Targa Tasmania starts this week and I’ll be heading down later today to act as service crew for car #923. The car itself, a MINI JCW GP, may look familiar to you.
And it is, almost!
This also means updates to AUSmotive may be a bit sparse for the next week.
Porsche has given the WEC a bit of a shake by claiming pole position for tonight’s 6 Hours of Spa. The #14 919, qualified by Neel Jani and Marc Lieb, came up trumps as the track began to dry at a typically wet Spa circuit.
The #8 Toyota TS040 has backed up its win at Silverstone well and will share the front row with Porsche. The first of three Audi R18s will start from the second row, joined by the #7 Toyota. Mark Webber and his mates will start their #20 Porsche from from P5, followed by the remaining R18s.
Qualifying in the WEC is a combined effort with the results from two drivers averaged out. As the weather improved an otherwise relaxed Marc Lieb was almost caught out.
“This pole position means a lot to me,” Lieb said. “It has been hard work for a long time for many people. Taking pole position today came as a total surprise. On my first run the track wasn’t dry enough for slicks and then Neel got into the car.
“I was having a coffee in the back of the garage and watching him. Then I was suddenly told get your helmet back on and improve your earlier lap time. It was tough time management to get these two laps and I’m a very happy man. Now I hope for a good race.”
Nigel Stepney, the key figure in the 2007 Formula 1 spygate ordeal, was killed on Friday after being hit by a truck on a British motorway.
Stepney had stopped his vehicle on the hard shoulder and had stepped out of the car before being hit. A statement from Kent Police reads:
For reasons yet to be established, the man appears to have entered the carriageway and was then in a collision with an articulated goods vehicle. He was pronounced deceased at the scene.
Ferrari’s Technical Director Ross Brawn left the team at the end of 2006 and Stepney, formerly Ferrari’s Race and Test Technical Manager, had publicly declared his dissatisfaction with the role he was given after the team restructured its operations ahead of the 2007 season.
Stepney was later found guilty of leaking 780 pages of confidential information to his friend Michael Coughlan then the chief designer at McLaren. Copies of the documents were made by Coughlan’s wife at a copy centre. Staff from the copy centre thought something wasn’t right and contacted Ferrari and formal investigations began. Stepney was handed a 20 month sentence by an Italian court, although he did not serve any jail time. He didn’t work in F1 again.
Since 2010 Stepney had been working as the Race Team Manager and Technical Director for JRM who compete in endurance racing, including the LMP1, GT1 and GT3 categories. A team statement can be read after the break.
Stepney started in F1 in the late 1970s with the Shadow team and made his name at Lotus working alongside Ayrton Senna in the mid-1980s. He was later part of the Ferrari dream team, along with Brawn, Rory Byrne and Michael Schumacher, who combined to end Ferrari long championship drought before dominating the sport in the 2000s.
No other words necessary.
The WRC could look even sillier than a race winner standing on a podium wearing a tacky sombrero with a bottle full of radiator piss in his hand if its latest plan to decide a rally winner comes to fruition.
A typical WRC event has somewhere between 15 and 25 special stages run over three days. To be the winner you have to perform consistently across the entire event. It’s a great test of man and machine and one of the great things that sets top line rallying apart from circuit racing.
However, under a proposed plan to try and increase television ratings, future WRC events could amount to two-and-a-half days of qualifying before a final special stage where the top 10 fight it out for the win. Thankfully, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds.
The final shootout would amount to five individual races for position, so first and second would race each other, then third against fourth and so on. The risk is the rally leader going into the shootout could make a minor mistake and lose his position, finishing the event in second. Although, thankfully, no worse than that.
In effect the WRC would become a 60-minute made for TV event with a stupidly long qualifying format.
Rallying is a paradox, we think. As a form of pure motorsport it is almost unparalleled. Fearless crews pitch themselves against each other in the elements, fighting the stopwatch as well as trees, rock-filled snow banks and even the dreaded hinkelsteins. Yet, as a form of pure entertainment it is one of the most difficult categories of motorsport to capture and bring to a wide audience.
