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The Dakar has already passed through Argentina and Chile, and is now into the final stages in Peru.

Bikes

In the bikes, as expected, it’s coming down to Red Bull KTM team-mates Cyril Despres and Marc Coma. They’ve been leaving regular blogs on Red Bull’s Dakar Rally 2012 website. They’ve never been far apart, and their blogs provide nice insight into their current thinking.

Coma, the chaser, realises he has to give it everything to have chance: “I will push as much as I can and maybe that will bring home the win but this is not going to be easy.”

Current leader Despres, on the other hand, is clearly intending to maintain his conservative approach. As he wrote after losing a few seconds to Coma on stage 10: “Maybe those seconds will be important in the end, we’ll have to wait and see. I could have taken more risks out there today but that’s not my style.”

Cars

Meanwhile in the cars, it’s Giniel De Villiers who is closest to the dominant Minis. He too is blogging for Red Bull.

With his Toyota Hilux entry put together at relatively short notice following Volkswagen’s withdrawal, it’s remarkable that he’s running in 3rd, and that it’s not the new Toyota which has suffered with unreliability, but the familiar Hummers. He’s clearly up for the challenge, as he wrote after stage 10:

“We’re running with a standard engine compared to what the Minis have under their hood so with this in mind we’re doing just fine. We’ve tried to push whenever possible and today’s stage suited us better than the others we’ve had in Chile. It was definitely not easy but that’s what we want to see more of. The more difficult the stage, the better it is for us.”

More!

As well as the blogs, the Red Bull site has stage profile videos with Marc Coma, video highlights, and reports. It’ll be interesting to see what the riders in particular have to say as they approach the finish – the bike contest hopefully going down to the wire.

Has the Formula 1 world moved on completely to 2012, or is there still any interest in looking back at 2011? Regardless, I’m still fascinated by Williams, and how spectacularly badly they did: a meagre 5 points, compared to the 41 of Toro Rosso and 44 of Sauber in front of them, and 0 of Team Lotus behind them.

A graphical look

The graph to the right compares the classified finishing positions of those four teams.

It’s clear that Williams (light blue) were consistently better than Team Lotus (green), and a 5 point differential – less than a 7th place finish – feels too little.

Conversely, both Toro Rosso (dark blue) and Sauber (red) were consistently better, but to the tune of those teams scoring more than 8 times as many points as Williams? Probably not.

A quirk of the points system

The question is: was this a fair reflection of the 2011 season for Williams, or an unfortunate quirk of the points system? With points only for the top ten finishers, there are always going to be drivers just missing out on the points.

So how different would it have looked if instead of the current points to 10th, we used the old points to 8th, the even older points to 6th, or MotoGP’s points to 15th? The table to the right shows just that.

Had points gone to 15th, Williams would have had around half the points of Toro Rosso and Sauber, and a few times more points than Team Lotus. Which, in an unhelpfully vague sense, feels about right.

Had points only gone to 8th, then Williams would have scored no points, but Toro Rosso and Sauber would have only had a handful. With points to 6th, Williams would have been joined on zero points by Toro Rosso.

Conclusion

Williams unarguably had a bloody awful season in 2011. By any measure, they were 9th out of 12 teams.

But the current Formula 1 points system happens to have conspired against them to make their performance relative to the teams around them look worse than it actually was. Using other points systems – respectable, genuine points systems – it’s clear that they were closer to the midfield teams than they appeared from the actual final points standings.

Last year, I wrote a typically meandering blog post about the joy of an orange livery. To my surprise, this solicited comment both here and on Twitter, pointing out examples that I’d missed. Turns out I’m not the only one to enjoy a nice bit of orange.

So, since 2012 is apparently the year of orange, it’s fitting that I get around to a follow up. Peel back your eyelids, here comes the orange.

I can’t resist starting with the Dakar, since it always makes for stunning photos, and it’s on now. I covered Robby Gordon’s exceedingly orange Hummer last time, but luckily we have some new orange: Leonid Novitskiy’s Mini. Novitskiy doesn’t get all the fun though; the other Monster Energy X-raid Minis are equally delightfully bright colours: green for Peterhansel, yellow for Roma, red for Dos Santos.

