f1buzz.net

In an interview with the Financial Times, Bernie Ecclestone has said that the only team he would really be sorry see to go is Ferrari.

He had previously said that Honda’s recent exit from Formula One was “no great loss” but these latest comments will do little to quell suspicions that Ferrari receive favourable treatment by the sport’s administrators.

Ferrari is the only team to have been in F1 since the inaugural Championship season in 1950 and Ecclestone has previously admitted that Ferrari receive more money than the other teams.

Ecclestone told the FT:

It’s bad for me to say this, but the only team we would really say we would miss is Ferrari.

McLaren’s outgoing team boss, Ron Dennis, seems open to the idea of Bernie Ecclestone’s medal system where gold, silver and bronze medals would be awarded to the top three drivers at each race with the driver with the most golds at the end of the year being crowned champion.

Last year Lewis Hamilton won the Championship by a single point even though he won fewer races than Ferrari’s Felipe Massa.

Ecclestone has since tried to distance himself from the idea of ‘medals’ but still thinks “the guy that wins the most races should win the Championship”.

At the launch of McLaren’s new MP4-24 at the team’s Woking headquarters on Friday Dennis said:

I think his view is that the person that wins the most races should win the World Championship. We don’t disagree with that view, and if that becomes the objective then we’ll make sure we win enough races to win the World Championship.

Perhaps understandably, Hamilton seems less convinced:

It’s got to be the driver and team that’s done the best job over the whole year and not just who’s won the most races.

I agree consistency should be rewarded but would a medals system make for better racing? Ecclestone’s idea is that if the Championship was decided on the number of wins rather than points then drivers would be more inclined to take risks and not settle for second place. It’s true McLaren deliberately targeted 5th place in Brazil last year because that was all they needed but I’m not sure you could really accuse drivers of playing a numbers game and not being aggressive enough. A bigger problem was the difficulty in overtaking, something that will hopefully be improved by the aerodynamic changes introduced this year.

But how many times has the world champion not won the most races in a season?  Quite a few, actually:

The inaugural FIA Formula One World Championship season in 1950 saw Nino Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio win the same number of races (3) but Farina scored more points so he was declared champion. In 1958 Mike Hawthorn only won one race in his Ferrari 246 F1 compared to Tony Brooks’s three and Stirling Moss’s four but his five second places allowed him to become Britain’s first world champion. The following year (1959) Jack Brabham won the Championship with an equal number of wins as Moss and Brooks.

1961 again saw three drivers sharing the same number of wins with Phil Hill becoming the only American-born driver to win the Drivers’ Championship. In 1964, John Surtees won it in a Ferrari 158 even though he had an equal number of wins as Graham Hill and Dan Gurney, and Jim Clark won more races than all of them. 1967 was the next year the Championship was won by a driver who didn’t take the most number of wins; Denny Hulme won two races compared to Jim Clark’s four. Then in 1968 Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart both won three races with Hill declared champion.

That was the sixties. In 1974, Emerson Fittipaldi took the Championship despite having the same number of victories as both Ronnie Peterson and Carlos Reutemann. Three years later in 1977 Niki Lauder scored one less win than Mario Andretti but still became world champion and in 1979 Australian Alan Jones won four races but Jody Scheckter was crowned champion with just three. Even though it would have handed him the title in 1977, Mario Andretti still thinks the idea of a medal system is flawed:

I don’t endorse it at all. That’s going back to the amateur system. Why change something that’s been a part of the profession and sport since the beginning. I don’t think it could add to it. I think it would detract.

The eighties had a string of races where the Drivers’ Champion didn’t win the most number of races. In 1981 Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet both won three races but Piquet took the Championship in his Brabham BT49. 1982 was a tumultuous season. The World Drivers’ Championship was won by Williams driver Keke Rosberg who became the first driver since Mike Hawthorn to win the Championship after winning only one race. Eleven drivers won a race during this season, none of them more than two times. 1983: Piquet won again even though Prost scored one more first place than him. 1984 saw the battle between McLaren team mates Niki Lauda and Alain Prost end with Lauda winning the Championship by just half a point without achieving a single pole position and despite Prost winning two more races than he did. But don’t feel too bad for the Frenchman, in 1986 Prost took the Championship with one less win than Nigel Mansell. Then in 1987 Piquet again won the Championship although Mansell won three more races than he did. In 1989 Alain Prost won the Championship from rival Ayrton Senna although he won two fewer races.

