Smooth Button masters F1's greatest test

At the circuit widely regarded as the greatest test of a racing driver in the world, Jenson Button took a victory in the Belgian Grand Prix on Sunday that was probably the most dominant this season.

Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel, who finished second to Button after an impressive performance of his own, had an even bigger margin of superiority in Valencia but he was unable to make it count because his car failed.

Button had no such trouble. He stamped his authority on the weekend from the start of qualifying and never looked back, as all hell broke loose behind his McLaren.

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The frightening first-corner pile-up helped him in that it took out a potential threat in world championship leader Fernando Alonso's Ferrari. The Spaniard was up to third place from fifth on the grid before being assaulted by the flying Lotus of Romain Grosjean, who had collided with the other McLaren of Lewis Hamilton.

But before the race Alonso had entertained no prospect of battling for victory, and while he would almost certainly have finished on the podium, there is no reason to believe he would have troubled Button.

The Englishman also comfortably saw off in the opening laps the challenge of Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen, hotly tipped before the weekend.

Raikkonen was left to battle entertainingly with rivals including Vettel and Mercedes driver Michael Schumacher, on whom the Finn pulled an astoundingly brave pass into the 180mph swerves of Eau Rouge which was almost a carbon copy of Red Bull driver Mark Webber's move on Alonso last year.

Button, meanwhile, was serene out front, never looking under the remotest threat.

For Button, this was a far cry from the struggles he has encountered in what has not overall been one of his better seasons.

A strong start included a dominant victory in the opening race in Australia and second place in China.

But after that he tailed off badly, struggling with this year's big Formula 1 quandary - getting the temperamental Pirelli tyres into the right operating window.

The 32-year-old had a sequence of weak races and even at other times has generally been firmly in Hamilton's shade.

Those struggles were ultimately solved by some head-scratching on set-up at McLaren, but they were undoubtedly influenced by Button's smooth, unflustered driving style.

Button's weakness - one of which he is well aware - is that he struggles when the car is not to his liking. Unlike Alonso and Hamilton, he finds it difficult to adapt his style to different circumstances.

The flip side of that is that when he gets the car's balance right, he is close to unbeatable. It is a similar situation to that of two former McLaren drivers - Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.

Senna, like Hamilton, was usually faster, but when Prost, whose style was similar to Button's, got his car in the sweet spot he was matchless.

"I obviously have a style where it's quite difficult to find a car that works for me in qualifying," Button said on Saturday, "but when it does we can get pole position."

Perhaps an elegant style that does not upset the car or over-work the tyres was exactly what was needed through the demanding corners of Spa's challenging middle sector.

That was McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe's view, certainly.

"It could well be," Lowe said, "because it's made up of these longer flowing corners rather than the short, stop-start ones. So that may well be something he can work with well, just tucking it all up and smooth lines."

Was this the secret to Button's performance in qualifying, when he was a remarkable 0.8 seconds quicker than team-mate Lewis Hamilton?

In a well-publicised series of tweets after qualifying, Hamilton blamed this on the team's collective decision - with which he agreed when it was made - to run his car on a set-up with higher downforce.

This is a perfectly valid decision at Spa -it was a route that Raikkonen also took - and in pure lap time the two differing approaches should balance themselves out. But for them to do so, the driver with the higher downforce set-up has to make up in the middle sector the time he has lost on the straights.

As the McLaren telemetry of which Hamilton so unwisely tweeted a picture on race morning proved, however, that was not the case. Hamilton was not fast enough through sector two - indeed his time through there on his final qualifying lap was 0.3secs slower than his best in the session.

The McLaren telemetry

Hamilton tweeted a photo of the McLaren telemetry, prompting a rebuke from his team.

That was the real reason why he was slower than Button in Spa qualifying - not the fact he was down on straight-line speed, which was always going to be the case once he went with the set-up he did.

It's worth pointing out in this context that Hamilton was also significantly slower than Button in final practice - a fact that led him to take the gamble on the different set-up.

How Hamilton would have fared in the race will never be known, because of the accident with Grosjean.

It was a scary moment - Grosjean's flying Lotus narrowly missed Alonso's head - and the incident underlined once again why F1 bosses are so keen to introduce some kind of more effective driver head protection in the future.

From the point of view of a disinterested observer, the only plus point of the accident, which also took out the two impressive Saubers, was that it has narrowed Alonso's lead in the championship. Vettel is now within a race victory of the Spaniard.

Despite this, to his immense credit, Alonso was a picture of measured calm after the race.

