Welcome to a new content strand on JA on F1, which will look at the decisive moments after each Grand Prix and the strategy behind them. The content is being sponsored by FX Pro. The Strategy Briefing is produced after consultation with a number of leading F1 engineers and analysis of the data. The idea is to help fans get more understanding of why the race unfolded as it did and to get closer to the sport. As F1 strategy is now less pre-planned and is more reactive, thanks to the no refueling rule, it will analyse the key decisions More…

One of the interesting human interest stories to come out of this Melbourne weekend was the renewal of the niggly relationship between Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher. The pair have history. Alonso is the driver Schumacher identified as his biggest threat as early as 2002, when the Spaniard was test driver for Renault. They battled for the title in 2006 and in Monaco that year, things came to a head when Schumacher blocked the track in qualifying. Alonso was one of the drivers prevented from taking pole by that move and was very angry about it. Privately, he threatened to More…

I’m very interested in the response of McLaren and its two drivers to the events in Australia. Jenson Button won the race with a performance of measured perfection and instinctive tactical brilliance, while Lewis Hamilton lit up Albert Park with his audacious passing, but ended up looking diminished in comparison with Button, less in control of his destiny, less mature. That isn’t so surprising; Button is 30 years old and ten years into his F1 career, whereas Hamilton is 25 and only three years in. Perhaps because he won the title so early in his career and has been a More…

Jenson Button won the Australian Grand Prix for the second year in a row, leading home Robert Kubica and Felipe Massa. The game changing moment for Button was an early gamble he made to opt for dry tyres on a damp track. The race had everything Bahrain did not; lots of overtaking and drama, suggesting that mechanical grip, rather than aerodynamics is the real problem with F1 in dry conditions. The start was chaotic; rain fell on the grid and everyone opted to run the intermediate rain tyres. On a greasy track, Fernando Alonso got away slowly from third on More…

Sebastian Vettel took pole position for the Australian Grand Prix with a stunning lap, where the car was right off the outer edges of the kerbs in the final corners. Red Bull team mate Mark Webber finished second 8/100ths of a second behind and Fernando Alonso was a similar margin behind in a qualifying session which lived up to the pre-season billing of being for closeness. It is the first all Red Bull front row. “We just had to nail it,” said a delighted Vettel afterwards. The session was also remarkable for the disappointing performance of Lewis Hamilton, who managed More…

New tech on the cars in Melbourne
It may be the early part of the season, when the long distance flyway races make logistics difficult, but many teams are pushing really hard on development. There are quite a few updates on show this weekend in Melbourne. Several teams have new aerodynamic parts including new front wings for Red Bull, Renault and Ferrari.

The Ferrari wing has a new endplate with a smaller vertical fin, outside the end plates, featuring an S shaped vertical profile, instead of a straight one. It is about 5cm lower than the previous version. It’s main function is to give less pitch sensitivity. Although this wing gives slightly less downforce than the previous version, it causes less turbulence in airflow around and under the car and works better with the new wheel fairings.

On Friday in Melbourne only Alonso used it, but both drivers will use it for the rest of the weekend.

Tyre graining
Melbourne is a circuit where the tyres often “grain”, which causes them to lose performance and it is something all the teams will be guarding against in the race if they want to be competitive.

Last year the graining on the softer of the two compounds was very bad and proved a decisive factor in the race. Many teams found that after just six laps the rear tyres had grained badly and were losing two to three seconds per lap. This year Bridgestone has brought tyres, which are a step harder. So instead of super soft and medium, they have brought soft and hard.

Graining is where the rubber shears away from the top surface, caused by a high level of sliding at high loads, both lateral and longitudinal. Lateral comes from sliding in corners, longitudinal comes from acceleration and braking.

Temperature has a lot to do with it, probably more than any other factor. Imagine a plastic ruler left in the fridge – when you take it out and bend it, it will snap. But if you bend a warm ruler it will flex easily.

It’s the same with F1 tyres – if they are being used below their operating range the rubber will be less compliant and will shear off more easily. The hard tyre grains less because the compound shear strength is higher.

