Force India - who's laughing now?
If you chose to absent yourself from all things related to Formula One this past weekend, the remainder of this paragraph will cause you to question my sanity. Force India came to Spa fully intending to wow the watching world this weekend and achieved their goal in no small measure. Pole position on Saturday was executed by Giancarlo Fisichella in a superlative demonstration of how to maximise speed through the corners of Spa-Francorchamps. The Italian then went on to underline this with such an almost effortlessly brilliant drive that a win at Spa was denied him only by bad luck.
No, I have not gone mad. You know the times when a cartoon character sees something he can’t quite believe, shakes his head hard enough for you to hear his brains rattle and then repeatedly slaps his forehead? Well, you would be justified in behaving like that this morning. Force India – a team that caused people to snigger behind their hands before now – had everybody staring in disbelief yesterday afternoon. A team which, until now, was viewed in snobbish F1 circles as nothing more than the vanity of an arriviste Indian who, despite his “new money” was never going to be worthy of a seat at the top table. “Yes, Mr Mallya,” they would say, “we are perfectly happy to wash down our chicken vindaloo with a drop of your Kingfisher lager when the pubs shut of a Friday evening but let’s be realistic here. You don’t really understand the sophisticated world of top end motor racing now, do you?”
Vijay Mallya, owner of Force India kept his cool, said very little and carried on brewing Kingfisher lager while pumping in the odd million or two into his F1 racing team. The scoffs had conveniently overlooked a very significant aspect of Mallya’s F1 team. It might have had the almost ridiculous moniker, Force India, but was in reality a card-carrying member of the F1 pantheon. Force India was the successor title given to Eddie Jordan’s brilliant Jordan racing team. Eddie Jordan, a hard-nosed, straight-talking Irish businessman, has long been one of the most colourful characters in motor racing. Despite his limited budget and unconventional approach, he has always had a knack for spotting drivers and reading their potential. It was Jordan who discovered Michael Schumacher and gave him his first drive at Spa back in 1991. It was Jordan who provided a home to an eventual British World Champion, Damon Hill, and it was Jordan who nurtured the talent of the younger Schumacher, Ralf. Fittingly, it was while at Jordan that yesterday’s sensation at Spa, Giancarlo Fisichella, earned his first Grand Prix success.
You may recall Mark Webber’s debut Formula One race at the Australian Grand Prix in 2002. At the time, Webber drove for another minor team called Minardi. By coming fifth in that race Webber assured Minardi’s then owner, a maverick Australian businessman called Paul Stoddart, survival for at least another season. So ecstatic were the two Australians that they had their own podium ceremony after the top chaps had left and sprayed one another with enough champagne to bathe each one three times over. The eight points earned by Fisichella from his second place yesterday meant much than that. One point for an F1 minnow is of huge financial significance. Eight points and you are now talking real money.
In another of its peculiarities, Formula One’s unfairness extends beyond the kudos attached to a big name like Ferrari. At the end of each season, the television revenues are divided amongst the participating teams in accordance with the number of constructors’ championship points each team has scored. Simply put, the team with the most points gets the most money. If, like Force India, you participate more as a hobby for a team owner than anything else, a single point catapults you into the world in which drivers, engine manufacturers and sponsors take you seriously. Force india was previously destined to last for only as long as Vijay Mallya stayed interested – and who knows how long that was going to be in a world where there are hundreds of ways of amusing oneself with money? – and no more. Now, I would like to meet the man who argues that Force India are not here to stay.
The celebrations were less muted in the Force India garage than the Minardi one at Australia in 2002. The reason is that everybody – including yesterday’s Belgian Grand Prix winner, Kimi Raikkonen – knows that they were robbed of a certain victory by a first corner accident and KERS. The first corner accident was caused by inexperienced drivers running into the back of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton and precipitating a massive pile-up which necessitated deployment of the safety car. Kimi Raikkonen, who had used KERS to catapult himself from sixth to second at the start, waited until the end of the safety car episode to press the KERS button again and fly past Fisichella.
I am no expert in these things, but I understand KERS to be a system that is designed to recover kinetic energy from an F1 car during braking, store that energy and make it available to propel the car later. Given that only Ferrari and McLaren had the wherewithal to invest in this expensive system this year, one begins to see that there is method in the madness of the FIA when they demand cost savings from all the teams. Nevertheless, without the safety car, KERS alone would not have been sufficient to deliver a Ferrari win yesterday.
Although, they have chosen to hold off further development of their 2009 car and concentrate instead on next year's, Ferrari must be delighted with achieving their first victory of this - for them, ghastly - year. To have identical cars at both ends of a Grand Prix finishing line must surely be enough to convince even the floor cleaner in Maranello that Felipe Massa’s Ferrari can no longer be entrusted to Luca Badoer in 2009. Despite the denials, I find it impossible to believe that a telephone call in rapid Italian was not made to Fisichella’s management on Saturday afternoon. Two things are now certain. First, a man is on his way from Maranello to Silverstone to deliver a healthy cheque to Vijay Mallya’s Force India office as I write this. Secondly, Giancarlo Fisichella will be in Ferrari overalls when the F1 circus reconvenes at Monza a fortnight hence.