One I realised that I missed just after publishing the original post, and was pointed out to me shortly after by @badhedgehog in the comments – is Henning Solberg.

Before he started messing around with his livery, it was spanking-bright orange, thanks to his sponsor of the time, Expert. This is, I’ll grant you, not the clearest view of his 2011 Ford Fiesta RS WRC, but it is a stormingly good photo.

Another suggested to me, by @a_lost_irishman on Twitter, was the many incarnations of the Jagermeister Porsche.

As Wikipedia points out, it’s not just Porsches that Jagermeister sponsored – though that was perhaps their greatest success, winning the 1986 World Sportscar Championship with Brun Motorsport. They even cropped up in that fancy Formula 1 lark, with March Engineering in 1974 and EuroBrun in 1989.

How did I miss KTM last time? There are few companies quite so orange.

The only problem is, they’re not bad at attracting sponsorship for their factory efforts so, for example, their Dakar livery this year is pure Red Bull – barely a hint of orange. At least their Motocross World Championship livery, though also Red Bull flavoured, has room for a little more orange – as you can see.

That’s enough orange for now. Suggestions of what I’ve still missed are very welcome.

Photo Credits
Monster Energy MINI ALL4 Racing: X-raid
Ford Fiesta RS WRC: kyn_chung – Flickr – Some rights reserved
Jagermeister Porsche: Nathan Bittinger – Flickr – Some rights reserved
MX2 KTM: Lutz & Patrick Fischer / schneller_blitz – Flickr – Some rights reserved

The festivities are over for another year, everyone’s back at work, it’s wet and windy, the news is unremittingly bleak – it’s easy to get down. So, in an effort to keep SAD at bay, here are some reasons to be blindly optimistic.

• It may be months until the new motorsport year gets into full flow, but until then there’s testing and, more importantly and immediately, the Dakar to keep us occupied. Unfortunately Australian broadcaster SBS seems to be finally using geolocation on its website, but with the likes of JMLatvalaFan around on YouTube, even that’s no reason to be down if you’ve not got Eurosport.
• It’s true that the first couple of Formula 1 races won’t be live on the BBC – but don’t dispair, non-Sky types! I for one look forward to having no temptation to get up ludicrously early. I like F1, but I also like a lie-in.
• I also like Ben Edwards, the BBC’s new F1 commentator. His excitable enthusiasm made ITV’s BTCC coverage what it is, and he’ll be a tough act to follow there. But I can’t wait to hear him getting excited about F1 on a regular basis.
• The new CRT entries in MotoGP may not bother the aliens for podium places, but they’ll add much needed bikes to the grid. And in the same way as the new F1 teams a couple of years ago, the battle to be the least bad of them will be something else to keep an eye on. They have to be welcomed.
• It’s not great in the WRC at the moment – just ask North One Sport or Kris Meeke. But it’s not all bad: we can look forward to Loeb versus Hirvonen at Citroen, Petter Solberg in a factory Ford, and Citroens for new faces Nasser Al-Attiyah and Thierry Neuville. We just need the commercial side sorting in the next fortnight, to avoid the Monte’s return to the WRC being less than the triumph it ought to be.
• With Evo regulations as standard this year, there’s every reason to hope that British Superbikes will be even more competitive than 2011. The entry list is filling up nicely, too.
• There’s never much known about the BTCC at this time of year, and 2012 is no different. But with most other grids broadly known quantities already, it’s nice to have a big reveal to look forward to – and that’s what the BTCC Media Day, a couple of weeks before the season starts, usually is.

Photo Credit
Houston Marsh – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Which nation is best at motorsport? Well, I thought I’d try to find out. To do so, I threw the final standings of an entirely arbitrary selection of world championships – Formula 1, WRC, WTCC, MotoGP and Superbike World Championship – at a spreadsheet, normalised the points to a total of 100 per championship, and totalled them up by nation. Then I made a pretty pie chart.

It’s impossible to make this fair, the most obvious issue being three car championships and only two bike. But given the extent to which Spain and Italy dominate on two-wheels, it doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Plus, this way, the UK comes out on top. Which is the most important thing.

