The Last MotoGP Home Outing For Valentino Rossi’s Chainsaw Fans
Because yes, they show up to MotoGP races with chainsaws. The high (or low) point for Rossi’s supporters in the MotoGP World Championship was during the openly hostile 2016 title fight. Italian rider’s rivals Marc Márquez and Jorge Lorenzo were given bodyguards during that season’s Italian Grand Prix weekend to protect the riders from any potential incident with Rossi’s fans. Thankfully, no altercation took place between the fans and rival riders.
It is unclear what these fans will do after the 2021 season. A team owned by Valentino Rossi will enter MotoGP for the 2022 season. Despite Rossi’s ownership, one of the team’s riders being his half-brother and being based in his hometown, it won’t be clear if the Italian icon’s fervent support will carry over to Racing Team VR46 until their first race in Italy.
Here’s Your Daniel Ricciardo Friday-In-Texas Update
“That accent cycled through so many different accents,” our own North Carolina native Collin Woodard messaged in Slack after watching the clip. Yes, Danny Ric’s Texan still needs some work, but damn if the guy doesn’t get an A+ for effort. And for dropping a “hell boogedy” in there — he’s definitely got the vocabulary down, at least to this Pennsylvanian who’s spent all of four days in Austin over the course of his life.
Anyway, Ricciardo is entering the weekend in the appropriate attire, too. Here’s the helmet he’ll be wearing, courtesy of Jens Munser Designs:
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I need a windbreaker with “McLaren Service Plus” embroidered on the breast and the back, like, yesterday. Ricciardo will of course lap COTA in The Intimidator’s 1984 No. 3 Chevy before Sunday’s race — the culmination of his bet with McLaren boss Zak Brown for nabbing a podium (ahem, race win) this year — so it all checks out.
Oh, and yesterday, this happened:
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Ricciardo ended Friday’s Free Practice 1 session in 16th, 2.5 seconds off Valtteri Bottas’ lead time. His teammate Lando Norris fell eighth on the timing boards. The Aussie’s last race in Turkey was nothing to celebrate, as he finished 13th after stopping for new tires too early and lost two spots in the last two laps of the race.
I’d like to think his spiritual homefield advantage will work in his favor this weekend. After all, I’ve heard he draws his power from the clay under the track.
Red Bull Bids Honda A Fond Farewell With Special White Livery
The tribute includes a one-off special livery in throwback Honda Championship White with red accent, paying tribute to the rising sun livery the company wore when it first joined F1 in the 1960s. The cars also carry the characters for the Japanese word ‘arigato’ with a hearty and heart-felt thank you to the powerplant manufacturer. The Alpha Tauri cars will also carry the thank you message.
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Image: Red Bull
Rather than switching to a new powertrain supplier in 2022, Red Bull will take over the intellectual property and production of Honda’s V6 hybrid power units later this year ahead of the revised chassis requirements next season. It would likely be too much of a pain in the ass for Red Bull to have to build a brand new chassis to new regulations and build a relationship with a new powerplant manufacturer at the same time. As a result the fizzy energy drinks company will start its own engine division called Red Bull Powertrains.
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Image: Red Bull
RBR’s Max Verstappen currently sits 2 points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton with seven rounds remaining in the championship. Perhaps this special livery will be enough to push him to his eighth victory this season, or perhaps it will go about as well as the last time Mercedes decided to run a special one-off tribute livery. We’ll see when the Turkish Grand Prix goes off this Sunday.
How Good Was Valtteri Bottas, Really, At Mercedes?
To get the full picture, you’ll have to watch the video. Stuart compares qualifying results, which show that Hamilton has pretty consistently outclassed Bottas when it comes to securing a higher starting position. Stuart also compares stats from the Hamilton vs. Rosberg era, so we get a much clearer picture of what we’re talking about. And while Hamilton also consistently outclassed Rosberg, Rosberg also took pole position and the front row more frequently than Bottas. In fact, Rosberg’s average qualifying time was faster than Hamilton’s.
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There’s more data to back things up, but the conclusion Stuart reaches is very much the one that many other fans have reached: Bottas has been a solidly good driver, but he was never destined to be a World Champion. And that’s exactly where Mercedes wanted him to be.
The 2021 Formula One World Championship continues this weekend after the summer break with the Belgian Grand Prix, the first race in a triple header that also includes races in the Netherlands and Italy.
The first half of the season ended with Mercedes-Benz AMG’s Lewis Hamilton passing Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen to claim the top of the leaderboard. However, there’s just six points separating them, so the title fight is still very much alive as we enter the second half.
The Belgian Grand Prix is held annually at Spa-Francorchamps. The famous circuit in the beautiful Ardennes features an unrelenting track that serves as a stern test for car and driver, and with an average speed approaching 145 mph, it’s one of the fastest laps of the season. How tough is it? Drivers experience over 5 g in some turns, such as Turn 10, known as Pouhon. The cars also run at full throttle for almost 80% of the lap.
