The Rule Changes

Many of the rules stay the same this year, however there are a few big changes that we need to be aware of.

Fuel – This year brings a ban on race refuelling, and with it most of the other changes. The cars now have to be larger to accommodate the extra fuel, and we will be back to extremely quick pit stops (3ish seconds) as fuel will not need to be added.

Qualifying – The qualifying sessions have changed because of the fuel rules. The format will be similar to last year with 7 drivers knocked out in each of the first 2 sessions, however Q3 will be back to low weight, high speed qualifying as the teams can run any fuel strategy they like in Q3. The kicker comes in the form of the driver having to start the race on the tyres that he set his fastest lap in Q3.

Tyres – The size of the front wheels has become narrower, and there will be less sets of tyres for each car to use over the weekend.

Points – The point system has changed to be more like the MotoGP system, this means gone are the 10 for a win system, and we now have the following points awarded all the way down to 10th place :- 25 18 15 12 10 8 6 4 2 1

McLaren

The McLaren team will bounce back strong this season, a good set of testing sessions, and good speed with the Bahrain spec aero package when it was tested at Barcelona. There has been a lot of speculation about exactly what’s going on under the skin of the new MP4-25, and I’m sure we probably have not heard the last of ‘Blown Rear Slots’ which McLaren look to have taken to the next step this season.

Drivers – Jenson seems to have settled into the team fairly well, Lewis as always will know what to expect, and how to shape the team. We must also remember that this is a 3 English Driver line-up in McLaren this year, as not only do the team have the last 2 World Champions (Both Brits) but also the much liked Gary Paffett as the third driver. The Engineering teams have been joined together this year too, so in theory the engineers are not assigned to a car/driver and this may help the crossfeed of information in the team, we will see how that works going forward.

Mercedes

The old Brawn team has been bought and rebranded by Mercedes Benz this year. The car has not been the last word in pace at test’s, however they were one of the teams that decided not to run the Bahrain aero configuration in testing, and with teasing words coming out of the team that there is a radical ‘package’ available for the first GP of the year, we will have to wait and see. Let’s remember that the W01 was started earlier last year than the team expected to be able to, so Ross must have something to bring to the car.

Drivers – Nico Rosberg must have got a shock when he found out he would be teaming up with the mighty Michael Schumacher in the car. However he should use it as a learning experience, after all it never hurt Felipe Massa to be shown how to drive by the big man. However it still remains to be seen how quick Michael will be after being out of the cars for 3 years. It will be like returning home for him though, with Ross being the man in charge.

Red Bull

The new Adrian Newey Red Bull RB6 looks a lot like the RB5 that went before, and that’s not a bad thing as that was a quick car. However because the team were working hard on getting the package all together they missed a lot of testing time. So this car is yet to be seen how quick it is. I’m quite sure the car will have changed a fair bit from what we have seen in testing when it’s finally unveiled in Bahrain. The major differences on this car though are the larger wheelbase because of the larger fuel tank, and a properly designed diffuser, rather than the ‘hacked on’ one they ran last year.

Drivers – Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel return as the pilots again this year, so stability reigns at Red Bull. Sebastian Vettel was quick last year, especially towards the end of the season so lets hope he picks up where he left off. Webber needs to do well this season, as he needs to get his contract extended (ends at the end of the season), and Red Bull now have Kimi in their stable, even if it is in the Rally part of the team.

Ferrari

The F10 Ferrari has rolled out of the garage and looked quick from day one. Which after the struggles last season is exactly what the team needed. The team have been so happy with the car that they have concentrated on long runs, doing more testing mileage than any other team.

Drivers – This is where it will become sticky for Ferrari. Felipe Massa returns to the cockpit of the car, and is looking as good as ever, the team know and trust him, as he has shown great courage to come back and take the driver seat again. However he finds himself lined up with perhaps one of the spikyest drivers of modern times. Fernando Alonso is without a doubt a great driver, it remains to be seen though if he will jell with Ferrari work ethics and mannerisms, and if he will work well alongside Massa.

Renault

The Renault team start this year on the back of one of it’s worst seasons for a long time. They have lost their top driver, their sponsors and a lot of respect inside the F1 camp. However having said all that they seem to have kept their heads down and done a the best they could on the 2010 car. That however does not seem to have gone all that well. The car has looked off the pace in testing, however the team did bring new parts to the R30 during testing, with new nose and rear wing (nicknamed the W wing) being the easiest to spot. The car is however very short in comparison to the rest of the 2010 cars, which may be down to work done on the engine to make it very efficient on fuel. So what they lack in outright pace at test, they may make up for in heavy running during races.

