Archive for Formula 1

The latest addition to the hot rumor pot is the possibility of Stuttgart-based auto maker Mercedes Benz pulling out of Formula 1 as the recent “lie-gate” scandal involving the McLaren Formula 1 team intensifies. Apparently, Daimler AG’s CEO, Dieter Zetsche has revealed to a German-based publication that, “If circumstances should change, perhaps because of an unreasonable punishment by the FIA, it is possible that we could consider our engagement,”.

In a couple of days, the World Motor Sport Council will meet and a decision will be issued out regarding the scandal that involves the McLaren outfit not being truthful regarding the yellow flag incident at the 2009 season opener in Melbourne, Australia.

The Woking-based outfit is expected to face severe penalties, and it does make sense for Mercedes to think about pulling out if it feels that the FIA’s decision is unreasonable. The premium brand is not only supplying its V8 powerplants to McLaren, but to two other teams as well, including the slower Force India and Brawn GP.

The FIA is supposed to be working on a new “World Engine” due in 2013 that can be used for 3 FIA categories – F1, F2 and WRC. Max Mosley described the engine as one single engine that could be aspirated and tuned differently for the different categories.

It could be turboed for F1, normally aspirated for F2 and perhaps lightly boosted for the WRC. He added that the project is only in its planning phase and in very early stages. FIA will consult the manufacturers on this matter. The engine will be standard but teams will be able to customise its peripheral areas, such as KERS and other forms of energy recovery such as from the brakes, brake heat and exhaust heat.

“Our basic objective is that the money spent in motorsport on research and development should be relevant and useful to the car industry rather than a highly specialized area which has no relevance to anything else,” says Max Mosley, referring to KERS and other peripherals.

With more and more standardization going into F1, the latest seems to be the engine itself, which takes a big variable and element of excitement out of the sport. There is already going to be a standard Cosworth engine that teams can pick from soon. What do you think guys, will a standard engine take the fun out of F1?

So it was a massively wet race, one that was made worse by the fact that it was an evening one – less light to cut through the heavy torrent. Jenson Button in his Brawn GP F1 car took the top spot again, with second place this time going to Nick Heidheld in his BMW. Barrichello who came in second the last race was in 5th place. F1 big names Ferrari and McLaren continues their woes with Kvalainen retiring on the first lap. Kubica also had to retire thanks to a mechanical problem.

Click for larger results table

The rain was so heavy that the race had to be red flagged, thanks to visibility which had dropped to near zero. The track had also become totally drenched with water. According to Button himself, “It wasn’t like it was a river out there, it was a lake!”. Hamilton said it was one of the most dangerous conditions he had ever had to race in, and all he could do was try to keep the car on track, don’t even begin to talk about actually racing yet.

Only half points were awarded to the point winners in this race.

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Jenson Button does it again, even with Malaysia’s monsoon rain!

Surprise, surprise, the flip flop disease has infected the FIA too. It announced that the new points system that bestows the driver championship to the driver with the most wins rather than points will likely be deferred to 2010.

However nothing is confirmed at this moment as the official statement had some “ifs” in it, and until those ifs are acknowledged by FIA and the announcement to revert to the previous points system in black and white, we’re still holding our breath!

This is the official statement: “On 17 March, the FIA World Motor Sport Council unanimously rejected FOTA’s proposed amendment to the points system for the Formula One Drivers’ Championship. The ‘winner takes all’ proposal made by the commercial rights holder (who had been told that the teams were in favour) was then approved. If, for any reason, the Formula One teams do not now agree with the new system, its implementation will be deferred until 2010.”

The Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) had earlier proposed that the points system be instead changed to a 12-9-7-5-4-3-2-1 points format from the existing 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1. The FIA was insistent in a “winner takes it all” system.

This is probably not something that teams are used to – changes and uncertainty to the rules are still happening just one week before the first race weekend in Melbourne!

I’m sure all of you are very familiar with how the current economic climate has been a plague to the very expensive Formula One sport. It’s not just teams that have folded (and resurrected), but some of F1’s biggest sponsors such as the RBS and ING have been shying away from the sport because they want to cut costs and disassociate themselves from F1’s image of lavish spending, which is seen as irresponsible in the current times. F1-related but not direct team-related expenditure by carmakers have also been cut, for example BMW used to host a party with its own grandstand, bar and restaurant area for up to 400 clients at the Australian GP that costs it over US$630,000 a year but this year there will be no such thing.