Stretching 4.35 miles, Spa has the longest track on the calendar. In fact, it’s so big that it’s not unusual to have varying weather conditions at different parts. For example, rain at one end and sunshine at the other. Looking at the weather forecast, we’re likely in for wet conditions during both Saturday’s qualifying and Sunday’s race.
Spa-Francorchamps, home of the Formula One Belgian Grand Prix
Spa’s track surface is on the abrasive side, meaning tires get quite the workout. Pirelli has nominated its P Zero White hard (C2), P Zero Yellow medium (C3) and P Zero Red soft (C4) compounds for the weekend, the same nomination as last year. However given the weather forecast, it’s highly likely the Cinturato wets will also be used.
After the first practice session on Friday, Mercedes-Benz AMG’s Valtteri Bottas was fastest, followed closely by Verstappen and AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly.
Going into the weekend, Hamilton leads the 2021 Drivers’ Championship with 192 points, with Verstappen in second with 186 points and McLaren’s Lando Norris a distant third with 113 points. In the Constructors’ Championship, Mercedes leads with 300 points, versus the 290 of Red Bull and 163 of McLaren. Last year’s winner in Belgium was Hamilton driving for Mercedes.
If watching this weekend, keep an eye out for Haas’ Mick Schumacher. He will be wearing a special helmet marking the 30th anniversary of his famous father’s debut F1 race, which took place at Spa back on August 25, 1991. Schumacher Snr. was driving for Jordan at the time.
About a month ago, the Mercedes-EQ Formula E team announced it’d signed an option with the series to begin development of its Gen 3 car. “Development,” in this sense, is pretty much tantamount to attending meetings alongside all the other constructors — but don’t mistake it as a confirmation of ongoing participation. The Gen 3 regulations are expected to kick in after the next season, beginning with the 2022-23 championship, and last until the end of the 2025-26 campaign.
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On Tuesday, team boss Ian James related in a virtual roundtable discussion, of which Jalopnik was a part, that Mercedes still isn’t quite ready to officially commit to the Gen 3 cycle. However, James also said that formalization will come “in due course.”
We need to take decision obviously at some point because of the development work that’s going on, and at the moment we’ve registered as an interested manufacturer. Therefore we’re able to take part in the technical working groups and so on and so forth.
So I don’t think it’s going to drag on for too much longer, but this just like the natural part of the process — just making sure that, you know, we understand the direction the things are going in and that it’s right. Mercedes has a lot of things going on internally — as there is across the whole automotive industry at the moment — and so there’s sort of external factors to us as a team, which needs to be taken into consideration, and that will all be done in due course.
What’s interesting about Mercedes dragging its feet with respect to a full endorsement is that many of its major automaker-aligned rivals have not. At the end of March a group of constructors, including Porsche, Nissan, Mahindra and DS, made their continued involvement known. There was said to be a deadline at this time for teams to make that call, as The Race reported, but Mercedes evidently decided to take its sweet time and not worry too much if anyone noticed.
If the tentative Gen 3 specifications bear out as planned, Formula E cars should receive quite the power bump — rising from the current qualifying spec of 250 kW (335 horsepower) to 350 kW (469 HP), and 300 kW for races. Energy recovery, or regen, will be harvested from both axles. The addition of mid-race “flash-charging” will necessitate pit stops for refueling, adding a degree of strategy and unpredictability while potentially extending race length, too. Perhaps Formula E will even be able to entertain more full-scale circuits as it’s attempted to this year, considering the cars will be more powerful and possibly be able to run for longer.
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But Formula E is in no position to twist Mercedes’ arm. It’s already losing Audi and BMW after this season, as the Silver Arrows’ top two domestic rivals have set their sights on sports car racing, specifically with LMDh prototype programs. LMDh is not a pure-electric series — though it does involve a spec hybrid component — so there is some alternative energy marketability there.
So the ball is really in Mercedes’ court at this point. That said, given the language James and the team’s technical advisor/development driver, Gary Paffett, were using on the call, it doesn’t seem like the company is feigning interest in Formula E just to dip out without a moment’s notice. I asked Paffett — who wears multiple hats within the team — to sum up his feelings on what Gen 3 will bring to the series. It seems he’ll relish the opportunity to get behind the wheel:
The circuits we race at, they’re very tight. Already with the car we have now, the Gen 2 car, the 250 kW in qualifying — you’re arriving at some corners thinking, you know, you could be in an F1 car in Mexico doing 320 [km/h]. They are damn quick. So the prospect of the speed we’re going to have in Gen 3 cars is going to be incredible. It’s going to be an incredible car to drive. And … the harvesting from both axles adds a completely new dimension.
