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Caterham principal aims for ‘fresh impetus’

Caterham team principal Tony Fernandes has spoken about the decision to axe Jarno Trulli in favour of Vitaly Petrov for the 2012 season. Go here for Red Bull v Cowboys! You heard right! Trulli was under contract for the team, but his future in Formula 1 now looks uncertain after being replaced by the Russian. Speaking about the [...]

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Ferrari’s fate the foremost of many unknowns

Kimi Raikkonen was to the point, as ever.

As pre-season testing wound to a close at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya, the man who returns to Formula 1 this season after two years in rallying was asked how he felt the teams compared.

“In two weeks we know,” the Lotus driver said. “There is no point to guess here. I don’t know who’s going to be fastest. Nobody knows.”

Up and down the pit lane, drivers from other teams were expressing more or less the same view.

“McLaren look very strong,” said Red Bull’s Mark Webber. “And some of the other times done by other teams were pretty handy, too.”

Jenson Button, meanwhile, managed to cover all bases in three sentences.

“There’s a lot of work needs to be done before we’re properly competitive,” the McLaren driver said. “I’m reasonably happy with what we have. I don’t know where we are but the feeling is good.”

That summed up the situation pretty well at the end of three pre-season tests.

The lap times have been particularly difficult to read this year but it seems some patterns have emerged.

Up and down the pit lane, the general view is that the field is a lot closer than in recent years. Red Bull are again very strong, McLaren look like running them close and Mercedes appear to have made a step forward. Lotus, Sauber and Force India have also looked pretty handy.

Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn says he is “expecting the tightest start to a season we’ve seen for a number of years“.

People don’t just invent these views – they are formed by looking through the mountains of data that each day of testing throws up.

Kimi Raikonnen returns to Formula 1 after a three year absence.

Analysing the lap times also produces some interesting numbers.

While it is not possible to know the programmes each team is running at any time, it is a reasonable assumption that over the course of winter testing all the teams will get through pretty much the same sort of work.

So, logically, an average of every lap time a driver has done over the three tests should give some indication of where each team is.

On average, over the whole of winter testing, Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel was the fastest of the drivers from last year’s top two teams, by 0.3secs from Button, with Hamilton a similar margin further back and just in front of Webber.

The specific average times look like this:

Vettel one minute, 25.340 seconds
Button 1:25.664
Hamilton 1:25.937
Webber 1:25.951

It’s also worth pointing out that the pattern of the last two or three years has been for Red Bull’s true pace to be disguised in both winter testing and in free practice at the grands prix.

Whether they are running more fuel than their rivals, or a weaker engine map, Red Bull always seem to find more time when it matters than the others do.

Mercedes have clearly been doing a different programme from the other teams – with a far greater concentration of longer runs – so comparing their times is potentially less instructive.

But when you see that Nico Rosberg did a 1:22.932 at the start of a 13-lap run on the penultimate day of testing, you know they have a pretty decent car.

“It’s still going to be the teams from last year that we need to beat,” Rosberg said, sounding confident. “But I think we have a good chance to annoy them a few times early in the season.”

And then there is Ferrari. Unless there is some Oscar-worthy acting going on, they are in trouble.

Ferrari have been open about the fact that they are struggling to understand the behaviour of their radical new car. Insiders tell BBC Sport that sometimes it behaves well and predictably, and sometimes it does not, and the team have no idea why.

The sense of crisis was heightened by Ferrari’s decision to cancel their driver media briefings over the final weekend of testing, saying they wanted them to concentrate solely on their job.

But Fernando Alonso did speak on television at the Barcelona-Sporting football match on Saturday night, saying: “In the first races we will suffer because we are not 100%.”

Ferrari put up technical director Pat Fry instead of Alonso on Sunday, and he admitted that he thought it unlikely the team would be able to finish on the podium in Melbourne.

One can only imagine the pressure Fry must be feeling right now.

A diffident man who is uncomfortable with the media, Fry is in his first year in the job following the dismissal of predecessor Aldo Costa. And he has overseen a design office that was told to take risks this season in an attempt to close the gap to Red Bull after a poor 2011.

They’ve taken those risks – but it does not look for now as if they have made wise choices.

And yet, and yet. If you average out Alonso’s lap times over the whole of winter testing, guess what? He is the fastest of all – by 0.3secs. No wonder Webber says: “The mystery is the Ferrari.”

