ATLAS F1 - THE JOURNAL OF FORMULA ONE MOTORSPORT
Reflections on 2001

By Roger Horton, England
Atlas F1 Senior Writer



The 2001 Formula One season ended pretty much the way it started: a win by Michael Schumacher in his Ferrari, and an accident between two cars that saw wheels flying through the air. In Australia, the accident was a high-speed affair and resulted in the death of a marshal; in Japan, everyone was luckier, no one was hurt and the incident was buried deep inside the race reports. The races may get safer and safer but the task of improving safety is a never-ending one.

In between Melbourne and Suzuka, the Grand Prix circus travelled around the globe, crowned its Champions, and went into its winter on-track hibernation. In the meantime, the world changed enough for even the most insular personalities in the paddock to notice: a worldwide economic slowdown looks like becoming a full blown recession, courtesy of the events of September 11th - surely the most public and damaging single act of terrorism in world history.

The dust may have settled in New York but the fallout is still spreading, and it is impossible to see just where it will finally end. The only certainty is that it will impact the F1 world as the recession bites and the many companies who fund the Formula One circus reign in their spending to protect their damaged balance sheets. When the historians get busy with the past decade, it may yet be hailed as one of the sport's great golden eras. An era when many of the world's greatest corporations - from motor manufacturers to hi-tech computer giants - jostled with the cigarette barons for space on the high-speed advertising billboard that is the modern Formula One car, and fuelled an almost unprecedented growth in team budgets.

This infusion of corporate investment has injected so much cash into Grand Prix racing that even midfield teams have made their owners seriously wealthy and turned on its head that old motor racing joke, that the only way to make a small fortune from the sport was to start with a large one. But your 'average' Formula One team owner is almost by definition a born survivor, and most will do whatever it takes to make it through the coming difficult times.

Next season, Toyota - the world's third largest motor manufacturer - will join the F1 merry go round. By some estimates, the Japanese giant has already spent close to $250 million just to equip itself for a year of testing and building three cars, which should be ready for Melbourne next season. If, as most observers believe will be the case, they take four or five years before one of their cars takes the chequered flag in first position, then we might witness the first Billion dollar maiden win. In the current economic climate, you have to ask yourself, what type of madness is this?

The name of the game in the coming seasons will be getting the biggest bang for the much-reduced income of bucks, and the Sauber team this year has provided an object lesson to most of the grid on how to achieve this. The Swiss team's paddock presentation is smart and functional, its two drivers are young and cheap, and Peter Sauber has gone quietly about his business without the need to adorn his pit garage with over the top page three girls at every opportunity.

Sauber, of course, have yet to win a race either and maybe they never will. But their performance this year, powered as they were with a customer engine, has highlighted just what a poor job a number of their rivals have done this season, especially given their superior budgets. No doubt most of the outfits that finished below Sauber in the constructors' standings harbour ambitions of one day being the sport's top dogs, replacing the likes of Ferrari, McLaren and Williams, but on this season's performances, they have no hope.

Jordan is in danger of becoming a perennial nearly outfit. Some say that the team's constant haemorrhaging of key technical staff is evidence that it is perceived as a place to hone your skills and gain experience before moving on to work for a team with greater ambitions. Eddie Jordan can sure talk the talk, but his team has slipped steadily backwards since that halcyon period during the '98 and '99 seasons, when it appeared the breakthrough had been made. A few wins too early, perhaps, and the foot lifted from the investment gas pedal when it should have been kept hard to the floor.

Eddie Jordan's mid season decision to dump Heinz-Harald Frentzen and replace him with Jean Alesi was used by his critics as an example of just how much the Irishman has lost the plot. While the Jordan team management were playing games with their drivers, and even toying with the idea of hiring the overrated Eddie Irvine, they let their main driving asset, Jarno Trulli, slip through their fingers. Now, for next season, Jordan have been forced into fielding two fresh drivers, never a desirable situation, one a rather reluctantly recruited Giancarlo Fisichella as their lead driver and the other, a promising but totally inexperienced Japanese rookie, Takuma Sato.