Drivers – A completely new driver pairing for the team this year. Robert Kubica joins as team leader, taking over from Alonso, and he is joined by new F1 boy Vitaly Petrov. Petrov has got the drive by being a ‘pay driver’ something that we have not seen all that much in F1 for a few years. Saying that though, Petrov was quick in GP2, and we all know that Robert on his day is one of the fastest drivers on the grid. With a little more time, perhaps the team can get the car’s pace to where it needs to be. Although since Michelin left F1 the team have struggled to get to grips with the Bridgestone tyres.

Williams

Williams come to the 2010 season with a lot to prove. They have taken the bold decision to throw away the 2009 design and start again. The out with the old, in with the new mantra also goes for engine supplier. Toyota are gone, and replaced by the Cosworth control engine. A lot of Williams success this year will be down to how powerful and reliable the new engine will be, although the team have had success in the past using Cosworth lumps.

The team did have initial reliability worries in testing, although it seems that they worked these out, as besides Ferrari, Williams covered more testing distance than anyone else.

Drivers – Williams have an old and new linup this year in the car. The elder statesman is the likable Rubens Barichello, and as we know he can dice it with the best when he is given the chance. He is joined by Nico Hülkenberg, who is no slouch himself, with championship victories in both GP2 and F3 Euroseries. Nico would do himself no harm if he got on with Rubens, and had him explain the ways of F1

Toro Rosso

The STR5 is a development of the STR4 (RB5) and can be clearly seen. However the team cannot now just borrow the Red Bull car when it’s a little more mature as the team are now a full blown constructor on it’s own. Testing has shown the car to be reliable (as it should be) and relatively on pace with where we expect the team to be. It remains to be seen how much development will be done on the car over the year, now that they cannot just inherit all the Red Bull technology.

Drivers – Sebastien Buemi is back for the team, and as he showed last year, he can be quick. The team should have enough data on this car to allow him some advantage at the beginning of the season, as they seemed to get to grips with setting the STR4 up towards the end of the season. Joining him will be Jaime Alguersuari, who showed he could hold his head above the demanding F1 water when he was dropped in last season.

Force India

The VMJ02 was a decent car towards the end of the 09 season, and the VMJ03 is hoping to improve on that cars abilities at low drag events. The team keep the powerful Mercedes drivetrain and have looked pacey in testing, although mostly on low fuel runs, so it’s still to be seen how well they do on a heavier load.

Drivers – Adrian Sutil and Vitantonio Liuzzi keep their seats in the car. Adrian needs to show a little more restraint this year, as he is exciting to watch, but usually ends up paying for his wheel to wheel antics with a DNF. Liuzzi has shown moments of speed, and is a decent driver, so lets hope the team can bring it all together and start worrying the guys ahead of them more often.

Lotus

The new T127 may not be the most extreme of designs, and in many ways looks very traditional by some of it’s competitors. However Mike Gascoyne has regularly started with a known base, and then introduced updates in rather large chunks, so keep an eye out for those. The team says it’s struggling for downforce at the moment on the car, but I’m sure that’s something that can be addressed over the season.

Drivers – Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen take the reigns at the new team. Trulli is widely regarded as a good setup/test driver and Heikki certainly knows his way around a development program, so the drivers will be good for the new team. They also bring experience, which may help the team keep the expensive chassis out of harms way to try keep costs manageable for the new team. A new start for Heikki may be exactly what he needs, he was certainly outshone at McLaren by Lewis, and now is his turn to show what he is capable of.

HRT (Campos)

Hespania Racing (F1) Team have taken the reigns from the Campos team after a late swap of owner. We have seen the car, but not yet on track so have no ideas to it’s pace. We do know it’s a Dallara designed chassis, with Cosworth power.

Drivers – Bruno Senna get’s the call upto the F1 playground, as does the Indian driver Karun Chandhok. Senna has shown ability in GP2, although it’s yet to be seen if he inhereted his uncle’s natural gene’s for speed. Karun’s name has been thrown about inside F1 for a while, being linked to Force India. He knows Bruno well (both raced at iSport) but has yet to show if he is a capable driver or not.

Sauber

The C29 is essentially a re-worked F1.09. However the Sauber team have brought over some of the newer trends from last year to the new car. The high nose made famous by the 09 Red Bull cars makes an appearance, as does the Shark Fin and cutaway air intake that’s become popular to most teams this year.

