Indholdsfortegnelse for 06/12/18 i Autosport

Despite Lewis Hamilton’s sizeable final winning margin of 88 points, the 2018 Formula 1 World Championship featured a fine tussle at the front for much of the year. Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari took the fight to Mercedes and for some time looked like they were gaining the upper hand. Red Bull also managed to get into the battle for wins at various points, while the incredibly tight midfield contest was worthy of its own prize. Throw in the arrival of Charles Leclerc, Honda’s salvation and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving Liberty and the teams, and it’s clear that there were plenty of subplots this year. Our team of F1 journalists delves into all of the above and more in this special review issue, which also includes our now-traditional top 10 drivers…

FORMULA 1 Charles Leclerc started his career as a Ferrari Formula 1 driver with the fastest time in last week’s Pirelli tyre test in Abu Dhabi, as several drivers began working with the teams they will join for 2019. Leclerc improved on his 2019 Ferrari team-mate Sebastian Vettel’s Tuesday time to top the Yas Marina test, although the fact that the lap was 1.7 seconds slower than the pole time for the Abu Dhabi GP is an indicator of the relative lack of meaning of the times. The purpose of the test was to give the 10 teams experience of Pirelli’s finalised 2019 tyre range. Leclerc used Pirelli’s ‘Compound 5’ tyre – the 2019 hypersoft – to end up on a 1m36.450s, almost four tenths quicker than Vettel’s time from…

FORMULA E Williams Formula 1 tester Oliver Rowland has replaced Toro Rosso-bound Alexander Albon at Nissan e.dams for the 2018-19 ABB FIA Formula E Championship. Shortly before Albon’s 2019 Formula 1 seat was confirmed last month, Nissan announced that it had agreed to part ways with the 22-year-old. Rowland, who replaced Albon for the final day of FE pre-season testing at Valencia in October, was confirmed in Nissan’s line-up on the eve of the 21st annual NISMO Festival at Fuji. Rowland raced for e.dams sister team DAMS in Formula 2 in 2017, when he finished third in the standings. “We know the guy – that was the biggest argument,” said team principal Jean-Paul Driot. “He’s a tough racer, he’s a strong character – he is a strong man.” Driot suggested…

This year’s alternative title fight Ever think ‘what if…’ about how the 2018 season would have been without the top three teams? What a season it was, with nine different race winners and only three drivers not once on the podium. That’s how F1 should be! Jukka Kamarainen By email That’s exactly what we did – great minds and all that. See page 52 for our round-up of the thrilling 2018 ‘Class B’ title fight – ed The forgotten grand prix I have followed grand prix motor racing for well in excess of 30 years. I’ve have the good fortune to attend some of the most memorable races in that time (Brands Hatch 1986, Silverstone ’87, Monza ’88, Silverstone ’92). I have been in attendance when world champions were crowned…

10 Kimi Raikkonen Re-entry Raikkonen was Ferrari’s Mr Consistency, which earned him third in the championship and allowed him to outscore Vettel over the closing stages of the season. But he finds himself 10th in this list simply because there weren’t enough peaks, and too many race weekends where he might have been able to win had he not made a mistake at a key moment. Austin, of course, was the exception. This was a superb victory requiring him to nail it in several key phases of the race, and he did it perfectly to take a long-awaited victory. The trouble was, this didn’t happen often enough and he ended up with the third-weakest dryqualifying pace-average team-mate comparison of the whole grid. There were other high points, of course. His…

In 2017 Daniel Ricciardo outscored Max Verstappen by 200 points to 168, while in ’18 the Dutchman beat the Australian by 249 to 170. That represented an extraordinary turnaround in their respective fortunes, and one that was heavily influenced by the high number of retirements that afflicted Ricciardo this year. But that wasn’t the whole story. After Monaco, where Verstappen started at the back following a practice crash and Ricciardo won in style, the younger man was never beaten by his team-mate in a grand prix that they both finished. He also consistently outqualified Ricciardo, often with a couple of tenths between them. Red Bull was convinced that Ricciardo would stay for 2019, having met his salary demands, and a contract was waiting to be signed immediately after the Hungarian…

