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.

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.

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.

Mosley gives F1 teams a parting gift

By anointing Jean Todt as his designated successor, Max Mosley has sent a pretty clear message to the troublesome Formula One teams.

They wanted him out but if they think they are going to get someone more amenable running motorsport’s world governing body, then they can think again.

In fact, they are mistaken if they think they have seen the back of Mosley himself.

As the Briton said in a letter to FIA member clubs on Wednesday, he hopes to play “a modest role” himself in any Todt administration after he stands down in October.

The Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) made their position pretty clear last month when Toyota’s John Howett, the group’s vice-chairman, said “we’d like someone independent… independent of any of the teams.”

Their immediate silence to Mosley’s letter was telling. As Alan Henry writes on the Guardian website, it “confirmed a deep-rooted suspicion that Todt is the favoured successor largely because he thinks like Mosley and, perhaps more worryingly for the teams, may act like him too.”

Todt might be seen as a Ferrari man, having presided over the golden Michael Schumacher era at the Italian team, but there is now a very different atmosphere at Maranello to when he called the shots.

Formula One on the brink as eight teams threaten split

Formula One plunged into its biggest crisis in 60 years on Friday with eight of the 10 teams announcing plans to set up their own championship.

The teams association FOTA said BMW-Sauber, Brawn, Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull, Renault, Toro Rosso and Toyota were united in a decision that would split the sport in two if carried through.

“The teams cannot continue to compromise on the fundamental values of the sport and have declined to alter their original conditional entries to the 2010 world championship,” said a statement.

“These teams therefore have no alternative other than to commence the preparation for a new championship which reflects the values of its participants and partners.”

Click here for the full story, and check back for more news as it happens on a decisive day for Formula One.

Formula One can name anything complicated … even a list

How complicated can an entry list be? Very, if its anything to do with Formula One.

On the piece of paper published by the governing FIA on Friday, there are 13 teams entered with a total of 26 cars. Simple as that.

Except five of the teams, including McLaren and championship-leaders Brawn, are only provisional because they don’t like the rules.

Of the other eight, three are confirmed but do not want to be. Ferrari, Red Bull and Toro Rosso say they should be provisional entries too and refuse to accept the FIA’s designation.

That leaves five undisputed unconditional entries, three of them new teams who have yet to produce a grand prix car but have convinced the governing body that they have the wherewithal to do it.

That also means that if, in a week’s time, there has been no breakthrough on the 2010 rules and governance of the sport, the eight members of the Formula One Teams Association FOTA could withdraw.

Back to the good old days

Time was when a Formula One car launch consisted of little more than a couple of oil-streaked mechanics wheeling their pride and joy out of a lock-up garage on a chilly winter morning at some deserted circuit.

Any media who turned up might raise their collars against the cold, kick their heels for a bit and then head off for a restorative cup of tea.

Fast forward a good few decades, past the excesses of the late 1990s and into the credit crunch era, and Red Bull’s launch of their RB5 car in Jerez on Monday was not too dissimilar.     The team’s title-winning technical whiz Adrian Newey probably didn’t do too much of the design on the back of a cigarette packet, as some designers reputedly did in the old days, and Jerez was certainly a lot warmer than Silverstone on a February morning.     But the principle remained the same. The car was rolled out, a tarpaulin lifted and then it was off for a cup of tea and a chat with the drivers.

“It’s gone full circle in many respects,” agreed a watching David Coulthard, the Scot who hung up his helmet as a Red Bull driver last year to reinvent himself as television pundit and team consultant.     “The days of Colin Chapman pulling a tarpaulin off in the garage, we are kind of back to that. You’ve got to be seen not to be wasting money. When people are losing their jobs, it’s a bit like the banks paying billions in bonuses when people have lost lots of money; it’s just not in good taste is it?”     Coulthard lived through the days when teams could scarcely throw enough money at their launched. McLaren famously hired the future Mrs Beckham and the Spice Girls to perform at one unveiling, Sauber took the Sugababes to Salzburg and Benetton flew the world’s media to Venice to show off their car in St Mark’s Square.

Looking back, the high water mark was McLaren’s 2007 launch when Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton drove their cars around the floodlit streets of Valencia before the Cirque du Soleil put on a firework extravaganza and violinist Vanessa Mae entertained the late night revellers.   This year we have had Toyota present their car on the internet and others fitting in the media as part of a regular test session.   “The time of cigarette sponsors and big budgets, it was an excessive period,” said Coulthard. “We did so many promotions all over Europe and everywhere we went we flew privately and had the best of everything and that was the norm at the time.     “But ultimately what Formula One comes back to is a car on a track. And that always means a cold day in January or February testing and trying to understand how to make a race car go quickly. All of those other bits that used to happen were always the extras anyway. It was the cream and the cherry. But you take it away and you still have your cake.”

PHOTO: Red Bull launch in Jerez earlier this month by Marcelo del Pozo (top), McLaren launch in Valencia 2007 by Gustau Nacarino.