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:
G/O Media may get a commission
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:
Advertisement
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.
The chalet, which belongs to the East Belgian Racing Team, will return in a different spot, as The Drive’s Hazel Southwell reported. What will take its place is a grandstand, pushed back, while the left-hand wall on the inside of Turn 5 will now extend further down toward the Kemmel Straight rather than sharply cutting in at the crest of the hill.
The profile of those corners, or any corners at Spa, will not change — just the areas surrounding them. That’s important to note, because fans critical of renovation tend to erroneously conflate the call for increased safety with arguments to reprofile the track. While Eau Rouge and Raidillon are obviously very fast and will always carry with them an inherent degree of risk, the simple (in concept, at least) act of pushing the left-hand wall back to prevent crashing cars from spitting back out onto the racing line could go a long way toward mitigating serious injury and death. And that makes it worth trying.
An official video released by the circuit last week outlined other adjustments. Gravel traps will be added, at least partiallym to the runoff areas around five corners, including Raidillon, La Source, Blanchimont, Les Combes and Stavelot. These changes were partially necessary to ensure the track meets FIM Grade C protocol ahead of next year’s 24-hour FIM Endurance Championship event in June, according to Motorsport.com.
G/O Media may get a commission
The use of gravel carries positive and negative connotations. Depending on who you ask, it either slows cars down prior to impact or makes it more difficult for drivers to apply braking when an accident is imminent due to the total lack of grip. Gravel works as a better deterrent to abusing track limits than asphalt, of course, but it also introduces the possibility of sending cars airborne.
Advertisement
And that’s just for racing with four-wheeled vehicles. Gravel has unique benefits for motorcycle racing, as World Superbike rider Scott Redding mentioned in reference to the Red Bull Ring during his MotoGP tenure some years back:
“Up into Turn 1 [is a concern], because there’s not much run-off, no gravel either. And gravel’s the problem. When we don’t have gravel, it doesn’t slow us down. When we slide on asphalt, we take the same speed, more or less. The gravel kinda stops us.”
Advertisement
Gravel may not be a perfect solution, but at least for Raidillon, the main improvement is the relocation of the outside wall, less so the surface in front of it. All in all, these renovations are estimated to cost 80 million euros — about $93,000,000.
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.
G/O Media may get a commission
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.
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.
Advertisement
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.
G/O Media may get a commission
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.”
G/O Media may get a commission
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.
Advertisement
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.
G/O Media may get a commission
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.
Advertisement
Image: Aston Martin F1 Team
Think back to the best looking F1 livery of the last thirty years. Whatever it is, this is better.