So what’s going on? The new F2012 looks like it can do a decent lap time, so it is conceivable that it will qualify pretty well in Melbourne the weekend after next.

But according to BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson, who spent some time watching trackside in Barcelona, it seems to quickly drop in performance, initially losing grip on turn-in, and later on corner exits too.

It seems to use its tyres particularly aggressively. Ferrari have been afflicted these last few years by a car that raced better than it qualified because it used its tyres too gently. In seeking to fix this trait, have they now gone too far the other way?

It’s not as if they can blame the drivers either. In Alonso, they have an all-time great, a gold standard who will push the car to its absolute limit on every single lap of every single race. Many consider his season in 2011 to have been better than his title-winning years with Renault in 2005-06, considering the equipment at his disposal.

This, team boss Stefano Domenicali has admitted to BBC Sport, was the point of signing the Spaniard on a lucrative contract that commits him to the team until the end of 2016. It puts pressure on the team to deliver.

Of course, all this may turn out to be an illusion. Perhaps Alonso will be a contender for victory in Melbourne, and throughout the year. But let’s assume for a moment he isn’t.

Back in 2007, when his relationship with McLaren was in tatters, Alonso had talks with Red Bull to discuss moving there.

Red Bull were keen but in the end Alonso opted for a move back to Renault, knowing a Ferrari seat was waiting for him a couple of years down the line.

At the time, with Ferrari contending for the title for the 10th time in 11 years and Red Bull still in the midfield, you could hardly fault the logic.

But now, in his quiet moments, or when he’s watching Vettel celebrate yet another win, or looking at the beautifully intricate detail at the back of the Red Bull, or when he’s wrestling his uncooperative mount into a corner, does Alonso wish he could turn back the clock?

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Webber ‘will threaten’ Vettel in 2012

Bernie Ecclestone has stated his belief that Mark Webber could be Sebastian Vettel’s biggest rival for the title this year. Check out our review of Red Bull in 2011! Webber failed to win a race last year of course, but Ecclestone is convinced that the Australian will improve, threatening his Red Bull team-mate along the [...]

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Red Bull to bring major update for RB8 | F1 Fanatic round-up

Red Bull to bring major update for RB8 is an original article from F1 Fanatic.

If this article has been published anywhere other than F1 Fanatic it is an infringement of copyright.

In the round-up: Red Bull are set to reveal a series of upgrades for their RB8 as pre-season testing draws to a close.

Red Bull to bring major update for RB8 is an original article from F1 Fanatic.

If this article has been published anywhere other than F1 Fanatic it is an infringement of copyright.

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Mercedes battle to match past glories

Red Bull have raised the bar in Formula 1 over the last two or three years, heaping pressure of one kind or another on all their major rivals.

McLaren’s inability to produce a car that can consistently challenge Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel had a clear effect on Lewis Hamilton’s equanimity last season, introducing new pressures into that team as the Englishman struggled to cope with his on-track disappointment and difficulties in his private life.

At Ferrari, a technical director has lost his job and his replacement has felt under pressure to take significant risks this year as F1′s most famous team seeks to produce a car that can do justice to Fernando Alonso’s abundant talents.

But nowhere, arguably, is the need to improve felt more greatly than at Mercedes, the team trying to make F1′s “big three” into a quartet.

Michael Schumacher drives the new Mercedes W03 during testing in Barcelona on 21 February

Mercedes are hoping their new W03 car for 2012 will herald a return to the front of the grid. Picture: Getty

The German giants enter 2012 seeking a huge step forward from a season of conspicuous under-performance. Lodged in no-man’s land, some distance behind the top three and some way ahead of the rest, there was not a single podium finish for either Michael Schumacher or Nico Rosberg in 2011.

Unsurprisingly, Mercedes’ vice-president of competition, Norbert Haug, describes that as “not good enough”. For one of the world’s greatest car companies, that is something of an understatement.

Mercedes’ latest venture into F1 has only been running for two years – since the company bought the Brawn team at the end of 2009 after spending 17 years as an engine supplier first to Sauber and then to McLaren.

But the current management has a lot to live up to – the company’s two previous forays into grand prix racing were considerably more successful.

