F1 2013 Season Preview: Marussia - Road to respectability

'The whole ethos of Marussia is steady growth towards respectability, albeit on about two and sixpence'. Marussia's Technical Director Pat Symonds sums up where the team is at as it enters the 2013 season. It's looking to continue its climb to credibility established over the last 18 months or so, but all the while with a budget almost certainly the most meagre of any of the 11 F1 squads.

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Respectability may not seem much of an aim to the uninitiated, but it is so for a team that spent much of its formative years in F1 treated as little more than a joke. As Virgin Racing, it had entered the sport for the 2010 season start among that batch of three debutant outfits, and even though none by now have been able trouble the midfield with any regularity, Marussia managed to finish bottom even of that pile in the constructors' standings in each of its first two seasons. Its debut year was tricky enough (and contained an egregious error by the team, where it had to admit that its fuel tank was too small for the car to last a race distance without swingeing fuel-saving) and, worse, 2011 represented a step backwards even from that, falling further behind the pace as well as further behind the progress of Lotus (now Caterham) who'd entered the sport at the same time.

As team principal John Booth stated, last year was very much year zero rather than year three for the team. Partway through 2011 it had resolved that if you are in a hole, you should stop digging. Many changes ensued as a consequence: having entered the sport in 2010 as a collaboration between F3 Euroseries squad Manor Motorsport and Wirth Research, Marussia facilitated the buying out of the Wirth half, and the deal allowed the whole team to move to one facility, at Wirth's base at Banbury in F1's silicon valley (previously the design had taken place there and the management of the team had been at Manor's base in Dinnington, Yorkshire). Further, the CFD-only policy of Wirth, an idea ahead of its time it seems, was abandoned, and a technical tie-up with McLaren was announced which ensured that Marussia cars would see a wind tunnel for the first time. The 2012 car's in-year development was wind tunnel based, and the 2013 Marussia was the first created in a wind tunnel. And star technical brain Pat Symonds, who has won championships with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso at Benetton/Renault, started to feed into the team as technical consultant (under the terms of his ban following 'Crashgate' he couldn't be more than a 'consultant'), as well as led the design of the 2013 car as Technical Director following the expiry of his ban. And Symonds has developed a new technical department at the team, including the recruitment of 20 new designers.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Caterham - The honeymoon is over

Things are changing for Caterham. In F1 as in anything else, people begin to notice when promises exceed delivery on a persistent basis. Excuses wear thin after a while. Awkward questions start to get asked. That's where the Caterham is at now. For this team, the honeymoon is over.

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Of course, it wasn't always this way. For a lot of the team's existence its image was akin to that of a cuddly toy. It was by far the most convincing of the three outfits that arrived in the sport for the start of the 2010 season. It received much kudos for rising from scratch in a matter of months before its race debut. Team Principal Tony Fernandes was a refreshingly open and engaging figure in the paddock. It even for a time ran with the evocative Lotus name, and was based near the famous old team's Hethel headquarters. Its cars weren't on the pace of the midfield, or even close to it, but that would come with time, right?

But now, as the team enters season number four of its existence, the tide of perception is turning. For all of Caterham's smart media management and bold proclamations that the corner was about to be turned, that it was about to make the seismic step into the pack and into points-scoring positions, somehow it still seems barely further forward from where it's always been. There might have been progress relative to the cars ahead over time, but if there has been it is glacial. The gap to F1's peleton still seems gaping, and by Tony Fernandes's own standards set in advance this represents failure (indeed, Mike Gascoyne said that if it hadn't joined the midfield by 2012 then the team will have 'cocked it up').

F1 2013 Season Preview: Toro Rosso - B plus

Toro Rosso bucked the trend in 2012, but not in a good way. In a year noted for the feast enjoyed by the midfield teams, the Faenza squad lived only on the crumbs that fell off the table. Sauber, Force India and Williams improved on their 2011 points totals vastly (and even then felt that they could have done better), but Toro Rosso's points haul almost halved, from 41 to 26.

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The team was some 50 points shy of Williams next up in the final constructors' standings, and spent much of the year in a strange vacuum, off the back of the midfield bunch while clear of the three (now, not so) new teams. Quite why this came to pass isn't certain. Indeed, the Toro Rossos actually started the year pretty well, qualifying in P10 and P11 in Melbourne, scoring points in the first two rounds and Daniel Ricciardo started sixth in Bahrain, the cars all the while being firmly among the midfield pack. But then as the European season commenced and the teams around it 'kicked' on development, Toro Rosso for whatever reason didn't keep up. The team that was possibly the sixth best and certainly good for giant killing in late 2011 now looked a world away. Come the summer break Ricciardo admitted that further points that season would likely only be won via the attrition of others.