Another major factor is the track surface at Albert Park. It is quite old and has low micro and macro roughness, which basically means that the stones in it are small. The result of its age and smoothness is that the surface is very low grip and this means that the tyres grain laterally here because the car slides in the corners.

Watch out for the rear tyres graining from the inside shoulder towards the outside.

Ride height adjusters
A lot of talk in the paddocks of both Bahrain and Melbourne has centred on ride height adjusters on the Red Bull and Ferrari cars in particular, which means that they can optimise the aerodynamics in qualifying and for most of the race.

Up to a point, the lower you can run your car the more downforce it will have. But this year with refuelling banned, teams need to set the ride height so it works for a low fuel qualifying lap and then without changing it in parc ferme before the race, also works when the car has 160 kilos of fuel in it. Inevitably the extra weight will lower the car on its suspension and mean you will be running 3mm lower in the first stint of the race than in qualifying. As the fuel burns off the car rises. If you can lower the car a few millimetres at your first pit stop, you will have more downforce for the rest of the race.

It is perfectly legal as long as the car is stationary when the change is made and the gain is worth a few seconds over a race distance. Here’s how it’s calculated; every 1 mm of ride height you move is worth 5 kilos of downforce, which in turn is worth 0.05 seconds per lap. So if you pit on lap 18 in Melbourne, you can lower the car will have 40 laps of benefit, which is worth two seconds. If you lower the car by 4mm, which is realistic, you will gain 8 seconds. It is only worth it if you can make the change easily in the pit stop without losing that time.

Ferrari’s system is manual and very obvious. There have been suggestions that Red Bull has a more sophisticated system, which allows the car to run low in qualifying trim but then raises itself up when the 160 kilos of fuel are loaded in and lowers itself again as the fuel burns off. The key to that is making it legal.

Other teams are scratching their heads about how Red Bull might have achieved that, but one suggestion is that they may be exploiting the regulation that allows teams to re-gas pressurize the dampers between qualifying and the race. If this is the case then they would get the benefit of running the car low in qualifying and then raise it up when the fuel is added. Hence their stunning qualifying form.

More on the McLaren rear wing
The McLaren rear wing with its novel airflow arrangement via the sharkfin engine cover, gave the team around 4/10ths of a second per lap in Bahrain, because it meant that the car could travel down the straights 5km/h faster thanks to the rear wing “stalling” and thus shedding drag. There has been a lot of speculation about how this is achieved.

It is known that the air enters the cockpit via a duct on the top of the monocoque and passes down a channel. The driver raises his left knee to close off a gap in the channel which sends high pressure air through the sharkfin and out of the back of the rear wing, breaking away the airflow which passes underneath. But the clever part of the system is how the air switches direction in the engine cover. This is done using a Y shaped junction and a science called fluidics, which is where air can be made to have digital properties.

Sauber has become the first team to attempt to copy the idea, with a duct on the left sidepod of their car. But it is hard to see how it will be optimised to the degree that the McLaren is.

Scrutineering
Ever wondered how they test whether the cars are legal? After every race the F1 cars have to be checked over to make sure that they comply with the regulations. But the pre-race legality checks are not carried out by the FIA, they are carried out by the teams themselves. It is up to them to make sure that their car is legal before the action starts.

FIA's Jo Bauer checks cars post race (Darren Heath)

All the FIA do pre-event is to check that the safety features are in working order, things like the monocoque, the electricity kill switch, the rear light and the fire extinguisher.

Virgin Racing’s initiation to F1 took an embarrassing turn this weekend as it was forced to request a dispensation to homologate a new chassis to allow for a larger fuel tank. It appears that the one the car was designed around is not big enough to allow the car to finish a Grand Prix. “It has become clear during pre-season testing and our debut race in Bahrain that our fuel tank capacity is marginal, ” said Virgin technical director Nick Wirth, ” And if not addressed there is the possibility that fuel pick-up could become an issue in certain circumstances,” More…

Using super soft and hard tyres, the two extremes of the Bridgestone range, at every race – that is one of the proposals on the table to bring back the spectacle and improve overtaking in F1. Currently the teams use tyres which are two steps apart, such as the soft and hard tyres here in Melbourne. But FIA race director Charlie Whiting’s suggestion of three steps between tyre compounds would mean drivers struggling to find a compromise between supersoft tyres, which might grain very quickly and last no more than 10 laps at some tracks and hard tyres, which will More…

