Geoffrey Harris•12 Apr 2013

NEWS

MOTORSPORT: Forget the niceties, it's no-holds-barred

The gloves are off in the great F1 stoush as Vettel digs in, while across the Tasman the flying Kiwis stand between Craig Lowndes and a record win

Vettel v Webber return bout in Shanghai, Aussies v Kiwis in NZ

After all the apologies it’s now plain that Sebastian Vettel isn’t at all sorry for taking the Malaysian Grand Prix win off Mark Webber three weeks ago.

And there won’t be any team orders to breach from now on, the most powerful motorsport figure in the Red Bull camp, Dr Helmut Marko, has declared in the lead-up to Sunday’s Chinese GP in Shanghai.

Vettel won’t be at all sorry about that.

And New Zealand’s suddenly super-competitive touring car drivers won’t be offering any apologies if they whip the Aussies in the V8 Supercar round at the revamped Pukekohe near Auckland.

Fabian Coulthard is a multiple victor already in that championship since the introduction of the Car of the Future six weeks ago, Shane van Gisbergen also is a winner, while 19-year-old Scott McLaughlin has the most points of the trio without winning a race or even standing on the podium.

While Craig Lowndes has another chance in Pukekohe’s four 100km sprints to break the record he shares with the retired Mark Skaife for the most race wins (90), each of the Kiwis is intent on claiming the Jason Richards Trophy named in memory of their countryman who died of cancer 16 months ago.

None of the top three drivers in the championship – Jamie Whincup, Will Davison and James Courtney – has won a race yet this season.

Lowndes is fourth after a dud round in Tasmania last weekend, while McLaughlin is fifth after a string of top 10 finishes. Coulthard is seventh and Van Gisbergen ninth.

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup is in Texas this weekend after Aussie Marcos Ambrose’s first top 10 finish of the year at Martinsville, Virginia, while it’s the fourth round of the World Rally Championship in Portugal, with new manufacturer participant Volkswagen’s championship leader Sebastien Ogier – a two-time winner of the event with Citroen – under the weather with a heavy virus.

Next week, from Tuesday to Sunday, it’s Australia’s major tarmac rally – Targa Tasmania.

Swords drawn in Red Bull F1 camp

Now that there has been plenty of time to reflect on the events of the Malaysian GP, and Red Bull Racing’s team principal Christian Horner’s efforts to defuse the kerfuffle between his drivers, Sebastian Vettel has made it clear he won’t settle for finishing behind Mark Webber.

And while Helmut Marko’s declaration that there will be no team orders will be seen as a change in the official stance it really is only a reiteration of statements Red Bull tycoon Dietrich Mateschitz has often made in off-seasons: that Vettel and Webber are free to race, provided they don’t collide and deny the team the most points possible.

While Mateschitz has been reported to have been “very unhappy” about what happened in Malaysia he won’t have been at all displeased at the exposure it has brought his drink brand – and the team still finished first and second. The order of finishing can hardly have mattered to him.

The Vettel who got so contrite in the hours after the chequered flag at Sepang and went to Red Bull Racing’s base in Britain a couple of days later to apologise to the entire team arrived in Shanghai taking a much different stance, saying he would do the same thing – overtake Webber in the closing laps – again in the same situation.

“I don’t apologise for winning. I think that’s why people employed me in the first place and why I’m here. I love racing, so that’s what I do,” he said.

“I was racing (in Malaysia). I was faster (although Webber had backed off, under team instructions). I passed him. I won.

“I don’t consider myself the bad guy.”

Now the Webber camp won’t have liked hearing that, and perhaps won’t have been surprised by it.

“If that’s what he thinks then that’s what he thinks,” Webber has said.

Vettel may not be the good guy that Webber is, but history has shown him – unpalatable as it may be to Australian fans – to be the superior racer and he has hit the nail on the head: racing drivers should be racing to win. Like jockeys, they should be riding their mounts on their merits to the finish line.

Many will argue that a large part of F1 is team sport, but the greater, overwhelmingly consideration ought to be that paying spectators and TV viewers, many millions of those paying now to watch GPs telecast live, see racing – not arranged finishes.