Invited to criticise Grosjean, he refused. Although, being the wise owl he is, he not only had at his fingertips the statistics of Grosjean's first-lap crashes this season, but slipped them into his answer.

"I am not angry [at Grosjean]," he said. "No-one did this on purpose, they were fighting, two aggressive drivers on the start, Lewis and Romain and this time it was us in the wrong place at the wrong time and we were hit.

"It's true also that in 12 races, Romain had seven crashes at the start, so..."

It was, Alonso pointed out, a good opportunity for governing body the FIA to make a point about driving standards this season, which Williams's Pastor Maldonado has also seemed to be waging a campaign to lower.

It was an opportunity the stewards did not decline.

Grosjean will now watch next weekend's Italian Grand Prix from the sidelines after being given a one-race suspension, the first time a driver has been banned since Michael Schumacher in 1994. Maldonado has a 10-place grid penalty for jumping the start and causing his own, independent, accident.

Earlier this year, triple world champion Jackie Stewart, who is an advisor to Lotus, offered to sit down with Grosjean and give him some advice about the way he approached his races.

Stewart is famous not only for his campaign for safety in F1 but also for his impeccable driving standards during his career. He has helped many drivers in his time, but Grosjean turned him down.

On Sunday evening, I was contacted by an old friend, the two-time winner of the Indianapolis 500 and former IndyCar champion Gil de Ferran, who was involved in F1 a few years ago as a senior figure in the Honda team.

That coaching, De Ferran said, "seems like a great idea".

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/09/smooth_button_masters_f1_great.html

Fernando Alonso Giovanna Amati George Amick Red Amick Chris Amon

Raikkonen favourite to taste victory in Belgium

At Spa-Francorchamps

In this remarkable season of unpredictability and uncertainty, of seven winners in 11 races, of the most open title battle in years, Formula 1 is still waiting for one big result.

A victory for the revived Lotus team has looked inevitable since the start of the year. And as the world championship re-starts in Belgium this weekend following a month-long summer break, the expectation is that this could be their race.

The car, from the team formerly known as Renault that won two world championships with Fernando Alonso in 2005-6, has been fast all season. Its best result has been four second places. But the momentum seems to be with them.

Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus pushed Lewis Hamilton's winning McLaren all the way in Hungary five weeks ago. The Finn has a stunning record at the stunning Spa-Francorchamps track that hosts this race and Lotus have been working on a technical trick that could give them a key advantage on the demanding track that swoops and twists around the contours of the Ardennes mountains.

Kimi Raikkonen

Kimi Raikkonen has won the Belgian Grand Prix four times. Photo: Getty

The 32-year-old Finn seems to have a special affinity with the circuit regarded as arguably the biggest test for a racing driver anywhere in the world. He has taken four victories here - and either won or retired from every single race he has competed at Spa since 2004.

Raikkonen's all-action style, based on fast corner entry in a car with good front-end bite, seems perfectly suited to Spa's cascade of long, fast corners.

Two of his wins - for McLaren in 2004 and Ferrari in 2009 - came in years when his machinery was otherwise uncompetitive. The other two were dominant victories from the front in 2005 and 2007.

But Raikkonen's position as arguably the favourite for victory this weekend is not founded just on his renowned Spa specialism. He is widely expected to have the car to do the job.

Lotus have come agonisingly close to victory twice already this year - in Bahrain in April and at the last race, in Hungary at the end of July.

Both times it was Raikkonen who challenged only to just fall short, behind Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain and Hamilton in Hungary. But the Finn, who returned to F1 this season after two unproductive years in world rallying, has actually been Lotus's weaker driver for most of the year.

His team-mate, the Franco-Swiss Romain Grosjean, who is in his first full season, has generally had a marginal advantage - to the point that around the European Grand Prix in Valencia at the end of June there were murmurings of dissatisfaction with the Finn, who won the world championship for Ferrari in 2007.

Raikkonen ultimately finished second to Alonso in Valencia, but had been off the pace of Grosjean all weekend - indeed the younger man was pushing the Ferrari hard when his alternator failed late in the race.

When, following the race, Raikkonen expressed his frustration at it taking so long for Lotus to win, one team member privately expressed the view that he would be better focused on beating Grosjean before moaning about not winning yet.

Since then, though, Raikkonen has upped his game and in the race in Hungary he was fantastic, the middle stint there that lifted him from fifth place to potential victor one of the most impressive pieces of driving all season.