After Honda left, Toyota stayed on but had its budget cut over and over and over again. It is said that if Panasonic had not signed the sponsorship deal for 2009, they would have pulled out. To hopefully prevent even more teams from falling out of the race because of cost issues, the World Motor Sport Council recently announced an optional budget cap of £30m a season from the 2010 race season onwards.

Now that figure seems like nothing, considering some teams spend over 10 times that amount! Can you imagine, an F1 car’s wheel nut might cost US$ 1,200? Teams that accept the budget cap will receive incentives such as allowing them to have more aerodynamically efficient (but standard) underbody, movable wings, and a engine that is not rev-limited or not subjected to a development freeze. Even free or sponsored items will count towards this budget. These are not finalised yet of course, and may be adjusted before 2010.

Thus you can either spend your way to victory or innovate your way to victory. There is this saying by the late David Keith Duckworth, a mechanical engineer who designed the Cosworth Double Four Valve engine (once an F1 standard): an engineer is someone who can do for one dollar what any idiot can do for a hundred dollars.

It’s not just the teams and the sports itself. Venues are taking the hit as well. In Europe, F1 fans are deciding to stay at home and watch the race instead instead of buying tickets and experiencing the race first-hand. The Belgian GP back in September last year took a big loss hit of US$4.9 million, and it only had 52,000 spectators, which is 10,000 less than 2007 figures.

And of course on our local ground, we have the Sepang International Circuit. As we all know our Malaysian income per capita is far far less than Europeans with their strong currencies, but Sepang has done a tremendous and commendable job in offering some of the cheapest F1 tickets in the world, at only US$31 per seat compared to an average of US$150 across all the Grand Prix races. That’s 5 times cheaper and very suited to Malaysian income levels, but yet the SIC is struggling, with ticket sales expected to dip by 20% this year and it does not expect to hit 36,000 international visitors this year, out of a total of 120,000 expected for the Race Day. The SIC is also offering student rates with discounts of up to 80%.

They have also been running other aggressive promotions, such as a 2 FOR 1 value buy package ahead of the race weekend of the 3rd to 5th April 2009, which is also valid for the lowest ticket price of RM100. This will admit one person to the race and to the post-race Jamiroquai concert on Sunday. It’s basically a free concert for all ticket holders. 2 for 1 means you get to watch the Race Day and also the concert at night. They want the Malaysian leg of the F1 race to be more than just a race, but sort of a day of entertainment for race-goers during the race weekend.

SIC wants to create a carnival like party. Think fast cars, men on stilts, beautiful women and loud music. The Kuala Lumpur Grand Prix City programmes will provide more fun for the fans than just the race. They are also offering a fully done-up Mazda RX8 as the grand prize for a competition for F1 ticket buyers. If you’re interested you can check out the F1 roadshow set to be held at the 1 Utama shopping center next on the 25th and 29th of March 2009.

Despite the doom and gloom and even more radical changes set for the 2010 race year, this year’s season should be interesting because of the rule changes as previously explained by Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel. Some technical changes have been made to provide more chances to overtake, which will further spice up the race. We’ll also see which teams will have good KERS implementations and how they will be used effectively. The team that gets KERS right immediately will have a big advantage.

The Sepang International Circuit has slashed ticket prices up to 80% for students. The Mall Area grandstand where the RM500 Citrine seats have been slashed to only RM100. The Tower seats at Turn 15 have been priced at RM100, down from the usual RM500 price. The C-2 covered hill-stand area is now only RM50, down from RM200. These special rates are only for fans with valid student IDs and can only be purchased at the SIC counter at KL Sentral or the KLIA Domestic Arrival Hall Flying Emporium.

More goodies for students – an 8 seat slot at a Fun Kart race against F1, GP2 Asia and Formula BMW Pacific drivers on the 2nd of April 2009. The qualifying rounds for these 8 seats will be held across 2 days, with the first being this Saturday.

“We have provided an opportunity of a life time for students to race with their racing idols. This has not been made possible in the past and hopefully SIC will make this an annual if not a more frequent event,” said SIC media manager Irwan A. Rahman.

CLICK: SIC Website

After much speculation, Honda has finally sold their F1 team to someone quite close to home – Ross Brawn. Brawn has been in F1 for quite some time now, having worked in various F1 teams including Benetton and Ferrari.

