Come in Felipe, Your Time is Up

 Motorsport  No Responses »
Aug 192012
 

“Felipe: Your F1 career is behind you. Can you confirm you understand this message”

Felipe Massa has been the #2 Ferrari F1 driver for a very long time now. In fact, since the team dropped Rubens Barrichello at the end of 2005, the second car has been piloted by Massa. Now it looks as if the Scuderia has lost patience with the Brazilian, and is ready to cast him aside at the end of the 2012 season, perhaps sooner.

When he entered the sport in 2002 with Sauber, it seemed as if he was a preordained Ferrari driver, farmed out to the customer team to get some experience. When I watched him at Silverstone that year, he didn’t exactly seem at ease with the car, alternately prodding it then chasing it through each turn.

Felipe Massa, Sauber, Silverstone 2002
image ©giles-guthrie.com

Age and experience have definitely mellowed that style, and he has been able to rack up 11 Formula 1 wins in his six years at the team. I would normally at this point make some bitchy comment about the number of Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships the team has amassed in this time, but the fact of the matter is that Massa has never had anything other than a superstar driving the other car in the team.  The only time this could be argued was in 2008, where Kimi Räikkönen was in the slough of demotivation. Massa capitalised, scoring 6 of his 11 wins in just this one year, on the way to losing the championship ten seconds after it looked in the bag.

But in Michael Schumacher, Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, Felipe has found himself pitted against the best. He’s defaulted to the role of “competent number two”, which can be a nice safe secure place for an F1 driver in a top team. Most of the money and adulation, hardly any of the real pressure. Let’s not kid ourselves though: Felipe has never really looked like threatening the greats on the other side of the garage.

Looking back, Felipe’s career has had a number of shocks that would cause even the most mentally-stable of drivers some difficulty. It seems as if Felipe has not recovered from them fully.

It seems fairly certain that Massa was meant to play #2 to Michael Schumacher, and to learn from him.  But at the end of 2006, when Michel “retired”, instead of promoting Felipe to the #1 status he probably felt owed, the Scuderia offered asylum to McLaren refugee Kimi Räikkönen. Räikkönen was feeling unusually motivated as he’d been dropped by the Woking outfit, and as Alonso and Lewis Hamilton engaged in their Kramer vs Kramer scrap to lose the World Championship, Kimi quietly put in a string of car-defying performances to snatch the cup from the squabbling duo. Felipe was left behind in his dust.

In 2008, with point proven, Kimi went back to cruise-and-collect mode, and it was Felipe who picked up the baton. With McLaren bruised by the previous year’s fight, Felipe was able to capitalise on their lack of solidity, and took the championship fight to the last corner of the last lap of the last race. Finishing first, with Hamilton out of position, there was a heart-breaking number of seconds where Felipe celebrated while Hamilton’s wet-shod McLaren blew by a series of slick-shod cars in torrential rain. 30 seconds later Felipe’s championship had been ripped from him by the Briton.

The next year saw all teams struggling to play catch-up to Brawn. Massa’s struggle became particularly personal after a piece of suspension, jettisoned from Barrichello’s Brawn BGP001, impacted his helmet at somewhere north of 150mph. The season was over, and many pundits reckoned that was it for Felipe.

But it wasn’t. He came back for the 2010 championship, now with Fernando Alonso in the other car. Alonso must be soul-destroying to have as a team-mate. So fast and so dogged is he that no result within his grasp is allowed to slip away. For someone as inconsistent as Felipe it must have been a nightmare come true.

And then, to Hockenheim 2010. Massa leading, Alonso second. “Felipe, Fernando is faster than you,” came the message. Felipe was being asked to sacrifice the win. The win that would have come a year to the day since he nearly died in one of the red cars. How can you overcome such certain knowledge that the team does not want you to win races in its cars? I normally believe that the one who completes the race distance in the shortest time is the one who deserves to win, but in this case, Ferrari should have held station. It would have been the honourable thing to do.

Ten years later…
Felipe Massa, Ferrari, Silverstone 2012
image ©giles-guthrie.com

Now, mid-way through 2012, Massa is nowhere. Alonso has gathered the team up, with its terrible car, and personally driven them to the top of the driver’s championship. Felipe is struggling to get into the third part of qualifying. It really looks like it’s time for a change.

F1 2011 + Bahrain = Bad

 Motorsport  No Responses »
Jun 052011
 

Image from Harold Laudeus's Flickr Photostream, used under Creative Commons

Last week, the FIA‘s World Motor Sport Council met, and – amongst other things – decided to reinstate the Bahrain Grand Prix for 2011. It will be run on October 30th, bumping the Indian Grand Prix to later in the year – perhaps as late as 11th December.

