We find ourselves at Christmas facing a long day of shopping in Union Squire, stores crowded with frenzied consumers and exhausted children. Bells are ringing everywhere. The gift list is long and the economy is tight. Defeated without having started, we throw in the towel and instead seek fortitude in a strong Irish coffee.
From the stool at the end of the bar, we at OnTheLimit are prone to sit back and reflect on the year that was. We were just at this bar a year ago; was it that long? It always starts well around this time of year, with all of the new car launches, driver announcements and pre-season testing. We stare out the window, shudder as another fog bank envelopes the bay, and stir the coffee one more time. It warms us to read about some lucky buggers who are off testing in the Algarve, or Spain, maybe Florida. We order another Irish coffee.
But the truth is, if we think back to December 2008, we pretty much got it all wrong for 2009. Nothing turned out as we had expected.
First, we did not expect a dead-in-the-water Honda team to re-emerge as Brawn, and proceed to win the 2009 driver and constructor titles. We assumed, rightly, that Lewis Hamilton would again be dominant in the McLaren, with Raikkonen (the 2007 champion) close by in the Ferrari. Honda had shown no signs of troubling the bigger fish.
But we were not sitting in the grandstands during testing while Brawn and a few other coy desigers figured out the double diffuser. Even if we had sat in on the early Brawn tests, or those of Red Bull, we would not have noticed the tiny little change at the bottom of the back of the car that made such a difference come March. The double diffuser was the single biggest influence in the outcome of the F1 title race, for it changed the balance of power in the sport in a rapid period of technological development (slicks and new wing packages being other key developments).
It is a credit to every member of the Brawn team for having the courage to continue pushing the limit, given the circumstances the team faced 12 months ago. Mated with Jenson Button’s best-ever drive, Brawn stole a march on the entire paddock. The season-ending acquisition by Mercedes seemed to justify Ross Brawn and Nick Fry’s efforts to revive the team from life support.
In fact, we are thinking of re-naming this drink the double diffuser. Because having had a second, things are becoming diffuse. This may explain the quality of our predictions last year as well.
We also failed to predict the depths to which the automotive industry would fall in 2009, setting the stage for Renault, BMW, Honda and Toyota to call time on F1. The ripple effect of the global economy had not fully sunken in by January 2009. Many have speculated that Honda’s depature gave cover to Toyota to wrap up its F1 experiment. BMW duly followed suit, but the suspicion was that the board in Munich found a pretext to withdraw on the heels of a losing season. We will never know. Suffice to say, the company also reduced its commitment to touring cars.
And then, beh oui, there is Renault. The battered French brand could not have fared worse, surviving a tempest in “Crashgate” to face a gradual sell-off announced just weeks ago. Prior to the season, we thought Alonso’s return would mean a few more tenths of a second for Renault, but things had turned out differently. At the end of 2008, the Renault looked much better in Fernando Alonso’s incredible hands, winning at Singapore and China after a largely mundane season.
We could not have predicted that the result in Singapore was the result of a decision by team members to stage a crash by Nelson Piquet, Jr., in order to trigger a safety car that would favor Alonso’s light-fuel strategy. When Piquet Jr. was released by the Renault team this year for yet more sub-par performances (and really, they were, let’s be honest), he went to the FIA and alleged that team princpal Flavio Briatore and engineer Pat Symonds had concocted a scheme to skew a race result. Briatore and Symonds were handed bans from racing, and Piquet Jr. received immunity. In theory, at least, his racing career survived. Briatore and Symonds, who have accomplished more in F1 than Piquet can ever dream of, lost their reputations.
This was the ugly side of F1, the sausage-making side of the business that we’d prefer did not exist. And yet, the events at Singapore, once revealed, tended to confirm our suspicions about how things really get done in F1. No one with a serious interest in the sport can claim to be imbued with the same sense of dewy optimism as an olympic athlete. But we would like to think that drivers are not out there crashing into walls in order to favor their teammates, if only becuase it seems such a collossally stupid thing to do at high speeds.
So the lesson we learned is that nothing is as it seems in F1. Four new teams will take the grid in 2010, but Bernie Ecclestone has just said in an interview that two of these teams won’t make the grid. A new ban on re-fuelling has been introduced, but we would prefer rules stability. The world champion has joined a new team, as has the best driver of our day (Alonso). Raikkonen is gone. Michael is back (?). Hamilton is facing an equal teammate. Rosberg, Trulli, Glock and Kubica will be in new cars. There will be two notable rookies (Senna and Hulkenberg).
All of this is subject to change. Ask us over an Irish coffee next Christmas.
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