action #1576 ran with the cover "Formula Ugly", and editor Rob Margeit's column was fairly typical:

For me, as a child growing up and falling in love with F1, part of the appeal lay in the simple beauty of of the cars. I still remember the first time I laid eyes on Mario Andretti's low-slung JPS Lotus. Respendent in its classic black-and-gold warpaint, Andretti's sleek racer was everything a race car should be. In the 1980s, I was enamoured of Gordon Murray's Brabham BT52 that propelled Nelson Piquet to the 1983 title... In 1991, team boss Eddie Jordan turned to F1 and made an immediate impact with the 191, designed by Gary Anderson and featuring the classic "coke bottle" shape. Look at it today and it still makes your heart beat just that little bit quicker.

And then, like clockwork:

Go back to the 1960s and F1 car design was an art. From sleek Brabhams, nimble Lotuses and gorgeous Dan Gurney Eagle, the 1960s represented the apogee of F1 car design. At least in terms of aesthetics.

Sigh. Yes, even in 2014, there are still people who can't forgive us for moving on from the Lotus 49.

Now I'm sorry Rob, everyone, but I just don't get it. You know what the cars of '66-'68 looks like to me? Primitive. They were simple, sure, but as far as I'm concerned simple is for simpletons. Give me complexity. Give me the fluid razor curves of the 2008 title rivals, the Ferrari F2008 and McLaren MP4-23, the most evenly-matched cars of the Noughties, maybe of all time. All I ever read in the official publications was how they looked like an aerodynamic dog's breakfast, but I just loved visualising the slipstream flowing around them, like some sort of fractal art in motion. I didn't care that they were the opposite of simple, they were clever, their shapes the result of an incredible amount of computer jamming, trial & error, and sheer hard work. They were and are, absolutely breathtaking.

It's no secret what's going on here. Everyone's idea of what Formula 1 should be is formed in the early days when they first encounter the sport; that's the era that gets framed by the nostalgia goggles and held up as the standard by which all other eras are measured. It happens to all of us, so I'm not going to be so unkind as to deprive the older fans of their right to an opinion. I just want them to realise that it happened differently to us young'uns. If you need a moment to gather up your blown mind, take all the time you need, we'll wait.

Cars with dongs on the front take a bit of getting used to, I'll admit. I'm not going to explain the technical loophole that created them, others have done a better job of that better already. But I will finish off by pointing out a basic principle. Want to see the four most beautiful Grand Prix cars of all time?

1992 Williams

1998 McLaren

2002 Ferrari

2011 Red Bull

The car that wins most looks best. So has it always been.

Magic 8-Ball Says: Outlook Not So Good

My Dad now drives a Volkswagen Amarok. He calls it The Wolf, partly because "amarok" is Inuit for wolf and partly because I don't think he's ever seen Pulp Fiction. It is the most ridiculous thing ever. Feels like driving a monster truck, you need a step ladder to clean the windscreen and it comes with an eight-speed gearbox - eight! This is because it's a German car from Germany and needed to be able to handle every speed from a standing start right through to V-max on ze autobahns. No it was never going to set the German highway system alight, but it needed to be, at the very least, not dangerously slow (I'm told if you get stuck behind a semi on an autobahn, that's it: other people will be coming up too fast for you to pull out and get past). So, fit that low-revving turbo diesel with more ratios and it'll have a wider spread of speeds. With an automatic, it literally doesn't matter how many are in there until the gearbox case is poking out both ends of the car.

Pictured: why the manual has only six speeds.

Same thing with the paddle-shift gearbox on a Grand Prix car. It doesn't really matter how many ratios you cram in there, the cockpit only has controls for the next one and the last one. Ergo, the number's been slowly creeping up over the years: back in the 90's they still only had six. For most of the Noughties it was seven. This year it's eight. Why don't they cut the foreplay and just bring in CVT you ask? Well, because the rule-makers think it would be boring and they want to maintain the spectacle. And that's rather worrying, because they left the engineers in charge of the asylum.



Great video, I honestly didn't really get how seamless-shift worked until I saw it. Seamless shift started making inroads into Formula 1 around 2006 (ironically, a little bit after they'd started showing up on road cars). Compared to the previous generation of (amazingly fast) Formula 1 gearboxes, that saved around two seconds a race - in a sport where races are won by tenths, a very worthy investment (forum trivia: generally only top gear made it past 1:1, which is the same as 3rd in your car. The rest are all reduction gears. If you were wondering how it was possible for a Grand Prix car to do 0 to 100 in less than two seconds, a major part of it was that the gearbox was substantially reducing the amount of work the engine had to do!).

But despite that, the basic concept remains pretty simple: your engine revs times your gear ratios times the size of your wheels equals the speed you're doing. If you can get your head around that, the actual numbers aren't that important.

So riddle me this - why have this year's cars grown an extra gear? Yes, they have lost some revs (redlining at 15,000rpm instead of 18,000 like last year), but the extra torque from those turbo engines should have cancelled that out. Just fit slightly taller ratios and they'd wind out to roughly the same top speed at Monza they've always had (which is, and always has been, frighteningly fast).

The other possible reason is because they need to keep the engine revving in the sweet spot. Ah, that sounds more like it. Turbo engines are notorious for the behaviour of their turbo; it's like the Tarja Turunen of an engine, an irritating diva that just happens to make the whole thing work. And like a diva, if you stop feeding it hot air it loses motivation and gives up. If you want the power to be there, you need to keep the revs up, and a fantastic way of keeping the revs up is to have lots of gears to choose from: "Hmm, middle of the corner, 12,000rpm, do I want third, fourth or fifth for this next bit? Better make it third, give that turbo a good squirt before the straight..."

And that, in my mind, is the problem. I don't want them to have choices. I don't want them keeping the revs up. I want them to screw it up occasionally. I want to see the driver fighting his car, standing on the throttle like it's a half-open manhole to Hell to keep the turbo turning over, even though he's running out of grip and climbing the ripple strips as it is. I want to see a driver lose a place because he took a corner wrong and lost the boost was left stranded. I want the cars to be less than perfect so the drivers have to display - not just use, display - a lot of skill to race them. What we're going to get instead are cars that glide through every corner as placid as Zen masters and then try to claw past each other using DRS and "push to pass" buttons.

But there it is, Grand Prix racing in the modern age: the FIA is desperate to have an exciting, down-to-the-wire World Championship this year, and they have absolutely no idea how to go about it. Forget eight gears, they should have dropped it to six.