Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i AUTOSPORT

@BenAndersonF1 We’ve nearly finished Formula 1’s great format experiment of 2021, and now the novelty has worn off and Monza’s ‘F1 Sprint’ (good they’ve finally settled on the name!) is in the books we can begin to analyse what we’re seeing. I have to say I think it’s the right approach to shake up F1’s traditional three-day schedule. For too long Friday practice has been a drawn-out boreathon. I know Robert Kubica loves using these sessions to work on finer details of set-up, but you don’t need four hours of practice when simulation is so good. Even cutting the total duration by an hour this year, eliminating most of the long-run tyre analysis, has been a step in the right direction. Having a focal point on each day is sensible,…

One of my key weekend jobs is to shoot parc ferme and the podium celebrations, and in Belgium that entailed rather a longer wait than expected. In fact, for a while we weren’t sure whether there would be a podium ceremony at all… You could see that in the body language of the drivers. Max had never won a grand prix at Spa-Francorchamps before and, this being one of the classic circuits where the finest drivers thrive, you feel a top-drawer talent like him should be a winner here. Likewise George Russell has all the makings of a grand prix winner but had yet to reach the podium. So it was a bit of a rum do for them to be there after just three laps behind the Safety Car.…

This is another shot from that first attempt to start the race, taken on the way up the hill, just before they brake for Les Combes. It wasn’t as wet at this point as it was later on, but still too wet to race. In the background you can see the wisp of smoke from the stand selling chips and mayonnaise – it must have done a roaring trade. Despite the lack of light I shot this on a high shutter speed because I wanted to ‘freeze’ the spray and give a real impression of how difficult conditions were out there. You can really see how it comes off the front wheels and flies up around the halo and into George’s face. Then it’s hanging in the air for the…

PICTURES How long has it taken you to read this sentence? There are many ways of expressing time and you might answer ‘just under three seconds’ or you might say ‘a little longer than the Red Bull team generally takes to change all four wheels on one of its cars at a pitstop. In Hungary, Red Bull set its fastest time of the season, completing a tyre-change in just 1.88 seconds. So fast are F1 pitstops now that the FIA has had its interest awakened and has issued further directives on what is regarded as acceptable practice, explaining how much automation can be used and what human intervention is necessary to ensure safety takes precedence over speed. So how is this achieved and how is the balance between technology and…

REMEMBER THE BUZZ about “a secret meeting” between Sebastian Vettel and Otmar Szafnauer last summer? A four-time world champion, left a free agent by Ferrari, was spotted in a parking lot at the Silverstone circuit jumping in the car belonging to the boss of the soon-to-be Aston Martin team, just a few hundred meters away from its factory. In a peak period of a Formula 1 silly season, it was seen as a clear sign: these two are edging closer to making a deal. It did eventually happen. Vettel moved to Aston Martin for 2021. But on that particular occasion it was just a chance meeting between two old friends. Seb didn’t hop into Otmar’s car to sign a contract. In fact, these two had already signed one by that…

100% Match 2021 12 1h 52m HD “How nice he is.” That was how Vanessa Nöcker, co-producer and co-director of the new documentary on Michael Schumacher, answered our question on what surprised her the most about her subject during filming. If that reads like damning with faint praise, think again about the figure we are talking about. For 20 years Schumacher was both parts an arrogant pantomime villain to the English-speaking world and a Zeus-like God who could do no wrong in his own country. But to those who worked with him at Benetton, then Ferrari and on his Formula 1 return with Mercedes, Schumacher was indeed simply ‘nice’. He was lovely, in fact; those who worked with him and for him generally adored him. For a man who spent…

