Looking back: F1 wizards' first visit to Oz

As you're no doubt aware by now the Bahrain Grand Prix has been postponed, possibly to be shoehorned back into the calendar later this year. The season's opening round will instead take place in Australia on 27 March, around the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne. Seems something much more appropriate about that.

The Australian race is one of the most eagerly anticipated rounds of the season, such is the atmosphere and local enthusiasm it always engenders (it's a pity therefore that it currently seems to be under threat). F1 was nevertheless fairly slow to discover the potential of an Australian race, with the first visit there as late as 1985. What's more, anticipation of the initial visit was accompanied by considerable scepticism from the F1 circus. But on arrival this gave way rapidly to huge enchantment, probably of an even greater intensity than the Melbourne round currently enjoys.

When the first Australian Grand Prix, to be held around a street circuit in Adelaide, was placed as the final round on the 1985 calendar misgivings were widespread. F1's recent record at the time on newfangled street tracks was far from good: the Dallas round of the previous year wherein the track had fallen apart over the weekend, and there were several other organisational difficulties, was fresh in the memory, as were similar problems at Detroit and Las Vegas. Indeed, the record of such rounds even going ahead was somewhat patchy, such as the Flushing Meadows street race in New York which had been on the calendar for three years in a row and had yet to become a reality (and it still hasn't).

Why does Fernando Alonso get such hate?

It's not very often that I pay much attention to what The Sun newspaper are saying, but yesterday was a partial exception. I had my attention drawn to their article published that day about Fernando Alonso, wherein they reported with considerable vitriol how Tom Bowers' recent book on Bernie Ecclestone contains 'shocking claims' of how the 'spiteful Spaniard' practiced 'treachery' towards his then team-mate Lewis Hamilton in 2007. I couldn't see anything new in the article (just regurgitated three-and-a-half year old talk about blackmail of Ron Dennis and the like) and can only guess it must have been the slowest of all slow news days in the tabloid's Sports Department. But the fact that the article, and its tone, existed at all got me wondering, and not for the first time, quite why Fernando Alonso inspires the level of hate that he does?

Before I go any further, I ought to declare an interest (which regular readers of the blog may have worked out already): I'm a Fernando Alonso fan. Hopefully not a slavish one, or one that does not always give other drivers respect and admiration, or credit when they deserve it, or one that does not criticise Alonso when he deserves it. But I'm definitely a Fernando Alonso sympathiser, and it's for these reasons that I find the malevolence Alonso seems to inspire rather hard to stomach.

Granted, one should take the tabloids' F1 coverage with several truckloads of salt. It's clear they have their own needs, and accurate reporting that will be appreciated by F1 enthusiasts isn't a priority. Instead, they seek to appeal to the 'mass market' or casual F1 observer, whose interest in the sport probably doesn't extend far beyond supporting the British drivers, and appealing to such readers' sense of moral outrage makes good copy. Yesterday's Sun article ticks those boxes. But it's not just in the tabloids that contempt for Alonso can be found: fans' forums have plenty, as does the specialist motor sport media (I won't name names). As Nigel Roebuck has commented: 'anti-Alonso sentiment...seems rife in this country'.

F1 not full of Middle Eastern promise

Not for the first time F1 has found itself encroaching on the front pages rather than the back in recent days, and not for the right reasons. Protests and unrest in Bahrain, against the ruling government and Khalifah royal family, have dominated news bulletins, particularly as security forces have sought at various stages to counter protesting crowds by firing on them, killing several people. And this of course gives F1 a problem, as the fraternity are due to gather at the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain for a pre-season test starting on 3 March, and then for the season's opening race on 13 March.

Bernie's current line is 'wait and see', but at the time of writing it's impossible to see how either the test or the race meeting can go ahead in Bahrain. The security risks are obvious, even if there is a period of relative calm in coming days it will only take one protester to decide that the global audience of an F1 event is too good an opportunity to miss drawing attention to their cause in an extreme fashion to give us a catastrophic outcome on several levels. In addition to any human tragedy, the legal implications (not to mention the damage to F1's image) of the event going ahead and, perish the thought, someone being killed amidst the unrest don't bear thinking about, especially since the official advice of the UK and US governments is not to travel there unless it is essential.

