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.

(more…)

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 was agreed today that three Formula 1 constructors will change their names.

Lotus Renault GP will cease to be Renault, and change to Lotus, because Renault don’t really like them any more. Conveniently, Team Lotus will switch from Lotus to Caterham – and probably change their team name too.

Marussia Virgin Racing meanwhile will go from Virgin to Marussia, to better represent where the money’s coming from. Which, inevitably, isn’t Richard Branston – he’s too clever for that.

Here comes the maths bit

As any mathematician will tell you, the order in which you do things matters very much – and changing Formula 1 team names is no exception. The FIA needs to take care in the order in applies the name changes, or we could end up in an awful mess. Let me needlessly elaborate at excruciating length.

Functions

To enact these name changes, the FIA could simply apply three functions to all thirteen constructors. Let’s define those functions:

Order

So if we nest those functions, we should have our new team names. Let’s see how that goes:

Oh no! Now we’ve got two bloody Caterhams. That’s not what anyone wanted. Let’s reverse the order:

That’s better.

Conclusion

So, FIA: please remember to apply g before f, or we’ll all end up in a right pickle. Alternatively, just change all three names at once. That might work too.

The 2011 BTCC season came to a close at the weekend, and the many and various champions were crowned – driver, independent driver, team, independent team, manufacturer/constructor. Comprehensive, no? No.

Paid drivers are commonplace in motorsport. But in the BTCC, many drivers don’t just bring sponsors, they are the sponsors. That’s why I think, as well as an Independents Trophy, the BTCC should have a Business Class.

The criterion is simple: if your company is on the car, then you are a business driver.

It excludes John George on a technicality – he’s nearly but not quite involved in Go Mobile. I’ll also ignore Dave Pinkney, who entered the first round but failed to start a race. Otherwise, hopefully I’ve got them all.

So how would the 2011 BTCC Business Class have looked? For simplicity, I’ll use points from the overall standings, rather than the separate points systems used for the Independents Trophy.

2011 BTCC Business Class Standings

1. Nick Foster – 47 points
   Chairman, Contour Electronics

   Your champion is Nick Foster. His outright podium finish in the third race at Croft, albeit from a reverse grid pole, secured his position as clearly the strongest of the business drivers.

   Scored a little under half the points of vastly more experienced team mate Rob Collard. Second placed of this year’s rookies, behind only Frank Wrathall.

2. Dave Newsham – 31 points
   Managing Director, Norscott Vending (parent company of coffeedrops.co.uk)

   Dave Newsham didn’t have the most straight-forward season, contesting the first couple of meetings in a Geoff Steel BMW, missing the third, then switching to a Special Tuning Seat Leon from the fourth round onwards. Despite that, he’s our runner-up, thanks mainly to a strong final round at Silverstone.

   Due to his swapping teams, it’s not easy to compare his performance, but his tally of 31 points looks respectable against the 76 of Tom Boardman, the other, more experienced, season-long Special Tuning driver.

3. Jeff Smith – 19 points
   Owner, Industrial Control Distributors

   Now we start to see some disparities. The other Pirtek car, driven by Andrew Jordan, amassed 143 points.

4. Andy Neate – 15 points
   Chief Technology Officer, Ceravision

   Tom Chilton was the other season-long driver of a brand new Team Aon Global Ford Focus, and he managed 135 points. Tom Onslow-Cole did the second half of the season with the team, and at Silverstone alone scored more points than Neate did all season. In fact, Onslow-Cole and Chilton both managed that at each of the final two rounds of the season.

5. Liam Griffin – 2 points
   Managing Director, Addison Lee

   Here we go: Matt Jackson in the other Airwaves Racing Ford Focus scored 191 points. Michael Caine contested two rounds, and James Thompson just the one, in a third car for the team; between them they equalled Liam Griffin’s season-long total of 2 points.

6. Tony Hughes – 0 points
   Managing Director, Hughes Safety Showers

   No points, but in his defence, he only entered five of the nine rounds, and that was in a brand new NGTC Toyota Avensis, which took time to come good even in the hands of Frank Wrathall.

What’s my point? Not that businessmen effectively buying drives in the BTCC is a bad thing in and of itself.

Rather that lumping them all together and generalising is not helpful: some of these drivers deserve to be in the BTCC, some of them not so much. I think it’s helpful to make that distinction.

Experience counts

Nick Foster spent about a decade rallying, then moved into circuit racing, which he had been dabbling in since 2006, before moving up to the BTCC this year. It would be hard to argue that he doesn’t belong in the championship, given his debut season performance.

Liam Griffin, on the other hand, has only been racing since 2008. He did well in two seasons of the VW Cup, but 20th in the 2010 Porsche Carrera Cup GB should maybe have suggested that he might not be ready for the BTCC. This season would seem to bear that out.

So it’s not that businessmen are stepping up to the BTCC, but that in the current climate, some of them are doing so before they’ve got the necessary experience for it. Not only that, but with top teams – hence some of the huge disparities above, when their team mates are front-running drivers.

In some cases it’s fine, in others it’s a bit of a waste, and in a few it verges on the ridiculous. But, as I said, that’s the current climate. On that note: at least we had nice full grids.

