Was this commissioned before Raikkonen knew he was returning to Formula 1? Given that rallying features heavily, and there’s no single-seater action to be found, it seems likely.

It’s a shrewd move though: Raikkonen has a rampant fan-base, and a game for iOS isn’t a bad way to pump them for cash. It’s a free download, with in-app purchases. To be fair, it isn’t stingy with its free content, and it does look pretty smart.

There are four racing disciplines, which vary from the nearly-okay to the quite-terrible.

Starting with the latter: rallying. At first, it feels borderline uncontrollable: on snow, there seems to be little on offer between driving in a straight line and handbrake-turning into a snow bank. After driving a different vehicle on tarmac, however, the problem is clarified: there’s an infuriating split-second delay between tilting the iPhone and your car responding to the input. With this knowledge, the rallying is less fist-mashingly bad, but the nearly-digital steering means it’s still far from enjoyable.

The lack of handling subtlety also hinders the NASCAR-style truck racing: ovals are a painful experience when it’s a battle to maintain a nice even cornering radius.

Things start to pick up with the sporty tuner car: the tight corners are more suited to the twitchy handling, and the car skids pleasingly without entirely losing grip. But bafflingly, either I just managed to avoid ever encountering another car, or it’s a rally-style time trial for no good reason. I’m fairly confident it’s the latter.

Karting is by far the game’s most enjoyable discipline: the handling is perfectly at home, and the tracks are nicely designed.

But it’s also where the game’s biggest bug is most obvious. The computer-controlled opponents can be absolute idiots, swerving everywhere and constantly resetting themselves. That’s not the bug though: if you lap your opponents, then you’ll cross the line in 1st, but the results screen will have you finishing last, presumably comparing your time over two laps to everyone else’s over one. Which means that, to register as winning, you have to wait up to five minutes or more for everyone else to unlap themselves. Which is rather tiresome.

So: the rallying is unsuccessful, and it’s a bit unresponsive. An accurate representation of Raikkonen himself, then. (Joke! Sort of.)

While it’s no Real Racing 2, it’s also nothing like as bad as the utterly incompetent TT3D tie-in. And plenty of the game’s problems could – and should – be fixed via updates.

We’re firmly into in Formula 1 launch season, which as always provides a stream of photos of largely familiar looking cars and empty soundbites. Far more interesting is what’s going on over in TV land.

GP2 & GP3

On the good news front, a TV deal for GP2 and GP3 has been announced: as widely hoped, they will be broadcast live on Sky Sports F1 HD. It’s only sensible; after all, they have a whole channel to fill. As Ted Kravitz reported Jenson Button as saying at the McLaren launch yesterday:

“I’m giving long answers because Sky Sports have a lot of time to fill on their new channel!”

He’s not wrong. GP2 and GP3 is a very good way to fill a bit more of the schedule on race weekends: dedicated fans want it, the casual viewer might just find something they like, and it’s great for the series to have live coverage on a serious channel. It’ll probably also tip the balance for a few undecided viewers to sign up for Sky.

WRC

While common sense has triumphed for the Formula 1 support classes, it’s still trying its best to do so in the WRC. iRally is the place for an up-to-date, blow-by-blow account, but let’s summarise.

WRC commercial rights holder North One Sport was bought by Convers Sports Initiatives in 2011. Later that year, the company went into receivership, following the activities of Vladimir Antonov. That sort of screwed everything up, just before the 2012 season was due to begin.

Eurosport stepped in and provided coverage of the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally, doing a good job at short notice, by all accounts. Eurosport, having experience from running and broadcasting the IRC, were – and are – the obvious choice to take over as promoter and broadcaster of the WRC. There’s been little word from the FIA, but the latest from iRally suggests that both sides want to make it work, but European employment law may be the latest sticking point.

It is a quite staggering mess. I complained last year that there was no free-to-air coverage in the UK, but this is another level of badness for the sport. Common sense says that a deal will be made between the FIA and Eurosport; let’s hope it triumphs in the end.

Photo Credit
Kevin Simpson / videocrab – Flickr – Some rights reserved

It’s nothing new to suggest that Kimi Raikkonen didn’t exactly dazzle everyone in the two years he spent rallying. But because of the relative lack of competition in the WRC compared to Formula 1, it’s not a given that his 2012 season will be much of an improvement on the last couple.

Raikonen’s WRC record

You see, even though he was a bit rubbish at rallying, the sheer lack of entrants in the WRC meant that on paper Raikkonen actually did all right. He scored 25 points in 2010, and 34 in 2011, finishing 10th in the overall standings both years.

Let’s put that in context, though. In 2010 Federico Villagra finished ahead of Raikkonen in the standings having entered four fewer rallies; in 2011 Dani Sordo did the same with three fewer rallies. In 2010, no-one below Raikkonen in the final standings did anything like a full season; in 2011 he finished 9th of the 12 championship regulars.

But that doesn’t change the points he scored.

Meanwhile in F1

On returning to the sport where he was crowned world champion, the least you’d expect is that Raikkonen would score more points than he did in the sport where he was just a bit crashy. So that’s 34 points in a single season, or 59 points in total. Either would seem reasonable as a target for 2012.