Vettel has had much more to say in Shanghai but it all is essentially the same: that he wants to drive to win races. He is not prepared to play second fiddle to Webber – and, as a triple world champion, why should he? – and he reckons that there have been numerous instances of Webber being less than supportive to him.

Without spelling it out, Vettel’s attitude appears to be that if Red Bull won’t allow him to drive to win he could go elsewhere to do it.

Ferrari understandably has always been interested in him, although it has Fernando Alonso on a long-term contract and a pairing of them might not work well.

But a McLaren seat, either with a Mercedes engine behind it next year or likely a Honda the year after, could be enticing to him – and McLaren. So too could a drive at the Mercedes team for a German driver and German manufacturer.

Webber has said he will talk to Mateschitz during the northern summer as usual about whether he goes on with Red Bull next year.

It seems impossible that he and Vettel could remain teammates beyond this season, and Marko makes no secret that Red Bull is interested in luring Kimi Raikkonen away from Lotus.

But any notion that Webber would walk away from Red Bull in the immediate aftermath of Malaysia was nonsense. If nothing else, as ex-F1 driver Alex Wurz points out, “he has a double-digit-millions salary to help him deal with the pain”.

"If he believes another team could serve him better then he should say goodbye but at the moment I think he has to swallow the bitter pill," Wurz has said. "At the end of the day he is on a team with which he can celebrate successes.

“If he is lucky and Vettel is not maybe he could even win the title. Otherwise he plays second fiddle, earns good money and is one of the stars of the show. Easy!"

Webber has said that he has had “a good break” since Malaysia, surfing in Australia and on the team’s simulator, and is hungry to get back on the track.

“I want to put together a strong campaign and challenge for more wins,” he said.

Having led more laps than any driver in the first two GPs of this season, Webber could chalk up his 100th finish in the points at Shanghai. And perhaps his 10th win. But he need not count on any help from Vettel.

Back to the future for V8s at Pukekoke

New Zealand has an enhanced permanent circuit out of the massive financial flop that was the Hamilton street event for five years and the return to Pukekohe on Auckland’s southern outskirts, where about $6 million was spent on improvements ahead of this weekend’s V8 Supercar Championship round.

More than half the field will be racing there – in V8 Supercars at least (including Van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin) – for the first time.

One of the major changes in the upgrade has been the addition of two corners in the back straight.

The old Pukekohe was very much a Holden circuit. Of 21 V8 Supercar Championship races there between 2001 and 2007 Commodores won 20 – and Kiwi Greg Murphy a heap of those, although these days he is relegated to an endurance season co-drive and participant in NZ’s V8 SuperTourer series. The one Ford win was by Marcos Ambrose in 2004.

After all races in last year’s championship were won by Triple Eight Race Engineering and Ford Performance Racing’s four drivers, the five races so far this season already have produced four winners – Craig Lowndes for Triple Eight, Shane Van Gisbergen for Tekno Autosports, Fabian Coulthard (twice) and Jason Bright for Brad Jones Racing.

Neither Triple Eight nor its drivers, Lowndes and Jamie Whincup, have ever won at Pukekohe. And Triple Eight boss Roland Dane does not shy away from his Commodores not having the ultimate speed of the BJR cars at the moment.

Coulthard said the new machinery under the Car of the Future rules has leveled the playing field among the bigger-budget and more modestly-funded teams.

“A clean sheet of paper has been a fantastic improvement for us (at BJR),” he said.

“Jamie Whincup (series champion in four of the past five seasons) hasn’t won in over 12 races now.

“It’s been a good turn of events for the Kiwis – and we just want to keep that rolling.”

Youngster McLaughlin said Pukekohe was a circuit that “rewards the brave”.

The New Zealanders will be prepared to brave it in the chase for the Jason Richards Trophy.

Success appears a long way off though for new players Nissan and Erebus Motorsport with its AMG-Mercedes.

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MOTORSPORT: Forget the niceties, it's no-holds-barred

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