It’s hard for spectators who have to trudge miles in the mud for a vantage point only to enjoy a few minutes of cars whizzing by before repeating the process again and again. It’s hard for TV crews to get cameras into position to beam the unquestionably awesome product into our lounge rooms.
Speaking to Autosport chief WRC Promoter Oliver Ciesla said: “This is an open discussion at the moment, but the intention is to increase the drama and increase the attractiveness of this decisive final moment of each rally—and to develop a media moment which leads us to a new level of audience.
“We are talking with all stakeholders in order to find out how that format will be developed to fulfill the needs of what the WRC is; the needs of the audience to create more drama and to make it fair in the eyes of the sporting participants.”
We don’t have any issues with the WRC trying to spread its message to a wider audience. And we certainly don’t propose to have the answers. But if rallying does embrace this proposal we fear how far they might go, dumbing down the sport in the chase for ratings, and possibly undoing the great legacy and tradition the sport has forged along the way with champions such as Loeb, Makinen, Sainz, Vatanen and Röhrl.
A final decision won’t be made until September, but if it gets up this proposal could be in place for the 2015 WRC season. Maybe you think this is a great idea, maybe you think it sucks big time. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
“It was twenty years ago today,” as The Beatles lyric goes, and if you want to find tributes for Ayrton Senna today you don’t have to look too hard. Here, though, is a video from 1 May 1994 showing how BBC television reported on Senna’s death, including some words from legendary F1 commentator Murray Walker.
Last year Adrian Newey, designer of the Williams FW16 Senna was driving, said: “What happened that day, what caused the accident, still haunts me to this day.”
A failure in the steering column is thought to be the most likely cause of the accident. Although, Newey added: “There is no doubt it [the steering column] was cracked. Equally, all the data, all the circuit cameras, the on-board camera from Michael Schumacher’s car that was following, none of that appears to be consistent with a steering-column failure.”
Unsurprisingly, the events of Senna’s death have attracted incredible scrutiny. The Williams F1 team was held to account with Newey and Patrick Head brought before Italian courts to answer charges of manslaughter. The focus of the trial centred around the failure of the steering column in Senna’s car.
While both men were originally acquitted in 1997, Head was later found guilty in a 2007 retrial. Head avoided a penalty due to the statute of limitations being passed.
Ayrton Senna 1960–1994
To mark the 20th anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death Sky Sports F1 invited Damon Hill to Imola so he could share his thoughts on a weekend he and the motoring world will never forget.
In an appropriate sign of respect David Brabham was also there to tell of his experience with the Simtek team after it lost Roland Ratzenberger the day before Senna was killed.
Both men were the last teammates of Senna and Ratzenberger respectively. The documentary is low key, there’s no overbearing voiceovers filled with hyperbole. It’s just two men talking us through that fateful weekend.
In some ways it’s quite morbid seeing Hill and Brabham alone on the sections of track where two men lost their lives. And yet it delivers a poignancy that makes this film very much worth watching.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Roland Ratzenberger. He was killed during qualifying for the ill-fated 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, which claimed the life of Ayrton Senna the following day.
David Brabham was Ratzenberger’s teammate that day and he has shared his thoughts via the family website. Here’s a few selected quotes, make sure you follow the link below for the full story.
After seeing Ratzenberger’s wrecked car on track
I remember immediately changing my focus to get back to the pits and keep the tyres warm. This was a ridiculous thing to think, but my mind just didn’t want to think about what I had seen and focus on something else, like some kind of defence mechanism.
On the team’s reaction
We were completely devastated, shocked and felt numb. We pulled the shutter down in the pit garage and went to the back of the pits, unable to say much. We couldn’t really see the reaction from the rest of the paddock, being in a state of shock we couldn’t absorb what was going on.
