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.

Sender of Eight

Here's a question: what do F1's new eight-speed gearboxes have to do with their new permanent numbering system? I'll give you a hint - they're both related to the new double-points gimmick they're using to spice up the last round of the championship. Give up? They're all signs the Powers That Be are desperate to have an exciting, down-to-the-wire World Championship this year, and they have absolutely no idea how to go about it.

And they usually handle this sort of thing so well.

Permanent numbers and the double points thing are also part of the ongoing NASCAR-ification of all things. Stock car racing's popularity boom from 1995 to, say, 2008, convinced many sports bosses that NASCAR was the way and the life and all racing series must to imitate its example to be successful - meaning adopting its make-all-cars-equal philosophy and putting big obvious numbers on the doors rather than, say, opening up your sport to Californians like Jeff Gordon rather than the usual rednecks and working hard to give your fans access.

Even the mighty Formula 1 has fallen victim to this line of thinking. Between 1972 and last year, the number for each car/driver combo was based on where they'd finished in the previous year's results. The #1 sticker went to the World Champion, with 2 going to his teammate. If the Constructor's Champion was a different team than the Driver's Champion, then they got 3 and 4. The team that finished next on the Constructor's table was given 5 and 6, and so on down to 21 and 22 (excluding 13, of course. This is a very Anglo sport, with Anglo superstitions). As a concept it bore the hallmark of Bernie Ecclestone, a man so anal about neatness he used to order team truck drivers to pull out and reverse it in again if they hadn't parked their trailers in perfectly parallel rows.

Maybe then the new system is a sign Bernie's grip on the sport is beginning to slip, because the reshuffle is such a dog's breakfast I really doubt it has his approval. The drivers have each picked a number below 99, and that's it, that's the number they'll have for the rest of their careers. While number 1 will still be reserved for the current World Champion, there's no number 2, Maldonado's got number 13, and Hamilton, Button, Sutil and Bottas have all gone for doubles (no word on whether they shouted "dubs get!" as they submitted the paperwork). The idea is that these numbers will become associated with their drivers, not a totally silly idea since it happens all the time anyway, it's just that it's usually more organic. Nigel Mansell was known for Red 5 as much as his porn 'stache, and to fans of a certain age 27 will always mean Gilles Villeneuve (brave choice, Nico Hülkenberg, brave choice). Will the new numbers stick and become part of the texture of F1? Will 44 one day be shorthand for Lewis Hamilton as 05 is for Brocky and 3 is for Dale Earnhardt?

This picture contains everything you need to know about the Bush administration.

My only real objection is that, while this American thing does seem to work, it's a distinctively American thing and I'm not sure we want to get that all-American ketchup on our sweet sticky crêpes. Time will tell I suppose.

What I'm less understanding about is the other bit of Dixie infiltrating our Euro-playboy sport: awarding 50 points for winning the last race of 2014 instead of 25 just sounds like a miniature Chase to me. No point wasting words here - I think it's stupid, contrived, arbitrary and spoils the whole point of the F1 World Championship being a championship. Why not just nominate a race at the start of each year and make whoever wins it World Champion? Hey I know, why not just pull a name out of a hat? It'd cut costs and, if you put off drawing the name until December 30, you'll reeeeally draw out the tension!

In all seriousness, it concerns me that this points tweak will only be around for a year or two, and in the history books ever after that year's World Champion will have an asterisk next to their name with a footnote reminding everyone they only won because the final race paid double. And if the championship is wrapped up before then, what was the point of changing the rules in the first place? All this can do is spoil someone's achievement by making it a technical, in-name-only sort of victory. Last-gasp championship wins are special because they're rare, guys. You can't have a once-in-a-lifetime event every year. If you do, your fans switch off because it becomes devalued. How many spec series have we seen fall by the wayside since the 90's? The racing was close, sure, but it was also pointless. Nobody cared that they were nearly always settled at the last race. It just proved this was roulette by different means.

What does this have to do with their new gearboxes? Well, this entry is already longer than I was planning, so I'll have to get into that next time.

New Gen

Formula 1 testing is soon to begin, and so we'll be getting our first feedback on who's hot, who's not, and how the cars are this year. And the unspoken consensus seems to be that that what these cars are is twitchy.