Mark Webber has hit back at suggestions that he may retire from Formula 1 at the end of this season. The 33 year old Australian arrived in the Melbourne paddock today with stories swirling around him thanks to an intervention from Lewis Hamilton, who suggested that he might retire at the end of the season, ”I don’t know how long he [Webber] plans to stay in F1, but I get the sense that it’s one of the years if he wants to finish on top and perhaps call it a day,” he said. But Webber said, “I’m very motivated, enjoying More…

The parc ferme rules in F1 are an important part of the ritual of a race weekend. From the moment qualifying starts on Saturday to the moment the cars go to the grid on Sunday, they are in parc ferme conditions, which means that no work or modifications can be done on the cars without FIA approval. It’s great for the mechanics, who get a guaranteed evening off, especially welcome at this time of the year. In Bahrain many teams did all-nighters on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. After qualifying the cars used to be handed over to the FIA and More…

I was interested to see the results of the recent fan survey conducted by FOTA with the support of LG Electronics and F1 Racing. They are fairly predictable, with Ferrari coming out on top with 30% of the support, well ahead of McLaren on 19% and Mercedes on 10%. 22% of fans said that they had no particular favourite team. On the driver side, Michael Schumacher has not lost his fan base and he tops the poll with 19.5%, ahead of Fernando Alonso on 9.7%, Kimi Raikkonen on 7.2%, Felipe Massa on 6.1% and Lewis Hamilton on 6%. Again it More…

We receive many messages asking, “How do I get a job in F1?” Renault has announced that it is expanding its intern programme, known as the Altran Engineering Academy, for this year and is offering a placement at the engine department at Viry as well as the team’s chassis HQ in Enstone. Renault is keen to encourage young engineers to come into F1 and three graduates of the programme have gone on to full time jobs with the team, one is still working there today. Last year’s winner was Helen Makey (pictured) Renault’s managing director Bob Bell says that ideas More…

Today is the 50th anniversary of the birth of Ayrton Senna. There are many dates to remember the great Brazilian by; key moments in his career or his very public death on 1 May 1994, but his birth should remain the key date in my view. Senna wasn’t like other racing drivers. He had the same skills as the very best of them, but what defined him was his intellect and the spiritual dimension of his character; it was a passion, a calling above and beyond the simple desire to compete, which drove him on and raised him to a More…

For those interested in the gaming side of F1, the official F1 game by Codemasters has had a revamp for 2010 and was unveiled in London this week. The game, due out in September, will be the first official F1 game to appear on the Xbox 360 platform and will be back on PC. It is also available for Playstation. The new game is also designed for HD consoles. The game is developed in Birmingham and uses the same proprietary technology as Colin McRae and DIRT 2. Last year’s game, the first by Codemasters after years of the contract being More…

The FIA has today announced that the application process for teams wishing to apply for the 13th and final slot on the F1 grid is now open and will close on 15 April. This is the slot created by the failure of USF1 to make it this season. Teams who wish to race in the 2011 and 2012 seasons must submit an expression of interest before then. The FIA will then undertake a process of due diligence. After 2012 there will be a new Concorde Agreement, but clearly any team which is accepted and which signs the existing Concorde Agreement More…

Ron Dennis launched the new McLaren roadcar the MP4/12 today and said that he had “moved on from F1″. Dennis’s career in F1 was full of success punctuated by some short bouts of uncompetitiveness, like the 1994-1997 period. But there is no doubt that he is one of the great team owners of the sport’s history. Now 62, he stood down from involvement in the F1 team this time last year after the scandal in Melbourne where Lewis Hamilton and McLaren sporting director Dave Ryan were found to have lied to the race stewards. Following on from the spy scandal More…

The organisers of the Bahrain Grand Prix brought out 17 of the 19 living F1 world champions to the season opener last weekend. Some of them took part in a parade in their championship winning cars or in other cars which were laid on for them to drive. On Sunday morning I went down to the tent behind the paddock to see the drivers getting into their cars before the parade. It was incredible. Here were the cars and drivers I had grown up watching. I have worked with and got to know quite a few of them, like Emerson More…