The UK and Spain – second overall – are the only nations to score in every one of the five championships – albeit the UK not very well in WRC and MotoGP, and Spain in WRC and WTCC. They’re followed by Italy, overwhelmingly thanks to lots of riders doing quite well – without winning championships – in MotoGP and SBK. Though to be fair, no championships were brought back to the UK either.

France is fourth, thanks to a couple of championships – Yvan Muller in WTCC, Sebastien Loeb in WRC – and Loeb’s new favourite rival Sebastien Ogier. Almost all of fifth place Germany’s points came from F1, and two-thirds of those from Sebastian Vettel.

Outside the top five, we finally leave Europe, and find Australia, represented almost exclusively by Casey Stoner and Mark Webber. Finland, in seventh, inevitably gets all its points from the WRC, chiefly Mikko Hirvonen and Jari Matti-Latvala.

The USA in eighth is pretty much the MotoGP lads, since most American drivers tend to stay in America. Ninth is Norway, courtesy of Mads Ostberg and the Solbergs in WRC. Alain Menu’s WTCC third place near single-handedly takes tenth for Switzerland.

The whole table follows for your delectation:

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You’ll be familiar with the concept of the post-race press conference in Formula 1. You’re probably aware that the first part of that is the TV unilaterals – someone like David Croft or James Allen asks the podium drivers generic questions for the TV feed, starting with the winner and something like: “So, that was a race! Say some words.”

Since the FIA kindly hosts press conference transcripts on their website, I thought it might be quite interesting to go back through the 19 races of 2011 and analyse the answers to these first answers by driver, with a little (lot of) help from IBM’s wondrous Many Eyes visualisation tools.

Sebastian Vettel

With a ridiculous 11 race wins, Sebastian Vettel spouted plenty of words for Many Eyes to churn through to, and produce this word cloud.

He obviously had a lot to think about, primarily the race unsurprisingly, and equally unsurprisingly it was usually good. He often spoke about the car, with which he was probably happy, if not really happy.

He often talked about the gap to those behind him, presumably because a lot of the time that’s all he was racing against. Jenson and Lewis featured significantly more in his thoughts than Fernando or Mark – which nicely reflects their levels of competitiveness in 2011.

But most interesting of all, it appears that Vettel might have a vocal tick in the word bit, which cropped up an awful lot. I’ll keep an ear out for that.

Jenson Button

Moving on to Jenson Button, the analysis gets a bit sketchier with only three wins to look at.

Nonetheless, he too had a lot to think about. He was a touch stronger with the superlatives than Vettel: great and amazing, rather than merely good and the odd fantastic.

But the bigger difference between them is that, while Vettel did credit the car, Button mentioned the team an awful lot. That is the McLaren way, after all – win and lose as a team.

Lewis Hamilton

The only other man to win multiple races was Lewis Hamilton, so let’s look at his three. Oh look, he too had a lot to think about. Inevitable when you ask for an opinion, I suppose.

Like Button, he spoke a lot about the team, but mainly referred to them as the guys. He too pulled out the superlatives: great and fantastic, in his case.

And like Vettel, it looks like Hamilton might have a curious vocal tick too: the word just. Another one to keep an ear out for.

Fernando Alonso & Mark Webber

With a win a piece, the word clouds for Fernando Alonso and Mark Webber are virtually meaningless. But if you fancy a look, they’re on my Many Eyes page, along with the other three and the data behind the lot of them.

The FIA has issued a new Driver’s Guide to Safe Motor Sport. It’s a very serious document, of course, but it’s also got a bit of personality.

Cover star

I’m not sure that it’s a compliment to be chosen to adorn the cover of such a document. That dubious honour goes to Sergio Perez, whose qualifying crash in Monaco this year is presumably intended to illustrate the safety of the sport, rather than serve as a judgement on his driving.

Excerpts

On pre-event precautions: “It makes sense to remove false teeth.” Well, motorsport is not exclusively a young person’s game. Michael Schumacher, Pedro de la Rosa, almost all of the WTCC – I’m looking at you.

On helmets: “Don’t forget to peel the protective plastic wrap off a new visor (it happens, even in Formula 1!).” Oh, come on! You can’t tease like that and not deliver the goods! Go on, tell us. It was Mark Blundell, wasn’t it?