LUIGI MUSSO PICTURES AMONG THE SIZEABLE COLLECTION OF… memorabilia accumulated through a lifetime in motor racing are two small trophies, which sit on a shelf in my office. One of them, won by my childhood hero Jean Behra, is from the 1957 Caen Grand Prix, while the other – from the same year – was awarded by the Automobile Club Roma, and is inscribed, ‘Luigi Musso, Campione Italiano Assoluto’. Following the death of Alberto Ascari in a testing accident at Monza in May 1955, Italian motor racing was in some despair. Gone was as great a driver as motorsport has known, and a new native superstar was urgently sought. The hope was that ultimately two young men – Musso and Eugenio Castellotti – might fit the bill. In those days…

FINISHING STRAIGHT 1“Aggressive” qualifying strategy earns Russell his first podium While Sunday’s race amounted to an un-edifyingly farcical handful of laps behind the Safety Car, Saturday at Spa at least permitted some of F1’s youngest and most exciting talents to shine. McLaren’s Lando Norris looked to be almost a shoo-in for pole position, having topped the first two segments of a rain-affected session. Super-committed in the damp early phases, Norris was eventually caught out as the rain intensified again ahead of Q3 – enough to require full wets instead of intermediate tyres. His McLaren MCL35M snapped into oversteer at the second apex of Eau Rouge then his front axle gripped again as he applied opposite lock, pitching him into the barriers on the left at a wince-inducing velocity. After the…

FINISHING STRAIGHT 24-26 September 2021 Sochi Autodrom THE MAIN EVENT Now looking towards the off-ramp as plans are drawn up to relocate the Russian GP to the Igora Drive circuit near St Petersburg, Sochi theoretically begins the 2021 season’s post-summer flyaway leg. Popularised by Joseph Stalin in the middle of the last century, this is a popular resort with a peculiar climate which enables visitors to choose between sunbathing on the beach or skiing in the nearby mountains. The track loops around and between venues used for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The constraints of the location explain but do not excuse a largely insipid layout which makes for processional racing, although the track is relatively unusual in that the second rather than the first corner is a key overtaking point…

PICTURES FINISHING STRAIGHT @CoddersF1 facebook.com/gpracingonline GP Racing readers who listen to the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue will no doubt be familiar with Mornington Crescent, the spoof game in which guests maintain a fiction of intensely strategic play when in fact they are merely calling out the names of tube stations. A similar feeling of improvisation pervaded that grim Sunday afternoon at Spa-Francorchamps, albeit with fewer laughs. As the rain teemed down, we were even treated to a few moments of pantomime as Red Bull sought permission to fix Sergio Pérez’s shunted RB16B – with rather less audience participation, the hardy trackside spectators being more engaged with the possibility of developing trench foot. Had the race actually started? “Oh no it hasn’t!” cried…

STEVEN TEE It's a trip down memory lane for our principal photographer as he give us his thoughts on his first trip to Zandvoort for 36 years (p44) DAMIEN SMITH Damien speaks to Vanessa Nöcker, one of the makers of the upcoming Schumacher documentary on Netflix, about the film (p56) OLEG KARPOV Oleg investigates the impact Sebastian Vettel is having at Aston Martin (p34) and Yuki Tsunoda's inconsistent start to his F1 career (p68) STUART CODLING What news of Codders this month? Well, he's been chatting with McLaren's Zak Brown about the direction the company is taking (p62) Thanks to Tim Bampton, Connor Bean, Matt Bishop, Harry Bull, Adam Cooper, Clarisse Hoffmann, Will Hings, Sabine Kehm, James Mann, Jonathan Noble, Carolyn Paterson, Will Ponissi, Michael Power, Charlotte Sefton IS POWERED…

This is a classic Spa image and I’m glad I captured it on Friday, when the track conditions worked in its favour. Nobody would have been able to go fast enough on Sunday… There’s a small area for photographers on the left, on the inside apex of the first bit of Eau Rouge. It’s a spectacular place to stand even if you’re not taking pictures. The change of direction, both horizontal and vertical, really tests the cars and their skid plates kick up great rooster tails of sparks as the suspension compresses when they hit the hill. Panning after them with a relatively slow shutter speed gives a nice graphic effect as well as a sense of the car’s sheer speed. Where Spa, Belgium When 2:17pm, Friday 27 August 2021…