Looking at 2010 and 2011, that sort of level is about 10th in the overall standings. And since that’s where he finished in both his WRC seasons, that seems like a good target.

Now, we’ve no idea yet how competitive the Lotus will turn out to be. But going on resources alone, it seems unlikely that the top four teams – Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes – will be bothered. Which leaves only two spaces in the top ten.

If Lotus continues to follow the downward trend set by Renault last year, then they will be overtaken by Force India. So Raikkonen seems likely to be in a four-way fight – at least – for the last couple of top ten places with his team mate Romain Grosjean, and those talented chaps at Force India, Paul di Resta and Nico Hulkenberg.

Conclusion

Nope, it’s definitely not going to be a trivial task for Raikkonen to improve on his WRC results. But Robert Kubica finished 8th with 136 points for Renault in 2010, so it’s not unachievable. He’s just got to want it.

Photo Credit
*nog – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Sponsored Post

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.

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:

(more…)

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!

It was a treat to come back from a week away and catch up with Wales Rally GB on the BBC iPlayer. If you’ve not watched it, be quick – today is the last day it’s available, unfortunately.

WRC on the BBC

The BBC has covered the British round of the WRC since at least 2009, presumably in part because the Welsh setting ties in with their commitment to the regions and nations. Also, being traditionally the final round of the year, it can cover the season as a whole. It’s very neat.

This year’s programme was a little dry, as usual, but the season highlights and rally coverage were solid, and there was a quite awe-inspiring feature on what goes in to putting on just one stage. And frankly, with no other free-to-air coverage of the WRC this year, it was just nice to see something.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that the BBC’s programme title was ‘Wales Rally GB’. Interesting because Wales is the event’s title sponsor – and the BBC would usually avoid giving prominence to a commercial sponsor. Hence, for example, Tennis: World Tour Finals, rather than ‘Barclays ATP World Tour Finals’. Of course, it’s easy to see how it slipped through: not only is Wales not a obvious sponsor, but it also describes the location of the rally. So I’ll let them off.

2012: WRC on free-to-air?

Attention now turns to 2012, and whether UK rally fans will get a better deal than this year’s subscription-only ESPN coverage.

It’s worth remembering that Dave didn’t lose the rights to ESPN, they decided not to renew their contract. So I hold out little or no hope of a return to Dave. Sadly.

A year ago, rumours did the rounds that Channel 5 were in the running. I’m not terribly hopeful: there’s not much obvious cross-promotion potential with the likes of OK! Magazine, the Daily Star and the Daily Express, all also owned by Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell. Also: they’ve probably spent all their money on Big Brother.

Channel 4 were interested in the Formula 1 rights, so might they be tempted to settle for the WRC? Having had the rights in the past, it strikes me that it wouldn’t be much of a consolation prize.

So, as always seems to be the case, we come back to ITV4. Like Channel 4, they’ve had the rights before. With BTCC, British Superbikes, Isle of Man TT, do they really need any more motorsport rights? Probably not.

And the BBC? Hardly likely in what I am obliged to describe as the ‘current climate’. In fact, with the 2012 calendar putting the Rally of Great Britain mid-season, there’s less justification for the BBC’s coverage of even that event next year.

Hope

In short: I don’t think the WRC is particularly attractive to any free-to-air broadcasters. What I think we have to hope for, is North One Sport to realise that they need the broadcasters more than the broadcasters need them.

If North One Sport could offer a decent package at a bargain price, then I’m sure someone would pick it up. I can’t imagine it would be up to the standard of the 2010 season on Dave, but something – anything – would be a start.

Photo Credit
kyn_chung – Flickr – Some rights reserved

It’s cautiously brilliant news that the WRC is piloting online live streaming for this weekend’s Rallye de France.

Even better, it’ll be free of charge, and available on wrc.com from lunchtime into the evening on both Friday and Saturday. The coverage will include live stage action, with English and French commentary, as well as interviews and “atmosphere”. Good, eh?

The biggest fear is that wrc.com will collapse under the pressure. In fact, it will. Two reasons: this is only a pilot, and earlier in the season the website couldn’t cope with the demand for just live timing.

Still, at least it’s revived my interest in the WRC. With coverage now hidden deep in the realms of pay TV on ESPN, as far as I’m concerned it’s faded into the background as the season’s gone on – much as expected.

Sebastien Loeb hasn’t helped, of course. Once he looked to be running away with it again, I stopped paying as much attention to the results. But a poor result in Australia, and a win for Mikko Hirvonen, means that the Finn is firmly back in the chase.

I’m not sure that online live streaming is the whole solution to increasing the WRC’s profile. Without some sort of coverage on free-to-air television, it’ll struggle to attract new fans. There have been vague rumblings that things may change for 2012. Fingers crossed.

But for appeasing the hardcore, online live streaming is a fantastic start. I’d be surprised if it remains free, should the pilot be successful, but combined with proper TV coverage that’s not necessarily a problem.