The debate rages on about how F1 can save itself from monotony this season. We’ve had an unprecdeented number of comments and suggestions here on JA on F1. Following on from Sunday’s uninspiring Bahrain Grand Prix there have been calls for radical steps to be taken to change the cars and improve the racing, with many people pointing to the aerodynamics and particularly the double diffuser, which the FIA decided to allow at the start of last season, as the prime culprit. The double diffuser is on its way out of the sport in 2011 anyway, having been voted out More…

It is being reported in Brazil that the new Lotus team, which made its debut in Bahrain at the weekend and got both cars through as classified finishers, has landed a sponsorship deal worth $9 million with Brazilian oil company Petrobras. It is said in Brazil that the cars will start running with the Petrobras branding from the Spanish Grand Prix onwards. Petrobras has not confirmed the reports in O Globo, and has said only that it is “in negotiations”, but sponsorship sources in the UK suggest that the deal is now done. Petrobras is understood to be on its More…

After the enormous build up, Michael Schumacher’s comeback drive didn’t yield a pole or a podium, he finished sixth two places lower than on his last race in Brazil 2006. And this is probably more or less what he expected. The Mercedes didn’t look as fast as the Red Bull and Ferrari in pre season testing and it more or less matched the McLaren for pace all weekend, showing what a good result third was for Lewis Hamilton. Analysing Schumacher’s performance is worthwhile for two reasons; it shows what kind of shape the great champion is in, on his return More…

Returning to the UK from Bahrain, it is clear from a scan through the newspapers that the new style post refuelling F1 has met with almost unanimous disapproval. Judging from the 300+ comments we have had on Sunday’s story about the lack of show, around 98% of JA on F1 readers agree with the journos on this. It’s a great shame for the orgamisers in Bahrain, as they put on as good a show as any race I’ve been to. The display of 17 world champions and their cars was breathtaking, something so audacious only a ruler who wanted to More…

Today was a real vindication of the decision taken last summer by Ferrari boss Stefano Domenicali to stop development of the 2009 car and throw everything at the 2010 model. The Ferrari was the best car overall this weekend in various conditions. It was quick on the single lap, quick on the soft tyre at the start of the race when the car was heavy and quick on the medium tyre in the second part of the race as the fuel load lightened. The Red Bull may have been quicker in the soft tyre parts of that, but when the More…

There aren’t many great stories in the aftermath of the first Grand Prix in Bahrain, but one of them is the performance of the Lotus team, both of whose cars were classified finishers today. Heikki Kovalainen crossed the line in 15th place and Jarno Trulli was 17th, albeit he stopped on the circuit. But that may have been tactical so that the team can change a gearbox without penalty for the next race. The concept of the new teams came in for quite a bit of criticism in the run up to the start of the season and all the More…

Fernando Alonso won the first Grand Prix of the season at Bahrain today, leading a Ferrari one two ahead of Felipe Massa with Lewis Hamilton third for McLaren. Pole sitter Sebastian Vettel led for most of the race, but ended up fourth after an exhaust problem on his Red Bull. After the race Alonso said that the races this year are likely to be dull because the result will always be decided by qualifying and the first lap. And as the front runners are always likely to choose the soft tyre for qualifying and then make an early stop to More…

Formula 1 is celebrating its 60th anniversary this weekend in Bahrain and has brought out all the living world champions. Only Kimi Raikkonen and Nelson Piquet are missing. Thanks to McLaren’s @fifthdriver on twitter here is a sneak peak of the “team photo” Who is the most legendary here? And who’s the coolest?

