The Racing Blog

Yet more motorsport! Peugoet 908 wins on debut

15 April 2007 - 17:49

After watching the Long Beach Grand Prix (Sebastian Bourdais is back to his old dominant form again!), I caught the end of a highlights show of the LMS race from Monza on Motors TV UK.

The five hour race was the first in the European Le Mans Series for 2007. It was won by the Peugoet 908 on it's first race outing. It's a shame that Peugoet missed the Sebring 12 hour race and that Audi have decided not to contest the LMS (racing only in ALMS except for the Le Mans proper) as we won't see how the Peugeot 908 compares to the Audi R10 until the Le Mans 24 hours in June.

The 908 wasn't totally dominant although the Marc Gene/ Nicolas Minassian car did finish a lap up on the second place Pescarolo of Emmanuel Collard and Jean-Christophe Boullion. The second 908 of Pedro Lamy and Stephane Sarrazin was delayed by double with it's doors popping open(!) earlier on in the race. I suppose that's the real advantage of the roadster format - there's one less thing to go wrong during driver changeovers. Still, from 2010 coupés are mandatory in the LMP1 category so the 908 is the way of the future.

By the way, it seems that Motors TV is very much the place for watching endurance racing in the UK. They showed the Sebring 12 hours race live earlier on in the year and will be showing the Le Mans 24 hours live in it's entirity for the second year this June. Congrats to them.

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Motor-racing Sunday

15 April 2007 - 14:40

It's been a big motor-racing Sunday here in the Racing Blog house. It started at around mid-day with the Bahrain Grand Prix. Then I watched a recording of the A1GP race in Shanghai. And now I'm rounding it off with the Champcar Long Beach Grand Prix. This reminds me that I should have linked to Patrick's excellent article on the current state of Champcar on his Motorsport Ramblings blog. That was written just after the Las Vegas race that opened the season and he's spot on about everything there in my opinion.

I like the look of the new Panoz car that Champcar is using this season. The old Lola cars were designed at a time when the Reynard was dominant and Champcar ran on a pretty even mix of ovals and road/street courses. With the series hardly running on ovals at all for the past few years, that Lola has looked increasingly lumbering. It was never the most attractive of machines either. The new Panoz car looks a lot like a GP2 at the front and back and like the classic Indycars in the middle. It looks a lot more nimble on the two street courses raced so far and that has to be the main thing. It certainly looks a lot better than the IRL cars do in their token road course races. Those things are a joke and would almost certainly be outpaced by a GP2 car if they ever raced on the same course.

By the way, I don't know much about Long Beach, but the area holding the race looks absolutely beautiful on the TV. Rather like the American Monte Carlo, but with much wider roads.

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Laser ride-height sensor on the Ferraris

14 April 2007 - 13:13

The Autosport.com gallery for Saturday of the Malayisan Gran Prix contains a number of photos of the front chassis bulkheads of cars. The things you normally see on the front bulkhead of a Formula 1 chassis are: the ends of the torsion bars (they take the place of the suspension springs on F1 cars), the steering rack, the brake fluid reservoirs, and maybe a random electronic unit.

This photo of the Ferrari chassis has all those things but what's interesting me is the sticker on the front of the electronics unit that reads "Optimess". The real tip-off though is the international warning symbol for laser radiation. That unit is laser ride-height sensor. It works, as far as I know, by shining a laser on the road surface through a small hole in the bottom of the nosecone. The beam is directed not exactly straight down, but at a small angle such that reflected light would not come back at the laser diode, but at an array sensor next to it in the package. The sensor array is like the sensor in a camera, but tuned to the wavelength of the laser. As the distance from the groud of the sensor package changes, the spot of reflected light moves on the sensor array due to the triangular shape created by that small angle I mentioned earlier.

Such ride-height sensors are frequently used by Formula 1 teams in test sessions, but I've never seen one fitted on a race weekend before. Teams use lots of different sensors and data recording equipment in test sessions but discard it for race weekends due to the extra weight and holes required in the bodywork etc. It is especially odd that such a sensor package would be used in Malaysia since all the teams except Spyker tested there the week before.

