Clever diffuser design for Ferrari

On the third day of testing in Jerez, Felipe Massa managed to climb to the top of the timesheets, with a clear message to the rivals.

On Tuesday, the Brazilian driver, who will stay alongside Fernando Alonso for this year´s campaign, said that the new F138 was on a different planet, commenting on how different the feel and drive was, compared to the 2012 car. And the results didn´t fail to show.

Massa clocked a time at 1:17.879, more than a second faster than Nico Rosberg for Mercedes. And though no clear image can be made from testing, the new diffuser on the Ferrari might have a thing to do with the pace.

According to Massa, the new F138 doesn´t have the corner or traction issues the old car had, and said the 2013 was very different to handle, unlikelast year´s car. Ferrari had a slow start to the 2012 campaign, but will be looking to improve in 2013.

Ferrari F138 revealed – gallery inside

British Grand Prix – The Day After

We are nearing the halfway mark of the season and the British Grand Prix on Sunday threw up another few surprises.

After a fantastic aggressive start from Fernando Alonso, and I have to say from Mark Webber too, because starts are not is forté, it looked as if Alonso might take this win too and make it two in a row. But those tyres…

Alonso pitted from the lead on lap 15, he had started the race on the hard compound, but surprisingly the harder compound didn´t seem to last much longer than the soft. Mark Webber started on soft tyres, which lasted 14 laps, so the gap of performance are so tight and the difference between the two compounds really small. comparing the two drivers and we see that Webber managed 19 laps on his hard tyres, after the first stop, then pitted for another hard tyre on lap 33, while Alonso managed 21 laps on his second set of hard. So at the end, we knew that Alonso needed soft tyres, but for some reason they couldn´t hold for the remainder of the race, despite the fuel load decreasing. Another thing that surprised, was McLaren´s tyre strategy for Hamilton. He pitted on lap 21 from hard to soft tyres, and was told to give it all. The problem was that the field was stretched out a little too far for Hamilton to capitalize on this and on his faster soft tyres he managed only to overtake Michael Schumacher for one position. He then pitted after just seven laps, came back out as 12th and ended the race in 8th place. Still, no matter how you look at it, Pirelli gave us another exciting race.

With the win at Silverstone, his second here, Webber is now carefully positioning himself as Red Bull´s best bet for a champion. We have heard him say, that he is driving for himself and that he will do everything it takes to win. There is also the added element of him being a, shall we say, grown man. He is 36 in a month and a half and if he doesn´t win this year´s championship, then what? He´s fast, reliable and consistent this year, while Sebastian Vettel seems to be having a little post of trouble from time to time.

But who did the best job on Sunday? Who surprised us and who failed?

Driver of the Day: Felipe Massa

I am so happy to give this one to Felipe Massa, after what has seem to be race after race of frustrations and finishing well away from the points, despite team mate Alonso getting a lot more out of the car. Of course there is the issue of personal driver set-up and for all we know, Massa needs the car to react very differently than Alonso. We know the car is a handful and can be tricky to get the most out of it, but his performance at Silverstone was aggressive, fast and calculated. It was a real joy to watch him. Great job.

The Oh No Not Again Award: Jenson Button

Seriously, what is going on at the moment? From what I´ve been told, Button is annoyed that he can´t tweak the car to his liking. He is a very smooth driver and is a very good tyre management driver, but I fear the ground model McLaren made has proven too hard to set-up. It´s like if you make a base model and then you know that as the season progresses you can bring updates. But I think that McLaren are really scratching their heads at this moment, because Button has always been able to get a lot out of a car that doesn´t perform 100%, but perhaps the base model is just not good enough? So the gap from the base model to the options the drivers have to adjust it to their individual settings, ie. Button´s, are just too large. I don´t know, but I am sorry to say that this championship is over for Button.

Driver Responsible For Putting More Action In The Championship: Mark Webber

You would have expected me to give Webber the Driver of the Day award, but even though he had a great race, I don´t think it can be labelled as the best of the day. I didn´t see much aggressiveness from him, but of course winning a race, is still winning a race. Did he deserve the win? Absolutely. As you can read below, this championship is not about who is starting from pole, or who has the fastest car. Ferrari has won two races with Alonso, and five podiums in total, in a car that´s basically not that fast. The Red Bull is the car to beat, but the tyres play such a big part that the usual driver set-ups can be thrown out the window. That´s why we haven´t seen Vettel go from win to win, but the reason Webber is winning, is due to his determination and his will. Whenever things aren´t going great for Vettel, he isn´t winning. Unless he is in front, he will have a tough time winning the race. So thank you Mark!

