It's gotta be the car!
In the novel Trilby by George du Maurier, Trilby O’Farrell, a tone-deaf but stunningly beautiful girl comes under the influence of a magician called Svengali who decides to make her a star. While under Svengali’s hypnotic spell, Trilby sings like an angel. So sublime is her voice that she captivates critical audiences in the world’s eminent concert halls. She becomes famous. One day, before a performance in London, Svengali is afflicted by heart disease and drops dead. Without the power of Svengali’s hypnosis, Trilby attempts to sing but can only produce discordant noises. Without Svengali she is a laughing stock.
As Sebastian Vettel took the chequered flag for the fourth time this season, the television camera panned across to the Red Bull pit wall in time for us to see Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, turn to the man sitting on his left and envelop him in a big hug. The recipient of Horner’s warmth was none other than Adrian Newey, the man who designed the Red Bull RB7 which is currently causing such devastation in Formula One. Upon seeing Horner’s gesture, I immediately thought of Trilby. Newey is the Svengali of Formula One: he designs racing cars of such overwhelming brilliance that he transforms ordinary mortals into superstars.
In the 1980s Spike Lee made a series of advertisements for Nike featuring the legendary American basketball player, Michael Jordan. In one of them, Lee questioned Jordan’s brilliance by taunting him with “It can’t be just you, it’s gotta be the shoes!” Unlike basketball, however, Formula One is almost unique among sports in relying almost entirely on the equipment provided to each competitor by his team. The answer to the age old question “is it the car or is it the driver” is “it is a combination of both, but mostly the car”. A driver’s performance is to a massive extent – perhaps even 80% - dependent upon the car. That is why Adrian Newey at Red Bull is such a huge problem for all the other teams. The gap between the Red Bulls and the McLarens, Ferraris and Mercedes is so wide that it is difficult at this stage to visualise circumstances in which Red Bull will not win this year’s constructors’ championship and Sebastian Vettel, the drivers’ championship. Four consecutive pole positions and three flawless victories have put him so far ahead of everyone else (his nearest rival, Lewis Hamilton, is 34 points behind) that we seem destined to watch the rest of this season’s races to determine who will come second and third.
It would be easy to put everything down to Adrian Newey and let the matter rest there - but that would be dishonest. In qualifying on Saturday, Sebastian Vettel achieved pole position while his team-mate, Mark Webber, in an identical car, slotted himself in at second place. The difference between the two was half a second. The time gap between the pole-setter and the next three cars is typically a couple of hundredths of a second or, on a very good day, one tenth of a second. Half a second is like an entire day in F1 terms. To demonstrate the superiority of Vettel’s performance, the BBC showed both Red Bulls’ qualifying laps simultaneously on a split screen in slow motion. Vettel attacks the corners and uses the kerbs so expertly that he almost makes the car fly; his qualifying lap in Istanbul was the fastest lap ever recorded at the Istanbul Racing Circuit. He is able to do this despite being relatively inexperienced – he’s only 23. Just to put this in context, the minimum age for drinking alcohol in Turkey is 24, so Vettel would have been permitted to spray his magnum of winner’s champion on the podium on Sunday but it would have been against the law for him to take a swig of it!
If Newey isn’t hobbled by some Mafioso and Vettel sticks with Red Bull, we could be about to witness a period of unrelenting Grand Prix domination by a German driver more complete than the last one by Michael Schumacher. This is not good for the sport by any means but it is hardly Vettel’s or Red Bull’s fault. The other teams are going to have to raise their game, and do so quickly.
“Schumacher domination” is not a phrase you will hear mentioned very much in the Mercedes team’s motor home or Chez Schumacher in Switzerland. Since returning to Formula One at the start of last season, Michael Schumacher is proving right those of his detractors – including yours truly – who boldly said that it was a mistake for the seven times world champion to return to motor racing after three years in retirement. He is not able to hook his car up for a quick qualifying lap like he could in the old days and ends up in unfamiliar territory during races: the middle order where tangles with other drivers are almost inevitable. He drives petulantly and ungraciously. Schumacher behaves like an old man driving an old banger on the fast lane of the motorway, resentfully refusing to move over for faster vehicles. Eddie Jordan, Schumacher’s first ever F1 boss and now a BBC commentator, described watching Schumacher these days as akin to watching Muhammad Ali humiliating himself by coming out of retirement and taking on Larry Holmes. Never mind that he has a contract with Mercedes which runs out at the end of next season, it is time for Michael Schumacher to hang up his helmet and make way for younger talent.
I had a few chums flying the McLaren flag in Istanbul this past weekend but despite their best efforts, the team didn’t get its sums right. Lewis Hamilton might conceivably have battled with Fernando Alonso for third place but his race was compromised by the pit crew taking far too long to fix a wheel nut on front right tyre. Jenson Button’s race was wrecked by an even more fundamental error: in a race where the only viable strategy was four pit-stops for tyres, McLaren opted for three. By the closing laps of the race it was all Button could do to keep his car on the road. He could not even put up a pretence of a defence against Nico Rosberg for fifth place.
This baffled me. McLaren tell us that they have sophisticated telemetry in the pit wall and back at the factory in Woking and yet they cannot do a simple calculation like how many laps a set of tyres should last. We have seen this sort of schoolboy stuff from McLaren too many times in the recent past (remember Hamilton’s disastrous race in China in 2007 that did for his championship chances?). If the team carries on cocking up, don’t be surprised to see a star like Hamilton move elsewhere before long.