In the 1990’s every champion also won the most races but in 2005 Fernando Alonso was declared the youngest F1 Champion even though he won the same number of races as Kimi Raikkonen. He did it again in 2006 with the same number of wins as Schumacher and then 2008 saw Lewis Hamilton take Alonso’s youngest champion record even though he won one less race than Ferrari’s Felipe Massa.

So would medals make better racing?  I doubt it.  Drivers have been winning the Championship despite not having won the most races since Formula One began.

Formula One teams have standard procedures for everything; race starts, pit-stops, post-race in-lap. Apparently there is also a standard procedure for running out of fuel.

On the first day of proper testing with the all-new F1.09, BMW Sauber continued the evaluation process begun on Tuesday during the shakedown. Robert Kubica completed 99 laps as well as conducting several race start simulations. In the morning he deliberately stopped on the track when he carried out a so-called fuel run-out, a standard procedure with every new F1 car.

I’m not really sure what this would involve apart from switching off any electrical systems and putting the car in neutral. I mean, if you run out of fuel there’s not much you can do apart from park at the side of the track and get out, is there? I suppose it must be more complicated than that if it is something they need to test. If you know what a ‘fuel run-out procedure’ is please let me know in the comments.

Kubica will be at the wheel of the F1.09 again on Thursday before Nick Heidfeld takes over on Friday.

The rain that continues to affect the Algarve Motor Park is making testing difficult for the teams at the Portuguese track. Sebastien Buemi’s interim Toro Rosso posted the fastest time on Tuesday of 1:34.429, three seconds clear of Pedro de la Rosa in the new McLaren MP4-24. Jarno Trulli was third fastest in the Toyota TF109 followed by the Renault R29 of Nelson Piquet and Nico Rosberg’s Williams FW31.

The wet conditions make it hard to evaluate how the cars will perform on a dry circuit and with the lack of in-season testing in 2009 the teams are missing out on vital testing miles.

But it does give us a chance to see how the new cars compare in the wet. Jarno Trulli has found the new Toyota hard to drive at Portimao:

In the conditions it was very difficult to get temperature in the tyres. It was really hard for everyone out there and it was nearly impossible to drive. This is the first feeling!

But McLaren’s Pedro de la Rosa didn’t seem to have the same trouble:

The car has a little bit more grip at the front end generally and it is very responsive to steering. You have to put everything together – if you put these tyres onto last year’s car, we would be three seconds a lap faster.

It’s always hard to compare lap times in testing as different teams will be testing different setups but perhaps this gives us a clue that more work is needed on Toyota’s 2009 goal of “stability”.

BMW Sauber unveiled their new car today at the Circuit de Valencia (not to be confused with the Valencia Street Circuit.) Immediately after the official unveiling in the morning, Robert Kubica gave the F1.09 its roll-out on the track. Taking advantage of the sunny weather in the afternoon, the team concentrated on system checks and collecting base data from the all-new car.

The F1.09 is quite different beast from their 2008 challenger. By the end of last year, the F1.08 had sprouted so many wings, horns and curves that it looked like something that had flown straight out of Hades. It looked like it would give you a nasty cut if you bumped into it. Basically, it looked cool. But when viewing the F1.08 and F1.09 side-by-side the difference is striking. The new car’s bodywork is smooth, the nose is higher and wider, the sidepods are high at the front and it almost seems like they’ve forgotten to bolt some things on around the front wheels there.

This is all part of the new look resulting from the 2009 regulations but unfortunately I don’t think BMW have succeeded in producing as attractive a car as McLaren or Ferrari. While the front wing has three elements it doesn’t look as racy as the McLaren’s and there is something about the whole car which just doesn’t look very adventurous. Still, BMW have been working on this car for a long time and were one of the first teams to test the new aero package and are reportedly well advanced in their KERS testing.

Robert Kubica’s performance was impressive last year, achieving the first win for the team. He was leading the championship at one stage and seemed to feel if the team had developed last year’s car more instead of turning their attention to the F1.09 he may have been in a position to challenge seriously for the title. But it’s always a trade-off. With the limited testing available in 2009 Kubica might be glad of all the work that has gone into the new car.

BMW Motorsport Director Mario Theissen clearly has his sights set on Ferrari and McLaren this year:

Ferrari and McLaren possess vast reserves of experience and have been operating at the top level for many years. That’s what our highly motivated team are setting out to emulate – through hard work and efficiency, coupled with our calm, analytical approach to the job.

If the F1.09 gets Kubica and Heidfeld onto the podium more often this year I’m sure they won’t care how it looks.