Ride-height sensors are used on race cars to get a better idea of how the aerodynamic performace of the car relates to height off the road surface and it's attitude on the road (there would be a sensor at the back as well). There are positional sensors on the suspension as well, but these cannot tell you the exact height of the car off the road because they don't take account of tyre deflection. Another use for the ride-height sensor is to use that data in conjuction with the suspension data to determine tyre deflections. This secondary use is more common on sportscars however as in a formula car there is really only room for one sensor in the centre of the car at either end and thus it can't take account of body roll and thus get a good picture of what the tyres on either side of it are doing. On a sportscar you can position a laser sensor very close to each wheel.

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A few thoughts on the Malaysian GP

12 April 2007 - 18:21

Thought I would just get a few thoughts down on the Malaysian GP before the Bahrain one happens - webhost and blog software problems prevented me posting earlier.

That was a good race I thought. Both the McLarens (from 2nd and 4th on the grid) getting past the Ferraris (1st and 3rd) made for an interesting start. Alonso was off the a flyer, Schumacher style, while Hamilton lapped far more slowly with his mirrors full of red. Still he kept it together brilliantly and it was the more experiened Felipe Massa that made the error. When Massa went off I expected Raikkonen to quickly get past or at least have some serious attempts at getting ahead, but for some reason he didn't seem that bothered and sat behind Hamilton until the first pitstops.

The second stint had Hamilton faster than Alonso, making up the gap created in the first, but again the Ferrari's failed to catch up the McLarens despite their supposed speed. In the third stint, the only remaining interest came from Raikkonen's attempts to catch Hamilton for 2nd place. Hamilton had opted to take the hard compound tyre in the final stint and was suffering for pace as a result. Still, Raikkonen only caught up to him on the final lap and Hamilton was ready by the then to show the same wide car to him that he had in the first stint.

Malaysia 2007 was almost the perfect race for McLaren. Sure, they would have liked to put the cars on the front of the grid in qualifying, but somehow it makes it all the more satisfying when you were expecting a damage-limitation exercise and instead you dominate. Lets face it, McLaren weren't expected to do anything more in Malaysia than they did in Australia - they would pick up plenty of points, but the Ferrari's were going to have a significant edge. Then in qualifying the McLarens were a real match for the Ferraris. They didn't outqualify Ferrari, but they were on the same level which is still significantly better than the consensus was after Australia.

Of course you can't count on getting ahead of your competition at the start of the race. Raikkonen left the door open for Alonso at the first corner in a perfect example of what Schumacher woundn't do - head straight for the racing line. Alonso was happy enough to go down the inside and park his car on the apex. Meanwhile Hamilton judge the condition of the track to perfection. It had rained heavily overnight and the track was said to be 'green'. In that state you can expect to get the same grip level everywhere, so going around the outside in turn 1 so you have first crack at the inside line in turn 2 is far more viable than it is normally.

It was a sign of how unexpected the two McLaren drivers performances were in the first stint that boss Ron Dennis was so keen that the first pitstop be perfectly executed. Alonso had lost radio contact with the pits and had to be brought in via the medium of the pit board. Fortunately drivers still look at those things - the stop was perfect and they even got the radio working again. I'm sure the team would have done just was well without Ron's close supervision in that pitstop, but when you've got a chance at a 1-2 when you thought you'd be getting s 3-4 at best, you don't want to blow it on something silly like running out of fuel through mis-communication.

The real sign of what this race meant for Ron Dennis was at the end. First he was greeted happilly by his current drivers, then during the weighing of the drivers that goes on behind the scenes, cameras filmed him conspicuously ignoring Kimi Raikkonen while grinning happily at Alonso and Hamilton. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen any team boss that happy with the outcome of a race. It's not just getting the 1-2, it's not just that it was unexpected but fairly won, it was getting it in a race where his old driver who defected to their greatest rivals, tried his hardest and could only get 3rd - and not because the Ferrari was bad but because McLaren were better. Because the two McLaren drivers were highly motivated, didn't make any mistakes, worked as a team and were happy to celebrate together afterwards. Kimi looked pretty lonely up on the podium drinking the champagne by himself while the McLaren buddies sprayed each other. When Kimi dropped his remains of his magnum down to his mechanics, as has become the custom, they dropped it. I think that sums up Ferrari's Malaysian GP.

A few other thoughts:

I thought after qualifying that Williams had been lucky to get Nico Rosberg qualified in 6th. As it turned out he had a pretty strong race until his car broke down with the old hydraulics problems. On the one hand it's great that Williams seems to have some speed again. On the other, despite the move to Toyota engines, the car still has questionable reliability.