In the mid-1930s, Mercedes and fellow German giants Auto Union (the forerunners of Audi) dominated with their famous Silver Arrows. And in 1954 and ’55 Mercedes produced a level of domination with the great Juan Manuel Fangio that makes Red Bull’s performances in recent years pale into insignificance.

Mercedes’ relationship with McLaren had produced drivers’ titles for Mika Hakkinen in 1998 and ’99 and for Lewis Hamilton in 2008, as well as near-misses with Hakkinen in 2000, Kimi Raikkonen in 2003 and 2005 and Hamilton and Alonso in 2007.

But the decision to set up their own team was based as much on the realities of the road-car marketplace as any comparative lack of success on the track.

The poor results McLaren produced in 2009, starting the season with their worst car for 15 years, were an influence. So, too, was the relative lack of recognition for the Mercedes brand in any McLaren success on the track – inevitably the case for an engine supplier, even if it did own 40% of the team.

But when McLaren decided to launch its own supercar into a market Mercedes was also planning to enter with its SLS, such close links were no longer tenable.

In the autumn of 2009, buying the team that had just won the world championship, run by a man who masterminded all of Schumacher’s world titles, must have seemed about as good a guarantee of success as you could get. Bringing Schumacher out of retirement, to rejoin the company that set him on the path to stardom and bring his career full circle, was supposed to be the icing on the cake.

Except that’s not how it has worked out. The cars have been uncompetitive and Schumacher – consistently out-paced by Rosberg in qualifying over the last two years, although with improving race form in 2011 – is clearly a shadow of his former greatness.

So why have Mercedes not been able to compete at the top? The simple answer is that Brawn’s world title with Jenson Button in 2009 rather disguised the reality.

That car was designed with Honda money, before the Japanese giant abruptly pulled out in December 2008. Team boss Ross Brawn had kept the company alive, but had to force through a painful 40% staff cut in 2009 to keep it going in more straitened circumstances.

The car’s speed owed much to its controversial “double diffuser” – and by mid-season a lack of development caused by budgetary restrictions had seen first Red Bull and then other teams overtake them.

There is some truth, then, in Haug’s consistent claims over the last two years that Mercedes are a small team that, as he put it this week, “need to learn and develop” to compete with Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren.

As Mercedes’ great rival BMW proved in 2009, major car companies in F1 tend to get itchy feet if they are not winning – it poses too big a risk to their global image if they are consistently seen to be beaten. In BMW’s case, a strong season in 2008 was followed by a weak one in 2009 and, with the global economic crisis gripping, the board pulled the plug.

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There is no sign of such a move from Mercedes but the pressure to perform has been plain to see. The team have been on a major recruitment drive over the last year, the biggest indication of which was the hiring of two star designers – Aldo Costa, the technical director sacked by Ferrari, and Geoff Willis, formerly of Williams, Honda and Red Bull.

There are now four men who have been technical directors at other teams all trying to work together to make Mercedes winners – Bob Bell, the man who currently holds that title at the team and who was recruited from Renault, Costa, Willis and Brawn himself.

Brawn is adamant they have defined roles and will work well together. Others remain to be convinced about the wisdom of having so many big beasts in one pride.

What this technical “super-team” does, though, is emphasise just how important winning is to Mercedes – and consequently just how critical it is that the new W03 enables the team to make a marked stepped forward over 2011.

There is no doubting the ambition.

Mercedes are the only top team to have waited until the second pre-season test to run their new car. The idea was to give them more time to find more performance in the car at the design stage, but the move carries risks. If problems occur, there is less time to iron them out before the start of the season.

Haug has been at pains to emphasise that Mercedes’ current position is understandable, and that they have the time and ability to improve.

But while the form of the new Mercedes will be watched with interest at Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari, you can be sure there will be some nervous faces in the boardroom in Stuttgart, too.

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Reading between the lines in a phoney war

The annual Formula 1 phoney war was in full swing at the second pre-season test at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya this week.

Fernando Alonso was talking down Ferrari’s form, Lewis Hamilton was talking up McLaren’s – as, intriguingly, was Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel. And the unlikely combination of Kamui Kobayashi and Sauber set the fastest time of the week.

As ever, the headline lap times were a poor guide to the order of the grid that can be expected in Melbourne at the first race in just three weeks’ time.

But look behind the fastest laps, and there is usually a way of gleaning at least some sense of form ahead of the season.

