james Allen

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Button in control for First McLaren Pole as Maldonado is punished again
Jenson Button claimed his first McLaren pole position in dominant fashion today with a spectacular performance in Spa to head an unexpected top three ahead of Kamui Kobayashi and Pastor Maldonado.

But hours after the session ended, stewards took Maldonado’s fastest time away for an impeding incident in Q1 on Hulkenberg. It moves Kimi Raikkonen, who was also quizzed by stewards for leaving the circuit boundary with all four wheels, up to third, with Perez fourth.

In Button’s 50th Grand Prix for McLaren he set two laps fast enough for pole and finished the session 3/10ths faster than anybody. The Briton, using a new rear wing, showed his potential early on in qualifying with the fastest hard tyre run in Q1, a significant advantage in Q2 and two immaculate laps in the top ten shootout.

“I’m surprised that the new rear wing is working so well, but the engineers also did a great job with the balance,” said Button. “And it’s even more encouraging that we had good consistency through all three qualifying sessions. Nonetheless, nobody has done any long runs yet, so we still need to wait and see how tomorrow pans out.

“Can I still win the drivers’ championship? Yes. We’ll take it one day at a time, but hopefully we can get some good points tomorrow.”

He has the pace, but has been hard on his tyres in races this season and tomorrow’s race is all about whether he has been able to fix that. Kobayashi and Sauber have good pace and look after the tyres and have profited from Button’s higher degradation before.So they provide a threat, as does Raikkonen in the Lotus, starting in third. If Raikkonen can get ahead of Kobayashi at the start he can take advantage of any problems with Button’s higher tyre use it should be a fascinating end to the race.


In turn, Raikkonen’s threat comes from Alonso, who has better straight line speeds. Alonso has to get ahead of Raikkonen at the start as the Lotus will get away in the middle sector of the lap and it will be hard for Alonso. In that scenario he may have to use strategy to gain places. THe Ferrari has looked good all weekend, despite not quite having the pace in qualifying.
Strategy will be vital; at present the hard tyre looks like it could end up being the better race tyre. It was superior to the soft tyre in Silverstone and the same could be the case with the medium tomorrow. Two stops is the fastest way, but there are some teams considering doing one stop.

Lewis Hamilton went for a higher downforce set up than his team mate, hoping to gain an advantage in the middle sector as Raikkonen did, which is downforce dependant. It didn’t work out, he wasn’t fast enough and lost 0.4s on the straights and it’s probably a less ideal set up for racing than Button’s. It will be hard to make progress.

Kobayashi becomes the first Japanese driver to begin on the front row of a Grand Prix since Takuma Sato in 2004. The Sauber was strong from the outset and Sergio Perez’s improved starting position puts them in a strong position to claim podiums and a large haul of points tomorrow.

Despite his penalty, Maldonado produced his best qualifying position since the Spanish GP and has piled further pressure on Bruno Senna, who could only get his Williams in to 17th place and behind the two Toro Rosso cars.

Throughout the session it had looked to be coming down to a Button-Raikkonen battle for pole and this remained the story in the final phase of qualifying until Raikkonen failed to improve during his second run. This means that, significantly, Button has a buffer ahead of his championship rivals with Alonso (6th), Webber (7th) and Hamilton (8th) all unable to compete with his pace.

Alonso, the pacesetter in practice this morning, could not build on this. But starting ahead of his main championship rivals leaves him in a very good position for tomorrow. He and Webber, who has a five-place gearbox penalty, had struggled to match the pace of Button in Q2 and opted for just a single tyre run in order to save a set of options for race day.
Vettel was just 2/10ths slower than Webber in Q2, but that amounted to seven positions and he missed out on a top ten place by 1/100th of a second.

Romain Grosjean and Paul Di Resta completed the top ten and they will have opposite emotions following the session. Grosjean just sneaked into Q2 after he hit traffic in Q1 and used up a set of options in the process. And with Lotus as many peoples tip for the win this weekend they will be disappointed to once again not have the qualifying pace to give them that platform. Di Resta, however, was impressive throughout and was happy to claim the bragging rights over Nico Hulkenberg. Di Resta will move up to ninth after Webber’s penalty.

Michael Schumacher in his 300th GP did his best but the Mercedes again wasn’t fast enough. He was 13th with Nico Rosberg only 18th. The team were once again struggling with tyre issues and will be hoping for either rain or chaos to claim a decent amount of points.
http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2012/09/bu...hed-again/

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The end of the European season is traditionally a time to take a look down the motorsport pyramid to see which drivers are beginning to knock on the door of F1 as the junior categories’ seasons come to a close.