Despite the Renault, Honda and Toyota works cars being outplaced by their customers in qualifying, they all did better than them in the race. Renault claimed 6th and 8th whereas the best Red Bull could manage was 10th for Mark Webber, David Coulthard having retired due to his brake pedal binding on the steering column - a odd one that. Honda had a dismal race with Jensen Button and Rubens Barricello finishing 12th and 11th, but they were still ahead of both the Super Aguri's by the finish line. Toyota's Jarno Trulli managed 7th in the race and while teammate Ralf Schumacher could only finish in 15th, the best Williams could manage after Rosberg's retirement was 9th for Alex Wurz.

In conculsion, the race wasn't action packed as such, but it kept us guessing, as far as second place was concerned anyway, right up until the chequered flag, and that's better than most modern F1 races so I was happy. I actually think Sepang is one of the best modern F1 tracks and sadly I don't see the upcoming Bahrain GP being half as interesting.

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F1 Malaysian GP Qualifying thoughts

07 April 2007 - 17:52

I watched a recording of the Malaysian Gran Prix qualifying earlier - I didn't get up early to watch it live (6:30am here in the UK) because, well... it's only Malaysia - nothing much interesting happens there. By the looks if it I was wrong though - it actually turned out to be one of the most interesting qualy sessions in a while, particularly with the final ten shootout living up to it's name for the first time as far as I remember.

I've written loads before criticising the current F1 qualifying format and the final segment of it in particular. They tweaked it part way through it's first season (2006) and reduced that final segment down to 15 mins so that even though drivers would still drive a number of laps to burn off fuel, they didn't spend quite so much time doing that. Still, it's a both a waste of resources (fuel, tyres, wear on the cars) and the viewer's time to watch cars circling the track as slowly as they dare in order to game the rules on race fuel starts for the top 10.

In Malaysia though the teams apparently feared rain in both the Q2 and Q3 segments. In Q2 we normally see the top teams come out only at the end and just do one flying lap, but in Malaysia most of them came out and did a flying lap on a brand new set of 'option' tyres right at the start of the segment. Those that were in danger had to come out again and do another flying lap on another new set of the softer 'option' tyres in order to guarantee themselves a place in the top 10 (which is why they don't normally go out at the start at all).

No rain appeared in Q2 but apparently the teams still feared it in Q3 so many drivers came out on their relatively high fuel loads (remember they have to chose a fuel load before the start of Q3 that lasts them for all the rest of qualifying and the first leg of the race itself) and used a set of option tyres to set a time before reverting to the usual slow-lapping routine.

Massa set the best time at the start of Q3. After teams had spent as much time as they dared burning off fuel, the four contenders proceeded to have a go at getting pole. Alonso was first to set a good time. Raikkonen couldn't top it. Some of the shine rubbed off Lewis Hamilton as he failed to even bear Massa's time from the start of the segment. Right at the end Massa came round and as many predicted he would, took pole. So at the front it is 1. Massa, 2. Alonso, 3. Raikkonen, 4. Hamilton.

Behind the contenders we have first the pretenders and then the no-hopers. The pretenders are led by BMW. I don't mean any disrespect to BMW's efforts by calling them pretender, but I don't see them as championship challengers and they probably won't even win a race this season. But they look likely to fulfill my pre-season prediction and become the 'best of the rest' team and finish 3rd in the constructors behind McLaren and Ferrari. If we're talking real pretenders then we have to look at Nico Rosberg in 6th for Williams-Toyota. He must be low on fuel in my opinion. What's more interesting is that 8th and 9th positions on the grid are taken by the two works Toyotas. All the teams run low fuel in Q2 to try and get into Q3 so you can't say Toyota did anything deceptive to get 8th and 9th. Those positions may not satisfy the Toyota board for the hundreds of millions they've put into F1 so far, but they're a damn sight better than I'd expected them to be in the second race of the season.

When you look for disappointments you don't have to look much further than Renault in 11th and 12th position, sandwiched by the two Red Bull cars (powered remember by Renault engines this season). Then you have the works Honda of Button in 15th behind the Super-Aguri of Takuma Sato and the works Honda of Rubens Barrichello 19th, one place behind the Super-Aguri of Anthony Davidson. Again, all those times were set on low fuel and should be representitive of the car's true pace.

This qualifying session also featured some new on-screen graphics that we will hopefully see in the race. I'll talk about them some more in another post, but it seems like there are some reasons to be cheerful about Formula 1 in 2007 - as long as you don't work for Honda or Renault.