Left field

Don’t write off the old continent just yet

By Alan Baldwin

Speaking about the Formula One calendar and the continuing expansion to east and west, the sport’s commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone declared this month that Europe was “finished“.

“It will be a good place for tourism but little else,” he told Spanish Sports daily Marca. “Europe is a thing of the past.”

With the financial pages full of Europe’s woes and the rise of the fast-moving BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) bloc, the 81-year-old was not just being his usual deliberately provocative self.

Formula One has always followed the money and there is still plenty of that sloshing around in the Middle East and Asia.

When it comes to the driver market, the situation is rather different. It has not been a good month for Russians, Indians or Brazilians while French fans can scarcely believe their good fortune.

Romain Grosjean will be Kimi Raikkonen’s team mate at Lotus next year, fellow Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne will be at Toro Rosso and Charles Pic makes his debut for Marussia.

Formula One’s youngest world champion was always a man in a hurry

From the very first moment he arrived in Formula One as a curly-haired teenager, new world champion Sebastian Vettel was a young man in a hurry.

The 23-year-old Red Bull Driver, who became the youngest winner of the drivers’ championship with victory in Sunday’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, has set records from day one.

Within seconds of his debut in Friday practice at the 2006 Turkish Grand Prix, he had been fined for speeding in the pit lane. The youngest driver to take part in a practice session, in quick succession he became the youngest to score a point, youngest to secure pole position and youngest to win a grand prix.

Born in the same year that Red Bull sold their first can of energy drink, the race ace with the look of a tousled schoolboy and cheeky grin has always seemed a marketing match made in heaven for the newly crowned Formula One constructors’ champions.

Irreverent, with a penchant for British humour and the Beatles, there has never been any doubt that Vettel is Austrian-owned Red Bull’s blue-eyed boy.

Helmut Marko, the former grand prix racer who is a close advisor to Red Bull’s billionaire owner Dietrich Mateschitz, has championed his cause from an early age and was on the podium, showered in champagne, as Vettel celebrated the biggest win of his life on Sunday.

Vettel, only the second man to win the title for Germany after Michael Schumacher, has also saved the best for last, for the moment when it truly mattered.

F1 team orders — What’s all the fuss about?

Red Bull have gone out of their way to stress that they will not be handing out team orders at the decisive season-ending F1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi. Oh no. They do say they “expect” Sebastian Vettel to help team mate Mark Webber win the title should the situation arise but will not be “ordering” him to do so.

This seems to be an important distinction in a sport where the phrase “team orders” carries with it a stigma equivalent to “professional foul” or “ungentlemanly conduct” in soccer.

But really, what’s the big deal about a sports team telling its highly paid employees to perform in a certain way? In cycling, all riders are expected to follow team orders and in general there is not supposed to be ‘I’ in team sports. However, in F1 you cannot have a champion or a winner without an I. The I, the individual, is as important to many F1 fans as the team.

Red Bull are right to play the politically correct card — the furore that engulfed Ferrari earlier this season when Felipe Massa was politely urged to move over and let Fernando Alonso win the German Grand Prix will not be easily forgotten and a similar decision by Red Bull at the season finale could really see the wheels come off.

Or could it? In Hockenheim, Alonso looked well out of the running for the championship race and an emotionally charged Massa was heading for a first win since recovering from a near-fatal crash in Hungary in 2009.

In Abu Dhabi, missing out on the championship because you’re not allowed to tell your own team what to do could leave Red Bull feeling as if they have scored an own goal. However, they are also selling an image associated with their product — one of equal opportunities and fair competition.

Come Sunday in Abu Dhabi, a first-placed Vettel could well be all that is standing between a maiden drivers’ championship for his team mate Webber and the team as a whole. You could hazard a guess that even if he didn’t want to, Vettel would ultimately bow to the pressure – the repercussions on team morale would make for a difficult end of season party.

The F1 title race, in old money

McLaren’s Formula One champions Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton have both sought solace in the scoring system after recent setbacks.

But in fact, if they did the maths they might feel a little bit sore. Applying the 2009 points to the 2010 results so far, the title battle would actually be even tighter.

“I think the new points system has definitely amplified what people think of the standings, but I’ve always imagined the points as they would have been under last year’s system,” Button said after last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix left him fifth overall and 25 points adrift of Red Bull’s championship leader Mark Webber.

“So, in old money, I’m 10 points off Mark, and Lewis is about eight or nine behind him. And, with four races to go, that’s not much at all.”

“When you say you’re 25 points off the lead, that sounds a lot – but it’s just easier for me to reference it by the old system. It makes it seem easier to understand and compute, too.”

Hamilton, who has retired from three of the last four races, is 20 points behind Webber with four races remaining while Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso is 11 off the Australian.

“That’s still less than a race win,” said Hamilton. “It’s easy to get disheartened by being 20 points away, because it sounds such a lot, but under last year’s rules, that’s only about eight points – and to be eight points off with four races left is nothing really.”

