MOTORSPORT: F1 gets into gear in Europe

Three Aussies among 33 drivers for Indianapolis 500
Formula One starts its “European season” this weekend in Barcelona. Australian eyes will be on Daniel Ricciardo and whether Red Bull Racing can close the gap to Mercedes, and whether Ricciardo can stay on top of Sebastian Vettel, who will have a different chassis. But Mercedes chief Toto Wolff reckons Ferrari is a bigger threat to his team that has won all four races so far this year than Red Bull.

There’s a two-day test at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya immediately after this GP at which Mercedes will trial a “megaphone” exhaust as a first step in F1’s attempt to placate fans peeved at the lack of noise from this year’s V6 hybrid cars.

Its seems Australia will have three drivers in this month’s Indianapolis 500 in America. Apart from IndyCar series leader Will Power with Team Penske and Ryan Briscoe with Chip Ganassi Racing, James Davison looks to have a deal to drive a fourth entry for KV Racing Technology. It will be the 33rd entry and virtually assured of a start in “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” on May 25, provided Davison does not badly damage the Chevrolet-powered car in practice or qualifying, because he will have no back-up machine.

This weekend there’s a new round in the IndyCar championship on a revamped road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, ahead of Indy 500 practice starting on the famed oval at the venue known as “The Brickyard”.

NASCAR is in Kansas for the 11th round of its Sprint Cup, there’s a World Touring Car Championship round in Slovakia too, while the World Rally Championship round in Argentina is underway with – surprise, surprise – France’s reigning world champion Sebastien Ogier in his Volkswagen Polo 3 seconds in front after the first “super special stage”, ahead of the Citroen DS3 of Norwegian Mads Ostberg. This event includes the longest stage of the season, almost 52km, which the field will cover twice as part of the full first leg.

Big changes are in the wind for the WRC next year, with plans for two long days of competition followed by a Sunday shootout involving the top 10 in head-to-head laps – a desperate attempt to increase rallying’s TV appeal. Participating manufacturers want the changes but may yet run into opposition from the rallying’s “old guard” officialdom.

Targa Tasmania is into its third of five days with South Australian Steve Glenney, winner of the tarmac rally in 2008, leading in his Nissan GT-R, ahead of Tasmania’s multiple winner (including the past two years), Jason White, in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX.             

And, five weeks from the Le Mans 24-Hour sports car classic now, Porsche is going testing at the Aragon circuit in Spain next week to assess new components on its 919 Hybrid after two front right driveshaft failures on the one Mark Webber co-drives in last weekend’s Spa Six-Hour in Belgium.

The Porsche team’s technical director, Alex Hitzinger, said the problem had cropped up even before the season-opening six-hour race at Silverstone in Britain at Easter and that a stronger driveshaft already was being made before Spa.

Red Bull Racing’s engine supplier Renault is hopeful of major progress in closing the gap on Mercedes. Renault’s head of track operations Remi Taffin said the company had made “significant improvements” to the software of its power unit “that should further enhance driveability and therefore overall performance”.

“We’ve made a huge amount of progress and this race may well show that the ‘engine race’ is a lot closer,” Taffin said.

“We have also moved forward in energy management and efficiency.”

Britain’s Autosport has published some calculations on the gap between the Mercs of championship leader Nico Rosberg and winner of the past three GPs Lewis Hamilton.

It rated Ferrari 0.801 per cent off the pace of the Mercedes factory team cars, Red Bull 0.883 per cent, Williams 1.200 per cent, McLaren 1.345 per cent and Lotus – so competitive over the past couple of years – only ninth among the 11 teams, 3.126 per cent away from Mercedes.

While the Catalunya circuit has a long main straight the teams agree that it is not going to be massively power-sensitive and that lap times will come from the best management of the new energy recovery and recycling systems and aerodynamics – traditionally Red Bull’s strong point.

Australian Daniel Ricciardo, in his first season in Red Bull’s premier team, has outqualified four-time world champion teammate Sebastian Vettel three times and the team has instructed the German to move aside for the Aussie in the past two races.

There have been suspicions that Vettel’s initial chassis may have had a fault in it and so he will have a different one this weekend – not new, but one used in pre-season testing (when the RB10 was hopelessly uncompetitive, although perhaps primarily because of deficiencies in its power unit).

Vettel said rear-end stability of his car had been an issue so far this season.

