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Articles by Darren Galpin
| Maladies in Malaysia - Sun 19th Mar 2006 |
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This is going to sound very much like a long playing record which is stuck in the same groove (see the last article), but consider the following: Fisichella started on pole, finished first, didn’t overtake anyone. Alonso started seventh, overtook both of the Williams cars and Montoya at the start before the first corner, and then didn’t overtake anyone. Button started second, dropped behind Montoya after a pit-stop, but didn’t overtake anyone. Montoya finished fourth, and didn’t overtake anyone. All of the top four relied on pit-stops and the mechanical failures of others to make their way into the finishing positions. This is meant to be Grand Prix Racing – there was precious little of that.
The race as a whole though was very much a pointer to the future, rather than the present. Consider the following – Felipe Massa, starting at the back of the grid, finished ahead of team-mate Michael Schumacher, who started fourteenth. Massa was his usual ragged self, locking his tyres several times as he fought his way forward. Schumacher though was strangely muted, and although he pulled off an aggressive overtake on Villeneuve, he didn’t look like being quite his normal self. This race, coupled with his almost excessive happiness at finishing second in Bahrain is sure to set off a whole mountain of press speculation about his future. OK, he had a bad year in 2005, but when was the last time that Schumacher was happy with second? He would normally be searching for the best way to move that one place forward, pushing the team to not be happy with anything else than first. The press will take one look at his age and conclude that he is past it. Massa is fast, but not in Schumacher’s class and should have been beaten. Schumacher needs to put in some more convincing displays than this to dispel the doubters and quieten the press. If he doesn’t, Schumacher might find himself being invited to retire rather than leaving at a time of his choosing. After all, why pay tens of millions of dollars more for a driver who can’t achieve a better result than the one you pay a single million or so for?
It wasn’t just the Ferrari drivers who were a talking point this race – the Ferrari engines were too. Massa lunched two of them during practice and qualifying, and Schumacher destroyed one as well. Ferrari told the press that this was due to a bad batch of piston rings – shades of the 1970s and Cosworth, when they similarly had a bad batch of pistons and lost several engines. Thus Cosworth must have had a sense of deja-vu when both of the Williams’ blew up. They may have a fast engine, but it seems somewhat marginal when the ambient temperature starts creeping upwards.
They weren’t the only two manufacturers to suffer with the heat – Mercedes suffered badly as well, with McLaren having to compromise their downforce by cutting extra louvres into the top of their sidepods to facilitate the cooling. This compromised their top speed, and thus limited how far up the finishing positions they would get. For Räikkönen this was all academic, his right rear was hit by Christian Klien on the first lap, and he suffered a rapid suspension failure which put him off the circuit. For Montoya it made for a boring afternoon, never being threatened by those behind, and never being fast enough to worry those in front either. McLaren must hope that it is only a temperature induced problem – if not, they could be in for a very trying year.
A special mention has to go to the Super Aguri team. Despite having a four year old chassis which they modified in only a couple of months, they have only been a couple of seconds off the pace, and Sato has managed to finish both of the races. It will be interesting to see what they can do when the Grand Prix circus gets back to Europe and they debut their new chassis. One further point to ponder: how good is the Red Bull chassis? Consider that they have the same engine as the Ferrari team, and then consider their results. I bet that they can’t wait to let Adrian Newey work his chassis magic.
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