We hoped that we were in for a season of surprises and it has certainly started well with Sebastian Vettel snatching pole for the Bahrain Grand Prix by a healthy margin over the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso. Vettel’s team mate Mark Webber could easily have made it an all Red Bull front row, but he lost a second in the middle sector, which features the fiddly new section of track. He set the fastest third sector time of all. Pre-season testing made it look like Ferrari and McLaren were in front, although there were signs in Jerez More…

There has been a lot of discussion today in Bahrain about the new teams and their pace, or lack of it. Today the fastest car, Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes lapped in 1m 55.409 and the slowest, the Hispania of Bruno Senna managed a 2m 06.968, only just over a second faster than the fastest GP2 time today. The FIA has made it clear that it would like to re-introduce the 107% rule for qualifying, whereby any car which cannot set a time within 107% of the pole is not allowed to race. Senna’s time was outside the 107% time, which is More…

I had breakfast this morning with Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali in his office at the track. Well, he invited me for breakfast, but to Italians that means coffee. The conversation was wide ranging and covered Michael Schumacher’s defection to Mercedes, the new teams, the financial situation in F1 and the serious problem of who will supply tyres to F1 next season. On Schumacher he said that that it felt “strange” to be racing against him and that he had not yet seen his former colleague at the track, but that he intended to today. “Racing against Ross and Michael is difficult; More…

Welcome to a new content feature on JA on F1 for this season.

In response to readers’ questions about technical issues in F1, we’ve got together with LG Electronics to produce a technical report which will appear at every Grand Prix, looking at the latest developments, key talking points and practical issues facing the teams. It will be written in layman’s language to provide a window into the often obscure world of F1 Tech.

I will be working with F1 insiders, engineers and a technical artist to demystify the technical story and to bring fans closer to the sport.

To kick the series off, we will look at some of the clever devices, which have got everyone talking ahead of the first race. We’ll look at some issues raised by the refuelling ban and examine what HRT will need to do first as they try to race an untested car.

Technical developments

The technical regulations for F1 have changed since last season, but not by as much as they did from 2008 to 2009. The aerodynamic regulations have stayed pretty much the same. The cars are in many cases longer and wider than last year to accommodate a larger fuel tank, which arises from the ban on refuelling. Instead of carrying a maximum of 90 kilos of fuel, cars will now start the race with around 160 kilos. This means that the weight distribution has to be reconsidered.

It makes for a fiendish challenge for the engineers when setting the cars up, because they need the cars to work the tyres hard on the first lap in qualifying but then, without changing the set up in parc ferme after qualifying, the car must treat the tyres gently over a long run in the race.

The slick front tyres are 25mm narrower than they were last year, but getting the set up right, so that the load is evenly distributed across the four tyres is as important as ever.

To help preserve the tyres, the Front Wing Adjuster will be very important during the races this year. It was made legal last season, but drivers rarely used it. This year those teams that have it are finding it very helpful, particularly with preserving the front tyres.

Using a servo, controlled by a dial on the steering wheel, the wing can be moved by up to 6 degrees and this affects the amount of downforce the front wing produces. It can be used twice per lap and will be used extensively during the race.

It is a difficult thing to get right, without movement you don’t want from the wing, but it counts for a lot and it’s something Ferrari were the first to master with the 2010 cars. By trimming it as the fuel weight burns off, the driver can keep the wear on all four tyres as even as possible.

Another major talking point arising from the winter testing is McLaren’s Rear Wing, which seems to have the ability to cut drag on the straights, giving the car additional extra speed. In Barcelona the McLaren was 5km/h faster through the speed trap than its closest rival.

This is achieved by passing air through a slot in the rear wing (the black line near the bottom of the wing in the picture left), which neutralises the rear wing, cutting the drag. Such a device would also reduce the overall downforce, which would be a bad thing. So switching it on and off when needed on the straights is the key. That is where the question of legality comes in.

The way it works is this: there is a hole in the cockpit to a duct through which the air passes. The driver decides when to open it and he does so with his knee. Air then shoots through the duct in the sharkfin engine cover and exits through a slot in the underside of the rear wing. This causes the airflow under the wing to separate from the wing and this cuts the drag.

The FIA’s Charlie Whiting inspected the wing on Thursday and is satisfied that it is legal, so it is something some other teams will be sure to copy. They are all working on their own versions of it now anyway. The problem is that they cannot make a hole in the cockpit because the rules say you cannot modify the safety cell once the season has started.

Ferrari’s wheel crowns
In a similar vein, Ferrari has also slipped in a clever idea which no-one can fully copy. Aerodynamic appendages attached to wheels, which help clean up the air flow, have been banned. But Ferrari has come up with an ingenious idea, involving two crowns on the wheels, which do part of the job the spinners used to do.