If they awarded Constructors' points for column inches in the media, Jaguar would have finished the season a lot higher than they actually did. From the time Niki Lauda appeared in the paddock in Melbourne and, sitting alongside a rather uncomfortable looking Bobby Rahal, tried to explain to a highly sceptical media the exact reason for his new appointment, the clock on their relationship was ticking. There has been far too much politics at Jaguar from the start, and you have only to look at Ferrari's recent history to see the benefits that team building and harmony can bring. For most of the year the atmosphere was hardly harmonious at Jaguar, and there has been precious little team building.

There is nothing in Lauda's management background to suggest that he has the experience required to get Jaguar to the top, and the amount of money the team will require over the coming years to make it a success may yet prove to be a poisoned chalice to Lauda and his boss Dr Wolfgang Reitzle, who is the Chairman of the Premier Automotive Group, of which Jaguar is a part. With their parent company, Ford, reporting a nearly 700 million loss for the last quarter in America, expensive racing programmes might not sound like the best thing the company could be spending its money on, so it's little wonder that Lauda is reportedly trying to make Jaguar self funding from the income from sponsors and car sales. The current economic downturn will not make his task any easier.

If the BAR and Arrows teams under performed pretty much as expected, the Benetton team showed just how to handle a difficult season. With Renault's radical new wide angled engine seriously behind schedule going into the season, they always knew that the first half of the season was going to be an especially character building experience. Despite this, technical director Mike Gascoyne remained upbeat and available, as his team made quiet progress. By the end of the season the B201 was starting to look like a regular point scorer and the advantages gained by having such a low centre of gravity at the rear of the car were becoming apparent. Once again, Renault has given the F1 world a wake up call and with Trulli peddling the car next year, some surprises could well be in store.

At the front of the grid the big surprise was really McLaren's poor form, whilst in contrast Ferrari performed all year at a consistently high level. When Ferrari got their tactics wrong - as they did at Silverstone with a poor pitstop strategy, or Indianapolis where they chose the wrong tyre compound - McLaren were there to pick up the pieces. But McLaren's inability to make their cars work with their Bridgestone tyres, especially in qualifying, was all too often clearly apparent, and their Ilmor engines also fell behind in the power stakes as the season progressed. Despite all the denials, design guru Adrain Newey's attempted defection to Jaguar destabilized the team at a crucial part of the season, and team boss Ron Dennis perhaps needs more than a brand new factory to restore his outfit to its former glory.

There was much satisfaction in the paddock as the Williams team returned to their winning ways. On their good days, the whole Williams-BMW-Michelin combo blitzed the field, and Maranello can be in no doubt from just which direction next year's challenge is going to come from. In mid-season, BMW and Williams were having a few clear-the-air meetings, where, according to their technical chief Patrick Head, there were many "free and frank exchanges of views," political parlance for a meeting that rated one notch below a blazing row. But the mutual respect for each side's achievements in their partnership remains intact and Williams's chances of winning their tenth Constructors' title next season look especially strong.

The Spanish Grand Prix saw the reintroduction of launch and traction control after being outlawed for some seven seasons and surprisingly for some, nothing much changed. The cars, especially on the exits of slow corners, sounded awful to the purist ear, but drivers could still apply too much power and spin coming out of mid speed corners. Power oversteer is alive and well, and snap oversteer still awaits the heavy footed driver. Throttle control, especially in the wet, still requires a delicate touch, and the fears of drivers simply flooring the throttle post-apex and the traction control taking care of everything proved to be unfounded.

All the teams developed systems that allowed the driver to adjust in the cockpit the amounts of traction control assistance the track conditions required, so for the driver this became just another skill to learn and not surprisingly the best drivers learnt the quickest. It has always been the case that the fastest drivers have used the throttle to steer the cars through the corners, so taking this option away from the guy in the cockpit never made any sense.

This year saw something of a changing of the guard in the driver ranks, and two newcomers - Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya - made the biggest impression. The contrast these two rookies made could hardly have been more different. Raikkonen is quiet, reserved, but possessed with a steely resolve that will serve him well in his Formula One career, although at many races he seemed to be almost anonymous in the paddock.