Let's recap those "regualtions": single exhaust pipe exiting out of the very rearmost part of the car? Check. Shallower rear wing with lower wing removed? Check. Torquey electrically-boosted turbo V6 engine? Check. Add all that up and you get a car giving much more shove out of the corners with less downforce to stick it to the road. In other words, you get a car that's much more tail-happy than last year. Webber says that'll suit his friend Sebastian just fine, but I can think of someone else who'll probably love it: Kimi Räikkönen. And I can think of corresponding driver who probably won't love it too: Jenson Button.

Kimi's always been a gutsy, stick-it-in-and-let-it slide kinda driver, so I can imagine he'll have a lot of fun driving this year's Ferrari. And unlike Fernando Alonso, fun is all he's after, so I have no doubt who'll be the happier driver at the end of 2014. It's gonna be amusing to see how that all pans out, in a tense kind of way.

Jenson, on the other hand, has always been a much more precise driver, one who drives with a soft touch, almost with the fingertips. That gives him certain advantages. I was there in Melbourne in 2010 when he did what I thought was impossible, making a single set of soft Bridgestones last fifty-two laps. And it's not like he lacks speed either: after a qualifying lap at Silverstone, then-Honda sporting director Gil de Ferran was moved to comment: "I remember looking at his data after qualifying and thinking, 'Jesus Christ!' He had basically judged every corner to perfection. It was all done with surgical precision; the throttle, brake and steering were just perfect. There was not one correction too many."

After his disappointing 2013, it's become fashionable to claim the weakness of Jenson's driving style is that it doesn't allow him to really hustle the car to find its extreme limits. That's what Lewis Hamilton can do, and that's why they were such a good pairing, because Lewis gave Jenson something to aim for, a lap time that showed what the car could really do. Sergio Perez did not, and that's why he's not around this year. Only time will tell if the rookie Kevin Magnussen can, but he certainly has the DNA for it. Kevin's old man is former F1 driver Jan Magnussen, who in '94 made British Formula 3 his bitch and brought Paul Stewart Racing 14 wins out of 17, and then made his F1 debut when the team became Stewart Grand Prix three years later. Jackie Stewart, a triple World Champion himself and not a man prone to hype, nevertheless went on record saying, "Not since Ayrton Senna a decade earlier have I seen a driver with more natural talent and flair."

Unfortunately, Jan Magnussen went down in history as one of F1's great lost talents: he came along at a time when F1 was tinkering with the qualifying format to make it more TV-friendly, and their answer in the late 90's was a kind of "one lap, one chance" deal. Jan was the sort of driver who liked to get in the car and work himself up to a really fast lap time, so this was a bit of a disaster for him. Add to that a general lack of application and you'll see he disappears from the entry list after only a couple of seasons.

On that level at least his boy Kevin has a better chance - "failing to apply yourself" isn't really a thing when you drive for McLaren, a team notorious for micromanaging every aspect of their drivers' lives. Diet and nutrition, fitness and training, PR, advertising their sponsors' products, not to mention testing and working on the car, McLaren really doesn't leave you to your own devices much, not even in your extremely hypothetical spare time. All in the name of maximising the efficacy of the package with a focus on minimising wetware malfunction, or something like that I guess. His CV isn't that impressive - just a Danish Formula Ford title and a Formula Renault 3.5 title, with no experience in the GP2 that's done such a fine job breeding champions, and the time elsewhere spent in German and British F3, which aren't really top-tier series anymore - but he did set the fastest time of the McLaren drivers at the Abu Dhabi Young Driver test, so there's that.

Throw in the death of his father John a couple of weeks ago and it seems 2014 is going to be a tough year for Jenson. Not that I'd bet against him, of course. The last time he was in for a tough season was 2009...

Ironically, the man who'd love this new slide-happy generation of F1 car the most is probably Jenson's old BFF from Brazil, Rubens Barrichello. Rubens loved him a tail-happy open-wheeler, and like Lewis he gave Jenson something to shoot for, because he was still bloody fast when he was finally booted from F1 - fast enough to get a seat in IndyCar before "retiring" to Stock Car Brasil (which is more like DTM, by the by). Which reminds me, guess who Jan Magnussen's teammate was the year he made his F1 debut? Yep, the very same Rubens Barrichello. Given that, I don't think he retired too soon, but credit where it's due: he was still impressively fast for an old man. And having been for a spin with an old, arthritic former NASCAR driver, I can promise you an old racing driver is still waaay faster and tougher and more talented than any of we fat civvies.

So Rubens, enjoy your working retirement, just don't forget to spend some time at home with Silvana and the kids. Jenson, our thoughts are with you, and we're all glad the Old Boy got to see you become World Champion at last. And Kimi... Kimi, yeah, never mind.