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.
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.
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.