Photo Credit
Peter Stanton – Flickr – Some rights reserved

It’s been a while, but there’s no better way to review a Formula 1 race than quarks.

Up

Early. But I’ve not watched an F1 race live for months, so no excuses. And it was broadly worthwhile, if only for Martin Brundle walking an unsurprisingly sparse grid, musing on the futility of asking Michael Schumacher for a word.

Down

Lewis Hamilton seems very down. He greeted pole position on Saturday with staggering disinterest. The only notable radio message played in during the race was Hamilton telling the team not to talk to him while he’s braking – which I’m sure is a fair point, but still.

He seemed a little perkier after impressively holding off Mark Webber to take second place in the race. But only slightly.

Charm

Michael Schumacher was unceremoniously punted out of the race by Vitaly Petrov. But both men were remarkably lovely about the incident. Schumacher told Lee McKenzie on the BBC:

“I have to say Petrov and I have had some great racing this year, so to have a few get-togethers, that’s racing.”

Petrov, meanwhile, accepted responsibility and apologised.

Bless them.

Strange

One good thing about F1 expanding into new territories is that it brings new and unfamiliar sponsors. And looking them up online is a good distraction in less interesting periods of the race.

So: SK ZIC is a Korean brand of engine lubricants; POSCO is the Pohang Iron and Steel Company.

Oh, and the massive shipyard structures in the background? Hyundai.

Top

It wasn’t a consistently fascinating race, but first laps that good are rare. Proper ding-dong stuff, nothing to do with DRS, just solidly aggressive overtaking moves.

There was some good stuff later on between Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton, too.

Bottom

That battle was slightly compromised by DRS though. With the activation zone just after turn one, it meant that a driver losing a place there would have DRS to fight back on the following straight. Not helpful.

Officially, it’s perfectly clear: it’s the FIM Superbike World Championship. The problem is, no-one really calls it that. World Superbikes is probably the most common way of referring to the series, which is then abbreviated to WSB. But SBK is the chosen abbreviation of series promoters Infront Sports & Media.

Good news, then, that the series is being rebranded. But they’re sticking with SBK, which seems like a missed opportunity.

It’s a mess out there. You have MCN, Visordown, Suzuki and Yamaha all using WSB. Honda and Ducati go with SBK. Kawasaki and Eurosport seem to like WSBK.

It’s a tiny issue, obviously, but branding-wise it’s huge. People searching for any one of the terms – World Superbikes, WSB, Superbike World Championship, SBK, WSBK – are only going to get some of the results.

With the series going by so many names, the promoter, teams and media all have to work extra hard just to be found. It’s totally avoidable if everyone could agreement on what to use.

But the promoters aren’t going to budge, presumably because SBK looks better than WSB. Which is true especially since, according to Infront’s Paolo Flammini:

“We have chosen to further develop the chevron, a familiar icon from the roads worldwide, as a key visual element for the new SBK brand family and bring it to life wherever we can.”

Which is another slightly curious choice: chevrons are associated with ‘keep your distance’, which is I’m sure is not the message the promoters are trying to get across.

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.

It’s been a bumper year for motorsport films – this being the fourth to receive decent national cinema distribution – and not without box office success.

A good time, then, for Mark Neale to follow up his 2003 release Faster. I’ve not seen that, but on the strength of Fastest, I shan’t go out of my way to seek it out.

It starts in storming fashion, with Rossi and Lorenzo’s epic battle at Catalunya 2009. It’s a brilliantly inclusive sequence, with suitably grandiose narration by Ewan McGregor, that serves as a magnificent advert for MotoGP. As a short film, it would work brilliantly.

But after that, it wasn’t long into the 110 minutes that I started to wonder what exactly the film was trying to do. The closest thing to a central theme – and a thought that Ewan McGregor bookends the film with – is that history means nothing, and the question is always: who is fastest now?

That’s somewhat undermined by the film spending, at a conservative estimate, half of its running time on the subject of Valentino Rossi. And of course, in the 2010 season – during which most of the film was shot – he was manifestly not the fastest. So history means nothing, unless you happen to be Valentino Rossi.

Not that would be anything wrong with a film about Rossi. But this isn’t that either. There’s some nice stuff from his home town, and the thoughts of his father are interesting, but it doesn’t go very deep. A biopic in the style of Senna this is not.

There are plenty of interviews with riders and team personnel, and though there are some amusing sound bites – particularly from Rossi and Simoncelli – they too are on the superficial side. The riders are perhaps too used to dealing with the media, and as a result never let their guard down. There’s not the open honesty of TT3D, so little insight into what really makes these people tick.

While I’m comparing it to the year’s other motorsport films, it’s not even a comprehensive season review which – for all its faults – I, Superbiker was.

There’s stuff to like, and plenty of bone crunching crashes which look particularly painful on the big screen – which is presumably what a lot of people want to see. But without any sort of narrative, skipping backwards and forwards in time incoherently, ultimately it’s little more than a hotchpotch of bits and pieces about MotoGP.

Which is, you know, sort of fine.