After a 1 year break in 2007 he returned as the Team Principal of the Honda F1 team for the 2008 race year, and now owns the team, which has been renamed Brawn GP. From milling machine operator in 1976 to F1 team owner in 2009, that’s really quite a long way to have gone. The new Brawn GP team will use Mercedes-Benz engines and will be piloted by Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. The team’s new colours are white, fluorescent yellow and black, and its BGP 001 conducted its first test at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona recently.

The car was pretty fast, in fact piloted by Button it was one of the fastest cars in the pre-season group test, despite being what Ed Gorman called “a Honda chassis and suspension bolted together with a Mercedes-Benz engine it was not designed for.”

So I guess we’ll see Brawn GP here in Malaysia then!

Formula One is a seriously expensive sport but it’s really hard to visualize how expensive it really is by just looking at the race cars battling it out on the circuits. There’s a tremendous amount of hard work, time and money put into the development of Formula One cars, and to even begin to grasp the idea of how much equipment and etc it takes, you will have to take a stroll behind the scenes to check out the development and manufacturing of the car. Look after the jump for a series of videos released by the BMW Sauber F1 Team called “Understanding Formula 1″. It looks like there are plenty more to come but these are the few released so far, so please enjoy!

Click here to read the rest of Understanding Formula 1: a series of videos by the BMW Sauber F1 Team

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One of the most iconic cars in Maserati’s history has also been voted the world’s greatest racing car ever by British magazine Octane. This car is the Maserati 250F and it was a Formula One car, which debuted in the 1954 season and used by customer teams until 1960. The name 250F refers to the specs that were instated for F1 in 1954 – a maximum engine capacity of 2.5 liters hence the 250 number, and F refers to Formula One naturally. Those rules also stipulated 750cc supercharged engines but Maserati decided to take the normally aspirated route.

It was built on a simple multi-tubular ladder-like frame which carries the suspension, body panels and engine. The rear used a De Dion axle while the front was of a double wishbone design. Maserati engineers paid their full attention to the engine that powered the car, a 2.5 liter inline-6 with twin spark dual spark ignition and 3 Weber 45 DCO3 Caburattors. It produced 270 horsepower at 8,000rpm. For those that complain about cars coming with rear drum brakes these days, this F1 car used drum brakes all-round!

Click for enlarged image

The 1950s Formula One world were dominated by road-car teams like Maserati together with Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz. The Maserati 250F competed in a total of 46 F1 championships with 277 entries and won 8 times. Its performance in its first two races exceeded Maserati’s expectations where it was driven by Juan-Manuel Fangio to victory before he unfortunately left to the newly-formed Mercedes-Benz team.

VIDEO: Fangio driving the 250F Maserati in Modena, Italy in the 1950s

Thanks to the beauty of the internet you can even check out Fangio driving the 250F from its on-board cam today, recorded all the way back in the 1950s!

“It steered beautifully, and inclined towards stable oversteer which one could exploit by balancing it against power and steering in long sustained drifts through corners. It rode well on the normal type of relatively smooth-surfaced course, although its small coil springs and leaf spring rear-end would use up available suspension movement over the bumps at the Ring,” said a young Stirling Moss who drove it as a private racer.

A couple of hours ago, team principals; Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor officially announced the US F1 Team in an interview with Speed TV. As reported earlier, the US F1 Team intends to take part in the Formula 1 World Championship with its very own chassis and engine, and by hiring American drivers as it plans to join the Formula 1 grid for the 2010 season.

This means that the team has about 1 year to fully develop its contender and assemble its drivers, and rumor has it that the American team is interested to get Scott Speed and Danica Patrick on board.

Nothing much has been revealed during the interview however, apart from the fact that the team will be based in North Caroline which is also the home to the Windshear wind tunnel. The wind tunnel is crucial for the development of the aerodynamic efficiency of a Formula 1 car. The US F1 Team with its “Made in America” tag line will join Force India, as another “country”-based Formula 1 Team.

Both Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor (who is also a motoring journalist) have long resume’s in motor racing such as Formula 1 and Indy Car. Both also revealed that US F1 will reside in North Carolina, America, although most of the other teams are based in Europe. According to the team principals, most of the technology that is utilized in Formula 1 comes from America and that it is cheaper to run a Formula 1 team in America, compared to running one in Europe. But I am pretty sure that logistics might be a problem.

Both also mentioned in the interview that the US F1 Team is privately-owned, as in not a team that is fully owned by a single individual (which should be a millionaire) or an automobile company. Continue reading to watch a 5 minute 23 second-long video of the interview.

Click here to read the rest of Its official: US F1 Team officially announced