Worst Driver of the Day: Pastor Maldonado

Winning one race doesn´t give you permission to crash into others. Granted, the incident in Valencia wasn´t his fault, but I can think of a few that was. And if we look away from F1 and the other series he has participated in, he has a story of dangerous driving. In 2005, when racing in the World Series by Renault. In Monaco he failed to slow down for yellow flags after an accident, and seriously injured a marshal. And in GP2 he picked up a penalty for speeding in the pitlane at Silverstone, then another penalty for passing under yellow flags, then crashed into Adrian Vallés and Kamui Kobayashi on the final lap. And in F1, when at Spa in 2011, he and Lewis Hamilton had another run-in, after squeezing Hamilton during the qualifying session, for which he received a five-place penalty, in Abu Dhabi he ignored blue flags twice. In the opening race of this season, Maldonado crashed while fighting for points, in Monaco he was penalised with a ten-place grid penalty for a collision with Sergio Perez in a practice session, only to top off the weekend by hitting Pedro de la Rosa´s HRT and retired. In Canada, he crashed his car into the Wall of Champions, and finally at Silverstone last weekend, he collided with Sergio Perez, again, retiring the Sauber and finished 16th. Maldonado was given a reprimand and a fine of €10,000 with two penalties given due to the “serious nature” of the incident. So sorry for my lack of enthusiasm about this guy.

With the championship so unpredictable, when a surprise winner emerges I would say that his talent plays second fiddle. I am not saying that the drivers aren´t talented enough, absolutely not. I am saying that there is a very good reason we had seven different winners in the first seven races. When Maldonado won in Spain, it had more to do with the set-up, the tyres, the conditions, luck, than it had to do with his talent.

 

Vettel not leaving Red Bull

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has reiterated that his double world champion is not going anywhere.

For weeks the rumours have been ripe about Sebastian Vettel´s alleged pre-signing with Maranello to join Ferrari in 2014, in fact so much so that there is apparently already a contract in place and it is just a matter of time before Vettel can make the transition.

But now Christian Horner is commenting on the rumours, insisting that Vettel is staying put.

“I have spoken with Sebastian about it and he’s made it quite clear that he hasn’t had any dialogue and hasn’t signed anything with Ferrari,” Horner told Reuters. “The rumour mill always will continue.”

Horner´s comments has come at a time when not only Vettel has been rumoured to leave Red Bull for Ferrari, but also team mate Mark Webber has been linked with a move, after this season, to replace Felipe Massa.

“I think most of our team has been going to Ferrari at some point this year, whether it be Adrian [Newey], Mark [Webber], Sebastian, even myself at one stage was supposed to be going.

“Sebastian is very comfortable in the team, the team is very comfortable with Sebastian. He’s been with Red Bull for over 12 years now and I think he will be us for quite a few years to come. I have no concern over Sebastian and where he will be in 2013, 2014 or beyond.”

Vettel´s Ferrari rumuours gather speed

Once again a news outlet has claimed that Sebastian Vettel, the current double world champion, will in fact move on to Ferrari soon.

It has long been rumoured that the 24-year old double world champion, the youngest in history, is number one candidate on a very short list of potential drivers for the Italian marquee, and now Italian TV station Mediaset Italia claims that a deal has already been reached between Vettel and Ferrari, to bring him to Maranello for 2014.

It´s bcertainly not the first time we see rumours appear, that the deal is already done, but Mediaset Italia believes they also know how much the team will pay to have the German switch to them, and how.

First off, Vettel is under contract with Red Bull until the end of 2013, but team mate Mark Webber is supposedly a free agent from next year. Ferrari are interested in getting Sergio Perez from Sauber, a member of the Ferrari Academy, but they feel the Mexican needs one more year to mature, before he joins. Perez would then take the seat belonging to Felipe Massa for 2014, Massa would switch back to Sauber, and for 2013 Mark Webber would fill Massa´s seat, if and when the Brazilian should be cut from the team.

But now with Sebastian Vettel in the mix, all bets are off. Naturally there is a reason Vettel comes with a massive price tag. Two titles and a huge talent is mouth-watering for any high profile team, so what now? According to Mediaset Italia, Mark Webber will replace Massa for 2013, in exchange for a €5m, £4m,  paycheck for that one year, and then he will move away or retire his career to make room for Vettel for 2014 Vettel has reportedly been offered €15m, or £12m, per season and will run until the end of the 2016 campaign, a time when Fernando Alonso´s current contract is also up.

 

Alonso: It´s like a cold shower

Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa are not at all happy with their qualifying performance on Saturday afternoon, when they only managed to finish 11th and 13th respectively.

In what became a very close fight for pole, all three qualifying sessions threw up different pole leaders and no certain winner was i sight until the very last minute, when Sebastian Vettel smoked the opposition by clearing more than three tenths off the pace and qualify for his third pole in Valencia.

Speaking about their qualifying session, Alonso and Massa were clearly disappointed, especially, as both drivers feel that the progress made with  the car has been positive and it also felt better to drive.