Fernando Alonso

Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari could yet to turn out to be a dark horse. Photo: Getty

I’ll preface what follows with a major caveat – this has been one of the most difficult tests to read for some time. But here goes.

Red Bull, as ever, looked especially strong. Vettel was fastest of all on the first day of the test, and throughout the four days he and team-mate Mark Webber set consistently formidable-looking times.

On Wednesday afternoon, Vettel and Hamilton set out to do race-distance runs at more or less the same time. Both did 66 laps – the length of the Spanish Grand Prix, which will be held at the track in May.

Vettel did five pit stops; Hamilton four. Discount laps on which they went in and out of the pits and they both managed 55 flying laps. Vettel completed his more than two minutes faster than Hamilton.

If that was repeated in a race, Hamilton would be lapped by the end.

And the pattern was repeated on Thursday with Mark Webber and Jenson Button, although the margin was reduced to about half a minute.

Of course, this is very far from an exact scientific comparison.

They didn’t use the same tyres as each other – although they don’t necessarily have to in the race either.

We don’t know what they were doing with fuel loads – although it would be counter-intuitive to start putting fuel in at pit stops because it would provide the team with data that was never going to be relevant to competition.

And it’s an especially confusing situation because only the day before Vettel was saying how impressed he had been with the McLaren’s pace on the longer runs.

But there was more – none of it especially happy ready for those hoping for a close season.
On the Wednesday, Vettel’s fastest time of all was nearly a second faster than Hamilton’s on the same type of tyres. Although both were set on very short runs – suggesting a qualifying-type simulation – that’s still potentially meaningless as there is no way of knowing the level of fuel on board at the time.

Nevertheless, if you then look at the lap times both were doing at the start of their race-distance runs, they were about the same margin slower than each driver’s fastest laps as you would expect given a full race fuel load.

That suggests that the headline lap times of those two drivers could be a reasonably accurate indicator of form – again worrying for McLaren.

Of course, this is only testing, and teams have updates to put on their cars before the first race – as Button pointed out. And everyone expects McLaren to be a close to challenger at the front come Melbourne. Nevertheless, few are under any illusions about Red Bull’s strength.

“You’re old enough, Andrew,” one senior insider said to me during the test, “to know that Red Bull look very strong. McLaren and Ferrari are a bit behind. Force India look like they have a quick car, too.”

He might have added that the new Mercedes looks quite decent as well.

But few teams are as difficult to understand right now as Ferrari – who have not done any race simulations to compare with their main rivals.

The messages coming out of the team have all seemed pretty negative.

There has been a lot of attention put on technical director Pat Fry’s remark at the first test in Jerez that Ferrari were “not happy” with their understanding of the car.

Start raking through the time sheets, though, and you begin wonder what’s behind all the negativity.

On headline lap times, Alonso was less than 0.3secs behind Vettel. And on both his days he started 10-lap runs with a lap in the region of one minute 24.1 seconds.

If you take 10 laps’ worth of fuel off that time, you are left with a lap in the low 1:23sec bracket – again, not far off what Vettel managed. And you can bet the Ferrari was running with more than just 10 laps of fuel anyway; most top teams routinely test with 60-80kg of fuel on board.

In other words, the Ferrari actually looks reasonably fast, and an insider did admit: “The car is not as bad as a lot of people think.”

If – and it’s a big if – Ferrari can start to extract that potential before the first race of the season, Red Bull might just have a serious fight on their hands. And that’s without even considering what McLaren might be able to achieve.

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F1 pre-season testing provides poor guide to form

So, after four days of testing and nearly 3,500 laps of running at Jerez in sunny southern Spain, what has the first Formula 1 pre-season test revealed about the season to come?

The simplest answer – as ever – is “not much”. Testing – or the “winter world championship”, as McLaren chairman Ron Dennis famously described it – is a notoriously poor guide to form.

Or at least it is if you look only at the headline lap times. At the end of last year’s test in Jerez, the fastest man was Williams driver Rubens Barrichello – and his team were about to embark on the worst season in their once-illustrious history.

Likewise, if anyone thinks Lotus driver Romain Grosjean is going to win this year’s world championship after setting the pace in Jerez this week, they will be waiting a long time for those pigs to fly in front of that blue moon.

Fernando Alonso

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso set the fastest time on the final day of the first Formula 1 pre-season testing in Jerez, in Spain with a time of 1.18.877. Photo: Getty

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that Jerez has revealed nothing.