As we know by now, the Red Bull company doesn't take kindly to failure, and mid-year Dietrich Mateschitz got team principal Franz Tost to change things at Toro Rosso, which Tost did by initiating a technical reshuffle which included replacing Technical Director Giorgio Ascanelli with the highly-rated James Key (ex of Sauber and Force India). The Toro Rosso team is admittedly behind the the midfield squads around it on staff numbers and resources, and to be fair to all concerned no one sought to blame the two debutant drivers for the underachievement. But Key when he arrived nevertheless found an aero department rather short-staffed as well as stuck in something of a rut - it's been suggested that for all of Ascanelli's considerable talents leading an aero programme is not among them. Key also found that the STR7 machine had a rather narrow set up window, losing performance rapidly outside of it particularly when not at a precise ride height. In the age of the peripatetic Pirellis, this was considerable impediment.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Williams - On the comeback trail

Twelve months ago things were very different. Williams, once the sport's standard bearers and with 16 world championships and 114 race wins to its name, appeared to be in terminal decline. It had gone close to eight years without a win, and the 2011 season just passed had been awful. Its best finish was ninth place and, even in the modern age of generous scoring systems, had accrued but five points. It was all rather too much like Tyrrell had been once upon a time

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Well, as we know, a year is a very long time in F1. Managing declines, or being asleep at the wheel, is not the Williams way, and the team following a reshuffle of staff and revision of its organisation bounced back in 2012. It claimed 76 points, rather dwarfing the 2011 total, and what do you know it even managed to win a race for the first time in way too long, Pastor Maldonado's tour de force at Barcelona taking the honours.

As intimated this did not happen by chance. Following technical director Sam Michael and head of aero Jon Tomlinson handing in their notices shortly into the 2011 season in came Mike Coughlan as technical director, Mark Gillan as chief operations engineer and Jason Somerville as head of aero. And it wasn't simply a matter of changing the names on the office doors; there was root and branch reform of how the team did things. Before, while the team had good facilities in many areas, it seemed that Williams had not adapted to the demands of modern F1, with around 20 races a season most of which are outside Europe, and severe testing restrictions. There was a lack of control at the factory (it's not for nothing that Coughlan's role was factory-based largely in the early days) and the factory tail was wagging the race team dog, taking a scatter gun approach to producing new parts for the race team to use up its Friday practice running and also burden to it operationally, without much coherence or broad understanding of what the car needed. And the benefits of all this change transferred all the way to the lap times, and ensured a decisive Williams stride back in the right direction.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Force India - A rising force?

Does Force India get the credit it deserves? It is often viewed as a quintessential midfield presence, sometimes so with a dash of derision. But it's easy to forget how far the operation has come in a short space of time.

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Rewind just to 2008 and the team was considered little more than end of grid fodder. The squad, following from Eddie Jordan's faltering final steps in F1, had stumbled on under the guises of Midland and then Spyker with few signs of progress. And when Vijay Mallya led a consortium to purchase the outfit in 2007 it's fair to say that not many expected the trajectory to change. But change it did; a reshuffle and a McLaren tie-up (complete with McLaren gearbox and Mercedes engine/KERS) later from 2008 through to 2011 Force India's year-on-year final constructors' standings positions read thus: 10th, 9th, 7th and 6th. All the while the team had almost nothing an F1 fan could object to: a proper racing team, making the best of what it had and displaying a rare willingness to give drivers opportunities on merit.

And despite appearances the improvement continued in 2012. Even though the team started slowly, seeming tardier than most to understand the potential within the new exhaust positioning and blowing regulations, and slipped back a place in the final constructors' standings thanks in large part to a congested midfield in which most raised their game more than Force India did, the team get stronger as the year progressed and in the end almost doubled its points from the previous year (accumulating 109 compared with 69 from 2011). And of course it might well have won the final round.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Sauber - You've come a long way baby

Time was when you knew what to expect from Sauber. Its cars would be a firm midfield presence: good for a few points, excellent at introducing young drivers to the sport and developing them (e.g. Raikkonen, Massa), but not where you'd look for excitement, technically or otherwise, or for surprise results. A monolith within ever-changing F1. There was something rather reassuring about it all.

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The year 2012 took that orthodoxy, scrunched it all up and discarded it in the nearest waste paper basket. When the Sauber C31 was launched before the season start there once again didn't seem a great deal ground-breaking about it, at face-level anyway. But in round two, in Malaysia, the thing flew and should have won. The team picked up three more podium finishes before the season was out, and on occasion looked plain the quickest thing out there, on race day at least. It was Sauber, but not as we know it.

