F1 2014 Season Preview: Caterham - The tortoise and the hare?

March. Team Haas. BAR. F1 teams big on hubris but less big on results ain't a new thing. And the modern age until recently had its very own contender: ladies and gentlemen I give you Caterham.

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The front worked for a while: the team being rather popular among the media and more widely in its early days, but in this game a lack of results cannot be denied for long, and the point that the outfit's charm wore off passed a good while ago. Caterham these days is rather akin to a joke that isn't funny anymore.

Last season in year four of its F1 existence the team seemed no closer to its long-awaited joining of the midfield or scoring of points - in terms of lap times it was as far from the standard as ever. And worse, the squad wasn't even able to cling to its bare minimum achievement of tenth place in the constructors' table which it lost to Marussia (and indeed had only salvaged at the very last in 2012 thanks to Vitaly Petrov passing Charles Pic in the final laps of the final round to claim P11 in the Brazilian Grand Prix). At the very least though under Cyril Abiteboul's leadership starting last year the bombast was toned down; the aims got more modest and realistic (and Abiteboul was explicit that over-promising had been a significant impediment for the outfit previously).

F1 2014 Season Preview: Marussia - Making the leap?

It says something that Marussia and Caterham are still sometimes referred to as the 'new' teams in F1. We are in fact about to start year five of their F1 existences, and the lingering perceptions of their newness is likely related to their being unfulfilled. Four full seasons down the line and the questions still swirl: when will they score their first point? When will they get on the pace of the midfield pack?

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The sneering that they face is rather unfair though. After all, both entered the sport promised a swingeing budget cap and technical freedom as a consequence, which subsequently were reneged on. And in F1 more than in most things you get what you pay for, and Marussia's budget continues to be around a third of the level of those further ahead. And what would we rather have, that the team spends money it doesn't have and thus encounters problems à la Lotus?

Yet even with these considerations there is evidence that Marussia might be poised to answer at least one of the questions outlined in the opening paragraph. Perhaps both.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Williams - Up where they belong

And to think that pre-season testing this year was supposed to be cryptic. Plenty of stories have come out of it: Mercedes's strides; Ferrari's operating beneath the radar; Red Bull's woe. But ranking with any or all of these is that Williams appears to be back. Right back among the leaders. A place it knows well.

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Yes, we've said this sort of thing at the outset of a few recent seasons; cynics might say that it's an annual event. Indeed you just have to rewind 12 months to find all in the team gushing about the grand potential of the new FW35, potential that evaporated when it came into contact with air at Melbourne for round one. The likes of Adam Parr, Toto Wolff, Mark Gillan and Mike Coughlan were supposed to herald the team's long-awaited up turn. All have since left, for varying reasons. And despite the odd false dawn, most notably Pastor Maldonado's victory in Barcelona in 2012, last year, with just five points claimed and sitting a long way off the back of the midfield pack, it seemed that the giant was no nearer awaking from its slumber that stretches all the way back to 2004. But, really, this time it seems to be different. Everything seems to be in place.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Toro Rosso - Hard to read

Toro Rosso has never been any ordinary F1 team. Aside from the bit we all know - that it's the Red Bull B squad - or perhaps even because of it in part, it's always been one hard to read. And for a few reasons at the outset of the 2014 campaign the Faenza squad seems a bit harder to read even than usual.

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Part of the confusion arises possibly from that Toro Rosso still seems a team in transition, of becoming one with its own aero programme rather than one, as it did up to and including 2008, that benefits from Red Bull big team hand-me-downs. The transition hasn't been a quick or easy one, indeed Giorgio Ascanelli - leading an aero programme not reckoned to be his forte - fell on his sword in 2012 and was replaced as Technical Director by the highly rated James Key. And Key appears still to be seeking to make sense of it all: beefing up the technical staff, overseeing investment in the facilities as well as doing his best to integrate the team's two bases in Bicester and Faenza. But by admission last year was a holding season while all of this was going on. The team did rise a place in the constructors' table, but that in truth owed mainly to Williams' woes - Toro Rosso didn't in the broadest sense move forward to any great extent. Adding to the confusion the 2013 car seemed an inconsistent one: sometimes qualifying well inside the top 10, other times struggling to scrape out of Q1.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Sauber - Swiss Stoicism

Saying 'Sauber' in a word association test with an F1 fan would likely elicit responses in the following areas: midfielders, solid, stoic, dependable, upstanding, non-contentious, somehow perennial. A rock in the middle of the F1 whirlpool. Nothing wrong with that, indeed the sport needs its sort. And somehow after several years as a fully paid up member of the piranha club its founder and former Team Principal Peter Sauber, probably uniquely, is virtually without an enemy in the paddock. Even the name is appropriate - Sauber means 'clean' in German.