Had Raikkonen not made a mess of qualifying, and taken the front row slot he should have earned rather than the fifth place he did, he might well have won. The same can be said of Bahrain, where a decision to save tyres for the race left him down in 11th place on the grid and with too much to do.

Grosjean, too, must be considered a potential Spa winner. Despite making too many errors, he has been all confidence and commitment this year.

He has looked a different driver on his return to F1 in 2012 from the haunted figure who was demoralised by Alonso during his first half-season at Renault in 2009, after which he was dropped.

The high expectations for Lotus at Spa are partly based on the car's inherent qualifies - a factor in its general competitiveness this year has been strong performance in fast corners, and Spa is full of them.

As well as that, though, is that innovation mentioned earlier. In Hungary, and in Germany the week before, Lotus trialled a clever system aimed at boosting the team's straight-line speed without compromising its performance in other areas.

Like the DRS overtaking aid featured on all the cars, the Lotus system affects the rear wing to reduce drag.

It works by channelling air from scoops behind the driver's head to the rear wing, which this extra air then 'stalls', reducing the downforce the wing creates and therefore its drag, boosting straight-line speed.

What is not clear is when exactly the Lotus system comes into play.

Is it independent of the DRS, as some believe, and therefore active above a pre-set car velocity and usable at all times, including in the race when DRS use is restricted to a specific zone?

Or is it, as BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson believes, linked to the DRS and simply an extra boost to the car's speed when that system is employed, like the system Mercedes have been using but without the inherent compromises that team have discovered?

Either way, it could be a significant boost to Lotus's chances in Spa. Lotus have yet to use the system outside free practice, and this weekend they will again try it out on Friday before making a decision whether to race it.

For all the talk of Lotus, though, a win for them is a very long way from a foregone conclusion. Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren will be as strong as ever on a track that should suit all their cars.

In fact, it will be a particularly interesting weekend all round.

Which teams have made best use of the mid-season break to develop their cars?

Have Ferrari made the step forward in performance they seemed in Hungary to need if Alonso - unquestionably the stand-out driver of the season so far - is to hang on to his championship lead?

Can McLaren maintain the upward momentum they showed in Germany and Hungary after a brief slump?

Will Red Bull finally unlock the potential of what has looked, on balance, overall the fastest car?

The climax of one of the sport's greatest seasons, a hyper-intense period of nine races in three months, starts here.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/08/raikkonen_favourite_to_taste_v.html

Jo Siffert Andre Simon Rob Slotemaker Moises Solana Alex SolerRoig

Pirelli changes tyre choices for Australia and Bahrain | 2013 F1 season

Pirelli changes tyre choices for Australia and Bahrain is an original article from F1 Fanatic. If this article has been published anywhere other than F1 Fanatic it is an infringement of copyright.

Pirelli has confirmed the tyre options for the first four races of the 2013 season.

Pirelli changes tyre choices for Australia and Bahrain is an original article from F1 Fanatic. If this article has been published anywhere other than F1 Fanatic it is an infringement of copyright.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/f1fanatic/~3/-zwWmP7bwD0/

Don Beauman Karl Gunther Bechem Jean Behra Derek Bell Stefan Bellof

Panis: Pic Happy With Van Der Garde

Former F1 racers Olivier Panis believes that Charles Pic is more than happy to be paired with Dutch rookie Giedo van der Garde at Caterham. Panis is heavily involved in the young Frenchman?s management team, helping him secure a seat with the green-and-gold outfit for 2013, following a spell at Marussia. He was expected to [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Formula1Fancast/~3/hh-PZWzExBE/panis-pic-happy-with-van-der-garde

Geoff Lees Gijs van Lennep Arthur Legat JJ Lehto Lamberto Leoni

Raikkonen favourite to taste victory in Belgium

At Spa-Francorchamps

In this remarkable season of unpredictability and uncertainty, of seven winners in 11 races, of the most open title battle in years, Formula 1 is still waiting for one big result.

A victory for the revived Lotus team has looked inevitable since the start of the year. And as the world championship re-starts in Belgium this weekend following a month-long summer break, the expectation is that this could be their race.

The car, from the team formerly known as Renault that won two world championships with Fernando Alonso in 2005-6, has been fast all season. Its best result has been four second places. But the momentum seems to be with them.

Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus pushed Lewis Hamilton's winning McLaren all the way in Hungary five weeks ago. The Finn has a stunning record at the stunning Spa-Francorchamps track that hosts this race and Lotus have been working on a technical trick that could give them a key advantage on the demanding track that swoops and twists around the contours of the Ardennes mountains.

