F1 Musings

Regarding :- Red Bull power play: How Austria is tightening its grip on the F1 team As soon as Mateshietz died, the passion project died with him and the suits in Red Bull started circling for the power, the glamour and of course the increased profits to turn into bonuses that they can get from Red Bull Racing.  They'd believe they can transition their undoubted expertise at running a marketing company that makes a drink under license and rebrands it into an elite sporting field at the pinnacle of engineering that actually manufactures real products with unique IP to remorseless, relentless deadlines.  This is going to be tested in real time in the glare of global publicity.  Barely anyone notices if the new flavour of sloshy caffeine is a week late.  They do if the new front wing is. The first example of this was the fact that Alpha Tauri was told to wash it's own face economically, hence the rebrand and the consolidation into the UK. RBR will now "enjoy" all t...

“I never won the world championship, but there were moments where I was, to be arrogant, world-class against world-class performers,” David Coulthard explained to   The Athletic. “What they were was consistently world-class. And I dipped in and out of it. My performances were like that, so that’s why the result books reflect the drivers at that time. Mika was consistently quick. Michael was consistently quick. They got the world championships.” Coulthard has explained even further. He recognised during his career the days on which he was untouchable and the steps he took to try to bottle that lightning. He engaged sports psychologists to try to work out what went so well on those days and to be able to reproduce it. But he admits he couldn't. There are of course a number of reasons for it all needing to come together and in the midst is the frailty of the human condition. A human that needs to be performing within a tenth of a second at all times. Even if only driving to a target l...

  One way of looking at Horner's firing is that the team considers itself in rebuild mode. They need a new development philosophy and perhaps a bit of a restructure to fill any gaps left by those that have left. Horner had potentially not demonstrated that he felt the need, or perhaps wasn't moving quickly enough, to achieve this. The tools have been allowed to grow stale - the wind tunnel and so on - and that was under his watch. A watch that had no limitations when it came to funding there was no reason a new wind tunnel couldn't have been ready for the ground effect era and now it won't be ready to design the 2026 car. It may even be that Horner's effectiveness was blunted in the cost cap era. He built RBR in Mateshietz's money-no-object passion project. If that meant building two updates so both drivers got pace added tot he car in the manner they could deal with RBR could afford it. For example the two sets of exhausts that the team ran in the blown diffuse...

Following on from the news that Christian Horner had been sacked by Red Bull Racing  - how does this matter to their star driver, Max Verstappen? It only matters to Verstappen if he was thinking of staying, if he was thinking of going it matters naught. Horner and Verstappen have enjoyed huge success together.  But the plan since Ricciardo left has been for any success to be delivered by Verstappen with another driver in support.  And those drivers have not been able to support Verstappen. It's Helmut Marko's job to produce the drivers but he could make a legitimate argument that Gasly, Albon, Tsunoda and Lawson are not bad Formula One drivers.  They are no Verstappen, but they are not as bad as the Red Bull cars make them look and their performance elsewhere would vindicate that.  Further, he could point out, when Red Bull went elsewhere for a driver and got the good, solid, journeyman that is Perez, in each of the ground effect years Perez started the season o...

Well slap my thigh and call me Gladys.  Check the calendar, nope yesterday wasn't the 31st March. Red Bull Racing have sacked Christian Horner. Seriously?!?!  This feels like one of those football sackings when a top team is struggling and whaddya gonna do?  It's "quicker" to replace the man at the top than the entire squad.  But F1 is an engineering formula, there aren't three races to get your "new manager bounce" and bag some points. I guess the problem is that Horner didn't demonstrate he could change the management philosophy he had been responsible for.  The relentless focus on Verstappen has resulted in a car that only he can get performance out of and perhaps a team that simply doesn't know any other way to build the platform. I don't think it's about losing Newey - or if it is then Horner is well out of there and RB GmbH is incredibly short-termist.  Newey, Marshall and Wheatley were going to leave one day.  Similarly it can'...

Regarding:- How can Alpine turn around its plummeting F1 performance? When though has the Enstone team been different? When it was Benetton? When it was Renault first time around I guess. Since then it's been making up the numbers really. Where has the statement been that it really, really, wants a tilt at the title? The closest statement was the big money signing of Ricciardo and the whole project around him as their race winning, franchise driver around whom they were going to build a future. But he bailed and that programme whithered away back into making up the numbers culminating with a return to being a customer team. Renault need to sell up as their heart has not really been in F1 since Crashgate. They could still buy title sponsorship if they want to maintain Alpine branding in F1 and the team can still have its collection of showy investors as it tootles around a closed shop league.