Montoya is open, confident and radiates a self-belief that reminded many of that other great South American debutant of almost two decades ago, Ayrton Senna. Montoya had previously astounded American journalists by predicting the ease with which he would blow away his opposition on the high-speed ovals prior to even starting his CART career. He duly delivered on his predictions with interest.

In Formula One, Montoya made no such public predictions, but the sum of his attitude and early season comments suggested that privately he still believed that he has yet to see a driver he didn't think he could beat. By the end of the season, he had gone some way to proving it to the F1 world at large.

It is still too early to say which of these two new drivers will ultimately prove the most successful in Grand Prix racing. But already there are some substantial clues. Raikkonen was outqualified and often outraced by his teammate Nick Heidfeld - a talented driver, but hardly an established star. By contrast, Montoya had learned enough in just nine or ten races to match and then beat the highly rated Ralf Schumacher.

McLaren insiders compare Raikkonen with the young Mika Hakkinen back in '93 - when the young Finn made such an impression at McLaren as a late season replacement for Michael Andretti - and believe that the ex-Sauber man will make a similar seamless transition.

The McLaren of that era, though, was a very different beast to the McLaren of now. Hakkinen took four years to score his maiden victory for Ron Dennis's team, but Kimi Raikkonen will be expected to win in a much shorter time scale, given the improved package at his disposal, and just to add to the pressure, team boss Ron Dennis has gone to great lengths to remind everyone that both Hakkinen and Heidfeld remain options for the future.

By contrast, Montoya had arguably one of the most impressive first seasons of any driver currently competing in Formula One, aided - it must be said - by his considerable previous racing experience. Only at Hockenheim, Monza and perhaps Brazil, was the Williams FW23 the class of the field in race trim, and on both occasions the Colombian was in the process of blitzing the field before problems intervened, Monza aside. All year the Michelin-shod outfits went to each race unsure of just how well the French maker's products were going to perform and spent much of their setup time dealing with their tyre's changing characteristics.

This was difficult territory for an F1 novice, but from mid-season onwards Montoya was making better use of his car's potential than his more experienced teammate Ralf Schumacher and he looked like a natural winner. Next season, assuming that his equipment is up to the job, Montoya will be Michael Schumacher's main Championship rival and a fascinating contest is in prospect between the established Champion and the new pretender. Given the stakes involved for both men, fireworks are virtually guaranteed.

Throughout all the changes that occurred during the F1 year, one constant remained. The little Minardi team battled on through tribulations that would have sunk many lesser outfits. Saved from bankruptcy by the Australian aviation entrepreneur Paul Stoddart, some six weeks prior to the start of the season, the team only once failed to qualify both its cars for the race.

Stoddart approached his task as a team owner with an almost simplistic enthusiasm, believing that even in this modern age, it was still possible to compete in Formula One in an honest and straightforward way, showing that he is a man with old-fashioned values. During the season some would have called him naive, some would call him stupid, still others would call him misguided, but just about everyone would agree that he was brave, and most wished him well.

And so another season of the Formula One World Championship ends. Michael Schumacher has taken another title and collected a couple more all-time records. Before long - though it may not seem that short right now - he will line up again in Australia, once again the man to beat. But if 2001 is an indication of things to come, Schumacher may just find himself in the fiercest of all battles. And, in many ways, now is not an end: it's the beginning.


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Volume 7, Issue 44
October 31st 2001

Articles

Jean Alesi: One in a Million
by Timothy Collings

Commentary

Reflections on 2001
by Roger Horton

2001: Rubber and Class
by Karl Ludvigsen

A Season in Waiting
by Richard Barnes

2001 Season Review

The End of Season Report
by Mark Glendenning

The 2001 Technical Review
by Will Gray

The 2001 Season in Quotes
by Pablo Elizalde

How Would F1 Score in Other Series
by Marcel Borsboom

Columns

The 2001 Qualifying Differentials
by Marcel Borsboom

2001 Season Strokes
by Bruce Thomson

The Weekly Grapevine
by the F1 Rumors Team



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