For the first time next week GP2 will travel to Singapore alongside F1 to stage its finale and the lead British driver in the category this year has been James Calado, who goes into the final two races in third place in the standings after a strong debut year at that level.

The 23-year-old from Worcestershire is already guaranteed rookie of the year honours having claimed two sprint race wins, at the season-opener in Malaysia and then Germany, along with five other podium appearances driving for Lewis Hamilton’s former, now Lotus-branded, ART team. Indeed he only dropped out of title contention last weekend at Monza.

Calado arrived in GP2 this year on the back of consecutive runner-up finishes in British F3 and GP3 yet has reached the most complex juncture of them all – working out how to take the next step and break through to F1.

Speaking in an interview for the latest edition of the JA on F1 podcast, Calado said: “Now I’m kind of getting the impression how hard it is.

“For me I think it’s just quite important to concentrate on GP2 and the last rounds I’ve got coming up. Formula 1 is quite political and it’s a big business and for a young driver to do that step from GP2 into Formula 1 normally involves quite a lot of money – no matter how good, or bad, you are.”

The path from GP2 to F1 is certainly tried and trusted – exactly half the grid are graduates from the junior series – yet a glance at the names who have made the step up to F1 over the past two seasons shows that significant backing is a necessity, be it from a large company in the driver’s homeland, a manufacturer or well established driver development scheme like Red Bull’s.

Since 2008, when he drove a single-seater for the first time, Calado’s career has been financed by the Racing Steps Foundation, a trust set up and backed by motorsport enthusiast Graham Sharp and managed by Derek Walters which provides financial support and personal development to young talented British drivers who are without significant funding.

“The philosophy is fairly simple: there was a lot of young talented drivers in the UK with no money and that talent would go to waste if it wasn’t supported,” explained Walters.

“So we’ve been pretty careful basically with the young drivers that we’ve picked and we’ve seemed to pick pretty well.

“James is following on from Oliver Turvey, who’s now working with McLaren doing a splendid job there on simulation work and so on, also finding it difficult to make that final leap into Formula 1.

“But on the other hand James is there, being noticed up and down the pit lane at the moment and is doing an extremely good job.”

Calado is one of 10 young drivers currently on the trust’s books, a roster which includes Oliver Rowland and Jack Harvey who are front-runners in the Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup and British F3 respectively.

Having made his way into GP2, Calado’s own support from the foundation ends at the end of this season and he admits that finding the funding to continue the forward momentum in his career will be tricky.

“I know now that I’m very fit and suppose I’m probably ready for Formula 1,” he said. “But it’s very, very difficult. This is my actual last year with Racing Steps Foundation so to be able to find the funding for Formula 1 will prove to be quite difficult I suppose.

“But I haven’t really been given any information [about 2013] – quite right I suppose, because like I said I need to just finish this year and discuss everything like that at the end of the year.”

Calado admits that the chance to run in the Abu Dhabi young driver test in November would be a great opportunity for him, but is waiting to see whether he gets an invitation from one of the teams. Nonetheless he says he will continue to back his talent.

“I do believe that if you perform well and your talent shows you will get there one day and progress even in Formula 1. So that’s my ambition.”

Fuente.

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Puente.

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Lotus’s solar-powered simulator and a look into the future
Posted on July 4, 2012

Formula 1 will move into a more environmentally-friendly era when the next generation engine formula is introduced in two years’ time and amid on-going attempts by teams to improve their own sustainability and efficiency Lotus has unveiled its new solar-powered simulator building.

The construction of the new state-of-the-art race facility adjacent to the main building at its Enstone base, which has been fully operational for the past few months and was revealed to the media this week, has been used as a platform to further reduce the team’s dependency on traditional energy sources, which has been ongoing since the Genii Capital-owned team joined forces with China-based Trina Solar in 2010.

Lotus had already become the first F1 outfit to introduce solar panels onto its team trucks and European race paddock motorhome prior to the construction of the simulator. The new building’s roof features 128 solar panels which can generate 33,000 kWh of electricity over the course of a year, enough to supply 75% of the power the new facility requires.

Speaking during this week’s media event, Lotus F1 Team CEO Patrick Louis said of the team’s desire to be more environmentally conscious: “Formula 1 as a sport will never be a green sport – just forget it. It’s petrol driven engines in the next future. But rules are changing, we can reduce the consumption. On the other hand we should not make it all black or white. Each flight leaving Heathrow for New York is creating more emissions than all the F1 cars in one season. So we thought about a couple of years ago, how can we react? And the only controlling method we have is the factory, is the paddock area, so that’s where we started then to be more intelligent than others might be.”

Intriguingly, while Trina Solar’s innovations with Lotus have so far been confined to use of traditional large flat solar panels, the firm has taken a look into the future to see what might theoretically be achievable as technology in the sector develops over the years ahead.