May is a good month for Grands Prix – it is like London buses, you wait for ages and then three come along. After Turkey, it is Spain in a fortnight and Monaco a week thereafter.
Gitau
10 May 2011
As Sebastian Vettel took the chequered flag for the fourth time this season, the television camera panned across to the Red Bull pit wall in time for us to see Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, turn to the man sitting on his left and envelop him in a big hug. The recipient of Horner’s warmth was none other than Adrian Newey, the man who designed the Red Bull RB7 which is currently causing such devastation in Formula One. Upon seeing Horner’s gesture, I immediately thought of Trilby. Newey is the Svengali of Formula One: he designs racing cars of such overwhelming brilliance that he transforms ordinary mortals into superstars.
In the 1980s Spike Lee made a series of advertisements for Nike featuring the legendary American basketball player, Michael Jordan. In one of them, Lee questioned Jordan’s brilliance by taunting him with “It can’t be just you, it’s gotta be the shoes!” Unlike basketball, however, Formula One is almost unique among sports in relying almost entirely on the equipment provided to each competitor by his team. The answer to the age old question “is it the car or is it the driver” is “it is a combination of both, but mostly the car”. A driver’s performance is to a massive extent – perhaps even 80% - dependent upon the car. That is why Adrian Newey at Red Bull is such a huge problem for all the other teams. The gap between the Red Bulls and the McLarens, Ferraris and Mercedes is so wide that it is difficult at this stage to visualise circumstances in which Red Bull will not win this year’s constructors’ championship and Sebastian Vettel, the drivers’ championship. Four consecutive pole positions and three flawless victories have put him so far ahead of everyone else (his nearest rival, Lewis Hamilton, is 34 points behind) that we seem destined to watch the rest of this season’s races to determine who will come second and third.
It would be easy to put everything down to Adrian Newey and let the matter rest there - but that would be dishonest. In qualifying on Saturday, Sebastian Vettel achieved pole position while his team-mate, Mark Webber, in an identical car, slotted himself in at second place. The difference between the two was half a second. The time gap between the pole-setter and the next three cars is typically a couple of hundredths of a second or, on a very good day, one tenth of a second. Half a second is like an entire day in F1 terms. To demonstrate the superiority of Vettel’s performance, the BBC showed both Red Bulls’ qualifying laps simultaneously on a split screen in slow motion. Vettel attacks the corners and uses the kerbs so expertly that he almost makes the car fly; his qualifying lap in Istanbul was the fastest lap ever recorded at the Istanbul Racing Circuit. He is able to do this despite being relatively inexperienced – he’s only 23. Just to put this in context, the minimum age for drinking alcohol in Turkey is 24, so Vettel would have been permitted to spray his magnum of winner’s champion on the podium on Sunday but it would have been against the law for him to take a swig of it!
If Newey isn’t hobbled by some Mafioso and Vettel sticks with Red Bull, we could be about to witness a period of unrelenting Grand Prix domination by a German driver more complete than the last one by Michael Schumacher. This is not good for the sport by any means but it is hardly Vettel’s or Red Bull’s fault. The other teams are going to have to raise their game, and do so quickly.
“Schumacher domination” is not a phrase you will hear mentioned very much in the Mercedes team’s motor home or Chez Schumacher in Switzerland. Since returning to Formula One at the start of last season, Michael Schumacher is proving right those of his detractors – including yours truly – who boldly said that it was a mistake for the seven times world champion to return to motor racing after three years in retirement. He is not able to hook his car up for a quick qualifying lap like he could in the old days and ends up in unfamiliar territory during races: the middle order where tangles with other drivers are almost inevitable. He drives petulantly and ungraciously. Schumacher behaves like an old man driving an old banger on the fast lane of the motorway, resentfully refusing to move over for faster vehicles. Eddie Jordan, Schumacher’s first ever F1 boss and now a BBC commentator, described watching Schumacher these days as akin to watching Muhammad Ali humiliating himself by coming out of retirement and taking on Larry Holmes. Never mind that he has a contract with Mercedes which runs out at the end of next season, it is time for Michael Schumacher to hang up his helmet and make way for younger talent.
I had a few chums flying the McLaren flag in Istanbul this past weekend but despite their best efforts, the team didn’t get its sums right. Lewis Hamilton might conceivably have battled with Fernando Alonso for third place but his race was compromised by the pit crew taking far too long to fix a wheel nut on front right tyre. Jenson Button’s race was wrecked by an even more fundamental error: in a race where the only viable strategy was four pit-stops for tyres, McLaren opted for three. By the closing laps of the race it was all Button could do to keep his car on the road. He could not even put up a pretence of a defence against Nico Rosberg for fifth place.
This baffled me. McLaren tell us that they have sophisticated telemetry in the pit wall and back at the factory in Woking and yet they cannot do a simple calculation like how many laps a set of tyres should last. We have seen this sort of schoolboy stuff from McLaren too many times in the recent past (remember Hamilton’s disastrous race in China in 2007 that did for his championship chances?). If the team carries on cocking up, don’t be surprised to see a star like Hamilton move elsewhere before long.
May is a good month for Grands Prix – it is like London buses, you wait for ages and then three come along. After Turkey, it is Spain in a fortnight and Monaco a week thereafter.
Gitau
10 May 2011
posted by Gitau at 6:58 pm
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