Renault had a clear objective in 2018 – to finish fourth in the constructors’ championship in the third season of its return as a works team. It achieved this aim, but it wasn’t easy given the prodigious pace of the Haas – on average the faster car, albeit only by 0.167% – and the strength of Racing Point Force India in its two incarnations. That Hulkenberg won the ‘Class B’ crown and Renault the equivalent constructors’ title confirms this was a strong season and a formidable test of the team’s mettle, considering how close things were. “We can say we reached the main target,” says Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul. “We had set ourselves to double the total of points, which we’ve done by a margin, and secondly to improve…

Formula 1 changes very quickly, and a year is a very long time. Surely, though, not long enough for anyone to have ever believed 12 months ago that, at the end of the 2018 season, Honda would be viewed as a potential deciding factor in the ’19 world championship. This year has been vital for Honda, which could have walked away from grand prix racing, tail between its legs, after three dismal seasons with McLaren. Instead it looked to Toro Rosso for redemption, in the hope that it could convince the team’s parent operation Red Bull it was worth backing longer-term. That target was very rapidly hit in 2018. Honda scored its best result since returning to F1, as Pierre Gasly’s fourth-place finish in Bahrain – just the second race…

How do you view Sauber’s progress this season? The first race we were more fighting with the medical car at Turn 1! We always had strong engine performance and reliability. We’re a small team – it’s very important to focus on the chassis and not the engine. We recruited to improve every single part of the company, and it’s paying off. It seems that you’ve outdeveloped everybody… It’s much easier to improve when you are four seconds off than when you are fighting for tenths! At one stage you will become more or less flat [in terms of development] and we were more on the high gradient. The next step will be by far the most difficult. Did your progress compromise preparation for next year? Not at all. We switched…

MINI SE7EN & MIGLIA The Mini Se7en and Mini Miglia categories will support the British Touring Car Championship at Thruxton next year as part of a special calendar to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Mini. Both Mini 7 Racing Club categories will get two races around the Hampshire circuit at the first of two BTCC visits over the May 18-19 weekend and are set to benefit from live or delayed-as-live TV coverage. The club’s 2019 schedule also includes its popular visit to Zandvoort for the British Race Festival in July, a return to the MG Live event at Silverstone, and being part of a revamped Mini Festival at Brands Hatch. The BTCC support slot is a significant coup. Not since the Super Touring Car Challenge appeared at Rockingham in…

PICKUPS Pickup Truck racing is set to return to the Mallory Park oval next year after Motorsport UK granted a licence for the circuit to be used again. Pickups last raced there in 2005, but the closure of Rockingham prompted the series to work with circuit officials to bring the oval back into competition. Oval racing has been an important part of the Pickup championship, which was the only category to use the Rockingham oval in recent years. It now has two meetings scheduled at Mallory next year and series boss Sonny Howard hopes to add more in future seasons. “With the demise of Rockingham, everybody said it would be the end of Pickup racing but that is not the case,” said Howard. “After Rockingham [closing] we want Pickups to…

FORMULA 1 The FIA’s official investigation into the first-corner crash in August’s Belgian Grand Prix has detailed how the halo on Charles Leclerc’s Sauber stood up to being hit by Fernando Alonso’s wheel, and how it prevented a helmet-visor strike. Following a thorough analysis of the incident, which was caused when Nico Hulkenberg pitched Alonso’s McLaren into the air and over Leclerc at La Source, the FIA’s conclusion, revealed here for the first time, shows how the halo proved its safety benefits beyond all doubt. Accident report The official crash report into the Spa accident, put together by the FIA Global Institute, confirmed that the main point of contact was Alonso’s right-front wheel striking the right-hand upper side of Leclerc’s halo with a force of 58kN – or 7G. “If…

FORMULA 2/GP3 Straight after his maiden Formula 1 test with Haas, Louis Deletraz stayed on at Yas Marina, hopped into Carlin’s ex-Lando Norris weapon, and topped the three-day Formula 2 post-season running. The Swiss, who has raced with Charouz Racing System during his second F2 campaign, headed two of the three days with Carlin, setting the overall fastest of the test in the final session. The team still ostensibly has one seat available for 2019 alongside Honda protege Nobuharu Matsushita, who is returning to Europe. “The test was great and I’m very happy with what we achieved – especially setting the fastest time across all three days,” said Deletraz (above). “It was enjoyable to run with Carlin and to get to know each other a little better. We tried lots…

