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Brawn GP continued their fairytale first race weekend with a 1-2 finish in the Australian Grand Prix on Sunday.  Jenson Button took the chequered flag after leading from the start while team mate Rubens Barrichello finished second despite a poor start and trading paint several times during the race.

Button had driven away to a 47.7s lead only for it to be reduced to nothing when Kazuki Nakajima spun into the wall, drawing out the safety car, but the Brit managed to keep his lead under the restart.  Rubens’s chances of a podium looked unlikely until the final laps when Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica found themselves in the same place at the same time.  Their crash took both cars out of the race and Vettel was later handed a 10-place grid penalty for Malaysia for causing the accident.  The Red Bull driver was also fined $50,000 for continuing to drive a damaged car.  Although Vettel appologised for the accident, BMW’s Mario Theissen thinks that without the crash Kubica could have reeled in Button and won the race.  Whether that is true, we’ll never know, but the BMW was certainly quick.

Toyota’s Jarno Trulli was originally awarded third but continuing the theme of penalties and protests he was later handed a stop-go penalty for passing under the safety car.  As this occurred in the final laps of the race this was translated into a 25 second penalty, promoting reigning World Champion Lewis Hamilton to an unexpected third place finish.  After going from starting in the pit lane to finishing third, Trulli wasn’t happy:

I can’t say how disappointed I am to finish third but have the result questioned. When the safety car came out towards the end of the race Lewis passed me but soon after he suddenly slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. I thought he had a problem so I overtook him as there was nothing else I could do.

Neither of the Ferraris finished the race and Aussie Mark Webber continued his tradition of bad luck, especially in his home Grand Prix, by finishing last.

The BBC’s coverage was pretty good; no ads and it was good to hear more radio traffic, especially from Ferrari and McLaren but what is with all the Bernie love?  I know the BBC must be happy to have taken F1 from ITV but does their contract include a clause where Eddie Jordan has to praise Ecclestone every chance he gets?

Overall, though, It was a great start to the new season.  The racing was close and there were some fantastic drives.  Jenson drove a perfect race from lights to flag, rookie Sebastien Buemi scored two points for Toro Rosso on his debut, the Toyotas started from the pit lane but (almost) finished third and fourth and Barichello gave Brawn GP a perfect 1-2 finish despite driving into everyone he could see.  The BGP 001 is a tough car and seems to be fast even with bits of its front wing on the track.

But almost as amazing as the first 1-2 finish from a new team for fifty years was Hamilton’s third place.  Lewis wrung all he could from the struggling MP4-24 and his drive reminded me of Schumacher who could always somehow salvage a good finish from what seemed an impossible position.  Lewis was lucky, though, and his 6 points will only give him and the McLaren engineers a little breathing room until they can find the downforce they are lacking.

2009 Australian Grand Prix Race Results

Photograph: Mick Tsikas/Reuters

The Times is reporting that in a meeting between Renault team principal Flavio Briatore, McLaren chairman and CEO Ron Dennis, Toyota team principal and FOTA vice-president John Howett and Bernie Ecclestone, Dennis and Briatore threatened to boycott the Australian Grand Prix.

They allegedly told Ecclestone that unless he wrote them a check they wouldn’t put their cars on the specially chartered flights to Australia last Sunday and neither would the rest of FOTA.  The money in question is in payment for signing a new Concorde Agreement, something the teams are yet to do.

According to Ecclestone:

Flavio said, ‘we’re not going to put our cars on the plane, we’re not going to Melbourne.’  He – Flavio – started it, aided and abetted by Ron Dennis.

Unfazed, Bernie decided to called their bluff:

I picked up the phone to our people that handle all the freight to ask them to cancel the aeroplanes.  They were saying, ‘all the Fota-schmota are not going – nobody’s going to go.’ So I said what I’d better do is cancel the aircraft obviously. It costs a fortune to charter those things and almost as much to cancel them.

All the cars are now in Melbourne so the threat obviously wasn’t carried out.  The first race hasn’t even been run but we may already have the Bernie quote of the season:

If they come in here with a gun and hold it to my head, they had better be sure they can fucking pull the trigger.  And they should make sure it’s got bullets in it because, if they miss, they better look out.

The tensions between FOTA and the FIA/Ecclestone has undertones of the FISA-FOCA war of the 80’s.  Back then, Bernie Ecclestone as Brabham team owner and Max Mosley as his legal advisor were on the other side of the conflict that culiminated in a boycott of the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix.  Among the complaints of the FOCA teams were FISA’s handling of regulations and financial compensation.

Sounds familiar…

Mark Hughes has written an interesting piece on the ITV F1 website about the problems McLaren have been having with their new car.

McLaren won the 2008 Drivers’ Championship and were among the favourites going into the 2009 season after early testing.  But recently the Woking squad have been falling further and further behind the other teams and drivers Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen have been lapping a couple of seconds off the pace.  After much speculation team boss Martin Whitmarsh confirmed McLaren weren’t sandbagging and those lap times were the best they could do.

But how could such a beautiful car be so slow?  And how could something with a nose like the Renault be faster?  It all comes down to the black art of aerodynamics.  While McLaren have banks of supercomputers running CFD analysis and a state of the art wind tunnel back in Woking, all it takes is one little disturbance in the airflow to effectively “switch off” a perfectly good aero part.