The F1.09 started life badly, but by the end of the 09 season the team had got it to a competitive place, with Kubica finishing second at Interlargos. It’s too early to say that BMW canned it’s F1 program too early, but the C29 has shown good speed and reliability in testing, and integrating the new Ferrari sourced engine has not seemed to detriment what the F1.09 had that worked.

Drivers – Unfortunately because the team did not look like it would be competing, all of it’s drivers found other places to go. Therefore the team has had to do the best it could with it’s lineup. Pedro de la Rossa joins the team after being McLaren’s third driver for many years, and we will have to see how good he is when back in the hustle of real racing, he does however bring a wealth of testing and development experience to the team. Alongside him is Kamui Kobayashi, an extremely exciting driver to watch, he excelled when dropped into the Toyota last year, and Peter Sauber will hope it’s another of his good/off the wall driver choices, after all the team is known to be a great place for up and coming drivers of the future to mature.

Virgin (Manor)

The VR01 was actually one of the first 2010 cars we glimpsed runnin on the track. The car is unique in that it’s completely designed using CFD by Wirth Research. This will no doubt be a cheaper way of designing the car, as wind tunnels are expensive to build and run, but will it be enough to make the car competitive. The team started off life as Manor GP, but Virgin have taken over the sponsorship and team. The team were the first to run, and also the first to have issues, with hydraulics and component failures blighting their sessions. The team say there are fixes in place for both the problems, but we will see at the Bahrain GP if that is indeed the case. The car does however look good in those colours.

Drivers – Timo Glock has joined the team, alongside GP2 veteran Lucas di Grassi. Timo is back to full health, and has shown he can drive quickly given a good car, as for Lucas, he was always overshadowed by a faster person in GP2, with Lewis Hamilton and Adrian Sutil both getting the better of him in the F1 feeder series. Although he has been sitting on the edge of an F1 seat for a few years now, with his name being tied to Renault for the most part.

The first race of the season is upon us, and it’s been an exciting wait for the first GP. So let’s hope its a great race.

Hosted by Formula 1 presenter Jake Humphrey, the evening marked the opening of this ‘virtual’ Hall of Fame, beginning with the naming of eight ‘founding members’ – the biggest names in the history of the sport. Among them were Moss and Stewart, who were on hand to help induct Andretti, Brooks, Dennis and Ickx into this exclusive club of motor racing greats.

Mario Andretti’s life story personifies the great American dream. Born near Trieste during World War Two, his family spent the first seven years of Andretti’s life in a displaced person’s camp before moving to America in 1955. During his remarkable career, Andretti won four Indycar titles, the 1978 F1 World Championship and countless races in single-seaters and sports cars. To date, he remains the only driver ever to win the Indianapolis 500 (1969), Daytona 500 (1967) and the F1 World Championship. No American has won an F1 race since Andretti’s victory at the 1978 Dutch Grand Prix.

Known as the ‘racing dentist’, Tony Brooks took part in 39 F1 World Championship Grand Prix. In 1955, despite being in the midst of his final exams, he scored the first win by a British driver in a British car in a Grand Prix since 1924, driving a Connaught at Syracuse in a non-World Championship race. Brooks claimed the first victory for a British-constructed car in a World Championship race in the 1957 British Grand Prix at Aintree, which he shared with Sir Stirling Moss. Like Moss, he is considered one of the best drivers never to have been World Champion.

Belgian Jacky Ickx started his career in car racing in 1964. By 1967, he was European Formula 2 Champion. He then went on to win eight F1 Grand Prix. His victories in endurance racing are even more impressive: two World Championship titles (1982 and 1983) and six victories at Le Mans (1969, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1981 and 1982) to name but a few. In the 1980s, Ickx participated in the African safari rallies, scoring a victory in the 1983 Paris-Dakar rally.

Ron Dennis CBE has been an integral part of the motor sport industry since he was a teenager, firstly with The Cooper Racing Car Company; then, aged 21, as chief mechanic to Sir Jack Brabham. During the 1970s, he ran a succession of successful teams, before merging his own company with McLaren in 1980. Over the past three decades he has made champions of Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Häkkinen, Niki Lauda and Lewis Hamilton, and built a company that stands as an example of all that is best in British industry. On 15th January 2009 he stepped down as team principal of McLaren, signaling the end of a sporting era.
The Motor Sport Hall of Fame is set to become a major international event in the motoring calendar, with four more individuals inaugurated each year.

 McLaren – Here you can see the cooling slots on the McLaren car, just above the sidepods. These are probably for airflow/electronics cooling.

They turned up this morning just on the left hand side of the car, and moments ago this pic was snapped with both sidepods having the cooling slots installed.

Time will tell what they are actually for.