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James and Mercedes in general have been nonspecific in explaining why the team hasn’t yet planted its flag for Formula E’s next era, but it’s fair to assume money probably has something to do with it.
It’s understandable that Mercedes would want to be absolutely sure it’s making the proper investment. Part of Gen 3’s addendums states that any team that exits the series midway through a regulatory cycle, as Audi and BMW are about to, must pay Formula E the lump sum of all the regulatory fees it would have incurred on a yearly basis if it’d just kept competing until the end of the cycle.
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Those fees amount to $415,000 per year — quite a lot to pony up at once just to not race, though only a small portion of the roughly $12 million Jaguar is said to have spent in 2019. (A prospective cost cap figures to bring that down by as much as two thirds.) Formula E is hoping constructors see that bill and decide they might as well stick around. And even if they don’t, the organizers can still make some scratch as teams walk out the door.
Sorry Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, your car is pretty much only going to get less competitive as the 2021 season drags on, because Scuderia Ferrari says it’s moving “90 to 95 percent” of its focus to developing its 2022 car and the new regulations. It will not risk compromising next year’s car to try and beat McLaren to third in the championship this year.
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2020 was not a good year for Ferrari, as it couldn’t do any better than sixth in the constructors’ championship. After it was forced to rein in its illegal 2019 engine, the car was significantly slower. Imagine that. For 2021, however, the Scuderia has managed to find a way to make its engine more powerful, presumably in a legal fashion this time. The SF21 isn’t as hopeless as 2020’s SF1000 had been.
After the first four races of the season, Ferrari trails behind McLaren by just 5 points, and Charles Leclerc is currently in fifth position in the world drivers’ championship. Clearly the team has found the speed needed to compete at the front of the mid pack. But it wouldn’t take much improvement for Alpine or Alpha Tauri to catch them up.
Laurent Mekies, Ferrari F1 sporting director, has said he has committed to fully focusing on next year’s car. “We are pretty much already in full switch, it’s already the case for us. If you want to put a number to it, if you call it 90 percent, 95 percent, whatever you want to call it, but it’s pretty much where we are.”
“This is very clear to us, we are focused on 2022,” Mekies added. “The fact that the field is tight that you may need a few hundredths or a few tenths to switch from sixth to third will not change our strategy, the focus is on next year. We have switched the large majority of our resources to it already. It doesn’t mean that some details will not change on the car from now onwards, as we all do with what we learn at the racetrack. But the focus is on next year, even if the field is tight. For us it is a clear decision.”
Interestingly, McLaren have taken the opposite tack.
Team boss Andreas Seidl commenting at the Spanish Grand Prix, “If you look since the first test this year onwards we simply tried to continuously bring updates to the car, to make continuously steps forward with the performance We’ve also brought upgrades for example to Portimao, we’ve brought updates for the car also here in free practice. And our plan is to still bring further updates also in the coming races.”
He later added, “It’s obviously a very tight battle, especially with Ferrari, and it’s simply important to make sure we keep bringing upgrades to the car in the next races in order to keep this battle of P3 alive.”
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Mekies seems to be totally fine with Ferrari sinking down to 6th in the championship again this year. It is only the third team (after Haas and Williams) to announce they had no more intention of developing the 2021 chassis. There’s no telling what other teams will do between now and then, but if I were Alpine, I’d be working on some mid-season updates right about now. Good luck with your 2022 car, Ferrari, it sounds like you’re going to need it.
I will always lament the loss of the BWT-sponsored pink Racing Point cars of the last few years, but if that excellent livery had to leave the sport, I can think of no car more fitting to replace it on the grid than the Aston Martin F1 Team AMR21. The blue-green take on BRG with just a kiss of BWT pink is the most exquisite thing I’ve seen grace the grid in my entire lifetime. It’s so good that I actually might have to cheer for Aston Martin this year, despite my well-known feelings about Sebastian Vettel. Even despite the team’s boneheaded move to ditch Sergio Perez.
It’s been over sixty years since Aston Martin was last in Formula One as a constructor. The team spent the off-season developing a new aero package to fit the 2021 rulebook (and presumably ditch the contentious Mercedes-copied brake ducts) and developing the car to work with Mercedes’ 2020-style rear suspension setup. Certain parts, like the rear suspension, can be taken wholesale from supplying manufacturers without using the team’s update tokens, so that was the plan all along.
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Image: Aston Martin F1 Team
The Racing Point team had a banner 2020 season, scoring enough points to finish third in the championship (were it not for the points stripped away due to the brake duct kerfuffle) and scored the team’s first win since it joined the sport. There’s potential for the Mercedes-powered renamed Aston Martin team to pick up where Racing Point left off. Despite my chiding, I’m sure Vettel has some fight left in him for the 2021 season, and Lance Stroll is a competent competitor, in spite of the nepotism at play here.