On safety harness belts: “Wear them as tight as possible (whilst still breathing).” No comment, it’s just a good line.

An appendix gives advice on what to eat and drink, including the suggestion to “include a few biscuits” in any pre-race meal. Maybe I was destined to be a racing driver after all.

The guide also also features quips on co-drivers, bowels and more. In addition to some actual safety advice. Good job, FIA!

Looking at the final teams standings, there were clearly a few classes of Formula 1 team in 2011.

The extremes

At the bottom, with no points apiece, the new(ish) teams – Team Lotus, HRT and Virgin. In with them, incredibly, you’ve got to lump Williams, with a pitiful 5 points.

At the top, you could argue that Red Bull Racing were in a league of their own; McLaren and Ferrari were their only competition.

The midfield

Where to put Mercedes? More than twice the points of fifth place, but less than half the points of third. As always, a graph is the answer. Let’s take a closer look at the midfield.

The first thing to say about Mercedes is that they had a remarkably consistent season. But they weren’t unchallenged for fourth place, at least until the second half of the season when they left the midfield – specifically Renault – behind.

Renault then. A season of three parts, one would suggest: 60 points in the first seven races; 10 points in the next six; 3 in the final six. No wonder the team has admitted to having had a “difficult” season. I think ‘threw it away’ was the phrase they were looking for.

Quite the opposite for Force India, who ramped up in the final third of the season to take sixth and even challenge for fifth. Would it be unfair to observe that that period was, perhaps, when Adrian Sutil started fighting for a job?

A couple of good results around the one-third point in the season were enough to give Sauber the edge over a rather consistent, but ultimately not good enough, Toro Rosso.

The FIA has had a driver on the stewards panel at each Formula 1 Grand Prix for a couple of seasons now, and inevitably some of the novelty has worn off. Certainly there’s not the same ‘big reveal’ around which driver it will be each weekend.

But I thought it might be interesting to look back at two full seasons of driver stewards, and see who’s been up there in the stewards room. So I made this:

Formula 1 FIA Driver Steward League Table

NB: earliest appearance used as tie-breaker

Analysis!

My assumption, I admit, was that relatively less successful drivers have probably dominated. I don’t think that’s the case though.

Johnny Herbert is the Driver Steward Champion, if you like, with five appearances. He had a very respectable – if not extraordinary – F1 career: three-times a winner, a clutch of podiums, and a lengthy stay in the sport.

He’s followed by two drivers with four appearances each, both with hefty F1 experience, albeit with differing levels of success: Derek Warwick had a handful of podiums; Nigel Mansell is obviously a former world champion.

Four drivers have made three appearances, and they’re a mixed bunch too: double world champion Emerson Fittipaldi; Heinz-Harald Frentzen, winner of three races; Alexander Wurz, who had a few podiums; and Emanuele Pirro, who had an unremarkable time in F1.

The only driver steward to have never competed in F1 is Tom Kristensen – but his eight Le Mans 24 Hour victories probably make up for that. To be fair, Pirro is a five-time winner too, and Wurz twice.

The rest of the table is a similarly varied selection of drivers: from brief stints in F1, to four-time champion Alain Prost, and everything in between. Those who weren’t long in F1 tend to have achieved elsewhere: Danny Sullivan was IndyCar champion; Allan McNish is another multiple Le Mans winner.

The one exception is Martin Donnelly, whose F1 career was cut short by a huge crash at Jerez in 1990.

Britain!

The only thing that stands out is that the top three are all British. In fact, an awful lot of them are British. But there have been more British F1 drivers than any other nationality, so it’s probably to be expected.

Summary!

Drivers of quality – from respectable racers to legends of the sport – have been quite willing to do their bit, with former world champions no less likely to come back for more. In short: the FIA hasn’t had to plumb the depths of former Formula 1 drivers. It doesn’t look like Zsolt Baumgartner will be needed any time soon.

More!

For completeness, here’s the full list of driver stewards for the 2010 and 2011 seasons. To the best of my knowledge anyway – some of the later 2010 races were a bit tricky to determine.

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