The new rear end of the McLaren is quite a piece of work as well.

Lots of development has obviously gone into the rear difusers this year, and the McLaren has obviously got the furthest along in the research, or at least is the only one willing to show off their ‘real’ rear end.

The ‘’SharkFin’ tail of the Sauber has grown too.

Now it’s completely hooked up to the rear wing, similar to the McLaren implementation.

The team is obviously testing both configurations to see what the car is most stable with, and for different aero packages.

First up is the Renault R30. The team seam to have changed colour scheme to yellow and black, and the car looks good for it. Although I’m sure Eddie Jordan might have some interesting words about it come the first race.

Another team to hide the diffuser for the launch, although sure all the other teams will have some very good pictures of it while the car’s on the track. The R30 looks quite similar to the R29, although we are told that it’s had a lot of changes. Chief among them are probably weight re-distribution because of the KERS removal and larger tank.

Next up we have the Toro Rosso

The new Toro Rosso is quite difficult the tell the changes on because of the clutter of the Red Bull logo’s. The STR5 does however seem to have kept a lot of the STR4’s appearance, the high nose and ‘SharkFin’ are still present, and there is obviously changes to the sidepods due to rule changes. I suppose we will see what the STR5 is to become when the new Red Bull get’s launched.

BMW Sauber – and yes, they are retaining the BMW monica, even if they are powered by Ferrari.

Now the C29 has changed a bit from last years BMW. The new high nose is an obvious change, as is the longer wheelbase (all cars seem to have got longer, due to space required for the new larger fuel tank). The C29 joins the ‘SharkFin’ crew as well, not quite as extreme as the McLaren one, but certainly a big step up from last years car. The new colour scheme looks good too. Let’s hope the sponsors don’t distil it too much.

Mercedes W01

The Brawn team as was has this to try keep the #1 spot. Brawns baby has certainly changed, now with a high nose (although not as extreme as some) and it’s certainly longer and more defined around it’s waist. Let’s hope Brawn and Mercedes spent some money on the car, and didn’t blow the budget on getting Schumi in to drive.

I’m sure all the teams have not show off their ‘final’ race spec, and are holding a few surprises back for the first race. But we will just have to see how all the cars go in testing to see what the early signs are.

I’m sure McLaren will not be in the same position as they were last year, with a slow car out the blocks, and with the last two world champions racing for them they should be considered to be the target.

I would like to see Sauber do well, and some of the ‘new’ teams show pace too, as it looks like the Ferrari may not be the car it should be at this early stage.

Bring on Bahrain I say, this year should be a cracker!

The car looks quite aggressive, and we are told that the rear diffuser is very aggressive, and was not allowed to be photographed (in fact it had a blanking cover over it).

More news and info on the launch over at F1 Fanatic as Keith was there.

Remember the new rules of smaller front wheels and bigger fuel tank have been put into place on the new car, and it’s borrowed from a lot of last years cars (Red Bull, McLaren and Williams definitely in there)

Obvious changes are the Santander logo on the rear wing, I’ll miss the Marlboro ‘Bar Code’

Fernando had the car out on the Paul Ricard track and he said the new car ‘is almost ready’ so lets hope we see it soon. Suppose McLaren/Lewis will have to stop making Lego bridges now.

Mercedes’ have this to say about the colour scheme

The new silver and green livery creates a true marriage between the heritage of the Silver Arrows and the team’s title partner Petronas. The legacy of the Silver Arrows goes back to the 1934 Eifel Race when, on the evening before the event, the white paint was sanded off the Mercedes W25 race car to fulfil weight regulations (750kg formula) and the silver colour of the aluminium surface of the car appeared. This season, with the return of the Silver Arrows, the MGP W01 will shine in silver combined with a flow of iridescent silver and green shading. On the nose and other parts of the car, traces of black carbon fibre are visible – a reminder of the first Silver Arrow of 1934.

So, here’s the pics

It looks a lot better than I was expecting it to, and is different enough to the old McLaren colours to not be easily confused.

Let’s hope the new car looks as good in the scheme as last year’s Brawn GP does.

Akio Toyoda

Seems that Toyota are not going into the next season of Formula 1. That will Leave F1 with just 3 Manufacturer’s in the sport next year, Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari.

This does have a positive side effect, if Toyota do not announce a buyer for the team, it seems that Sauber will be able to take their place on the grid as the 13th team.

The pullout will actually cost Toyota to do as well, as they have signed up to the sport until 2012, so unless they can sell the Cologne based team as a going concern then they will have to pay the expenses to pull out.

Translated version of the page here