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There has been the odd variation from this norm: such as plucking Kimi Raikkonen from Formula Renault to give him his F1 debut in 2001, as well as the C31 of 2012 that on occasion could sail through the field like the rest were parked. But they've been the exception. However last year too Sauber threatened to vary from character, and this time not in a good way. The team that had for as long as anyone could remember been highly fastidious got behind on its supplier payments, as well as in the retainer of its star pilot Nico Hulkenberg reportedly. This devastated Peter Sauber, a man who had dipped into his own pocket in order to save the team and its 400 jobs in 2009; a man who had always prided himself on running a steady ship; in doing things the right way. Sauber it seems was just the latest team to suffer from a sport that struggles to attract sponsors and has a financial model that concentrates wealth well away from those who are not among the few at the top. And if even Sauber can be bitten by it...

F1 2014 Season Preview: Force India - Indian Summer

Never judge a book by its cover. And in the same spirit never judge an F1 season by the top level outcome. Force India last year on the face of it re-asserted itself as the clear best of the midfield bunch, in so doing equaling its best ever constructors' table finish of sixth. Yet the feeling emanating from the Silverstone camp at the end of it all was one of lingering regret, as but for a few matters - some within its control; many not - it could have been better. The considerable scalp of McLaren's might have been its too.

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Why? Well as Mark Hughes noted in Autocourse, Force India's 2013 experience was that of a 'conscientious pupil who had done all of his exam preparation, only for the syllabus to be changed halfway through the exam itself'. The team in Technical Director Andy Green's words put 'a huge effort' into ensuring the car had gentle tyre usage given what was known about the delicate nature of the season's Pirelli product, and this brought its rewards in the first part of the year. After the Silverstone round Force India sat pretty in fifth in the constructors' table and did so with a clear 59-37 lead on McLaren, despite missing out on even more points via Adrian Sutil puncturing a tyre against Felipe Massa during Bahrain's lap one and both cars dropping out with wheel problems in Malaysia. But as we also know, for a few reasons after Silverstone everything changed, rendering the team's previous work on the tyres largely useless. By this time too the team had shifted a lot of resource to focussing on the radical 2014 regulation changes, and it rather confused itself in response to the here and now changes too: apparently the warm conditions at Silverstone in the young drivers' test as well as the track's unusual characteristics gave the team a bum steer about the behaviour of the revised rubber, while the squad hindered itself further with a few subsequent blind alley set up changes. A mini recovery was made in the final few races of the year but by this point McLaren was but a distant speck on the horizon.

F1 2014 Season Preview: McLaren - Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

McLaren's ability to somehow daintily dance around championship triumphs, almost as if they were doing it consciously, is the stuff of legend. Despite being one of the sport's most prestigious and most lavishly resourced and supported outfits, winning but four titles of the last 44 available rather crudely demonstrates such a failing. But at least you used to be able to count on its cars being at the sharp end; being competitive; in the thick of the fight. That was until last season, when somehow the bone dropped clean out of the team's jaws. Even though it ended 2012 with the most competitive car out there seemingly, and there being relative rule stability, in 2013 McLaren sunk like a stone, never so much as getting a podium finish (or even coming all that close to one). This for the first time since before the McLaren International era, in 1980.

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And just like then there was a palace coup in response to it all, and also just like then it was a certain Ron Dennis who ended up in charge as a result. As far as Dennis and a few others were concerned the rap sheet of Team Principal Martin Whitmarsh was a lengthy one: the decision to go radical in the car's design in the last year before a major set of regulation changes, which backfired as intimated; the time taken to decide whether to stick with the MP4-28 or return to the previous, successful, machine; that having decided to stick rather than twist apparently underestimating what was required to make that car competitive; the failings of a car for which the various bits looked good in theory but never looked nearly as good together, possibly betraying disparate technical groups not interacting effectively; apparent lateness in finalising new technical recruits, which meant that they weren't able to feed into the 2014 car's fundamentals (including in the midst of it all missing out on James Allison); and an inability to attract a new title sponsor to replace Vodafone. That he sealed a Honda engine deal for 2015, while positive, got rather dwarfed. It wasn't much of a secret that Dennis has wanted to seize back the McLaren race team reigns ever since he was forcibly de-saddled in early 2009 (indeed he'd already had a few goes at it), but various events of 2013 combined to give him his opportunity finally, and he struck.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Lotus - Enstone woe

On the surface, all looked good for Lotus last season. The E21 machine was an excellent one, arguably the second best out there; some had it closer to the mighty Red Bull than top-level results suggested. The team was in the thick of the battle for second place in the constructors' table, bagged a race win as well as had a few other near misses along the way. And all this against teams much better resourced than it. Lotus had a good claim to be punching further above its weight than any other.