First of all, it has become clear the teams dislike the look of the new cars as much as anyone.

For them, the ugly step on top of the noses of all cars apart from the McLaren is an unfortunate necessity in the pursuit of the best possible aerodynamics, following a rule change requiring lower front noses.

“Performance comes before aesthetics,” as Red Bull design chief Adrian Newey put it.

The teams head back to their factories with a mountain of data, on which decisions will be based about the direction in which to take the development of their new cars.

These gleaming machines are prototypes for their entire lives, but in terms of maturity right now they are still in the post-natal stage.

Nowhere, it seems, is that more true than at Ferrari, whose decision to start with a clean sheet of paper after a chastening year in 2011 has left them with a lot of work to do.

Fernando Alonso may have left Jerez with the fastest time from the final day – and the second fastest overall – but no-one was fooled by that.

Ferrari were clearly struggling to understand their new F2012 and spent most of the four days doing aerodynamic assessment tests.

The car, they said, was behaving inconsistently in the corners, and so far fixing its behaviour at one stage – the entry, say – messes it up at either the mid-corner or exit, or both.

This is not an especially encouraging sign for a team whose 2011 season came off the rails at the final pre-season test, when new parts that they expected to bring a chunk of speed actually made the car worse.

It turned out this was a result of a lack of correlation between the results that were being created in the wind tunnel and the actual performance of the car out on the track – a major problem in a sport where aerodynamics are critical to performance.

Ferrari spent most of last season trying to get on top of this, and by late summer they insisted they had. Yet when they introduced an update to the car at the Belgian Grand Prix in August, that too did not work.

Were they not concerned about this, I asked an insider a little later in the season. No, he said, they knew why it had happened – the wind tunnel correlation was fine.

Yet on Thursday this week, there was technical director Pat Fry admitting that there was still a small problem in this area. “There’s reasonable correlation,” Fry said. “I certainly wouldn’t say it was perfect.”

Despite that eye-catching lap time from Alonso, then, Ferrari’s potential remains unclear.

“That time was on soft tyres,” a source close to the team said. “It was not so special. The feeling is they are waiting for a lot from this car – but they don’t know how to get it. It is impossible to say what will be the future.”

But it is not just Ferrari. Over at McLaren, Lewis Hamilton has said his first impressions of the car were “all positive”. But the more he talked, the more you wondered.

They had not found the best set-up yet, he said – unsurprising, perhaps, so early in testing.

“It feels like an evolution of last year’s car in many ways but also there are some things that are not so good,” he added. “The downforce on the rear for instance, is not as good through the high-speed corners as it was last year, but I’m sure we’ll get that back.”

Again, this was to be expected given the ban on exhaust-blown diffusers, from which all top teams gained huge amounts of rear downforce last year – and Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel also noticed a similar experience in his car.

But perhaps Hamilton’s most revealing remark was this: “You never know what fuel loads people are on. I think we’ve been quite aggressive with our fuel loads.”

A translation of which seems to be that McLaren are running with less fuel on board than they might normally be expected to – which will make their lap times look more impressive.

Despite that, the car looked as if it was not quite as fast as the Red Bull, which Hamilton effectively admitted. “I think you can see the Red Bull looks quick,” he said.

The Red Bull indeed appeared to do its times with relative ease, both in the hands of Mark Webber and, later in the week, Vettel.

Just as much of a concern for their rivals will be that pictures suggest the car seems to have retained what most believe to be its crucial secret.

That is getting the front wing to run closer to the ground than any other car, a critical aerodynamic advantage.

This is despite design chief Adrian Newey saying they had had to reduce the rake on their car following the ban on exhaust-blown diffusers and despite the introduction of a tougher front-wing deflection test.

And yet even Red Bull clearly have work to do. After three pretty much trouble-free days, an electrical fault appeared on the final morning, and Vettel lost an entire morning’s running while the team fixed it.

In summary, then, Red Bull again look like the team to beat, and there is a mixed picture from McLaren and Ferrari.

Just as it did in 2011 when the team were Renault, the Lotus has left a good initial impression.

Toro Rosso and Williams also appear to have decent cars, while Force India fell back after a promising start, almost certainly because of losing a day to reserve driver Jules Bianchi’s crash on Thursday.