PICTURES 01 The 2022 grid is close to complete after a slew of driver announcements during the Spa/Zandvoort/Monza tripleheader. Kimi Räikkönen called time on his F1 career, paving the way for Valtteri Bottas to move from Mercedes to Alfa in 2022 – and George Russell to take Valtteri’s place. Meanwhile, Red Bull announced the renewal of Sergio Pérez’s contract ahead of the Belgian GP, then sister team AlphaTauri confirmed two days after Zandvoort that Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda will be retained for 2022, while Red Bull facilitated reserve driver Alex Albon becoming Russell’s replacement at Williams. This was the chronological sequence of events, but the key mover in all this was Russell – a driver who was out of contract at Williams and needed to be promoted lest Mercedes…

@_markgallagher When Formula 1 announced its ‘record breaking’ 22-race calendar for 2020 back in August of 2019, none of us could have anticipated the seismic events that would overtake sport. It’s been an other-worldly, Hollywoodesque experience. Two years later, the world is a different place. While it is tempting for those fortunate enough to be double vaccinated to sit back and enjoy one of Formula 1’s greatest duels, it can feel like indulgent escapism. A great deal of misery has ensued. Fans and industry figures alike have lost their lives. For some, the question arises as to whether they may ever see F1 visit their shores again. That was the very question put to me by Sky News Australia following July’s announcement that the Grand Prix in Melbourne, cancelled in…

1985 WAS MY FIRST full season of Formula 1 and I hadn’t been back to Zandvoort, or Holland, since – until the grand prix came back this year. The whole area, everything, was very much as I remember: sand dunes, the beach. Pickled herrings – you can buy pickled herrings and chips and mayo in the little shelters they’ve got lined up like little caravans all the way along the seafront. That was exactly the same as I remember from 1985, though it feels a little bit more upmarket now. They’ve got beach clubs, and the whole place has quite a nice vibe to it. Holland is really cool. We stayed in Haarlem, a picturesque city to the east of the circuit, with a canal and a windmill and all…

YOU’D BE FORGIVEN for wondering why a grandee team which hadn’t won a grand prix for almost a decade until Daniel Ricciardo’s triumph at Monza, is spreading its wings beyond Formula 1. Especially when that team, despite that welcome 1-2 in Italy, is part of a financially troubled group which has had to make difficult cutbacks – to the extent it now rents the home it spent £300million building. But with McLaren’s growing involvement in IndyCar, eSports and Extreme E, alongside putative dalliances in Formula E and the World Endurance Championship, there is at least a historical precedent: this is a company rooted in getting stuck in to different racing formulae, even if it hasn’t done that for many years. Back when the factory, such as it was, had a…

FINISHING STRAIGHT 1 Mercedes has no answer to Verstappen’s searing speed After the first-lap drama of Silverstone, the mess of Budapest and that soggy farce at Spa, a flat-out dry race at Zandvoort represented a reset for the world championship battle – a chance to see where the main protagonists really stood. For Mercedes, it was a sobering lesson. Max Verstappen dominated from pole position in front of his adoring public and Lewis Hamilton never really got a look in. Losing almost all of Friday’s second practice session to an oil-related engine problem didn’t help Hamilton’s cause, but it’s doubtful even a clean weekend would have changed the result. “We were struggling a bit around Turn 2, 3, especially on Friday,” said Mercedes engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “The banked corners…

This is Max ‘leading’ behind the Safety Car during the first attempt to start the Belgian Grand Prix. You can see how excited the strong Dutch contingent among the spectators is – the flares are already starting to go off in the background. This is the run up to Les Combes and on a dry day you might see cars running three abreast at the start of the race. But on this day, at this point, it was already obvious to me there was no chance of starting the race. The rain had set in and the spray was getting worse. What a shame for Max and his fans that his first F1 win here was the proverbial damp squib. Where Spa, Belgium When 3:25pm, Sunday 29 August 2021 Details…