There were lots of reasons for this, but the overarching one was that the C31, either by luck or by judgement, often had a magic touch on the fragile Pirelli tyres. Frequently the Sauber drivers would push while others had to rein back, carry on while others pitted. The car also from the get-go had Coanda exhausts, which would rapidly be honoured by imitation by almost the entire grid as the season progressed, as well as neat packaging around the rear.

MoneySupermarket.com F1 bloggers' 2013 predictions

MoneySupermarket.com asked me and several other F1 bloggers for their predictions for the forthcoming 2013 season. The fruits of their labours are below in the infographic. You'll see that it features no fewer than three quotes from my good self.



Fernando Alonso for the drivers' championship and Red Bull for the constructors' is the consensus. One optimist - who has been named and shamed - reckons Felipe Massa will sweep the board though. As for improvers, Romain Grosjean and Mercedes are those most expected to make a step up (not a bad shout, given there is conspicuous room for improvement in both cases).

Within each team, in many cases there is strong expectation for one driver to get the upper hand, though in the case of Williams and Toro Rosso things are poised tantalisingly.

So, will there be collective predictive wisdom among the F1 blogging community? We'll just have to wait and see.

More details can be found here: http://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/blog/grand-prix-preview-2013/

F1 2013 Season Preview: Mercedes - Curiouser and curiouser

Every sport must have one I suppose. Something or someone who, despite having all of the requisite pieces to succeed it seems, somehow fails persistently to assemble it all correctly to the end of actually getting the results. And in F1, dear reader, I give you Mercedes.

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The Mercedes brand is one of the strongest in the world, and not just in motoring. It is a marque with an exemplary heritage in F1 and in motorsport more widely. Its Grand Prix effort is a properly-funded manufacturer outfit, it took over the champion constructor at the end of 2009, and is headed up by one of the finest brains in the sport. And yet success since has been meagre, and the trajectory over time has if anything been downward rather than upward. About the only thing it has accumulated consistently over this time is excuses.

In 2010 Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn could point to the necessary 40% cuts of the Brawn staff during the previous season, which hampered development of the 2010 machine. In 2011 the car was fundamentally flawed, mainly down to a too-short wheelbase which was in turn related to the team not foreseeing the potential of aggressive exhaust blowing of diffusers. Last year, for a short time, it looked like Merc would finally make its breakthrough, challenging for pole in each of the first three rounds, and winning the race in round three (its first F1 triumph since 1955), and all the while boasting what looked like being the year's big thing in the Double DRS system. But it was all an illusion, Mercedes then slipped down the order rapidly. The W03, just like its predecessors, had fundamental flaws, chewing its rear tyres and having an extremely narrow operating window, needing cool temperatures and/or a track requiring quick tyre warm-up, plus a layout with short corners needing good direction change and where tyre wear is less critical. These were broadly the case in China and Monaco, where the car was devastating. But if these things didn't come together - which was broadly the case everywhere else - then the W03 was in trouble. And the Double DRS rather than a breakthrough became a millstone: apparently making conventional development to the front and rear wings much harder as well as slowed up front wing downforce reattachment after the DRS was closed. By the end of the year the Mercs were consistent midfield runners, and the team finished a distant fifth in the constructors' standings, barely ahead of Sauber.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Lotus - Dark horses?

The fundamentals of the current technical regulations have been in place since 2009. The probability of devising big advances within those diminish by the year, for the main reason that they've mostly been discovered already, and everyone else has had a chance since to honour them by imitation. Thus now as we face 2013, the regulations' fifth year of existence, reshuffles in the pecking order are not to be expected. But even within this, ever-cryptic pre-season testing suggests that there may be at least one climber between 2012 and 2013. That team is Lotus.

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The Lotus team was also 2012's highest climber compared with the previous year, but that owed in part to the fact that 2011 was a conspicuously bad one for the Enstone team, wherein it had gone down a technical blind alley with forward-facing exhausts, and a bad atmosphere seemed to pervade the team. If it has indeed stepped up further this time too it will doubly-impressive. And remember that any forward stride from last year will in all probability land Lotus right in the championship fight. The team may well be the 2013 dark horse, and not because of its livery.

Arguably last year's Lotus, the E20, was the best race-day car out there. It was outstanding in extracting performance from the limited-resource Pirelli tyres for longer than its rival cars, possibly due to it being softly sprung. But its best trait also contributed to its worst, in that it struggled to get sufficient temperature into its tyre for a qualifying lap, which often left its drivers with too much to do on race day (even in modern F1, qualifying remains important; only four of the 20 races in 2012 were won from off the front row). But nevertheless consistent points accumulated by inspired signing Kimi Raikkonen kept it in outside contention for the drivers' championship for most of the year, and it all was topped off by a late-season victory for Kimi, Enstone's first since 2008, in Abu Dhabi (possibly the year's most popular win too). All in, it was Enstone's best campaign since its 2005/2006 title triumphs and by a distance.