There follows a 10-day break before the teams reconvene at Barcelona on 21 February.

The Circuit de Catalunya’s mix of long corners of varying speeds have long been the ultimate test of an F1 car’s all-round capabilities, so more pieces of the jigsaw should fall into place there.

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Buemi joins Davidson at Toyota’s Le Mans team | F1 Fanatic round-up

In the round-up: Red Bull reserve driver and ex-Toro Rosso driver Sebastien Buemi will join Anthony Davidson in Toyota’s Le Mans 24 Hours team.

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Red Bull v Cowboys! You heard right! (Video)

Everyone must be missing their Formula 1 fix by now, so with this in mind…here is a video to enjoy! [There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.] What are your favourite Formula 1 videos? Get in touch on Twitter! Also, if you fancy a [...]

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Webber wins but Vettel is still the man to beat

If Mark Webber did not sound as if he was jumping for joy after winning the Brazilian Grand Prix – his first win of 2012 in the final race of what has been a tough season for the Australian – it should be no surprise.

There is no artifice about Webber and he knows as well as anyone that, statistically, this has been a disappointing year for him. One win in a race in which his team-mate had one arm tied behind his back does not on its own signify that his fortunes will change next season.

Nor, though, does the manner of victory necessarily mean that they won’t.

Eleven wins and a new all-time record 15 pole positions for Sebastian Vettel as against one win and three poles for Webber are numbers that do not make comfortable reading for the older man.

But it should be remembered that the two men were evenly matched in 2010 as they both battled for the title with Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso and McLaren drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

Webber is determined to recapture that form and there have been signs in the second half of the season that he is heading in the right direction.

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Undoubtedly he struggled in the first half of this year. He was hit hard by reliability problems – if there was a problem with Red Bull’s troublesome Kers power-boost system at the start of the year, it seemed Webber’s car would have it – but also he took much longer than Vettel to adapt to the different demands of the new Pirelli tyres.

By the time he had, Vettel was long gone in the championship. It has, though, been much closer between the two in the second half of the season.

Vettel has still had the upper hand – and his electrifying qualifying pace and consistency has put him in a position to control many of the races.

But Webber has been getting on top of one of his biggest problems this year – higher tyre wear than Vettel, sometimes influenced by problems outside his control – and on race pace the two have been pretty evenly matched, even if it has not always been obvious because of their different positions in the race.

Webber could have won in Korea had not a mystifying pit-wall decision prevented him from passing Hamilton and exploiting a strategy that should have beaten Vettel, too.

In the end, the much-needed win came in Brazil in a race in which Vettel’s gearbox problem prevented him having a straight fight with his team-mate.

But as Webber pointed out, these things happen and you take wins however they come. Not only has he himself been on the receiving end of that sort of fortune many a time, it was probably also about time Vettel had some bad luck.

“Even if the win didn’t come today there were some positive signs for me in recent races,” he said.

“There has been some good pace from me considering some of the things that have been going on. Today was a good grand prix.

“It’s not a bad thing to finish the year like this, one of the most important things is I started to feel the car a bit better, to get a bit more of an understanding.”

“It’s great Mark has won a race,” team principal Christian Horner said.

“It would have been very, very tough for him to have not won a race if Seb had won 11.

“Hopefully this win will give him a big confidence boost. He’s third in the championship. Hopefully he’ll go into the winter, have a bit of time off, recharge his batteries and I’m sure he’ll come back stronger in 2012.

“Let’s not take anything away from Sebastian, though. He has been operating at such a high level this year. That’s what’s compounded the issue for Mark. He’s been up against a team-mate in the most phenomenal form and operating at the most phenomenally high level.”

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Webber is under no illusions that Vettel will be formidably tough to beat again next season.

The German’s drive on Sunday was yet another from the top drawer in a season that has been full of them.

He drove the first few laps as he has in so many races this year – building a 2.2-second lead in two laps. But after that Webber managed to keep him within three seconds or so – striking distance, in other words – until Red Bull came on the radio at the end of the first stint to warn Vettel of a gearbox problem.

This is not the first time this has happened to him and at first you wondered how he and the team he might react.

Back in Canada in 2010, Vettel also had a gearbox problem while running in fourth place ahead of Webber, who was ordered not to attack him as the team feared what might happen if he did.