On his decision to race
I remember jumping in the car for the start of the race and feeling uneasy, but thinking this is what I had to do. I can’t imagine what my wife was going through, seeing me go out there after what happened the day before. It must have been very painful for her.
On the immediate aftermath of Senna’s crash
We all had to stop on the pit straight and get out of our cars. You could see all the drivers were in a state of shock, word got round it was Senna and it didn’t sound good, although no one knew how bad. It took a while to start the race again, I’m not sure how many drivers really wanted to continue, but a driver finds it hard to say ‘no more racing’.
[Source: brabham.co.uk | Pic: Sutton Images]
While Formula 1 continues to find its way in the new V6 power unit era we’ve heard a lot of moaning about how slow the cars are compared with the normally aspirated and relatively thirsty engines of recent years. Perhaps over a single lap that may be the case, but what about over a full race distance?
The table below compares the total time elapsed for the first four races of 2013 against the same events from 2014. Due to differences in tyre degredation and other possible variables we do acknowledge this is not a foolproof measure to establish the outright speed of the new fuel efficient regime.
We also have to stress that the Chinese Grand Prix was supposed to run for 56 laps, which it did in theory. So the total elapsed time for the full 56 laps is shown below, rather than the 54 lap result which came about due to the chequered flag first being waved on lap 55.
| Location | 2013 | 2014 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 1:30:03.225 | 1:32:58.710 | +0:2:25.485 |
| Malaysia | 1:38:56.681 | 1:40:25.974 | +0:1:29.293 |
| Bahrain | 1:36:00.498 | 1:40:25.974 | +0:3:42.245 |
| China | 1:36:26.945 | 1:36:52.810* | +0:0:25.865 |
As you can see, the result in China shows it took Lewis Hamilton around 26 seconds longer to win in the race in 2014 compared with Fernando Alonso’s race winning time from 2013. That’s less than 0.5 seconds per lap slower while using around 33% less fuel. A small price to pay, don’t you agree?
If you compare Lewis’ 2013 result in China—he finished third, 12.3 seconds behind Alonso—the gap to his 2014 result is even closer—around 14 seconds—just 0.25 seconds per lap across the full race distance.
This stat has been highlighted by Joe Saward, who argues the FIA has not been proactive enough to promote this early success of the new world era:
Now that is what I call getting a better bang for your buck. And I’m willing to bet that by the end of the year the gap will have closed more and, perhaps, the races will be run even faster than they were 12 months ago.
So who has highlighted these statistics? Who has told the world that F1 is doing a brilliant job for them? If no-one says this stuff how can the sport to sell the success of its new engine formula? That leaves the way open for the naysayers and the vested interests to promote their negative messages about the sport.
Saward makes a great point. Follow the link below to read his thoughts in full.
[Source: Joe Saward]
The Nissan Zeod RC will be racing at the 24 Hours of Le Mans later this year and when we last brought you an update on the car we didn’t know anything about its internal combustion engine. Well now we do—plus heaps more—as these videos show, featuring the slightly nerdy guy from Engineering Explained.
It’s okay everyone, we didn’t forget you and your love of quality Formula 1 pictures. Life just got in the way for a bit. Finally, we now bring you our selection of photos from the 2014 Chinese Grand Prix. Once again Lewis Hamilton came up trumps. He’s making a habit of this winning lark it seems and we eagerly anticipate the sport’s return to Europe to see if any of the teams can catch Mercedes.
Watching Climb Dance, in high definition, is there a better way to start the week?
We can’t think of many ways to top this, so sit back and strap yourself in for a crystal clear ride with one of rallying’s best, Ari Vatanen, as he man handles his Peugeot 405 T16 in the 1988 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
Jean Louis Mourey originally released this film back in 1989 and the remastering of the footage was commissioned by Peugeot last year as part of its Pikes Peak assault which saw Sebastien Loeb smash the all-time record for the 20km course.
In 2013 Loeb reached the summit of an all-paved Pikes Peak in 8:13.878. Ari Vatanen’s 1988 time was 10:47.77.