Further, this whole case is perhaps an inevitable consequence of F1 'following the money' via holding rounds in countries with such regimes, despite well-documented concerns about their human rights records. The financial benefits of the Bahrain round to F1 are obvious - they throw sums of money unthinkable to 'established' F1 countries at the Formula One Group for the rights to hold a race (in the case of Bahrain it's thought to be in the region of £37m annually), despite the absence even of much local demand for tickets. And the reason they do this is as an elaborate application of admittance to the 'international community', or a 'branding exercise' as the Crown Prince of Bahrain called it. Further, F1 doesn't just have a stake in terms of the race events, McLaren is 42% owned by the Bahrain government. But the flip side is that oppressive regimes have a tendency to oppress people.

Looking back: F1's Phantom Races

There's been lots of coverage today of unrest and protests in Bahrain, and (in our blinkered F1 mindset) the possibility of the cancellation of the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix in March.

That got me thinking (taking the blinkered F1 mindset to its logical conclusion) about F1's previous when it comes to cancelling races, so I sought to list such instances. The list (see below) turned out to be surprisingly extensive, and up until the mid-1980s F1 calendars were often astonishingly fluid by modern standards.

It probably won't surprise you that most of the cancellations were due to money running out, though there are also some gems in there. The Belgian Grand Prix of 1985 was famously postponed for three months after the fraternity took part in the first practice and found the track crumbling as a result (a fuller account is here). My personal favourite though is that in 1983 a 'Swiss Grand Prix' at Dijon (another way of describing a second French Grand Prix of the year) was canned after French television refused to provide coverage of two races in a season!

Thoughts on Bobby K and Renault

Robert Kubica's crash last Sunday while competing in the Ronde di Andora rally is by now well-documented. And despite the encouraging early signs of recovery and his own clear determination, such are his injuries it looks like he'll be out of racing for some months.

This of course is a tragedy on many levels. Most of all it's a tragedy for Robert, who has an almost primal urge to compete and take machinery to its limit. Further, it comes literally days after the evidence from the Valencia test was that Renault could well have made a large performance step at the start of this season, raising the possibility that Kubica would finally get his hands on a car as competitive as he deserves it to be.

It's also a tragedy for F1 - it is the sport's pinnacle and the more top drivers that are in it the better it is for everyone. And make no mistake, Kubica, without hyperbole, can be bracketed among the top of the top. He's spent his time in F1 invariably getting his car into places it has no right to be, including still being in title contention right up to the penultimate race in 2008, while driving a BMW that had barely been developed since mid-season. He's bloody quick, incredibly consistent, highly committed and pushes his team effectively. Moreover, he has a Prost-like ability to avoid driving errors - if you try to think of a time that he has trashed an F1 car it's incredibly difficult to cite an example. It's not for nothing that the likes of Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton really fear the day that Kubica gets his hands on a set of wheels that do justice to his towering talent. As his technical director James Allison said, 'If we can give him a car that's even half capable of getting a championship he'll get one'.

Testing times: what we learned in Valencia

The 2011 F1 season kicked off in earnest this week with the first test session of the year taking place at the Ricardo Tormo circuit near Valencia. All teams were represented (eventually, in Lotus's case), and eight out of the twelve teams piloted their 2011 cars.
 
It is a truth held to be self-evident that little can be read into testing times, but that we'll nevertheless do our best to decipher clues from them on who's hot and who's not approaching the new season.



Above film of Valencia Testing 2011 courtesy of Sutton Images

So, what can be read into the three days' testing at Valencia? First, the usual disclaimers. There are many variables which make reading much into the fastest times from testing hazardous in terms of predicting who'll be on top in qualifying in Bahrian in March. Fuel loads, and therefore weight penalties, vary, possibly to the tune of several seconds per lap, as do programmes in terms of number of laps run in a stint, whether or not KERS is being used etc. Track conditions also vary throughout each day and between days. Then there's the fact that the intense rate of development will ensure that cars now will be virtually unrecognisable come the first race meeting.

A message to you, Schumi

The F1 cars of 2011 hit the track for the first time on Tuesday next week, at Valencia, with the Mercedes, like many cars, being launched that morning. It's very easy to forget in the passage of time that, winding back 12 months, the Merc squad were the centre of attention, and not just because they were a new team or (effectively) the defending world champion constructor. No, the attention was because Michael Schumacher, returning from a three-year 'retirement', was to be one of their pilots.

