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Will Buxton / Images by LAT Above: Takuma Sato tests the Super Aguri SA07 at Jerez, December 2007.
It's Christmas, a time of hope and goodwill. And so, with mulled wine brewing and mince pies warming, I thought I'd share a story of hope from Formula 1's recent past to push away the cold of 2016 and usher in the new year just around the corner.
(Small tip with the warm mince pies: Lift the lid and slide a bit of stilton in there. Put the lid back on, give it a minute for the cheese to melt, eat. You're welcome.)
Now, lots of folks are hoping that the new regulations for 2017 will see an increase in competitiveness across the field. A new start obviously affords a fresh set of opportunities, a blank sheet of paper if you will, for teams up and down the grid to get it right. The reality, of course, is a bit more complicated than that, for while there is a chance of getting it right, there is an even greater chance of getting it wrong. Far from a hard reset in technical regulations ensuring closer racing, more often than not it provides precisely the opposite.
For the big teams, it is possible to create secondary design teams to work on the new cars while also dedicating sufficient resources to the current car. The earlier they can do that, the bigger the jump they can get on their rivals. The more money they have to put into the project, the more routes they can investigate, the more mistakes they can make, the more possibilities they can explore.
All of which leads to the big teams staying at the top, and the small teams falling further behind.
At least, that's usually what happens.
Step forward, Super Aguri. Back when Honda's B Team was putting noses out of joint in 2007, Formula 1 was looking at a huge aerodynamic regulation change for 2009. At the time, Super Aguri was running an old Honda chassis, which they had modified and updated to use as their own. So brilliant were the minds in their design office that they made the year-old mule more competitive than Honda's then-current F1 challenger.
But behind the scenes, Super Aguri was already hard at work on what would be their first actual car, designed from a blank sheet of paper in Leafield. 2009 was to be the year when the small team took a giant leap away from its parent, and stood on its own feet. Ever since the regulations had been announced, almost all of the team's attention had been focused two years ahead of time.We never got to see Super Aguri in 2009, as the team folded halfway through the 2008 season. But we did get to see their car. Or at least parts of it.
You see, when Super Aguri went under, its brilliant design team quickly found employment elsewhere. Some went to Honda's F1 operation in Brackley. Others moved to Toyota and Williams, the latter of whom was using the former's engines and majority of its rear end. The former Aguri employees took with them the concepts they had been formulating for 18 months and more, one of which was to prove pivotal to the 2009 season.
Honda pulled out of F1 at the end of 2008, but at Brackley there was confidence that the effort the team had put into its 2009 car – having itself focused on '09 rather than '08 for much of the season – would reap rewards. Even shoehorning a Mercedes engine into the back of what was to be the BGP001 couldn't take away from something everyone there felt was incredibly special.
When testing began, the Super Aguri influence showed itself for the first time, as the three teams to which the Leafield clan had migrated arrived with a concept at the rear of their car which would become known as the Double Decker Diffuser. Rival teams protested in Australia, but the FIA ultimately determined that those running the DDD had exploited a loophole in the regulations – and had done so brilliantly.
Above: Jenson Button at Abu Dhabi, 2009
The BGP001 which went on to win the 2009 world championships was, at the time, deemed to be one of the most expensive F1 cars of all time in terms of the resources spent on its gestation. Eighteen months at Super Aguri. A year at Honda. Full wind tunnel resources used in Brackley and Tochigi, not to mention a special projects operation at Dome. An expensive car, yes, but a miniscule operating budget. And its roots, the design concepts that lay in its genius, had been born in Leafield two years before it ever hit the track, for a red and white Super Aguri that never was.
All of which begs the question of whether, had they not folded mid-2008, it would have been Super Aguri who had turned up in Melbourne as the car and the team to beat? Might history have recorded a very different British world champion in 2009, as not Jenson Button but Anthony Davidson ultimately defeated his teammate Takuma Sato in the most unlikely championship story in the sport's 60 years?