Kimi Raikkonen

Kimi Raikkonen has won the Belgian Grand Prix four times. Photo: Getty

The 32-year-old Finn seems to have a special affinity with the circuit regarded as arguably the biggest test for a racing driver anywhere in the world. He has taken four victories here - and either won or retired from every single race he has competed at Spa since 2004.

Raikkonen's all-action style, based on fast corner entry in a car with good front-end bite, seems perfectly suited to Spa's cascade of long, fast corners.

Two of his wins - for McLaren in 2004 and Ferrari in 2009 - came in years when his machinery was otherwise uncompetitive. The other two were dominant victories from the front in 2005 and 2007.

But Raikkonen's position as arguably the favourite for victory this weekend is not founded just on his renowned Spa specialism. He is widely expected to have the car to do the job.

Lotus have come agonisingly close to victory twice already this year - in Bahrain in April and at the last race, in Hungary at the end of July.

Both times it was Raikkonen who challenged only to just fall short, behind Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain and Hamilton in Hungary. But the Finn, who returned to F1 this season after two unproductive years in world rallying, has actually been Lotus's weaker driver for most of the year.

His team-mate, the Franco-Swiss Romain Grosjean, who is in his first full season, has generally had a marginal advantage - to the point that around the European Grand Prix in Valencia at the end of June there were murmurings of dissatisfaction with the Finn, who won the world championship for Ferrari in 2007.

Raikkonen ultimately finished second to Alonso in Valencia, but had been off the pace of Grosjean all weekend - indeed the younger man was pushing the Ferrari hard when his alternator failed late in the race.

When, following the race, Raikkonen expressed his frustration at it taking so long for Lotus to win, one team member privately expressed the view that he would be better focused on beating Grosjean before moaning about not winning yet.

Since then, though, Raikkonen has upped his game and in the race in Hungary he was fantastic, the middle stint there that lifted him from fifth place to potential victor one of the most impressive pieces of driving all season.

Had Raikkonen not made a mess of qualifying, and taken the front row slot he should have earned rather than the fifth place he did, he might well have won. The same can be said of Bahrain, where a decision to save tyres for the race left him down in 11th place on the grid and with too much to do.

Grosjean, too, must be considered a potential Spa winner. Despite making too many errors, he has been all confidence and commitment this year.

He has looked a different driver on his return to F1 in 2012 from the haunted figure who was demoralised by Alonso during his first half-season at Renault in 2009, after which he was dropped.

The high expectations for Lotus at Spa are partly based on the car's inherent qualifies - a factor in its general competitiveness this year has been strong performance in fast corners, and Spa is full of them.

As well as that, though, is that innovation mentioned earlier. In Hungary, and in Germany the week before, Lotus trialled a clever system aimed at boosting the team's straight-line speed without compromising its performance in other areas.

Like the DRS overtaking aid featured on all the cars, the Lotus system affects the rear wing to reduce drag.

It works by channelling air from scoops behind the driver's head to the rear wing, which this extra air then 'stalls', reducing the downforce the wing creates and therefore its drag, boosting straight-line speed.

What is not clear is when exactly the Lotus system comes into play.

Is it independent of the DRS, as some believe, and therefore active above a pre-set car velocity and usable at all times, including in the race when DRS use is restricted to a specific zone?

Or is it, as BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson believes, linked to the DRS and simply an extra boost to the car's speed when that system is employed, like the system Mercedes have been using but without the inherent compromises that team have discovered?

Either way, it could be a significant boost to Lotus's chances in Spa. Lotus have yet to use the system outside free practice, and this weekend they will again try it out on Friday before making a decision whether to race it.

For all the talk of Lotus, though, a win for them is a very long way from a foregone conclusion. Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren will be as strong as ever on a track that should suit all their cars.

In fact, it will be a particularly interesting weekend all round.

Which teams have made best use of the mid-season break to develop their cars?

Have Ferrari made the step forward in performance they seemed in Hungary to need if Alonso - unquestionably the stand-out driver of the season so far - is to hang on to his championship lead?

Can McLaren maintain the upward momentum they showed in Germany and Hungary after a brief slump?

Will Red Bull finally unlock the potential of what has looked, on balance, overall the fastest car?

The climax of one of the sport's greatest seasons, a hyper-intense period of nine races in three months, starts here.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/08/raikkonen_favourite_to_taste_v.html

Hiroshi Fushida Beppe Gabbiani Bertrand Gachot Patrick Gaillard Divina Galica