Such talk now seems a million miles away given how the year panned out, but the return of the seven-time champion was the talk of last year's season previews. As an example, Motor Sport magazine, with the front cover headline 'Return of the King', commented in their preview that: 'The big news, of course, is that he is back...Double World Champion Fernando Alonso moves to Ferrari, the two most recent champions are paired at the same team and still Michael sweeps the headlines just by turning up again'.

Furthermore, expectations (including mine) were high - how could they not be? Sure, he was 41, and had been away for three years, but we'd long since learned to write the guy off at your peril, such was his frightening competitiveness, supreme ability and aggression, and ability to overcome just about any obstacle in his way first time around. He always had and clearly continued to have super-human levels of fitness. Further, as Motor Sport outlined: 'In prospect it is a package that could, perhaps should, dominate: the mighty Michael, back in harness with the unassailable Ross Brawn, Mercedes cash and power, a tech team that (Honda-funded) produced last year's double-world-title-winning Brawn BGP001....Nico Rosberg, almost inevitably, will be expected to play wingman' (I don't quote this to criticise or embarrass Motor Sport, most others were talking the same way).

Two teams in the Lotus position

As I'm sure you're aware by now, this forthcoming F1 season will most probably have two separate Lotus-branded teams on the grid. One will be Team Lotus, with Renault engines, (Lotus Racing from last season), and the other, somewhat confusingly, will be Lotus Renault (nee Renault).

The Lotus naming row has been one of the the most persistent F1 stories of the off-season, and demonstrates F1's ability to shoot itself in the foot, just when you were thinking that the sport was getting to be refreshingly free of embarrassing internal politics, and gratuitously confusing its customers. Up until now I'd been keen to ignore the case, hoping against hope that it would go away by itself. Neither side seems to want to blink though, and the latest leg of this is a summary judgment into the rights surrounding the use of the Team Lotus name due to be heard in the High Court on Monday. I'm not a lawyer, but the smart money is on the stand-off rumbling on beyond that.

Lotus Racing from 2010, now Team Lotus

The reason this situation has come about is not straightforward, and I'll do my best not to detain (or bore) us with the details. Historically Team Lotus (the F1 team) and Group Lotus (who built the road cars) are separate entities, and have been ever since Colin Chapman (Lotus godfather) decided to split the two in 1958. When Team Lotus (that's the F1 team, do keep up) went belly-up at the end of 1994, it was acquired by a gentleman called David Hunt (James Hunt's brother, if you're interested). After Chapman's death in 1982 Group Lotus had several owners, before Proton bought them in 1996. Last year, the Lotus Racing F1 team used the Lotus name under licence from Group Lotus.

Back from the Autosport Show...

I was in Birmingham for the Autosport International Show on Saturday. Had a jolly good time thanks for asking.

I always see it as a good start to the motor sport calendar. Plenty of cars, old and new, F1 and non-F1, are on display. The F1 Racing display of the 2010 grid was, as usual, a highlight (though Ferrari were conspicuous by their absence), as was the historic display of McLarens (you sometimes have to remind yourself of McLaren's heritage, it never seems to come as easily as it does to the likes of Ferrari, Lotus, Williams etc). Drivers and others are in plentiful supply to talk and answer questions - this year included Martin Brundle, Jake Humphrey and Jody Scheckter, among others. It's difficult to think of another major sport that offers such access to some of the main protagonists.

It's also an opportunity to part with cash, with lots of merchandise and memorabilia on show. I managed to leave with a 1971 Autocourse, an F1 Racing magazine subscription, and a DVD of the 1964 British Grand Prix (really). The live action arena is also good value, though I've never mastered how to take a decent photo at it.

The 2011 F1 World Championship Calendar, if it was up to me

The quiet off season has left me with nothing better to do than play Bernie and attempt to construct my very own 'if it was up to me' 2011 F1 calendar.

I've tried to be realistic, and not included tracks that no longer exist (so no original Zandvoort), or can't realistically be resurrected (so no Montjuic), or clearly aren't suitable for modern F1 (so no Nordschleife). Obviously, commercial considerations (other than a base desire to take F1 to where the fans are) haven't entered things.

Just like reality there are 20 rounds, which is just as well as whittling the calendar down isn't easy. I actually now sympathise a little with Bernie.

Anyway, here goes (I've listed them in chronological order):

1: Argentina - Potrero de los Funes Circuit
A little bit of a left field choice for the first round, but such is the support for F1 in South America it really deserves a second race (after Brazil). This is a challenging and undulating semi-permanent track in San Luis, currently used in FIA GT.