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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”.

McLaren became the third team to launch their 2009 car on Friday at their headquarters in Woking. Unveiled by world champion Lewis Hamilton and his team-mate Heikki Kovalainen, the new MP4-24 bears little resemblance to its world championship-winning predecessor due to the introduction of a raft of new rules that have reshaped Formula 1 ahead of the 2009 season.

There have been a lot of comments during pre-season testing that the new regulations for 2009 will make for ugly looking cars and when I first saw the BMW I didn’t think it looked that pretty either. I think 2008’s MP4-23 was probably the best looking car in the paddock last year so I was a bit worried about what would come out of the factory at Woking on Friday. But I have to say with each new car launch the new look is growing on me. I like the clean lines and waspish waist the new cars have. The differently shaped sidepods look cool and the front and rear wings don’t seem so out of proportion any more. Sure, the front wings don’t have such sophisticated, curving surfaces any more but there is still scope for individuality and there is added complexity with the moveable elements.

At the launch of the MP4-24 everyone was saying how good it looked.

Ron Dennis:

At the same time you are trying to make a good looking car, that is a value we put high, if it looks good it goes good.

Lewis Hamilton:

This is the first time I’ve seen it fully put together and it looks beautiful. The team manages to always put together a stunning car and it’s great to see the final outcome of the work that has gone on.

There’s an old saying in motor racing that says a beautiful car often turns out to be a quick car. And all I can say is that I hope that’s right, because I reckon the MP4-24 looks simply sensational. Really beautiful, in fact.

Heikki Kovalainen:

I echo Lewis’ thought. It looks great. Whatever the regulation changes are the team have managed to make a beautiful car.

I agree. The McLaren MP4-24 is a beautiful car. It continues the attention to detail of its predecessor in little things like the surfaces round the air intake. The front wing looks nicely shaped and I like the long narrow nose.

Interestingly there seem to be buttons marked “KERS” and “MEDICAL” on the chassis next to the button for putting the car in neutral. I assume the KERS button will disable the KERS device but I don’t remember seeing a medical button before.  It could be that this is not a button but a medical warning light that signals that threshold forces have been exceeded. These labels seem much more subtle than the big “N” stickers on the Ferrari F60 and Toyota TF109 so it could be that standard labels will be applied after the launch.

With in-season track testing now prohibited, the MP4-24 will undergo an intensive winter programme at the following venues prior to the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on March 29:

2008 saw some controversial decisions by the stewards with the most controversial being the decision to strip Lewis Hamilton’s win in the Belgian Grand Prix and in so doing hand the victory to Filipe Massa. After watching one of the most exciting races of the year fans then discovered two hours later that the stewards had applied a 25 second penalty to Hamilton’s time and he wasn’t in fact the winner. Niki Lauda called this “the worst judgment in the history of Formula One” and there were many calls for changes to the way stewarding worked to try to increase the transparency and consistency of decisions. Three-times championship winner Sir Jackie Stewart said:

it’s being overseen by people who are not doing it full-time and we get inconsistent decisions. In football, rugby, tennis or cricket you have professional referees and umpires who do their jobs day in, day out and you have accountability. We need that in motorsport.

It seems the FIA has taken these criticisms on board and in a meeting on 5 November 2008 the World Motorsport Council agreed the following changes:

• Any national steward participating who is officiating for the first time will be required to ‘observe’ a minimum of one Grand Prix prior to their event.
• At five Grands Prix in 2009, a number of trainee Stewards, nominated by their ASN and selected by the FIA, will be invited to attend.
• Before each Grand Prix, a short CV of each steward will be posted on the FIA website.
• With the benefit of a new replay system available to the stewards, all incidents will be investigated and appropriate action taken during the race, unless it is essential to seek further evidence afterwards.
• Following the race, a short written explanation of steward’s decisions will be published on the FIA website. This will supplement the formal steward’s decision which largely defines the breach of the rules.
• Where appropriate, additional film evidence that the public may not have seen but which was reviewed by the stewards, will be made available on both the FIA and FOM websites.

Hopefully these changes will bring a consistency and transparency to the stewards decisions in 2009. In particular it seems we won’t have any more outcomes being changed after the conclusion of the race. In what is already one of the most highly regulated sports the emphasis should be on the wheel-to-wheel racing not on the rules. Obviously rules are necessary and if they are broken then appropriate penalties should be applied but we don’t want a situation where drivers are afraid to make a racing move because they don’t know if they will be penalised later.

Consistency of decisions will also help to dispel the conspiracy theories about Ferrari’s special place in F1 (even if they do make for some funny jokes.)