This was quintessential Formula 1: two great teams going at it hammer and tongs; constant shifts in the balance of power; a tough development war; political and technical intrigue; and a pair of quadruple world champions butting heads. That the challenge of Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel ran out of steam and Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton wrapped up both titles with time to spare doesn’t change that. This was a ferocious battle that deserved a more dramatic denouement. The brilliance of Hamilton in surely his greatest F1 season to date, and an exceptionally resilient Mercedes team, denied us that. When it came to the pressure points, Vettel and Ferrari simply were not as robust and too often imploded or were consumed by chaos, despite spending more than half of the 2018…

Valtteri Bottas’s season was better than fifth in the championship suggests, and he certainly should have had at least two wins given what happened in Azerbaijan and Russia. But while his qualifying performances improved versus Hamilton, there were too many times when his races unravelled – particularly late in the season. Carlos Sainz Jr remained a classy performer and was robbed of midfield victories both in France (MGU-K failure) and Mexico (battery). But while he still demonstrated his ability to turn in strong race drives, such as a superb 10th place in the Japanese Grand Prix that he effectively scored from nothing, he was outperformed by teammate Nico Hulkenberg both in qualifying and race results. Sergio Perez was far closer to team-mate Ocon’s performance than the qualifying head to head…

Nine winning drivers, six victorious teams, half a dozen championship contenders and no way of knowing who would lead the way on any given race weekend. Formula 1’s unofficial ‘Class B’ championship, comprising the seven teams outside the big three that duked it out in the midfield, created a dramatic, if disconnected, subplot during the 2018 season. Had it been the battle for outright victory, this would have gone down as an all-time classic season, even though ‘champion’ Nico Hulkenberg clinched the title with a race to spare when you reshape the season with Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull eliminated. For the purposes of this story all results reflect a revised classification for each race disregarding those ‘big three’ teams, in an era that has an unusually distinct chasm between…

It is one of the time-worn tropes of Hollywood storytelling, and a pillar of the classical three-act structure, that the hero of the piece must at some point be sorely tested and laid low. Whether delivered to rock bottom by accident or his own hubris, our hero then dusts themselves down, and through some form of equally challenging self-improvement proceeds towards the resolution. You might have thought that McLaren reached its nadir in 2015, when the team’s much-vaunted new relationship with Honda delivered little in the manner of results, but plenty in the way of festering rancour. Then, after brief glimmers of hope in ’16, ’17 proved similarly wretched, costing the head of long-time figurehead Ron Dennis. But surely by ’18 McLaren would at least be angling towards the proceedings…

Pierre Gasly rates his first full year in Formula 1 as 8.5 out of 10. “Why? Because I think in my first complete season my main target was to make the best out of the package I had,” he says. “I knew there would be two, three, four opportunities in the season to score points, big points – I had to make sure that in these kind of moments I would be right there and be able to make them happen. And I think that’s what I did.” He’s not wrong. As well as banking Honda’s best result since returning to F1, with fourth place in Bahrain, Gasly scored big twice more before the summer break – he was seventh in Monaco and sixth in Hungary. But Toro Rosso’s general…

BAHRAIN GT FESTIVAL BAHRAIN (BRN) NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 1 Ayhancan Guven and Salih Yoluc led Turkey to victory in the first-ever FIA GT Nations Cup at the Bahrain International Circuit. The Mercedes-AMG GT3 pair started the race from pole after a win and a second in the two qualifying races. But this was not to be a straightforward triumph since they had to fight off Team UK and Team Russia. Yoluc maintained his lead at the start as a string of first-lap incidents required a safety car. One of the high-profile casualties of the melee was Mike den Tandt in the WRT-run Team Belgium Audi R8 LMS, which he had shared to victory with Charles Weerts in the first qualifying race. He crashed out after contact with the Russian and Mexican…

Specialist motorsport memorabilia shops are rare. So Helensburgh – a coastal town 25 miles from Glasgow – may seem an unlikely location for an example of this rare breed. Yet there you’ll find Auch Aye, which opened earlier this year. Its location has a motorsport link, albeit an uncanny one: it’s on the street where Jackie Stewart met his wife Helen on a blind date. John Black, who runs Auch Aye, has his own motorsport history. He attended Chirnside Primary School at the same time as Jim Clark. He had a racing career too, after moving to Vancouver in 1964. Black has, among other things, competed against Mike Hailwood on two wheels and against future Indycar racers Mike Hiss, Tom Gloy and Dennis Firestone. He quit racing in 1975 and…