“In general I don’t mind when the rear is moving, I don’t mind oversteer, but if it is too much or its starts to bother you, and the car slides too much and you find yourself correcting rather than pushing and getting maximum out it slows you down,” Vettel said.

“That is part of the problems so far. It would be nice to have one problem and one fix behind it, but it is more complex this year – there are more factors than car set-up.”

Ricciardo has massively impressed Red Bull and the wider F1 community since his promotion from the drinks company’s junior team Toro Rosso and has shown an ability to make his tyres last longer than Vettel.

But he is continually careful to defuse talk aimed at fuelling rivalry between him and Red Bull’s established superstar Vettel, especially after the torrid relationship between the German and his previous Australian teammate Mark Webber.

“I want to race the best version of Seb and he wants to race the best version of me,” the diplomatic Ricciardo said this week.

Lewis Hamilton, four points behind Rosberg in the championship but the favourite to add a second world title to that he won with McLaren in 2008, is mindful of Red Bull’s aerodynamic strength ahead of this first European race.

“It depends what step they make, but the Red Bulls are at the back of my mind,” Hamilton said. “They have perhaps a little more downforce than us; they just don’t have as much power as us.

“This [Catalunya] is very much a downforce-dependent circuit so you’ll get a real good indication of how good their car is.”

But Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff thinks Ferrari rather than Red Bull will be the main challenger this season.

“Catalunya will prove how good our car really is, because we compete on ‘a Red Bull track’,” Wolff said.

“Red Bull’s progress in the recent races was extraordinary [after terrible pre-season testing form], so Catalunya will really be a benchmark for everyone.

“[But] Ferrari are the only other team [besides Mercedes] to have everything, car and powertrain, in-house.

“And I reckon [Fernando] Alonso to be a real race monster who can achieve everything.”

Alonso’s last victory was in Barcelona a year ago, from fifth on the grid and on a four-stop strategy, but he was on the podium in Shanghai three weeks ago, has put new teammate Kimi Raikkonen in the shade at Ferrari and is third in the championship.

“With Fernando we’ve seen an extraordinary level of performance, scavenging every possible point at every possible opportunity,” Ferrari technical director James Allison said.

But Spanish dual world champion Alonso is not giving any sign that he feels the sport’s most revered team can match Mercedes yet.

Seven drivers have won in Barcelona over the past eight years – but Hamilton is not among them.

Ten of the past 12 Spanish GPs have been won from pole position and 17 out of 23 at Catalunya.

Once this race is over the teams go into a two-day test ahead of the Monaco GP on May 25, with Mercedes to trial its new “megaphone” exhaust.

It is confident that the attachment it will use to amplify the sound of its V6 turbo engine will be enough to solve the problem F1’s commercial supremo, some track promoters and fans perceive with the new quiet power units.

But Renault’s Remi Taffin has declared that the powertrains must not be fundamentally altered because they were designed to be so energy-efficient.
  

Curiously though there is still no mention of this on the website of KV Racing, the team jointly-owned by expatriate Australian venture capitalist Kevin Kalkhoven and former IndyCar racer Jimmy Vasser.

The team already had three drivers entered for the May 25 classic – Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais, Colombian Sebastian Saveedra and American Townsend Bell.

The Indianapolis Star described the Davison entry as “a budget-conscious program” and said he “won’t start practising until the middle of next week” – while the rest of the field will begin immediately after this weekend’s new road race at The Brickyard. The paper also quoted Davison saying he would take a conservative approach at the notoriously unforgiving 2.5-mile (4km) rectangular speedway because he would not have a back-up car.

While he will be a rookie in America’s greatest open-wheeler race, Davison has won at The Brickyard before – nine years ago on the previous road course in a Formula BMW support race to the now-defunct F1 GP there – and has raced there in Indy Lights too.

Two internationally high-profile Indy 500 winners, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya, are back in the field this year, meaning Villeneuve will miss the second round of the new Rallycross World Championship in Britain, but there is only one woman among the 33 entries this time – Britain’s Pippa Mann.

Five newcomers – Russian Mikhail Aleshin, Britons Jack Hawksworth and Martin Plowman, Colombian Carlos Huertas and American Sage Karam – have passed the rookie test.

NASCAR driver Kurt Busch had passed that test previously but not participated in the 500. This year Busch is intending to race there and then fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the Sprint Cup night race, and was allowed to practice at Indianapolis with the five pure rookies.

Busch is one of five drivers for Andretti Autosport’s Honda-powered team.