They are legal because they are made of the same material as the wheel. Ferrari only put them on the car at the final Barcelona test. And the clever bit is that, as the wheels are now a homologated item (along with the safety cell and crash structures), the other teams can’t change their wheels to adopt this solution!

Racing an untested car
The new teams have not been able to do as much testing as their established rivals and one team has done no testing at all. The HRT team was only rescued at the 11th hour and their car, built in Italy by Dallara, has yet to turn a wheel before Bahrain. So what will be the priorities for the engineers in those first practice sessions?

Cooling is the first thing to check on Friday morning. A car which overheats will not get far, especially in the heat of Bahrain. If anything the car is likely to be engineered to overcool; with all the uncertainty over this team, the design engineers are likely to have been conservative. However the general rule in F1 is that a car which cools really well is a slow car. Designers want to shrink wrap the bodywork over the car to get the best aerodynamics, so in a really quick car, the bodywork is often no more than 5mm away from the radiators.

Water temperatures typically run to 140 degrees, which is possible because the system is pressurized, while oil temperatures of 115 degrees are acceptable. If the oil gets any hotter than that it loses its lubricating properties and causes damage.

After the cooling has been verified, the engineers will begin the difficult process of learning about the tyres. This is what the other teams have been doing for the last month in testing. It will take HRT several Grand Prix weekends to learn how to set the car up, to get the load evenly balanced across all four tyres and get the correct balance between aero and tyre temperatures. There aren’t too many short cuts here and even very experienced teams can get it wrong. This is a problem Brawn engineered into their car in the second half of last season, for example. The HRT team has hired ex Honda technical director Geoff Willis to help speed up the learning process. Gabriele Tredozzi, formally of Toro Rosso and Minardi, is working for Dallara on the design side.

Getting the electronic systems to work will be another priority, the teams all use the same Microsoft McLaren Electronics ECU and getting that coded to work with all the the other systems on the car, such as the gearbox and the hydraulic systems. HRT will be helped in this by the fact that they are using the same Cosworth engine and Xtrac gearbox elements as Lotus and Virgin. But modern seamless shift gearboxes are fiendishly complicated things. The coding for programming one runs to 50 pages of A3, to get the timing and fail-safes working properly!

Cooling the fuel
One aspect of the refuelling ban which has not had much attention is the danger of the last drops of fuel overheating in the tank towards the end of the race. With the first races taking place in Bahain, Australia and Malaysia, this is an even greater risk. Hot fuel evaporates and in extreme circumstances you get a condition called cavitation, where the fuel boils and air bubbles get into the fuel system, damaging it.

In the days of refuelling, fuel chilled to 10 degrees would be put into the car at a pit stop. Without that luxury, the teams have had work on two areas; insulating the fuel tanks from the engine heat and working with their fuel suppliers to blend the fuel with additives which will stop the fuel from vapourising. Shell in particular have put a huge amount of effort over the winter into blending “cool fuel” for Ferrari, believing this to be a key area.

It’s been a busy day at Bahrain, albeit totally lacking in tension. The drivers and teams all seem very calm ahead of the new season. The new teams are understandably a little more edgy, but generally I am amazed how calm everyone is. That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a lot going on. Alain Prost is to act as a steward this weekend, alongside three of the more traditional steward types, in order to add credibility to penalties handed out to drivers. Also the World Motor Sport Council has today been discussing the 107% rule and decided to look More…

The first day of the new season kicked off with a trip to a Mercedes dealership on a highway out of Bahrain’s capital Manama, to see Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg. This was one of those occasions which was more interesting for what it looked like rather than what was said. It was a bit of a mess organisationally, with the principals over an hour late and then delayed further by a decision to do a TV scrum before the formal press conference, rather than the other way around. So by the end of it we had lost a whole More…

Here on JA on F1, we are always trying to bring content that you the readers have asked for, to answer your questions and help bring you closer to the sport. One question which we get regularly at this time of year, when the new cars come out for the start of the season, is “How much does the driver bring to the car, in terms of lap time, from his development ability?” Ever since Fernando Alonso famously claimed to bring 7/10ths of a second to a car in the development stage, there has been a desire to understand what More…