Team orders? That will be $100,000

Any Formula One team wishing to manipulate the outcome of a race in favour of one or other of their drivers at least now knows the going rate after this week’s hearing in Paris into the recent Ferrari furore.

Team orders? That will be $100,000 — at least until the end of the season, after which there may well be no charge at all.

In fact, there may not be any more charges this year either because we are now approaching the point in the season where drivers will be ruled out of contention and expected to support their team mates.

That will be strategy, of course.

And by next season the rule will have been re-written, or ‘clarified’.

Maybe, as McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh suggested, Ferrari should get their money back.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

What’s behind Spain’s run of sporting success?

Spanish sports fans have never had it so good.

The Iberian nation is celebrating its latest triumphs after a month of success that local media have called a golden age.

On Sunday, Alberto Contador sealed his third Tour de France title, Fernando Alonso won the German Formula One Grand Prix, and Jorge Lorenzo roared to MotoGP victory in the U.S.

Pictures of Contador clad in the Tour winner's yellow jersey and Alonso in the red driving suit of Ferrari dominated the newspaper's front pages, chiming perfectly with the colours of the Spanish flag.

All that just two weeks after Spain secured its first World Cup soccer crown and three weeks after Rafa Nadal won Wimbledon for the second time.

It was enough to leave the daily Marca proclaiming Spain "the world's great sporting superpower".

Formula 1 starts 2010 with a headache

Former champion Niki Lauda did not mince his words last year when he said that Formula One’s Singapore Grand Prix race-fixing scandal demanded the heaviest of punishments to restore credibility.

A Times headline called Brazilian Nelson Piquet’s deliberate crash at the 2008 race “the worst act of cheating in the history of sport.”

Renault were handed a suspended permanent ban, with the authorities eager to keep them in the sport, while former team boss Flavio Briatore was barred for life and his engineeering head Pat Symonds for five years.

Piquet, the driver at the eye of the storm, walked away without sanction after being handed immunity for telling the governing FIA how he had obeyed orders to help team mate Fernando Alonso to win the race.

This week’s decision by a Paris court to overturn the bans on Briatore and Symonds leaves the sport’s reputation no stronger.

The worst act of cheating ever in the sport? The biggest let-off, more like.

Sure, Renault have suffered a huge blow to their reputation but their punishment was suspended and will be lifted altogether at the end of next year.

The same old Felipe Massa?

Felipe Massa won a lot of respect in Brazil a year ago when, having missed out on the Formula One championship by a single point after winning his home grand prix, he proved gracious in defeat.

“I know how to win,  I know how to lose,” he said.

The Ferrari driver returns to Interlagos as a spectator and special guest this weekend after suffering life-threatening head injuries in Hungary in July.

He will not race again until next season, but is on the mend.

Some, however, are asking whether Massa is the man that he was. Not physically, since he has been given a clean bill of health, but in that he appears to have become far more outspoken in his absence.

He suggested early on that Jenson Button was buckling under the pressure of leading the championship — a fair enough point of view — and that he had been ‘robbed’ of the title himself last year by the Renault race-fixing scandal.

The worst kept secret is finally out…Alonso moves to Ferrari

In the world of Formula One, it is very hard to keep a secret.

We’ve known for months that Fernando Alonso would be replacing Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari, a move confirmed on Wednesday.

Insiders also reckoned he had signed a deal a while back, which Alonso himself has revealed, although he said it was originally for 2011.

The only aspect of the move the press did not get right was the length of his deal or his pay packet. Some Spanish newspapers said he would sign for six years when in fact it is for three while various astronomical numbers have been bandied about.

Spain’s Marca said Alonso would be paid around 20 million euros a year, some seven million less than Raikkonen was said to be getting. Ferrari put out a statement which hinted he would not be earning as much as some might have thought given these pressured times.

“Reading certain newspapers one might think that there is a gold rush in Maranello. The numbers talked about have absolutely nothing to do with reality. It’s easy to write numbers, forgetting that the world has changed recently,” it said.

Would you drive into a wall if someone asked you to?

Crashing a Formula One car is easy. Even I could do that, although fitting into the cockpit might be a bit of a squeeze. It’s the driving that is difficult.

In the old days, when there were fewer races in a season but more funerals, you crashed at your peril. 

“In my era, if you crashed a car it was pretty serious. Nowadays if you crash a car you can’t get hurt really badly because it is so fantastically made,” Stirling Moss observed this week in an interview ahead of his 80th birthday.  

That said, crashing deliberately is simply counter-intuitive. Everything in a driver’s instincts tells him to back off, correct the slide, lift the throttle, avoid the wall. Self-preservation is a basic instinct.

All of which makes the allegations being levelled against the Renault Formula One team, who have abstained from commenting, all the more extraordinary.

The former champions will be hauled in front of the governing International Automobile Federation (FIA) in Paris on Sept. 21 to face accusations that they ordered Brazilian Nelson Piquet to deliberately crash in Singapore last year to create a situation that would allow team mate Fernando Alonso to win the race.