But there was to be no repeat of that, as Vettel’s engineer Guillaume Rocquelin came repeatedly on to the radio to warn him of the worsening problem. Eventually he had to accept that this was a race he was not going to win, and he let Webber past.

From then on, it was a case of managing the problem, which he did magnificently.

“Despite running a gear taller in each corner and trying to reduce the amount of shifts as much as possible, his pace was still very strong,” Horner said. “There must be zero oil left in that gearbox because it went off the scale – a very mature and measured drive.”

Inevitably, there were conspiracy theorists who suggested Red Bull were making the whole thing up to provide a convenient excuse to provide Webber with a win he needed and which also lifted him into third in the championship ahead of Alonso by one point. These can be dismissed, however.

For Vettel to still finish second in those conditions was impressive. One doubts, though, whether his performance merits the comparison Vettel himself made with Ayrton Senna’s victory here in 1991, when the great Brazilian battled a failing gearbox in the rain to hold off the faster Williams of Riccardo Patrese despite driving the last two laps with only sixth gear.

Red Bull’s advantage in Brazil was bigger than it has been in recent races, which is a worrying sign for their rivals.

Jenson Button drove a brilliant season this year to take second in the championship, the first time Hamilton has been beaten by a team-mate, and put in another strong performance on Sunday.

Alonso, too, has been mighty, battling the odds in an uncompetitive car. And Hamilton himself will surely find some equilibrium over the winter and come back stronger in 2012.

All of them, though, can do nothing if Red Bull produce a car next year with the sort of advantage seen from this year’s RB7.

“What makes retaining the title so special,” Horner said on Sunday, “is the calibre of opponents we are up against is so high.

“We are a stronger team in all areas than in 2010. I’m convinced with continuity we can still improve. We don’t know what the other teams are doing. We will keep our heads down and hopefully turn up with a competitive car in Melbourne next year.”

The gauntlet has been thrown down and it is up to McLaren and Ferrari to pick it up.

This blog is about the Brazilian Grand Prix and 2011 F1 season. If you wish to read about – and comment on – the BBC’s plans for 2012, please do so here

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2011 Season Review: The year of Red Bull

Without a doubt, 2011 was the year of Red Bull in Formula One. They had won both the driver’s and constructors titles in 2010 but it had gone down to the wire. This time around there was less drama and more style as Vettel wrapped up the title with races to spare and the constructors [...]

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Red Bull set to dominate?

To some, the decision of Red Bull and Ferrari to pull out of the Formula 1 Teams’ Association, the umbrella group that represents the teams’ interests, could look innocuous enough. In reality it could have far-reaching consequences.

The F1 teams have put a brave public face on it, but behind the scenes there are serious concerns that it could lead to a period of Red Bull domination about which their rivals can do little.

The move by two of F1′s most powerful teams was provoked by continuing distrust about whether all of the competitors were adhering to the terms of a document called the Resource Restriction Agreement.

The RRA sets out limits on the amount of staff, external spend and aerodynamic research teams can employ and covers work on the design of the car – with drivers’ salaries, marketing and engines excluded.

Sebastian Vettel

World Champion Sebastian Vettel’s (left) team Red Bull and Michael Schumacher’s (right) former team Ferrari announced that they have quit the Formula One Teams Association (Fota). PHOTO: Getty

It is not a budget cap per se, but it does have the effect of keeping costs under control, to the point that the biggest budgets have dropped from in the region of £300m in 2008 to an estimated £150-200m in 2011.

To cite just one example, the RRA limits the amount of hours a team can dedicate to wind-tunnel testing – a key way of honing an F1 car’s aerodynamics, the single biggest performance differentiator.

And the more wind-tunnel hours you do, the less simulation of aerodynamics on a computer is allowed (and vice versa).

Because there is only so much of this work that a team can do, there is only so much money they can spend.

The problem that has arisen is that some of the teams – led by Ferrari and Mercedes – believe Red Bull have been exceeding these limits since 2010, the first of their two consecutive title-winning years.

Red Bull insist they have always operated within the RRA – and they counter their rivals’ accusations by pointing out that it is easier for an F1 team allied to a car company (as Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren all are) to hide extra work than it is for one that operates in isolation.

A year’s worth of talks to try to reach a compromise agreement with which everyone is happy have come to nothing, leading to a situation where Ferrari and Red Bull have run out of patience. They signalled their intention to quit Fota late on Friday – although they have to give two months’ notice.

