MOTORSPORT: Gongs of 2015

It was the season Lewis Hamilton became a triple Formula 1 world champion, emulating his idol Ayrton Senna and overtaking the late Brazilian’s 41 Grand Prix victories.

Hamilton’s 10 wins in 2015 have taken him to third on the all-time list, trailing only the still-seriously-injured Michael Schumacher (91) and Alain Prost (51).

Sebastian Vettel’s three triumphs in his first season at a Ferrari team reborn after its worst season in two decades boosted him to 42, one more than Senna.

This has been the year too that Mark Webber eventually became a world champion – indeed, an official champion in any form of car racing. His title came in sports car racing, after the ultimate honour eluded him in a 12-year F1 career.

On home soil Mark Winterbottom finally clinched the V8 Supercar Championship after a decade of trying.

Craig Lowndes became the first Australian to win a century of touring car/V8 Supercar races, including a sixth Bathurst 1000. He now has 103 victories but ended up the championship 'bridesmaid' for the fifth time since his three titles in the 1990s.

Winterbottom won nine races in the last season of Ford’s support of what had been its factory team but had already transitioned from Ford Performance Racing to Prodrive Racing Australia.

Not only did 'Frosty' deliver to the couldn’t-care-less Blue Oval its first V8 Supercar crown in five years, but teammate Chaz Mostert was his main rival until his Bathurst crash, and David Reynolds, another teammate although in different colours, finished third in the championship.

Jamie Whincup, champion six times in the previous seven seasons, ended up with eight wins (and a career total of 97) after a late surge, giving Holden 19 for the championship – including 12 of the last 13 races, and a sixth straight manufacturers’ title – to Ford’s 16.

The only victory this year by any of the other three makes that have come into V8 Supercars in the more open era introduced in 2013 was Will Davison’s success for Betty Klimenko’s privateer Mercedes outfit. None for Volvo after four in its 2014 debut season, while Nissan’s only victory remains that at Winton three years ago on E70 fuel rather than the usual E85.

Although Germany's F1 event fell over because of crippling costs, in the three major world championships German makes dominated. Mercedes won 16 of 19 GPs, as it did the previous season in the first year of the V6 hybrids, but this time with one more one-two finishes – 12 by Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, the latter leading the way in the final three races for a total of six victories for the season.

Porsche claimed the World Endurance Championship, winning the last six rounds – starting with the Le Mans 24-Hour, although that was by a third 919 Hybrid rather than its regular two – after Audi took the first two rounds.

And Volkswagen continued its annihilation in the World Rally Championship, winning 12 of 13 rounds, its third straight manufacturer title and Sebastien Ogier clinched his hat-trick of driver crowns with victory in Rally Australia at Coffs Harbour.

BMW claimed the constructors’ trophy in the DTM – the German touring car championship – ahead of Audi, although champion driver Pascal Wehrlein was in a Mercedes.

Citroen blitzed Honda in the World Touring Car Championship, but the Japanese manufacturer came out on top in Britain.

Petter Solberg completed back-to-back World Rallycross Championship successes in a Citroen ‘Supercar’, without serious manufacturer support, while Scott Speed claimed the Global Rallycross Championship, predominantly in the US, in a VW Beetle for one of the many arms of the Andretti family’s operation ahead of teammate Tanner Foust. Efforts to revive rallycross in Australia flopped though.

Chevrolet claimed its 13th straight manufacturer title in NASCAR, while in IndyCar it made it four in a row – every year since it re-entry as an engine supplier.

Roger Penske’s drivers Joey Logano and Juan Pablo Montoya won America’s two biggest races, the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500, yet missed out on the drivers’ titles.

Kyle Busch miraculously became the first winner of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup in a Toyota since the Japanese manufacturer entered the series in 2007, while Scott Dixon snatched the IndyCar crown from Montoya on a countback after winning the double-points final race in which the Colombian harmed his cause in a collision with teammate Will Power.