McLaren’s problems highlight the importance of aerodynamics in Formula One.  With no development allowed on engines, aerodynamics is where most of an F1 car’s speed can be won or lost.  Take the Brawn GP BGP 001; it has the same engine as the McLaren, but better aero and Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello have been putting in some scorching lap times.

The good news for McLaren fans, according to Hughes, is that once the McLaren engineers find the problem it should be pretty straightforward to fix.  The question is can they find the problem before they give away too many points?

In other aerodynamic developments, the Brawn GP diffuser’s legality has been called into question along with the Toyota and Williams.  According to Cologne newspaper Express, the BGP 001 design links the floor with the diffuser in a sneaky (and illegal) way to generate more downforce.  The FIA have already inspected the Toyota and Wiliams cars and found them, in their opinion, legal.  As Max Mosley says:

The current FIA view is that Williams and Toyota have been clever and found a loophole in the rules. It’s probably wrong, but they’ve exploited the wording of the rules in a clever way.

But because of the way these things work, the teams have to wait until Melbourne if they want to lodge an official protest.

And finally, Williams have decided to remove the cockpit-mounted ‘skate fins’ that appeared on their car in testing.  It seems like FIA technical delegate Charlie Whiting didn’t like the safety implications of two massive spikes on either side of the driver’s head and I can’t say I disagree.  They did look kind of cool though.

Wow.

Only days after the new Brawn GP car’s first shakedown at Silverstone, Rubens Barrichello set the fastest time on the final day of testing in Barcelona on Thursday.

His lap time of 1:18.926 was nearly a second faster than Nico Rosberg’s Williams FW31 and Lewis Hamilton was almost two seconds slower in his MP4-24 despite being powered by the same Mercedes-Benz engine.  The other Mercedes powered car, Fisichella’s Force India VJM02, finished in tenth place.

Not only was the BGP 001 fast it was reliable too, completing 110 laps.

I said last week that I thought Brawn GP could do alright this year but I didn’t really expect it to look so strong so soon.

Team owner Ross Brawn said:

The team made a very late start to our pre-season testing programme, with only seven days in which to run the car before the first race in Melbourne; therefore our focus has been on reliability and achieving as much mileage as possible. Both of these aims have been successfully achieved this week.

There has been loads of speculation about what the times we’ve seen in winter testing mean.  Does the fact that the Brawn went quickest mean it is really the fastest car or are McLaren sandbagging?  We won’t really know until the lights go out in Melbourne but even if Rubens set that time running on fumes, comments from the other drivers suggest they are impressed by the car’s speed.  Ferrari’s Felipe Massa said:

No one can do the same times [as Brawn GP]. Everyone was using less fuel, not only them.  But their times were much faster than those that anyone else could do.

McLaren’s performance is also very puzzling.  There have been comments from Ron Dennis and Norbert Haug suggesting that they don’t have the speed they want yet but I get the feeling they aren’t trying for raw pace.  With the ban on testing this year I think McLaren are being very methodical in correlating what they see on the track with what their computer simulations tell them.  If they can accurately simulate the real world using CFD and racks of computers then they will have an easier time developing their car ‘virtually’, as it were, throughout the year.

They may also be playing their cards close to their chest, not wanting to give any advantage away that could be copied by other teams.  As Ron Dennis said:

We had a strategy for this year to leave it to the last possible moment to produce our aerodynamic package for the Australian Grand Prix.  That in itself gave us some production challenges, and we have really only started to run the car in the last day with the Australian aero package. It doesn’t mean you are lost or that you don’t know what you are doing.

So that was why they were running the 2008-spec rear wing?

It’s all very exciting and who will be on the podium at the Australian Grand Prix at the end of the month is anyone’s guess but after Ross Brawn previously downplayed his team’s chances and suggesting that 2009 will be another transitional year it looks like Brawn GP could be serious championship contenders.

Thursday was the final day of testing for Ferrari, BMW, Toyota, Force India and the two Red Bull teams before the season opener in Melbourne but Brawn GP and McLaren will grab a few final days in Jerez next week.

David Coulthard said that “Force India could be the shock of the season”,  but if Brawn GP carry their testing pace through to Australia it could be the Mercedes-Benz powered BGP 001 that is the real shock.

Last month, when Williams introduced their radical ‘skate fins’ I wondered why Adrian Newey, the man who introduced shark fins to Formula One, decided to shrink the engine cover on the new Red Bull RB5 to little more than a ‘stingray barb’.

Well, it seems like he was just teasing us as Red Bull have arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya with the mother of all shark fins.  As you can see in the picture, the engine cover of the RB5 now stretches all the way back to the rear wing!  There’s a closer view at thef1.com.

The 2009 race season hasn’t even started and already the teams are seeing what kind of crazy stuff they can fit around the new aero regulations.  McLaren have installed a completely new floor with cutout sections near the rear wheels and whether the FIA will allow Williams to keep the skate fins remains to be seen.

I don’t really mind the standard shark fin and even those skate fins are ok but I think the Red Bull’s new engine cover spoils an otherwise good looking car.