Ferrari’s statement was long and detailed, talking about their reluctance at a “difficult decision”, their ongoing commitment to cost-reduction and other changes in F1, and emphasising their own central role in Fota since it was set up in 2008.

Red Bull’s ran to only two sentences: “Red Bull Racing can confirm it has served notice to withdraw from Fota. The team will remain committed to finding a solution regarding cost saving in Formula 1.”

This in itself has led to more suspicion.

It is clear, more than one insider has said, why Ferrari pulled out of Fota – if the organisation could not sort out an RRA, what was the point of it? – but Red Bull’s reasoning was very different.

The implication being that the world champions did not like the RRA because they had no intention of adhering to it. Fota had become an inconvenience.

Red Bull were not available for comment.

This suspicion has been poisoning the atmosphere within F1 all year, despite attempts to reduce it.

As well as the endless meetings aimed at bringing the two warring sides together, there was an investigation in the summer by external consultants into the way the teams were detailing their use of resources.

But while Red Bull believe this effectively cleared them of wrongdoing, their accusers disagree. “The analysis showed more than one concern about what Red Bull were doing,” one insider told me.

The next step, as laid out by the RRA, was for a full audit of the accounts of the team about which there were suspicions – if a certain number of teams wanted this to happen, the accused team had to agree.

But this point was never reached, and after further meetings at the season-closing Brazilian Grand Prix, Ferrari and Red Bull ran out of patience.

So what happens next? Is this the death knell for Fota? Will the departure of Ferrari and Red Bull lead to a domino effect of teams leaving the organisation?

Alternatively, will a rump stick together, recognising that there can still be strength in numbers, not least in the forthcoming negotiations with F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone over a new Concorde Agreement, the document which binds the teams, the commercial rights holder and governing body the FIA together?

That may become clearer after a Fota meeting on Tuesday.

More importantly, does this mean the end for resource restrictions in F1 – and will the sport therefore revert to the ‘arms race’ spending that led to the RRA in the first place?

On the face of it, the answer to that is no. The RRA is still technically in force. It is a legally binding document which lasts until at least 2012, or perhaps even 2017 – depending on whom you believe, and which version of the document you are talking about.

In theory, if Red Bull’s rivals feel that they are breaking the RRA, they can sue them. If that sounds unlikely, one insider I spoke to for this article raised it as a possibility.

Equally, though, Red Bull and Ferrari are due to meet the other members of F1′s big four – McLaren and Mercedes – next week to discuss resource restriction and how to move forward on it.

That hardly sounds like the actions of a group of people on the verge of legal action.

In public, everyone in F1 says they want to avoid a return to unrestricted spending.

One of the main reasons for this is that (effectively) unrestricted money is no longer available to top F1 teams – the effects of the credit crunch have reached even this notoriously expensive sport’s rarefied climes.

Many of the smaller teams are living hand-to-mouth to a degree, with only the top four existing in relative comfort.

But even they have limitations on what they can spend.

McLaren are a private team who have to live within the budget they can raise from sponsorship and other commercial partnerships.

Mercedes, huge car company though it may be, has set clear limits on the amount of money its team can spend.

Even Ferrari, who 10 years ago could effectively spend what they wanted, now have to be careful with money.

But Red Bull are different, or so their rivals believe.

Team principal Christian Horner insists they have far from the biggest budget in F1 – he ranks them about third or fourth.

But his rivals raise their eyebrows at that, pointing out that Red Bull is worth billions and that the soft-drinks company is weathering the global economic downturn well by comparison with car companies and traditional corporate giants. In that sense, their rivals say, they really can spend what they want.

So whether founded on reality or not, and whether the accusation at its heart contains any truth, the fear at the heart of F1 is quite simple.

If Red Bull, despite the RRA, are prepared to spend what they want, as well as having the best designer in Adrian Newey and arguably the best driver in Sebastian Vettel, who can stop them dominating for years to come?

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Why Vettel is ‘stronger than ever’

Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz has revealed that Sebastian Vettel will be ‘stronger than ever’ in 2012. The two-time World Champion is expected to be challenged a great deal in the 2012 Formula 1 season, but Mateschitz believes the German will prove himself as the best once again. He said: “Sebastian has improved and is [...]

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