Gitau
31 August 2009
No, I have not gone mad. You know the times when a cartoon character sees something he can’t quite believe, shakes his head hard enough for you to hear his brains rattle and then repeatedly slaps his forehead? Well, you would be justified in behaving like that this morning. Force India – a team that caused people to snigger behind their hands before now – had everybody staring in disbelief yesterday afternoon. A team which, until now, was viewed in snobbish F1 circles as nothing more than the vanity of an arriviste Indian who, despite his “new money” was never going to be worthy of a seat at the top table. “Yes, Mr Mallya,” they would say, “we are perfectly happy to wash down our chicken vindaloo with a drop of your Kingfisher lager when the pubs shut of a Friday evening but let’s be realistic here. You don’t really understand the sophisticated world of top end motor racing now, do you?”
Vijay Mallya, owner of Force India kept his cool, said very little and carried on brewing Kingfisher lager while pumping in the odd million or two into his F1 racing team. The scoffs had conveniently overlooked a very significant aspect of Mallya’s F1 team. It might have had the almost ridiculous moniker, Force India, but was in reality a card-carrying member of the F1 pantheon. Force India was the successor title given to Eddie Jordan’s brilliant Jordan racing team. Eddie Jordan, a hard-nosed, straight-talking Irish businessman, has long been one of the most colourful characters in motor racing. Despite his limited budget and unconventional approach, he has always had a knack for spotting drivers and reading their potential. It was Jordan who discovered Michael Schumacher and gave him his first drive at Spa back in 1991. It was Jordan who provided a home to an eventual British World Champion, Damon Hill, and it was Jordan who nurtured the talent of the younger Schumacher, Ralf. Fittingly, it was while at Jordan that yesterday’s sensation at Spa, Giancarlo Fisichella, earned his first Grand Prix success.
You may recall Mark Webber’s debut Formula One race at the Australian Grand Prix in 2002. At the time, Webber drove for another minor team called Minardi. By coming fifth in that race Webber assured Minardi’s then owner, a maverick Australian businessman called Paul Stoddart, survival for at least another season. So ecstatic were the two Australians that they had their own podium ceremony after the top chaps had left and sprayed one another with enough champagne to bathe each one three times over. The eight points earned by Fisichella from his second place yesterday meant much than that. One point for an F1 minnow is of huge financial significance. Eight points and you are now talking real money.
In another of its peculiarities, Formula One’s unfairness extends beyond the kudos attached to a big name like Ferrari. At the end of each season, the television revenues are divided amongst the participating teams in accordance with the number of constructors’ championship points each team has scored. Simply put, the team with the most points gets the most money. If, like Force India, you participate more as a hobby for a team owner than anything else, a single point catapults you into the world in which drivers, engine manufacturers and sponsors take you seriously. Force india was previously destined to last for only as long as Vijay Mallya stayed interested – and who knows how long that was going to be in a world where there are hundreds of ways of amusing oneself with money? – and no more. Now, I would like to meet the man who argues that Force India are not here to stay.
The celebrations were less muted in the Force India garage than the Minardi one at Australia in 2002. The reason is that everybody – including yesterday’s Belgian Grand Prix winner, Kimi Raikkonen – knows that they were robbed of a certain victory by a first corner accident and KERS. The first corner accident was caused by inexperienced drivers running into the back of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton and precipitating a massive pile-up which necessitated deployment of the safety car. Kimi Raikkonen, who had used KERS to catapult himself from sixth to second at the start, waited until the end of the safety car episode to press the KERS button again and fly past Fisichella.
I am no expert in these things, but I understand KERS to be a system that is designed to recover kinetic energy from an F1 car during braking, store that energy and make it available to propel the car later. Given that only Ferrari and McLaren had the wherewithal to invest in this expensive system this year, one begins to see that there is method in the madness of the FIA when they demand cost savings from all the teams. Nevertheless, without the safety car, KERS alone would not have been sufficient to deliver a Ferrari win yesterday.
Although, they have chosen to hold off further development of their 2009 car and concentrate instead on next year's, Ferrari must be delighted with achieving their first victory of this - for them, ghastly - year. To have identical cars at both ends of a Grand Prix finishing line must surely be enough to convince even the floor cleaner in Maranello that Felipe Massa’s Ferrari can no longer be entrusted to Luca Badoer in 2009. Despite the denials, I find it impossible to believe that a telephone call in rapid Italian was not made to Fisichella’s management on Saturday afternoon. Two things are now certain. First, a man is on his way from Maranello to Silverstone to deliver a healthy cheque to Vijay Mallya’s Force India office as I write this. Secondly, Giancarlo Fisichella will be in Ferrari overalls when the F1 circus reconvenes at Monza a fortnight hence.
Gitau
31 August 2009
posted by Gitau at 12:55 pm
2 Comments:
Good one, Boss. What do you make of the investigation of the Piquet crash in Singapore? Is it a credible claim or has Nelsinho just gone off the deep end?
You were right...: http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/78286
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