Australia’s first IndyCar champion in 2014, Power slipped to third this year with just one race victory, but he came within 0.15 seconds and five metres of winning ‘The Greatest Spectacle in Racing’, the Indy 500.

Two podiums was the best Daniel Ricciardo could do in F1 – third in Hungary and second in Singapore – with the underpowered Renault in his Red Bull RB11 after his stunning 2014 produced three GP victories.

It was the first season since 2008 that RBR did not win a race.
Ricciardo dropped from third to eighth in the drivers’ world championship and finished with three points less than his first-year teammate Daniil Kyvat, but he set the fastest lap at three GPs.

Apart from the scintillating form of Max Verstappen, the youngest driver in GP history at 17 on debut in Melbourne in March and who quickly made some spectacular overtakes, F1 had little to commend it in 2015. It was easily the worst season of GP racing for more than a decade, and it may be a while yet before we see better from it – and Ricciardo.

At home another West Australian, Tony Ricciardello, was formally acknowledged as the ‘Driver of the Decade’ in sports sedan racing – even as the country’s most successful circuit racing champion – after his ninth national title.

A couple of kids, Liam McAdam and Alex Rullo, emerged through the Kumho V8 touring car series at the Shannons Nationals as potential V8 Supercar stars.

Young talent also was on show in the new Formula 4, in particular Queenslander Jordan Lloyd and Victorians Thomas Randle and Luis Leeds, the latter a schoolboy who won a support race at the Mexican GP and has been included in Red Bull’s junior squad which groomed Vettel and Ricciardo for F1.

We had other young open-wheeler winners overseas – Joey Mawson in Europe, Scott Andrews in America and Britain and Jordan Love in Asia. However, Anton De Pasquale’s international quest has ended after two years, crippled by the sheer cost.

Formula E – international electric open-wheeler racing – hasn’t sparked great interest and is largely a home for drivers discarded from F1, with Nelson Piquet Junior its first champion.

GT racing has gained further traction, especially in Australia through the Bathurst 12-Hour, while a German, Chris Mies in an Audi, won the national championship – which concluded in New Zealand!

Australian drag racing is in turmoil, but overseas Aussie Richie Crampton won five rounds of the world’s major series in the US and finished third in the points.

In speedway Kerry Madsen was runner-up to nine-time winner Donny Schatz at the Knoxville Nationals in America, while at home Jamie Veal is the coming man on the dirt ovals.

The motorsport year overall had too much sadness though.

French F1 driver Jules Bianchi succumbed to his head injuries nine months after his crash in Japan, while Brit Justin Wilson was killed by flying debris in IndyCar.

And Australia lost a legend – Frank Matich, elite as a driver and constructor of sports and open-wheel cars, died in Sydney at 80.

Best race cars of 2015
Porsche conquered Le Mans and the world in just its second year back in top-level sports car racing with its 919 Hybrid. The 2015 version was 30kg lighter and had an improved drivetrain on that which won just one race in the previous World Endurance Championship.

Its 2.0-litre V4 turbocharged petrol engine and powerful energy recovery systems combined to produce about 1000 horsepower and phenomenal acceleration, while Audi’s turbocharged 4.0-litre V6 diesel R18 e-tron quattro’s strength was in high-speed cornering.

At Le Mans the 919 Hybrid recouped and re-used eight megajoules of energy a lap – enough to supply a family home with electricity for three months. Audi had dominated there this century, but this was Porsche’s 17th outright victory in the classic – extending the record it already held despite its long layoff.

Toyota, the WEC’s 2014 champion manufacturer, didn’t win a race this time around with its 3.7-litre V8s.

Mercedes had set the bar in the first season of F1’s V6 hybrids and improved on its near-perfect performance in 2015 with its W06 model. Even though Ferrari narrowed the gap with its SF15-T, after a massive shake-up of personnel, the 275 points by which Mercedes won the constructors’ championship represented the equivalent of more than another six one-two finishes.