 

Were you booked to be in India on 30th October? That’s a shame for you, as the race will be 1,650 miles away. Hope you bought refundable tickets, or that your travel insurance includes cover for “capricious governing bodies”. By all accounts, the Indians are quite glad of the extra time to prepare, as it will help them avoid the situation that arose in South Korea, where while the track was complete, nothing much else was.

It’s difficult to know what to believe in this modern age, where media is controlled by corporate agenda and manipulated by global PR agencies. Twitter has muddied the waters further, with claim and counter claim coming from all sides. What is clear though is that there is deep resentment within Bahrain, where the ruling classes are unable to represent the interests of the majority of the population, as their respective beliefs are quite different. There was an uprising earlier in the year, and since there has not been a regime change (unlike in other Arab states), one has to presume that the uprising was put down with some measure of governmental violence.  It is therefore likely that significant quantities of the populace are going about their daily lives feeling some weight of oppression. While the government continues to control the military, and uses that military to restrict the freedoms of the population, violent flare-ups cannot be far away.

On 2nd June, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office updated its travel advice for Bahrain, reducing it from “only travel if absolutely necessary” to “no restrictions”. However, there is then extensive guidance on the (in)stability of the region, culminating in a general counselling to ensure one’s travel and medical insurance is comprehensive. Hmm, reassuring.

As the governing body of Formula 1, the FIA maintains considerable responsibility for the safety of participants, support crews and spectators. We see this in safety cells, crumple zones, marshall points, air ambulances, trackside fencing et al. But the location of the race has a great deal of influence on the safety of competitors, engineers and spectators. When Jenson Button’s car was attacked in the not-in-civil-war Brazilian city of Sao Paolo, people wondered about the safety of the F1 crowd, and whether it was wise to go to the country. Unable to control the population of a host nation, why would the FIA take this risk with F1 folks’ lives? What possible benefit is there? There are already 19 races in 2011, it’s not as if one more will make the championship more credible. There doesn’t seem to be any reasonable upside to going to Bahrain, but there is a very real threat of civil unrest spilling over into the three-day race event.

The FIA also seems to be quite insensitive to the public appearance of sending F1 to race in the Kingdom. Irrespective of which set of reports you believe, the general perception is that the ruling class is oppressive, and that there have been repeated incidents of government-sanctioned violence against the Kingdom’s people. It seems odd that the FIA would dispatch a high-profile glamour sport to such a nation. It sends a message that the FIA sides with the Kingdom’s rulers, not with its people. This is an affirmative message, but in cancelling the race, the FIA could have elected not to send a message at all. In going ahead with the race, the FIA is saying “We think it’s safe and that the reports of violence and terrorism are false. The government is clearly in control.”. Whereas in cancelling the race, the FIA could be construed to be erring on the side of safety, and allowing the Kingdom additional time to resolve its internal difficulties.

The FIA has now placed the decisions in the hands of the team bosses, of the global media controllers, and of the sponsors. By failing to act in the interests of the sport, and the people over which it has a duty of care, the FIA has now left it to each individual manager responsible for dispatching personnel to Bahrain. The team bosses must consider which is more important: the safety of individuals who dedicate their professsional lives to the furtherment of their team, or the shoring up of a regime viewed with contempt by much of the rest of the world.

Sponsors must consider whether they wish their logos to be shown on television reports of the race which may be affected by terrorism. Or which may be taking place while there is civil unrest elsewhere in the 290 square-mile  Kingdom.

If it were me, I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t ask any employees to go on my behalf. And if I were pumping millions of dollars into the sport to have my name on the side of the car, I wouldn’t want my name to be sullied by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No innocent person is going to be harmed by F1 not going to Bahrain. The same cannot be said if F1 shows up with its glitz and its glamour and its kowtowing to the King and the Crown Prince.

Thanks to Harold Laudeus for the photo of the 2008 Bahrain Grand Prix

FIA “Race Control”

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Aug 022010
 

Much is made of the FIA’s stewarding of Grands Prix. Tweaks are made to process and staffing, and it’s all in the name of applying transparency and fairness to the process. For 2010, the FIA introduced the concept of an ex-F1 driver being on the steward’s panel.

And yet they continue to make errors in judgement, and they continue to let incidents get out of hand, and they continue to fail to manage both the incident and the public’s perception of it. Why is that?

Firstly, it’s important to drop all pretences of partiality. The fact is that in any incident on-track that requires a judgement from Race Control, there will be two sides (at least). A penalty applied to one side will automatically be perceived to be unfair, depending upon the commenter’s personal partiality. This is why the ex-driver representation is important: ex-drivers know most about what can legitimately be called a “racing incident”. Only when the actions of Race Control are reviewed across multiple events, multiple drivers, multiple teams, and multiple years can a true pattern emerge. Further credence comes when the behaviour of Formula 1 Race Control is compared with that of the equivalent body of other forms of motorsport.