James Hunt’s battle-worn McLaren-Ford M23 skitters to a halt in the Fuji pitlane in urgent need of fresh Goodyear wet-weather rubber after suffering a puncture in the closing stages of the tumultuous, rain-lashed 1976 Japanese Grand Prix. Hunt rejoined the race in fifth place, a position in which he would fail to clinch the world championship despite the withdrawal after only two laps of title rival Niki Lauda (Ferrari 312T2), but fought back to cross the line third, surprising even himself. For more great photographs, visit motorsportimages.com…

DAYTONA 24 HOURS Fernando Alonso was top of Wayne Taylor’s list when he went looking for drivers to bolster his team’s line-up for next month’s Daytona 24 Hours. But he ended up signing another name from Toyota’s World Endurance Championship squad first: Kamui Kobayashi. Now Wayne Taylor Racing has ended up with the pair of them in its Cadillac DPi.V-R alongside full-season drivers Jordan Taylor and Renger van der Zande for the IMSA SportsCar Championship opener on January 26-27. And Taylor Sr is understandably billing it as “the best driver line-up in the race”. Taylor met with Alonso on his sportscar debut at Daytona this year with the United Autosports squad. That contact was maintained through the season in what the team owner calls an “up-and-down” struggle to sign him…

2014 Points 405 (2nd) Wins 3 Poles 0 2015 Points 187 (4th) Wins 0 Poles 0 2016 Points 468 (2nd)  Wins 2 Poles 1 2017 Points 368 (3rd) Wins 3 Poles 0 2018 Points 419 (3rd) Wins 4 Poles 2 Was 2018 the best season of the hybrid era thus far for Red Bull? That judgement depends on how you measure performance. In both 2014 and ’16 the team finished second in the constructors’ championship, and this year it was ‘only’ third. And in the latter of those runner-up seasons the team logged 468 points, considerably more than the 419 it managed in ’18. But those numbers are skewed by the fact that in 2014 and ’16 Red Bull happened to have a better package than Ferrari, while Mercedes was…

There are two ways to look at Haas’s 2018 campaign. One was that it had, on average, the fourth-fastest car and failed to translate that either into ‘Class B’ victory or best-of-the-rest in the constructors’ championship. The other is that Haas is in only its third season and emerged as a consistently strong force to beat a clutch of better-established teams. Haas ended up 29 ‘real’ points behind Renault, and it’s not difficult to find the ‘missing’ points. From the first race of the season, when both cars retired thanks to cross-threaded wheelnuts costing a likely fifth and sixth place, there were too many missed opportunities. Romain Grosjean’s litany of errors early in the season, notably crashing under the safety car while running sixth in Azerbaijan, were also costly, while…

Scoring almost enough points to finish fourth looks like a miracle – was it? The strength of this team isn’t the factory, the buildings, the infrastructure, because that’s sub-standard compared to our competitors. The strength of the team is the people, and if those people didn’t stay together through the bad times then there was nothing to sell. It was the administrator’s job to sell the team and do the best for the creditors. The only role I had was to keep the team together. What was the key to being able to do that given the very obvious financial difficulties of the team? The way you earn trust within the team is be honest. When you are trying to predict the future, you can predict it that way but…

For Stoffel Vandoorne there’s one statistic he will never be able to escape. He was emphatically ‘nilled’ in qualifying by Fernando Alonso in 2018, beaten 21 times. Vandoorne was also dropped by McLaren, the team that spotted his talent in his early days in the junior formulas and had supported him ever since. It was a sad way to end – or at least pause – an F1 career that had promised so much. Despite that depressing qualifying stat, Vandoorne is much better than he has seemed. It’s been a case of right place, wrong time. He was fantastically dominant in GP2 against some highquality opposition but, even as he homed in on an F1 drive, circumstances turned against him. He was impressive in a one-off drive substituting for Alonso…

Can you remember anything from Charles Leclerc’s first three Formula 1 races? Maybe his spin in Bahrain Grand Prix qualifying or his trip through the gravel during the Chinese GP spring to mind. Leclerc arrived in F1 with Sauber with massive expectations as runaway Formula 2 champion, and everybody around him trying to play them down. The argument was that he needed time and was going up against a much more experienced – and quite underrated – team-mate in Marcus Ericsson. So it didn’t matter if Leclerc needed half a season to find his feet before progress took hold. If Sauber was willing to accept a ‘season of two halves’ from Leclerc, it must have been absolutely chuffed to watch its driver enjoy ‘a season of one-seventh and sixth-sevenths’. After…