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Image: Aston Martin F1 Team
Will the team win the championship? No. Will it win a race or two? If it’s lucky. Will it outscore Red Bull in the manufacturer’s standings? Probably not. McLaren? That’ll be closer, but I’m going to say no. Will it beat every team on the grid in a beauty competition? You bet your sweet ass it will. This is a beautiful machine.
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Image: Aston Martin F1 Team
Think back to the best looking F1 livery of the last thirty years. Whatever it is, this is better.
The Haas Formula One Team finally did it. It fired both of its current drivers and replaced them with two young guns that have been competing in the junior ranks of the sport. In 2021, Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin will hit the F1 grid for the first time in their careers. Let’s run you through what you need to know about both of ‘em.
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Mick Schumacher
If you see that last name, you know exactly who this is. Mick Schumacher is Michael Schumacher’s 21-year-old son and a driver that, in part because of his performance and in part because of that loaded last name, has caught the gaze of motorsport pundits around the globe since he first got behind the wheel.
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Let’s run through his stats:
Four top-three finishes in various championships
Leading 2020 Formula 2 points standings
Nine top-three finishes in F2 this year
For a young driver in a competitive world, those are some fairly impressive numbers—certainly far more impressive than other drivers that have ridden to the pinnacle of a racing discipline on the back of a famous name. Expectations will be high for Mick, but there’s no reason to believe he won’t meet them.
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Schumacher joined the Ferrari Driver Academy in January of 2019, so his promotion to Haas makes sense—the team is powered by Ferrari engines.
He was due to make an FP1 outing at the Eifel Grand Prix, but bad weather saw his chance behind the wheel postponed. Instead, the first time we see Mick on track during an F1 race weekend will be the first free practice session in Abu Dhabi.
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Nikita Mazepin
Russian-born 21-year-old Nikita Mazepin is currently sitting third in the Formula 2 championship with two wins and six podium positions to his name. He has also finished within the top three in the GP3 championship and the F3 Asian championship. That said, he hasn’t really been pegged as one of the drivers expected to progress into F1—you’d likely only recognize his name if you avidly watch the junior formulae.
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And he comes along with his fair share of criticism, both of being a pay driver and for his unsportsmanlike behavior, which includes beating the shit out of one of his competitors.
Yes, Mazepin is largely part of the 2021 Haas squad because he has a lot of money. His dad is worth over $7 billion as a result of the family chemical company, and the family was in talks with the Force India team as it went into administration and was ultimately bought out by Lawrence Stroll.
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That said, he’s showing brief glimpses of promise in his career. He’ll need to work hard to achieve consistent results, but I can imagine Haas will cut him some slack if he’s able to cover his bills.
What’s Happening To The Old Lineup?
Current drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen are both looking like they’re done with F1. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth talk about where they’ll end up—IndyCar, IMSA, Formula E, wherever—but this late in the year, finding a seat can be difficult.
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That said, Kevin Magnussen has joined Chip Ganassi Racing’s DPi program in the IMSA series. Grosjean’s plans are currently to be determined.
Formula One has finally fleshed out its revamped 2020 schedule with the addition of races at Istanbul and Abu Dhabi with two events at Bahrain. The second race at Bahrain, known as the Sakhir Grand Prix, will be staged on the circuit’s outer loop layout—which could see the series posting laps under 60 seconds.
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While Formula E had previously been the only series so far to run a different layout at a track due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the addition of the outer Bahrain circuit will become the next alternative layout to be used.
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Essentially, the outer loop perfectly mimics the Bahrain Grand Prix circuit up to turn four, at which point the track bypasses the central portion of the circuit and connects back at what would normally be turn 13 via a long series of sweeping turns. Anticipate this track being a quick one similar to Monza with its lack of tight corners.
There’s also a longer version of the Bahrain track that had been used in 2010, but it wasn’t a hit with anyone, either drivers or fans.
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This will be the first time that the outer loop will be used for an international racing event, which has only previously been used for club racing or corporate events.
The shorter, faster track sees F1 anticipating the quickest lap times ever set, with simulations clocking in at around 55 seconds. The current record for the quickest F1 lap time during a race weekend was set by Niki Lauda at Dijon in 1974, where the Austrian driver clocked a lap of 58.79 seconds.
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F1’s managing director of motorsports Ross Brawn has said that the whole purpose of this track layout is to challenge drivers and teams, saying, “We assessed a number of options for the alternative circuit layout and concluded the outer circuit will provide the best alternative and will provide a new challenge for all the teams and entertain all our fans with high speeds and fast lap times.”
The Sakhir Grand Prix will take place on December 6, 2020.