Apart from winning all but one round of the WRC, VW’s Polo R set the fastest time on 159 of 231 stages in the season. It is the most successful model in WRC history and continues to prove itself top of the class on all surfaces.

The Ford FG X V8 Supercar developed by Prodrive Racing Australia deserves an honourable mention, even though Holden’s Commodore VF – primarily those built by Triple Eight Race Engineering rather than Holden Racing Team – consistently beat it in the last third of the season. Lighter and with more rear-end grip than its predecessor, the FG X enabled Mark Winterbottom to break his title duck – a tribute to PRA’s efforts much more than those of Ford.

Red Bull F1 chiefs complained endlessly about Renault’s power unit, only to have to swallow their pride and stay with the French company for another year – albeit with TAG-Heuer badging in 2016 on what surely will be an improved package.

As unaccustomed as Red Bull was to not having success, it displayed a sense of entitlement to a better power unit without having invested in one, the RB11 was not as bad as portrayed. While not a match for the top two Mercedes teams, or Ferrari, Red Bull Racing did better than two other teams with the mighty Mercedes power units.

Best race team
Cases could be made for Porsche in the WEC and Mercedes, or even the greatly-improved Ferrari, in F1, but – all things considered – we think it’s Roger Penske’s outfit in the US, with Ford in NASCAR and Chevrolet in IndyCar.

Joey Logano won six Sprint Cup races, more than any other driver – including the Daytona 500 and all three in the second round of ‘The Chase for the Championship’, then was wrecked by Matt Kenseth in a payback at Martinsville Speedway while on the way to a fourth straight victory.

That cost him a spot as one of the last four title contenders. Sixth in the final standings did not properly reflect Logano’s season and Penske’s other NASCAR driver, 2012 champion Brad Keselowski, was next. So both Penske stock car drivers still in the top seven of the world’s most competitive race series.

Juan Pablo Montoya delivered Penske’s 16th Indianapolis 500 victory and, failing to finish only once because of mechanical failure, led the IndyCar series all the way, only to lose to Scott Dixon because of the contentious double points at the final round.

He had to settle for runner-up, with teammates Will Power and Helio Castroneves third and fifth.

The Penske organisation’s class showed through, with The Captain’s lieutenant, Tim Cindric, saying: “This business is so dynamic that spending a lot of time looking at the past and licking your wounds really isn’t productive.”

These are all great portents for Penske’s future in V8 Supercar racing after a modest debut year since buying into Dick Johnson Racing. Scott Pye is a talent and notched a podium at New Zealand’s Pukekohe late in the season and now is joined by Fabian Coulthard as DJR Penske expands to two cars.

Surprise of the Year
The most delightful moment on Australian soil was diminutive Japanese driver Katsumasa Chiyo’s audaciousness in the sprint to the chequered flag of the Bathurst 12-Hour after the last of 21 safety car periods.

Chiyo had fouled up the previous year and in Saturday’s qualifying, yet when the crunch came on that Sunday afternoon in February he was unstoppable, charging past a Bentley Continental and an Audi R8-LMS Ultra for a thrilling and hugely-popular victory in a Nissan GT-R more than two decades after Bathurst fans had booed earlier 'Godzilla' conquests. Chiyo’s European computer-gamer graduate co-drivers Wolfgang Reip and Florian Strauss did their bit early in the enduro too.

Further afield, Max Verstappen’s debut year in F1 with Red Bull’s junior team Toro Rosso was nothing short of sensational. The Dutch teenager wasn’t even eligible for a road licence until late in the season. So concerned was the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) at the outset about his youth and lack of experience that it legislated against a repeat.

Yet 10 times Verstappen scored world championship points,  consistently in the second half of the season. In Hungary and the US he finished fourth, but it was his daring passes that quickly became his trademark – most memorably around the outside of Felipe Nasr through Spa’s Blanchimont turn at about 300kmh. Mind-blowing!

