Team Orders

Amid all of the furore surrounding a certain race changing penalty awarded to Sebastian Vettel there has been little coverage of a number of stories that would have been big news after any other race. Let’s have a look at three big stories that nobody is talking about. Renault Renaissance This weekend in Montreal Renault scored as many points as they had in the previous six races. With Daniel Ricciardo qualifying in an impressive fourth place and finishing in an almost as impressive sixth following some exciting racing with Max Verstappen and Nico Hulkenburg who managed to qualify seventh and hold on to his starting position to the end of the Grand Prix. The big question is was this some sort of fluke or quirk of the Canadian GP? The good news for Renault is that this may well be a representative result. Renault announced that they would be bringing a significant back log of upgrades to Canada as well as an engine upgrade halving the deficit to Mercedes. This certainly see...

F1 insiders often describe the Monaco GP as the ‘Jewel in the F1 Crown’ and it would be easy to understand why if you had access to Champagne and super yachts, but for us mere mortals existing far from the glamour of the principality the race has often been, to be frank, a little bit dull. The race has in recent years been a bit of a procession with wide cars struggling to overtake on narrow streets with the occasional crash thrown in to liven things up. As a die-hard Formula 1 fan I will obsessively watch all of the races but I must admit I was not really looking forward to Monaco this year. To my great surprise I found that I not only enjoyed the race, but probably enjoyed it as much as any of the other races so far this season. Is this a damning indictment of the races so far in 2019 or was Monaco more watchable than it has been in previous years? The build-up to the race was characterised by the usual razzmatazz that marks the arrival of F1 in Monaco and a qualifying that...

I should start this article by holding my hand up and admitting I am a big Mercedes fan; in fact, I am almost as fanatical as a full blown Tifosi is about Ferrari. Despite this I have a dawning realization that perhaps the current period of Mercedes’ dominance since 2014 may be damaging the sport. We have seen periods of dominance by other constructors, notably Red Bull and before that Ferrari, but the sport has rarely seen the level of dominance that allows a team to score five consecutive 1-2 finishes at the start of a new season. Since the introduction of the V6 hybrid engine in 2014 the numbers make stark reading. Mercedes have won five consecutive Driver and Constructor World Championships. They have won 78 of the 104 races during this period or just over three quarters. Even more starkly there have been only six races during this period during which they did not make the podium. Mercedes cannot be blamed for dominating so utterly. They are a race team; this is their ra...

We are only three races into the 2019 season and it has already been kinder to some drivers than others. This article will examine which drivers are thriving at the top of their game and who is hanging tight just to survive to the next race. Thriving: Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas It is probably best to get the discussion about the undeniable success of the Mercedes duo out of the way first. Lewis has started the season with the assurance that you would expect from a five-time world champion and Bottas has come back from the closed season with an assurance we haven’t seen from the Finn since his days at Williams. The Mercedes W10 is undoubtedly an excellent car and worryingly for Ferrari one with great upgradability. Both Mercedes’ drivers have put in the sort of assured, level-headed performances that have allowed them to capitalise on mistakes from Ferrari when they have been behind. I think most Formula 1 fans are hoping that Ferrari can find some performance or ...

McLaren are one of the most iconic and successful Formula 1 teams in the history of the sport, second only to Ferrari in age and success. Their recent poor performance has been the cause of much heartache for many Formula 1 fans as they have watched this once great team struggle through season after season at the back of the grid with their last win in 2012. F1 giants, such as Martin Whitmarsh and Ron Dennis, have been laid low as well as the former two times world champion Fernando Alonso. But maybe, and it is a big maybe, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for McLaren who have already achieved a couple of encouraging results this season which coupled with an exciting new driver line-up gives F1 fans everywhere a reason to be optimistic for the future of this formerly great team. The architect of this transformation would appear to be Zak Brown, CEO, who ousted long-standing McLaren man Ron Dennis at the top. Brown has continued Ron Dennis’ work diversifying McLaren an...