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.

Helping to pay your way in F1

Indian Narain Karthikeyan’s return to Formula One, along with Renault’s retention of Russian Vitaly Petrov and the imminent arrival of Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado and Mexican Sergio Perez, has put the issue of the so-called ‘pay driver’ — a man whose place on the grid is rightly or wrongly considered as much down to the amount of sponsorship he brings as talent behind the wheel — firmly back in the spotlight.

There are those who bemoan the situation, lamenting the lack of opportunities for the talented but hard-up aspirant, but that is not a new phenomenon even if it was more muted in the era of manufacturer dominance.

In the early days of the championship, you had the well-heeled gentleman racer — flamboyant types like Thailand’s Prince Bira — who could afford to buy a Maserati or two and go racing.

“Do you think we are running on air? The money has to come from somewhere,” HRT team principal Colin Kolles, Karthikeyan’s boss, told Reuters last week when asked about the Indiank. “For more than 100 years if you want to race, you have to put money on the table.”

You only have to ask Niki Lauda about that.

By the early 1970s, with the arrival of swathes of on-car branding and ostentatious sponsorship, the pay driver was a recognised species and Austrian Lauda was in the vanguard.

“To the best of my knowledge, Spain’s Alex Soler-Roig (1971-72) was the first driver to use his own cash to buy himself a few Formula One starts,” Lauda wrote in his 1985 autobiography “To Hell and Back”.

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.

Remembering Bruce McLaren

Ferrari made much of their 800th Formula One grand prix in Turkey last Sunday, throwing a party in Istanbul and racing with the number 800 on their cars’ engine covers.

It was just a shame their performance on the track was nothing to shout about.

Over at McLaren, a more poignant milestone was being marked more discretely — one fittingly capped by Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button finishing one-two in the race while the sport’s only Antipodean driver, Mark Webber, joined them on the podium.

Wednesday, June 2, will be the 40th anniversary of team founder Bruce McLaren’s death in a testing accident at the Goodwood circuit in southern England.

The New Zealander, whose team would ultimately go on to become one of the sport’s most successful, was only 32 years old.

Throughout the weekend, inside the team hospitality, a rolling series of images from yesteryear were projected on television screens as a backdrop to the team’s regular activities.

F1 is not all glamour

Who said Formula One was all glamour, parties and champagne?

Mark Webber provided a different insight on Wednesday as he sat in the Red Bull hospitality unit — the usual description of motorhome hardly applies to a floating palace moored to the Monaco harbourside — and described how his evening had panned out after winning the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona last weekend.

The Aussie hero had just taken the third win of his career, dominating the race from pole and beating the rest of the field into submission. So how did he celebrate? A night on the town perhaps? Not a bit of it.

After 66 laps, and 307km, of pounding around the Circuit de Catalunya, he got back in his loan car — a Renault, nothing fancy — and drove another 600km to Monaco.

“I drove here on Sunday night,” he said. “I’m not the most patient guy in the world when it comes to moving around. So I got in the car at seven o’clock. It was a bit of a late night on Sunday night.

“Ann (Neal, his partner) wasn’t too keen on driving so I had to do the whole trip myself. I did 900k on Sunday. 300 in the grand prix and 600 on the road.

Who do you think you are? Lewis Hamilton?

An irresistible story from Melbourne, where Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton was stopped by the police for “over-exuberant” driving on the road.

Hamilton was fastest in practice for the Australian Grand Prix on Friday and apparently struggled to make the adjustment to his road car. Here’s the story from Ian Ransom in Melbourne and Alan Baldwin in London:

Lewis Hamilton was stopped by police for behaving like a boy racer on Friday only hours after he had wowed a Melbourne crowd with the fastest lap in Australian Grand Prix practice.

The McLaren driver, who in 2008 became Formula One’s youngest ever world champion, found himself having to make a public apology about his behaviour in Australia for the second year in a row.

“This evening, I was driving in an over-exuberant manner and, as a result, was stopped by the police,” the 25-year-old Briton said in a McLaren statement.

“What I did was silly, and I want to apologise for it.”

Senior police constable Scott Woodford told Reuters that a 25-year-old male, resident in Switzerland, was stopped at 9.15pm in the St. Kilda neighbourhood at the wheel of a brand new Mercedes.

Who do you think you are? Jenson Button?

Muscles acheing, and body sagging under the lingering effects of jet-lag, I wiped away beads of sweat and warily contemplated our newly-arrived karting opponents.

They looked like proper Formula One drivers.

A British media v Lewis Hamilton/Jenson Button “challenge” could only be a mismatch, even if one of our more souped-up members did bring his own race suit and helmet to the party.

The past two world champions were certainly considerably better turned out than this reporter, squeezed as he was into ill-fitting overalls with a dodgy fastener that kept bursting open.

McLaren had organised a 50 minute ‘endurance’ test in two-man teams as a warm-up while we waited for two of the fastest men in the world to join us at the indoor track on an industrial estate near London’s Heathrow airport.

Just a couple of stints at no more than 40mph was enough to remind an ageing and unfit hack just how strong real racers must be to manage a full grand prix distance for up to two hours at speeds in excess of 200mph.

Schumacher faces up to his past

The late Peter Ustinov, a comic connoisseur of national stereotypes in his 1958 spoof commentary for an imaginary Grand Prix of Gibraltar, might have enjoyed Monday’s Mercedes team launch in Stuttgart.

As Michael Schumacher observed, referring to his new employers’ prospects for the season ahead, all the ingredients were there.

Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche, a man whose walrus moustache would not look out of place in a Munich beer hall, spoke firmly of the birth of the Deutsche Nationalmannschaft, the German national team.

An American reporter kicked off the questions to team principal Ross Brawn with a technical poser about the challenges of designing the 2010 car under the new rules, before the British media scratched around and dusted off old Anglo-German rivalries.

Schumacher, returning at the age of 41, was asked whether he felt he needed to prove he could win “in the right way” after controversies dating back to the days when he and Britain’s Damon Hill battled for the title.

The Italians wanted to know whether the former Ferrari favourite had been back to his favourite restaurant in Maranello.

There will be plenty more of this over the course of the season, one already presented in Britain as an Anglo-German duel between British heroes Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button in the McLaren camp and the all-German line-up at Mercedes.

Odd Germans and lucky underpants

Cynics may observe that Michael Schumacher’s desire to be the odd man out in Formula One has the added bonus of always putting the German ahead of his team mate in the pecking order, even if only on paper.

What Schumacher wants, Schumacher generally gets and it comes as no shock that the new Mercedes (formerly Brawn GP) team run by his old Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn immediately granted the seven times world champion’s wish and give him the number three on his car, ahead of Nico Rosberg’s number four.

Some may be more surprised that the most successful driver Formula One has ever seen, a man able to separate his private and personal life into compartments and rationally analyse everything around him, should be seemingly so superstitious.

But maybe they shouldn’t be.

Formula One, a sport that has seen 31 races marred by fatalities since the world championship started in 1950 and many more drivers killed in other arenas, has its rituals like any other competitive activity.

The number 13, unlucky in much of the world, is not allocated to any driver while some Italians have a thing about 17 because the Roman numerals XVII, when re-arranged, spell VIXI — meaning “I have lived” in Latin and therefore suggestive of death.

Rubens Barrichello swapped with Honda team mate Jenson Button for the 2006 season, although it didn’t do the Brazilian much good, because he wanted the number 11 that he had when he took the first race win of his career, all his karting titles and his first victory in the junior Formula Ford championship.