On race day in Belgium I took myself up to Les Combes because that’s a place where things happen – and not necessarily on the first lap. Still, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone have a shunt there while driving to the grid. Apparently Sergio Pérez said afterwards that it could have happened to anybody. He’s not far wrong. It was a peculiar accident, all at very low speed and not at all spectacular: Pérez just rode over the kerb at a bit of an odd angle and slewed off, a passenger as he slid into the wall. It must have felt awful. Still, I had a job to do, so I fired off this shot of him as he was surveying the damage while the car was being…

@benedwardstv PICTURES Having burst back on to the top of the podium at Monza just after completing his 200th grand prix start at Spa, Daniel Ricciardo has completely revamped his season and potentially his whole career. Early next year he will pass Mark Webber’s existing record for the most starts for an Australian and his success in Italy meant a deep breath of relief after a troubling time earlier in the season. In the first 10 races of the year, he out qualified his team-mate Lando Norris on just three occasions and scored under half of Lando’s points tally. The gap in qualifying was the biggest average loss he has suffered in his career; in 2018 he lost out to Max Verstappen by just 0.14s across 18 representative qualifying sessions,…

It’s been a long road back for ‘Team Enstone’ because there was something of a brain drain under the previous ownership. What have been the main challenges, in bringing the facilities back to where they ought to be, and in terms of learning how to win again, as a team? Like you said, when Renault purchased the team again, in December 2015, there had been a big brain drain – a lot of people had left. Often it’s the best people who get an offer first from the other teams and, if their salaries aren’t being paid, that’s a breach of contract and they can leave on a Friday and start at another team on Monday. That’s how bad it was. People would just disappear almost overnight in the latter…

When he was already a racing driver, Yuki Tsunoda attended a school in his native Sagamihara that years before had also hosted Ukyo Katayama, the man who up to this day still holds the record for most Formula 1 starts among Japanese drivers. It’s an amazing coincidence given that, before Tsunoda, F1 history included just 17 other racers from Japan, a country with a current population of 126 million people. “And when I moved to a different high school, it was Takuma Sato’s old school,” a smiling Yuki reveals in a conversation with GP Racing. But then he admits right away that he only recently became aware of this fact - and, in fact, of who Katayama and Sato are at all. It’s because Yuki Tsunoda was never an F1…

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FINISHING STRAIGHT 1Hamilton and Verstappen collide in ‘Silverstone part 2’ After a sequence of races where the title protagonists were kept apart, either by accidents (Hungaroring), rain (Spa) or sheer pace (Zandvoort), Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen collided at Monza, in what might be called part two of a row that has been simmering since they came to blows so spectacularly at Silverstone. The first flashpoint came on lap one of the Italian GP, as Hamilton tried to pass Verstappen around the outside approaching the second chicane. Predictably, Max squeezed Lewis fully to the outside under braking, then choked off space in the middle of the complex, forcing Lewis to avoid contact by going off track. The stewards were fine with this. The pitstop phase created the circumstance for the…

FINISHING STRAIGHT JAGUAR CENTURY Author Giles Chapman Price £60 quartoknows.com Next year is the centenary of the venerable marque which began life as the Swallow Sidecar Company, established by William Lyons and William Walmsley. It became a visionary automotive brand, navigated the economic privations of the early 1930s and the postwar years, and enjoyed success on track, pioneering the use of disc brakes in its sportscar campaigns. The 1935 SS and 1961 E-Type are among the most elegant examples of their genre. Author Giles Chapman is a former editor of GP Racing’s sometime sister title Classic & Sports Car, and over the course of this lavishly illustrated tome – which comes packaged in a slip case – he focuses on the road car side of the business. There’s plenty on…