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But F1 teams are rather like icebergs, that what can be seen is but a small proportion in relation to what goes on underneath. And so it was at Team Enstone in 2013: the main problem was that the team was out of money; spending more than it was raising. A drip-drip hemorrhaging of technical staff, such as Technical Director James Allison as well as his deputy Dirk de Beer to Ferrari and Rod Nelson and David Wheater to Williams, gave the first hint at problems. Then the dam rather burst late in the year, via a very public falling out with star driver Kimi Raikkonen, the Finn owed apparently upwards of 16 million Euros in wages. The Quantum Motorsport deal, that was supposed to solve the whole matter, for months lingered apparently poised to be finalised but proved ultimately to be a mirage. And then, on the eve of the 2014 season, team principal Eric Boullier jumped ship too, gratefully accepting the rope thrown by the restructuring McLaren. It was tempting to ask that the last person out of Enstone please turn out the lights.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Ferrari - Dark horses?

Nico Rosberg summed it up. In the middle of the third and final pre-season test before everyone headed out to Melbourne for round one he reckoned he had a good handle on where his Mercedes team was on pace relative to all others. Well, all apart from one. For him, Ferrari remained a mystery. And he wasn't the only one feeling this way.

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Perhaps appropriately F1's most enigmatic team has been the enigma of 2014 pre-season testing, for the most part getting on with its business without drawing attention to itself; in Anthony Rowlinson's words performing 'a measured and consistent programme'.

Confusing the whole issue, with Ferrari there was none of the extremes on show at either end of the spectrum from Mercedes or from Renault/Red Bull - instead the consensus is that while neither team nor engine were experiencing anything like the woes of Red Bull or Renault, and indeed were running pretty reliably at least, they weren't reaching for the stars either.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Mercedes - Silver into gold?

Pre-season testing is cryptic enough at the best of times, as we're forever being reminded. And this year's variety has the potential to be much more cryptic still: radical rule changes render the form of previous years close to irrelevant, and will likely vary the programmes being run - and in turn the topline lap times - even more than usual.

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But despite this we've had something close to unanimity out of 2014's running on who's on top: the Mercedes is the best power unit of the three, and of the Mercedes-powered runners the eponymous works team is as things stand clearly poised as the team to beat.

The Mercedes team has visibly been far ahead of the rest in terms of its preparation and programme. The W05 has covered more mileage than any other car, and seeing a Mercedes circulating alone, perhaps joined only by a McLaren, was a common sight in the opening two tests. In Jerez only the Merc did a race simulation run, while uniquely in the first Bahrain test it indulged itself with a quali-type run too.

F1 2014 Season Preview: Red Bull - The party's over?

Time was that Red Bull was viewed - nay derided - as F1's party team. Even today four world championship doubles later the moniker remains apt to an extent, given the squad's tendency to act generally as well as to celebrate triumph with much greater abandon and expression than is the case for their rivals.

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But is it so that as we stand before the 2014 season start that, finally after four years of living it up to the most raucous degree, the party's over? The bar's shut?

Major sets of rule changes - and we have just had about the most major of the sport's modern times - always carry more risk for whoever's on top by definition, given their tendency to repatriate everyone to base camp; to render irrelevant previous advantages. History is littered with examples of such occurrences turning cheetahs into slugs at a stroke, sometimes irrecoverably.

So the risks were there. But even with these there were specifics that set perilous traps before the Bulls. The tilting of the formula more towards engines and away relatively from aerodynamics, for a team for which aero usually was the trump card, was one. That Red Bull, unlike its two closest rivals in the 2013 championship table, does not manufacturer its units under the same umbrella - and either down the corridor or down the road - was another; instead they're made several hundred miles away and over the English Channel in Viry-Chatillon. Add to this that even during the team's dominance it never appeared entirely at one with energy recovery systems either, which now are a bigger factor.