Although still in its relative infancy on a mass consumer scale, large reductions in the cost of solar installations over recent years and improvements in battery capabilities have come on stream and research is ongoing to see how silicon and its solar properties can be blended into laminate and composite materials. With that work in mind, one of the F1 concepts put forward by Trina is a silicon-coated race helmet that could generate enough power to work, for example, the in-car radio system.

Marketing director Jerome Mazet also told JA on F1 that the firm is scheduled to unveil a concept F1 car with solar-powered elements at Monza, while one more easily achievable innovation for the sport in the more immediate future could be solar-powered pit wall gantries.

F1’s own sense of innovation has given rise to increasingly advanced and accurate race simulators in recent years and Lotus chief Louis believes his team’s new one compares favourably to those used by rivals such as McLaren and Ferrari. JA on F1 were among the invited guests given a unique chance to see the driver-in-the-loop simulator and its impressive high definition graphics in action during a live session with Lotus’s test driver Jerome d’Ambrosio, with the Belgian completing laps around a virtual Silverstone ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix.

The engineers working on the simulator said that in an average day in the build-up to a GP weekend a driver would be able to complete 100 laps of a circuit like Silverstone, with breaks factored in for drivers to take account of the demands placed on them by the very different work environment.

The team is also able to run a physical standard ECU unit in the computer servers, meaning young drivers in particular can get to grips with such processes as anti-stall, while the cockpit contains the latest steering wheel used in the real E20.


Fuente

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Ferrari’s 500th GP with Shell
Posted on September 26, 2012
Shell Motorsport image

Considering the Singapore GP is regarded as one of the most commercially significant events on the calendar it was somewhat apt that Ferrari and its most long-standing partner, Shell, celebrated their 500th race in partnership over the weekend.

To mark the occasion several events were held around the city from Thursday onwards, including Fernando Alonso performing a demonstration lap of Marina Bay in the Shell Performance Simulator (which you can watch here), while a specially-commissioned tribute video was also shown for the first time which looked back at the history of the two world-renowned brands in partnership.

The four-minute film, which we’ve made available for you below, features archived footage dating right back to the F1 World Championships early days in the 1950s and is intercepted with soundbites explaining the significance of the relationship between team and fuel supplier from famous Ferrari names past and present such as Luca di Montezemolo, Stefano Domenicali, John Surtees and the first man to win an F1 race for Ferrari, Argentine José Froilan Gonzalez.

Brief footage of the now 89-year-old’s victory at 1951 British Grand Prix, including his presentation of the winner’s trophy by the Queen, is also shown.

The clear message that comes out through the short film is how intrinsic the partnership between Ferrari and Shell is and how vital a part the latter has played in the team’s unrivalled success over the decades. As di Montezemolo himself says succinctly: “The Shell brand with the Prancing Horse is a good combination.”

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Red Bull double DRS revealed in Suzuka
Posted on October 7, 2012

It’s not often that an innovation on an F1 car slips through without being noticed at a Grand Prix, but the talk of the Japanese Grand Prix was the double DRS device on the rear wing of the Red Bull, which had actually been on the car in Singapore.

The idea is a simple variation on something tried by Lotus this year, aimed at shedding even more drag than a standard DRS wing. Lotus have yet to be able to qualify and race with theirs as they have problems getting the aero rebalanced once the device is deactivated.


The Red Bull idea works simply; when the DRS is activated it opens a hole (where the narrow, curved grey piece is on the inside of the endplate) to channel air through the endplate and out through the main beam of the wing (the lower part), shedding drag. It helps with top speed and speed through fast corners.

Like Lotus, Red Bull needed help with qualifying, their chances in races were being harmed by not qualifying at the front of the grid. The DRS can be used in qualifying, but not the race and on a track like Suzuka, where there are many higher speed corners, there’s a good gain to be had.

So in Suzuka this device came into its own, giving Red Bull their first front row lock out of the season and setting Sebastian Vettel up for a momentous win, that blows the world championship wide open with only four points separating him from Fernando Alonso with five races remaining.


Red Bull also had a new front wing in Suzuka, which appeared to have been evolved to be sure to pass the more stringent FIA flexing tests, which were introduced to address rumoured rotation of the front wing.

Red Bull also had some updates to the rear suspension which helped to improve traction and rear tyre life. It was very noticeable from the audio on the on-board camera shots of Vettel’s pole lap that there was almost no wheelspin out of the lower speed corners.

The team has a tremendous momentum now and must be considered the favourites for the championship as the car is coming good at just the right moment, especially as Ferrari seems to be struggling to make updates work on its car.
http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2012/10/re...in-suzuka/