My belief is that a pattern has emerged. I don’t hold much truck with the common allegations, such as that FIA is an acronym for “Ferrari International Assistance”, or that the stewards are currently trying to be extra hard on Ferrari given that the FIA President is the ex Ferrari team principal. I also don’t believe that the stewards have been unfairly hard on McLaren in recent years, although that is a view I have expounded in the past.

No, my view is that the term “Race Control” is incorrect. Race Control does not control the race. Race Control attempts to apply the rulebook to attempt to justify the actions it’s going to take. But this takes so long that the control has been lost long before any penalty is applied.

Also, the sport has no respect for Race Control. Because of a history of injurious decisions, very few people in F1 as participants or spectators actually trust Race Control to make the right decisions. And such is the level of mistrust that these people feel that they have a right to challenge the decisions made. Accordingly, the statute books have been amended to contain only “standard” penalties, such as a pit-lane drive-through, or a 25-second post-race penalty. Attempting to apply standardised penalties to the infinite variance of in-race behaviour is as futile as it sounds. That the sport has lost faith in its governing body is bad enough, but the consequences of this are unacceptable. The consequences have essentially broken F1 racing.

Some examples? In 2010, at the British Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso pulled a pretty cheeky passing manoeuvre on Robert Kubica going into Vale. Kubica took his line, forcing Alonso to the grass, cutting the second part of the Vale corner. Alonso emerged ahead of Kubica. Since Alonso’s car had gained an advantage by leaving the track, he should have conceded the place back to Kubica, but he did not. He felt that Kubica’s taking of the racing line left him with nowhere to go. Race Control agonised for so long over what to do that Kubica’s car had blown up before they came up with a decision. And because they’re on standard penalties, the only decision they could make was to apply a pit-lane drive-through, putting Alonso to the back of the field. Why they could not have simply looked at the replay footage that was beamed across the world and issued a radio command to Alonso’s Ferrari to give Kubica back the place is unfathomable. Instead, we witnessed a situation whereby a ‘wrong’ committed against a competitor was being righted after that competitor was no longer in the race! Why no suspended penalty? Race Control should have been able to issue a probationary notice to the effect of “That pass was illegal, but the car is no longer in the race. Do it again and we will punish you”.

In 2008, at the Belgian Grand Prix, both Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton left the track to complete passing manoeuvres. In Raikkonen’s case, Hamilton blew back past so quickly that Race Control had barely awoken to the infringement before the on-track action righted the wrong. Hamilton later passed Raikkonen by going off track, then ceded the position back to the Finn, then passed him again. He would go on to win the race. Raikkonen crashed in what the Police call a “single car incident”. At the end of the race, Race Control decided to penalise Hamilton for not ‘properly’ ceding position to Raikkonen. And because they could only apply a 25-second extension to Hamilton’s race time, this put him behind Massa, who had played no part in the incident at all. This very much looked like favouritism since Hamilton was fighting Massa for the championship. Again, a suspended penalty would have been more appropriate.

In 2009, at the Australian Grand Prix, under the Safety Car Jarno Trulli fumbled his Toyota and went off-track. Lewis Hamilton passed him, then had an attack of doubt. He asked the team for guidance, but they did not guide him accurately, tried to second-guess themselves and went completely off the rails. A scandal ensued. The rules are quite clear in that there is no overtaking under the Safety Car unless the car being overtaken is completely off-track. Rather than adjudicate and advise on the matter straight away, Race Control stayed mute, watching as the McLaren management – terrified of a penalty – self-destructed.
In 2010, at the German Grand Prix, Ferrari switched the order of their cars in the race. Race Control did nothing, preferring instead to make a mealy-mouthed grab for $100,000 from Ferrari’s deep pockets. Why did they not get on the radio to Ferrari, and tell them to reverse the switch?

Evidence supports the fact that FIA Race Control steers a haphazard path between impotence and ineptitude. There are glimmers of hope. Issuance of a black & white flag to Lewis Hamilton for weaving at the 2010 Malaysian Grand Prix was finely judged, and an apt warning to both Hamilton and the rest that the behaviour was unacceptable.

By way of contrast, other series’ have faith in, and respect for, their governing bodies. It’s not a fear culture (such as that which McLaren holds for the FIA), it’s just a quiet obedience. In various the US stock car series, the governing body is frequently called to reset the race order as the track goes “full course yellow” with cars two- and three-wide on track. Each driver reacts to the yellow differently, and they run so close that this can affect the race order. Race Control resets it, and the drivers obey. Similarly, in the Australian V8 Supercar series, penalties and adjustments are handed down and obeyed without insubordination. And in its most extreme form, the American Le Mans Series applies huge variance in penalties. Mid-season in 2004, ALMS teams made a conscious decision to drop their opposition to Race Control decisions. Their philosophy was “we may not like our penalty, but we may later benefit from someone else’s. In the mean time, we have to trust that these things will balance out.”

F1 would do well to learn from its mistakes, and the things that its rivals do better.