The rollercoaster recent history of Williams continued into 2018, and this time it hit rock bottom. Ninth in the last season of V8s in ’13, ahead at least of Marussia and Caterham, the team bounced back to be third, third, fifth and fifth in the four subsequent seasons, flattered perhaps by the superiority of Mercedes power in the early days of the hybrid era. However, in 2018 the Grove outfit slumped to 10th and last by a significant margin, its only scores an eighth in a high-attrition race in Baku, and ninth and 10th at Monza, where in low-drag configuration the team managed to find some performance in the FW41. Elsewhere it was a struggle for Lance Stroll and his rookie team-mate Sergey Sirotkin. Both were often on the back…

The 2018 Formula 1 season was the second to be conducted under the sport’s new management. Having laid the groundwork last year, investing and dramatically expanding staffing levels at its new HQ, Liberty Media was probably hoping to achieve rather more than it actually did. F1 chief executive Chase Carey and his colleagues are playing the long game, with a focus on 2021 and beyond, and they stress that there shouldn’t be a rush to judgement. But it was inevitable that there was a little impatience in some quarters, and by the end of the year F1 team bosses were questioning an apparent lack of progress on various fronts. The shape of the sport from 2021 was the dominant topic. Liberty’s basic plan was to review distribution of income among…

The 20th anniversary of Mika Hakkinen storming to the first of two Formula 1 world titles was honoured at the 37th T Autosport Awards at Grosvenor House on Park Lane last Sunday. He received the Gregor Grant Award for lifetime achievement, as did six-time Le Mans winner Jacky Ickx in recognition of a career spanning five decades. But as motorsport legends and legacies were honoured, the evening climaxed with a celebration of Britain’s next generation of superstars. Tom Gamble was showered in confetti when he was revealed as the 30th recipient of the prestigious McLaren Autosport BRDC Award, which has launched the careers of Jenson Button, David Coulthard, Dario Franchitti, Paul di Resta, Lando Norris and George Russell. Autosport readers voted Lewis Hamilton as both their International and British Competition…

BRITISH F3 British Formula 4 race winner Paavo Tonteri was just one of several drivers to get their first taste of BRDC British Formula 3 machinery on track last week at Silverstone. Finn Tonteri tested with Double R Racing, the team he raced with in British F4 and which carried Linus Lundqvist to the 2018 F3 title. German Formula 4 champion Lirim Zendeli tested with Fortec Motorsports, but won’t race in the series. “He was just learning the circuit for FIA Formula 3 next year,” said team boss Richard Dutton. “He was very quick though.” Fortec also tested IMSA Prototype Challenge champion and Pro Mazda Series driver Kris Wright. Elsewhere, Chris Dittmann Racing ran recent Formula Ford 1600 race winner Tommy Foster, while Carlin tested Kaylen Frederick, who finished sixth…

BRITISH GT Former British GT4 champion Graham Johnson has rejoined Balfe Motorsport to drive a McLaren 570S GT4 next year, but has split with long-time co-driver Mike Robinson and will team up with McLaren Driver Development Programme graduate Michael O’Brien. It ends a long partnership between Johnson and Robinson, who raced together in endurance karting events in the early 2000s and have paired up in British GT since ’15, winning the ’16 GT4 title before adding the Pro-Am crown in ’17. They took one win this year at Brands Hatch. “I would be surprised if we didn’t team up again in the future,” said Johnson. “We’re great friends and we have fun racing together, but at some point you have to set yourself new challenges. “I’ve got to learn how…

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN? WHO IS THIS? This incognito racer went on to form a dynasty and become one of the most famous faces of a golden generation. Having tired of the courts he took to the track and soon caught the bug. On the advice of a national hero he left home and oiled the wheels of his career. This gave him the signal to move into the big time, but he would have to fabricate his chances before he slithered into a top drive. Success came quickly and his high-stakes gamble paid off. Never one to shy away from something new, he was the first of his kind as things became explosive. He took a king’s ransom to triple up, but a wilted flower almost kicked him into…