I went up to Cosworth recently to have a look around and find out how the testing has been going. Cosworth is returning to F1 after an absence of three years and in many ways they symbolise the new post-manufacturer F1 era, as the power behind Williams and the new teams. There was quite a bit of scepticism about Cosworth when the FIA issued its list of new teams accepted for 2010, all of whom would be using Cosworth engines. In some quarters it was suggested that having Cosworth engines was the only way to be accepted, but there were More…

In a revealing interview with BBC Radio 5 Live this weekend, Lewis Hamliton has admitted that he has made “lots and lots of mistakes in my career, hopefully this will be a year of a lot fewer!” It’s very unusual to hear a driver admitting to any mistake, let alone lots of them. It is criticism that was often leveled at Michael Schumacher and has to a lesser extend been aimed at Hamilton from time to time. This charm offensive marks an interesting change of direction for Hamilton, ahead of what is likely to be another hard fought season. He More…

Of the new teams in Formula 1 it looks as though the radical Virgin Racing car is probably going to be the fastest, once it hits its stride, but preparations for the season have been undermined somewhat by reliability problems in testing. The car has been unable to hold on to its hydraulic fluid and during its first test a front wing fell off. This has been a little embarrassing for technical director Nick Wirth, who has staked his reputation on a car which has never been anywhere near a wind tunnel, but instead was designed only using CFD or More…

The F1 grid is now full with the announcement that Karun Chandhok will drive for the newly renamed Hispania Racing Team alongside Bruno Senna. The 26 year old from Chennai becomes the second Indian driver to enter F1 after Narain Karthikeyan, who raced for Jordan in 2005. He is also brings the total of GP2 graduates on the F1 grid this year to 11, in other words almost half the field. This is quite a feather in the cap for the GP2 series. The average age of the grid this year is now set at 27, which is quite mature. More…

The Renault team’s strategy of pushing into Russia in search of commercial opportunity has yielded fruit with the signing of Lada as a sponsor for the team. This leads to the highly unusual situation of an F1 team displaying two car brands. The deal was done with the blessing of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and is more than anything else symbolic of Russian support for Vitaly Petrov and Renault F1′s programme. Renault has a 25% stake in Avtovaz, Lada’s parent company. Lada uses Renault platforms and transmissions. Both cars will run with Lada branding and Petrov will carry the More…

The FIA has published an official entry list for the 2010 season, with ten days to go to the first race. USF1 are not on the list, having asked the FIA for dispensation to miss the 2010 season and start in 2011. Meanwhile Campos is now officially rebranded HRT, an unfortunate set of initials, which does not mean Hormone Replacement Therapy, but in fact means Hispania Racing Team. How long it retains that name remains to be seen. Bruno Senna is named on the official entry list and it is interesting that although HRT was allowed to rebrand before the More…

There is plenty of movement going on behind the scenes this week among the new teams and aspirant teams with the new season starting next week. Campos is undergoing a name change today and this will be made public shortly. Sections of the Spanish media have suggested that it will be called “Hispania Racing”, in line with the new majority owner Jose Ramon Carabante’s business enterprises. However it is clear that this team is becoming increasingly German since former Force India team principal Colin Kolles took the reins. The team is set to run out of the former Opel DTM More…

Lewis Hamilton has come out with the revelation that his father Anthony will no longer manage his career, in an interview with Autosport. The pair have been inseparable since Hamilton’s early karting days, but the dual roles of father and manager are difficult to balance because it is so hard to divorce emotion from what should be pragmatic decisions and with some of the strained situations which have arisen in Hamilton’s brief but turbulent F1 career, the 25 year old and his father have decided that they would like to have a more normal father and son relationship. “I want More…

World Champion Jenson Button spoke to a few of the leading F1 websites today on a phone-in from the McLaren Technology Centre. He seemed very upbeat after the testing and clearly believes that he has a competitive car. However he said that the last few weeks have proved to him that the first few laps of the race are going to be vital, “It’s like an endurance race, like Le Mans, ” he said. “The car works very differently from high to low fuel loads in terms of balance. It is a different way of driving from last season. We More…