Disappointment of the Year
It has to be Marcos Ambrose’s short-lived return to V8 Supercars after almost a decade in NASCAR. It may have taken courage and great honesty for the 2003-04 champion to tell Roger Penske so soon that he wasn’t the man for the job, and step aside for Scott Pye to take over, but this was a huge letdown after the fanfare of Ambrose’s return. Nothing to show after so much fuss.

Honda’s comeback to F1, a year into the hybrid era, with the McLaren team with which it enjoyed such success in the late 1980s and early ’90s, hit depths almost impossible to have imagined.

Honda is convinced that the fundamental design of its power unit is right and changes to the part recapturing heat energy over the off-season may improve it greatly. There were a couple of flickers of hope late in the season, but to see world champions Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button struggling so far off the pace so often was not a good advertisement for Honda, McLaren or F1.

Nissan’s radical Ben Bowlby-designed Le Mans challenger was another debacle. The GT-R LM, with its front-mounted 3-litre twin-turbocharged V6, raced without its hybrid system engaged in the French classic.

One was running at the end but not classified as a finisher, having spent a third of the race in the pits. Nissan did not appear with its LMP1 model at any of the other seven WEC rounds. Its motorsport chief Darren Cox is now gone and the GT-R surely is too.

Motorsport Man of the Year
NASCAR’S new champion Kyle Busch missed the first 11 races of the Sprint Cup after breaking his right leg and left foot in the season-opening race of the second-tier Xfinity Series at Daytona in February, yet came back to win four of five races mid-season and then the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Not only is Busch the first driver to become champion in a Toyota, he delivered the fourth title for Joe Gibbs as a team owner – one more than the number of Super Bowls the legendary American football coach won.

Jeff Gordon, a four-time Cup champion driver with Hendrick Motorsports, retired with great class after making the final four in The Chase.

Motorsport Woman of the Year
There’s always too thin a field for this one, but it’s simple this time.
Molly Taylor became the first female driver to win a heat at a round of the Australian Rally Championship in WA’s Forest Rally, and then won the National Capital Rally in Canberra outright in the Renault Clio R3 in which Scott Pedder had become the 2014 ARC champion.

Taylor and her astute former policeman co-driver Bill Hayes were runners-up to Eli Evans and Glen Weston. In a Citroen DS3 R3 this time, it was that pair’s third title together after two – in 2012 and ’13 – in a Honda Jazz.

Gripe of the Year
At this time each December, reflecting on the season just gone, it’s uplifting that, when it’s all said and done, there’s not too much to complain about.  We lament the miserable quality of F1 racing now, yet – as bleak as that may seem at the minute – it could just pleasantly surprise us. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Perhaps it’s the Christmas spirit, but – in the main – we love what we see, although we’d welcome less of the claptrap off-track around F1 and V8 Supercars.

What we’d pay to see in 2016
A year ago we wished for an Aussie to win the Indianapolis 500, most likely Will Power, and he almost did. Here’s hoping he can go one better in the 100th running of the American open-wheeler classic next May 29.

Shane Van Gisbergen as the teammate of Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes in an expanded Triple Eight Holden outfit, is going to be even more special to watch.

The Giz is a phenomenal talent, a chip off an old block with his simple love of competing in anything every weekend. The competitiveness within Triple Eight and the guiding hand of its chief Roland Dane may just produce the consistent results to reward The Giz’s abilities with a title.

Ford is going back to Le Mans, not in the top prototype category that would make it even better, on the 50th anniversary of its historic outright 1-2-3 at the French circuit. Its battle with Chevrolet and Ferrari in the GTE Pro Class will be enthralling and Aussie Ryan Briscoe will be representing the Blue Oval.

Best of all there though would be an overall victory for Mark Webber in the 24-Hour, which would nicely cap his career before he turns 40. Bigger and better than the WEC title and perhaps cause for a bigger celebration than his first Grand Prix win.