It's not as crazily far-fetched as it sounds.
Ross Brawn has been speaking of what it takes to successfully oversee a new car for new regulations in a recent interview with the FIA's in-house magazine "Auto." I would recommend it as a brilliant insight into what the teams have been doing for the past few years and how Brawn himself oversaw the preparation Mercedes put into what has been three years of absolute domination.
Both his words, and my own recollections of the Super Aguri that never was, have brought into clear focus the hopes of Toro Rosso in 2017. The team, and in particular the performances of Carlos Sainz, stood out as spectacular in 2016, with the paddock only too aware of the genius that exists within a design office headed by James Key and his lieutenants Paolo Marabini and Matteo Piraccini. With a 2017-spec Renault engine powering the squad after a year of making do with an old Ferrari lump, expectations are high that the Italian outfit can do something special next year."The team has been developing the car since 2015 so I'm confident they're doing a good job," Sainz said recently. "But when there's a new regulation, sometimes you depend a bit on luck to know if the philosophy of the team has got it right. If we have a strong chassis as we had the last two years, then with the power unit of Renault we should be looking to be in the place Force India and Williams have been this year. It will mean beating established manufacturer teams so it will not be easy, but I trust in our team because they've produced a chassis lately that is in the top five."
There seems a lovely symmetry here. A junior team taking a two-year objective to focus on a new set of regulations, determined to use the hard reset of a new set of regulations to get the jump on its rivals, use the combined genius inside its walls that has seen it worry far better funded rivals and climb the ladder to compete with the major manufacturers. Might Toro Rosso be about to do what Super Aguri came so close to achieving?
Nobody does and nobody can know just who has what up their sleeves. We won't know for sure until testing begins just who has got it right and who has got it wrong. And for all the fears that such a major shift in regulations can and often does play into the hands of the bigger teams, there's always a chance that the smaller outfits, so used to punching above their weight and making every small opportunity work for them, will have found the magic bullet that defines the new order.
So many of us as pundits and fans breathed a heavy sigh of resignation when Red Bull said they wouldn't be making Sainz available to Mercedes to fill their Rosberg-shaped hole. But, if they've got their sums right, might Toro Rosso be the place to be after all?
some good early 90s F1 on at the moment. BTW this link works ALL THE TIME. It's some live feed of old F1 races. I have no idea if there is a schedule for it somewhere. I have it set up to feed to my Roku.
91 US GP in Phoenix. Alesi in the Ferrari, Senna in the McLaren.
still surprises me to see how these cars behave like 1000hp karts requiring the driver to fight it to stay on the track vs today's machines that require such a delicate touch to prevent the tyres from protesting
edit - 750hp according to murray walker in this particular race
Mick Schumacher will graduate to the European Formula 3 championship with Prema next season, the team confirmed on Saturday.
Schumacher, son of seven-time Formula 1 champion Michael, competed for Prema in ADAC and Italian Formula 4 this year, placing second overall in both championships.
The German racer will now make the move into Formula 3 for the 2017 campaign.
"F3 will be the ideal step for me to make, and I am totally fired up for the new year to start," he said.
"I am also really happy about staying with Prema, because this is such a professional team and I will again be able to learn a lot.
"The next season will surely be challenging, but the tests we've been doing in the past weeks proved the F3 car is extremely fun to drive. I can't wait for 2017 to begin."
Schumacher, 17, joins Callum Ilott and Guan Yu Zhou at the team.
RIC
ROS
HAM
VES
Fred (this is the only 1 that gives me a meh). I could see a few other drivers possibly 5th but doesn't given me heartburn.
HAM was much better than ROS at times but he did some really stupid ****. The Baku binning and all his **** poor starts come to mind right away. All he has to do is not crash in Baku and even if he had the engine setting issue he would have ended up 3rd at worst. Losing 10 instead of 15 points to ROS.
Re: The Official Formula 1 2017 Season Thread