“When you don’t qualify for Q3, it’s obviously very sad and there’s no point hiding the fact,” said Alonso.

“This result is a cold shower, because our expectations were high and the car’s potential has also increased, to the extent that in Q2, we were only three tenths off the best. It’s easy to say now that with two runs on Softs in Q2 we would have made the cut, but maybe now we would be here lamenting the fact that we did not have two for Q3: it’s always easy to judge things after the fact. However, we were not quick enough to be in the top ten in the second part of qualifying and now the race will naturally be tougher.

“The podium is out of reach and clearly, with Hamilton on the front row, it’s easy to expect that we will lose ground to him. However, the race will be very long and will be run in even higher temperatures than today’s, which means everyone will have to be very careful when it comes to tyre management. Let’s hope that, starting from the clean side of the track I can quickly make up a few places and then we will try to also make the most of the two sets of new Softs we have left: that’s at least a small consolation after this far from positive afternoon.”

Team mate Felipe Massa, who has been under fire all through 2011 and 2012 so far for his performance, agreed that the cars are capable of much more, and that the qualifying results does not give a clear picture of the potential possible.

“It’s really frustrating ending up outside Q3 by less than a tenth,” said Massa.

“It was a very close qualifying, with so many drivers very near to one another in performance terms: in Q2, we were three tenths off the fastest time and we were eliminated…A shame because the feeling from the car was very good and I always felt comfortable and capable of fighting with the best. The position does not tell the truth: today we were worth a place in the top three rows. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that if we had used two sets of Soft in Q2, we could have made the cut, but we wanted to be in the best possible shape for Q3 and Q1 had shown that we were even quick on the Medium tyre.

“Tomorrow, strategy will play a very important role and we have seen on several occasions – Canada being the last one – how even those who start from the back have a chance of fighting for the top places. Obviously, we are not happy today, but we know we have a good car and we still have every chance of securing a good result.”

Report: Vettel has signed with Ferrari

A possible bombshell has rocked the F1 community, as two British newspapers claims that Sebastian Vettel has already signed a deal to join Ferrari from 2014.

Both The Independent and The Sunday Times claims that double reigning world champion Sebastian Vettel have already signed a pre-contract with the Ferrari team to join them for 2014. Both reports are separate of each other.

“Insiders are adamant that the German has signed an option with Ferrari for 2014, subject to competitive form from the Prancing Horse stable for the rest of 2012,” said the Independent.

Vettel´s team mate, Mark Webber, has just won the Monaco rand Prix, his second victory in the principality, as the Aussie also took a win fro Red Bull here in 2010. Webber has been heavily rumoured to be replacing Felipe Massa for 2013, but only for one season in order to make room for Sergio Perez for 2014.

The Times commented:

“It is not known whether the Vettel option is binding on either side, but if there is a one-year Ferrari vacancy for 2013, it strengthens the case for Webber being the man to fill it.”

Top 3 driver´s quotes

Jenson Button, Romain grosjean and Felipe Massa, finished 1-2-3 in the second practice session in Monaco on Thursday afternoon. Here are some of their thoughts.

Jenson Button:
“The most important job today was to try and get a decent high-fuel long-run on the Supersoft tyre – which I don’t think anyone managed. We’ve got to see how the tyre works because its performance will play a considerable role in the race. Still, it was nice to briefly stick that tyre on and see how much grip it has – that gives you a bit of information to look over before Saturday, even though we’ll still get to run that compound again before qualifying. I definitely feel like the car improved from P1 to P2. We tried something different for this afternoon’s session and I was happier with how the car felt. There’s still room for improvement, but we know what direction we want to take.”

Romain Grosjean:
“I think the car is suiting the track pretty well and I love Monaco, it’s good to be here and it’s nice to see so many fans. The car was looking good this morning and this afternoon – we are working in a good direction. Unfortunately it was a bit wet this afternoon and we couldn’t do all the programme we wanted to achieve but as we have a good baseline it shouldn’t be such a big deal. Let’s see what the weather will be like tomorrow and what we can achieve. I think that we are looking good in both conditions.”

Felipe Massa:
“We weren’t able to do as much running as we would have liked because of the light rain that fell this afternoon, but all the same, I am happy with the way things went on this Monaco Thursday. The car seemed to me to be okay right from the start of the first session, with a good balance in all conditions and with slightly better traction than we had expected. Even when we ran the intermediates in the final part of the second session, the feeling was still positive. As for the tyres, we didn’t even fit the supersoft, therefore we can’t say anything about their behaviour, while the softs worked well, also in terms of their degradation. Sure, there is still plenty of work to do to fine tune all the set-up details, but we have an extra day to think about what to do to improve in this area. It’s hard to make predictions about qualifying and, even more so for the race, but definitely we can say the first day of free practice can be considered a positive one.”