Left field

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.

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.

Schumi returns as if he’d never left

When Germany’s best-selling tabloid Bild sends two reporters to an overseas Formula One test in the depths of February, you know something big is brewing.

The return of Michael Schumacher, and the seven times world champion’s first drive of the new Mercedes W01, in Valencia on Monday triggered scenes reminiscent of the glory days when the German was so dominant with Ferrari.

Reporters and television crews pushed, shoved and elbowed each other to get a Schumacher soundbite at the end of the session.

His first lap was echoing around the blogosphere before he had even crossed the finish line.

Schumacher had earlier shown a fair turn of speed out on the racetrack — so fast that he bamboozled the timing system into putting him out front by a massive margin until it became obvious he had taken one of Bernie Ecclestone’s recommended short cuts — and ended the day third fastest.

Times do not mean a lot in testing, with the new fuel regulations leaving plenty of scope for teams to run light and impress would-be backers while others run through programmes with a full tank, but this all looked pretty good nonetheless.

“He was very enthusiastic. It was good to see the enthusiasm,” said team principal Ross Brawn. It would have been more of a surprise for me if he hadn’t been where he is today – so it was just confirmation really of what we both thought, that Michael should be competitive. One thing that came through was Michael’s precision about what is going on in the car. He has great clarity of reasoning in what he does and that is nice to work with again. It was a bit like old days but not as far back as ’91.”

Vlog-Schumacher shadow still hangs over Ferrari’s Maranello

Maranello is the spiritual home of Formula One glamour team Ferrari, but there is very little glitz in the working class northern Italian town.

Mark Meadows was there for the launch of Ferrari’s new 2010 car, which will have to go up against former favourite Michael Schumacher this season. Click on the video to hear more.

Schumacher – The Comeback Part II (or not?)

A lot of people are getting quite excited about the possibility of Michael Schumacher coming out of retirement to race for the new Mercedes F1 team (formerly known as champions Brawn) at the age of 41.

The German’s spokeswoman Sabine Kehm feels it is highly unlikely while Mercedes said at the weekend that “some speculations are nothing but dreams which will not come true” (although note the carmaker did not specifically say this particular piece of speculation was one of them).

Team principal Ross Brawn, who is currently on holiday, has been quoted by Germany’s Bild newspaper as saying that “the media are trying to put together a dream. Michael would have returned to the cockpit for Ferrari, but only temporarily. He has no ambitions to start a new career.”

Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone told the BBC on Sunday that he was “very doubtful” about any such comeback, however appealing it might be.

On the other hand, Kehm told Britain’s Times newspaper on Monday that “I can see a lot of tempting things in it for Michael, but I can also see a lot of non-tempting things. I don’t know.

“It is as it was in August when you couldn’t tell what was going to happen. Then I was convinced Michael would never come back and suddenly all the circumstances were right for him,” she added, referring to the champion’s abortive attempt to return as a stand-in for injured Brazilian Felipe Massa at Ferrari.

A Schumacher comeback has a lot of media appeal — witness all the stories — and not least because McLaren will have two British world champions next season in Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

Button to McLaren – the real deal or just pretend?

Jenson Button’s eye-catching visit to McLaren on Friday is of obvious benefit to both parties, whatever the reality behind the headlines.

If a deal is done, the new Formula One champion gets the bigger salary that Brawn are reluctant or unable to pay as well as a potentially winning car for next season.

McLaren would get a line-up of champions that will appeal to global sponsors like Vodafone and show that they remain, along with Ferrari, a big hitting team that can always pull in the top talent.

At the very least, Button is able to send a clear message to Brawn that he has other, viable and possibly more lucrative, options and that they cannot assume he will just stay out of loyalty.

McLaren are similarly able to remind Kimi Raikkonen, until now widely considered the main choice to partner Lewis Hamilton, that they too have alternatives and that he should consider reducing his wage demands.

Raikkonen, their former driver who won the 2007 title with Ferrari and has now left the Italian team, was seen at the factory on Wednesday with his management.

But what if Brawn don’t blink, Raikkonen refuses to accept McLaren’s terms and Button signs up to join Hamilton?

When will F1 have a Middle Eastern driver?

 Abu Dhabi’s new Formula One circuit has given the Middle East seemingly unbeatable bragging rights as home to the world’s most modern and lavish track.

“No one is going to top this,” commented Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone on his arrival at Yas Marina and he may well be right.

Spending billions of dollars cannot buy atmosphere, of course, and Abu Dhabi is a long way from Silverstone, Spa and Monza, but the signs so far are that the locals are pretty passionate about their motorsport.

“Monaco, Montreal and Singapore do different things fantastically,” Khaldoon al Mubarak, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi government’s business development company as well as Manchester City soccer club, told the National newspaper.

“Our hope is Abu Dhabi can take it to a whole new level.”

The circuit is an obvious sign of that intention but it is not built in isolation.

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.

The worst act of cheating in sport?

The back page of today’s Times carries an opinion piece that pulls no punches about Formula One’s race-fixing controversy.

“The worst act of cheating in the history of sport,” is the headline.

Not the worst act of cheating in F1, but the worst in any sport, in the opinion of columnist Simon Barnes.

What do you think about that assessment? Former Ferrari driver Eddie Irvine scoffs at that idea.

“Formula One has always been a war and in war all is fair,” he told the BBC. ”When I was in various teams you would do anything to win. Back in the day, it was normal. This is probably slightly on the wrong side of the cheating thing but in days past every team have done whatever they could to win — chat, bend the rules, break the rules, sabotage opponents. This is just the FIA going on a crusade.”

Looking back at examples of sporting fraud, the systematic doping carried out by the former East Germany really will for many stand out. That was state-funded and long-lasting. Athletes’ lives were put at risk while scores of others had their careers blighted by doped up rivals taking top honours.

Years of training, effort and commitment laid waste by cheats who were not found out until it was all too late for those competing against them.