F1 2013 Season Preview: McLaren - A new page

There of course is a lot which is very good about McLaren. It is one of the best resourced outfits in F1. It boasts a vast army of fans. In terms of corporate branding and sponsor gathering it could well be the best of the bunch. It is consistently competitive; take any time period stretching back from now and you'll struggle to find a team that has been in the fight for wins as consistently as the Woking squad has. Its heritage of success is breathtaking. But there is a problem: somehow in recent times the team has shown an astonishing inability to win world championships.

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Think I'm exaggerating? Well here are a couple of facts to chew on: McLaren has won only one title - for drivers or constructors - since the turn of the millennium, with Lewis Hamilton's drivers' title in 2008 its only success. And the problem stretches back even further than that, all the way to the end of the Senna/Honda run of titles in 1991. In the 21 seasons since McLaren has won only four of the 42 available championships. Just stop and think about that for a moment.

And last season for McLaren the old story continued; indeed if anything the team seemed to find whole new ways of daintily dancing around the sport's ultimate prizes. It started the season with clearly the fastest car (perhaps unusually), some even talked after qualifying in round two of it enjoying a year of dominance as Red Bull had the year before. It ended the year with the fastest car too, and was also at the sharp end for much of the intervening period. Yet, somehow, in the final shakeout it didn't really come close to scaling either championship summit, its drivers placing a distant fourth and fifth in the drivers' table and the team ending up third in the constructors'.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Ferrari - One more push?

One more push and they're there? Ferrari hasn't won a title since 2008, a drought by its standards, and last year it came oh-so-close to the drivers' title, finishing but three points shy of the summit in a season wherein it wasn't without its share of bad luck, or without conspicuous room for improvement in its machinery.

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But then again things might not necessarily be that simple for the Scuderia in 2013. In truth, its closeness to title honours last campaign was to an extent illusory. The F2012 was, at best, the third-best machine out there (and some would argue even that assessment is generous) and at no round was it the quickest in dry conditions. Further, it was a debacle out of the box, and although the team was able to correct its most glaring faults in short order, it could never quite escape its inherent flaws demonstrated by the car proving maddeningly resistant to development in the year's latter part.

That Alonso missed out on the drivers' title narrowly owed to a measure of circumstance such as a tight year in which no one dominated for the most part allied to mistakes from others, a large dollop of brilliant, tenacious and consistent driving performances from Alonso, mixed in with reliability (Ferrari didn't have a single breakdown in a race in 2012) and the F2012 at least being being fairly flexible in how it looked after the Pirelli tyres.

F1 2013 Season Preview: Red Bull - Four on demand

The question is the same as it was 12 months ago. Which indeed was much the same as the question 12 months before that. Up and down the F1 fraternity the conundrum being wrestled with is thus: just how do you beat Red Bull?

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And despite the corkscrew plot of the 2012 season, in a lot of ways the year didn't bring us much closer to an answer. Yes, I hear you cry, Fernando Alonso came within three points of claiming the drivers' title in Red Bull's stead, and with reliability and stronger operations the Lewis Hamilton/McLaren partnership likely would have swept up the honours for themselves. But, despite all of this, despite rule tweaks that could have been (and probably were) written with impeding the Bulls in mind, despite getting it wrong in the first part of the year technically and thus conceding much ground to its rivals by the season’s two-thirds' point, Red Bull still ended the year having claimed the drivers' and constructors' title double, its third on the bounce.

One day someone will tell the incredible tale properly of how the 'fizzy drinks company' took over the remnants of Ford's abortive and in the main rather shambolic F1 effort, and within a few years had usurped the sport's most illustrious names at its very pinnacle. And then stayed there. The Red Bull team doesn't seem to be winning any popularity awards right now though (outside its own staff and supporters anyway). Of course, part of it is that winners rarely get much affection from their vanquished. Others in the pitlane regard the team as arrogant, the team's spending levels arouse suspicion (though nothing has ever stuck), as does its close relationship with Bernie and its willingness to explore the outer reaches of the rules' elasticity (and get away with it). Its tendency to stand alone (with Toro Rosso, natch) on political matters arouses resentment. But even with all of these slings and arrows, Red Bull's achievements are absolutely not to be belittled. Let's not forget that only the grandees of Ferrari and McLaren have ever won three title doubles in a row before it, and in each case it was only once.