F1 2012 — A Retrospective Part 1: Pre-Season Testing and Expectation
By: Declan Harte
Tags: Sport, Retrospectives, Formula 1, F1, Nostalgia

The 2011 season was a disappointing follow-up to an intense 2010 campaign that saw a season-long battle between three teams and four drivers for the world title.

The drivers championship was won in Japan with four more races to go, and the constructors crown was won in the following race.

Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull became the youngest two time champion in F1 history. At 24 years and 98 days old he earned the record previously held by Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who was 25 years and 85 days old when he won his second title in 2006.

Those two made up a third of the former/current champions on the grid for 2012. For the first time ever, there were six drivers who had all won the title on the same grid.

Jenson Button, Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher were the other four. Between them they had earned 14 drivers championships.

They drove for five different teams all vying for the constructors crown, which Red Bull had also claimed in the previous two seasons alongside their German driver Vettel.

Red Bull had really set themselves apart as the team to beat in those last two years. McLaren and Ferrari were lagging behind as part of a Big Three that dominated the front of the grid. In 2010 and 2011 they made up 70% and 79% of the total points accumulated in those years.

The gap between Ferrari and Mercedes was stark.

Vettel himself dominated the 2011 season. He won 11 of the 19 Grands Prix and claimed pole 15 times, with teammate Mark Webber picking up three of the other four and winning once.

Following pre-season testing, the hype surrounding Vettel and the Red Bull team remained. Richard Williams, of the Guardian, spoke in their video preview of the season that they should certainly be considered the favourites again.

“Well the question that everybody is thinking about of course, as we look at the start of the season, is can anyone beat Sebastian Vettel and the Red Bull, the winners of the last two championships?” said Williams.

“There’s an expectation that [Vettel will] become the youngest ever triple world champion. He is phenomenal, and the car that he’s been driving is just as phenomenal, and maybe even more.

“Everybody is waiting to see what [Adrian] Newey has come up with for this season to give Vettel the chance of dominating as he’s done for the last two years.”

Vettel won comfortably ahead of Button, Webber and Alonso.

Button came closest to Vettel in 2011, but he was still some 120 points away by season’s end. The Briton won three races that year, the most exceptional of which was in Canada.

It was the longest Grand Prix event in F1 history, and he still holds the record for most visits to the pit-lane while still winning a race in F1 history — he pitted six times in victory — passing Vettel on the final lap.

He finished 12 and 13 points ahead of third and fourth place in the driver standings, and picked up 12 podiums. His worst race result was sixth place, showcasing a level of consistency that set him apart from his teammate Hamilton, who only picked up half as many podiums but the same amount of race wins.

Hamilton struggled in 2011, it was the most turbulent year of his career off-track, and it played a significant role in a drop-off in performance on-track. But McLaren were quick in pre-season testing and both drivers were optimistic of their chances of taking on the mighty Red Bull.

Button’s consistency in 2011, as well as his immense talent at managing his tyres, meant that pundits had him the slight favourite over Hamilton in the McLaren battle.

Button celebrates on the podium in Canada.

“On pre-season testing, which is again difficult to judge, I would be looking at Jenson [Button] especially to be challenging Sebastian Vettel,” said Giles Richards for the Guardian.

“What we have with Jenson is there were new tyres this year, still manufactured by Pirelli. They’re slightly softer compounds. We’re quite probably looking after [the tyres] a little bit better now, Jenson does that superbly. His driving style lends itself to that.

“He may well work the tyres a little bit better and if he has a competitive car from the off that may put him that tiny bit closer to Sebastian over Lewis [Hamilton].”

However, despite a difficult 2011, Hamilton can simply never be written off. The 2008 champion had shown many times by now that he was more than capable of bouncing back from any difficulties.

“Nonetheless, if Lewis gets a big start, he’s an extraordinary driver. He gets a good start, he builds some momentum, gets some points, he will begin to feel that he can beat Sebastian Vettel,” said Richards.

“Now he thinks he can already, once he sees the points on the board and he’s actually achieving it then he will have a feeling of superiority and the confidence that goes with it. That’s terribly important.

“Either of those two drivers, I would expect to be there or thereabouts at the end.”

Ferrari won just a single Grand Prix in 2011.

Ferrari as a whole struggled to match their 2010 form throughout 2011. Alonso picked up one win in the entire season, claiming the top step of the podium in Silverstone. He achieved 10 podiums, but lacked the pace to consistently battle for the race victory.

The car was still quick enough to easily finish in the top three of the constructors, but they were too far back on the Red Bull and McLaren.

Alonso’s consistency made up for a difficult year for Felipe Massa. The Brazilian failed to finish on the podium all season, his best result being a fifth place he earned at six different races.

Their start to the 2012 season indicated another tough year ahead. Pre-season testing went horribly, with many being surprised at their lack of pace. Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali reflected on this during the postseason calling it “the most difficult moment of the season.”

“The first day that we put the car on the track it was a little bit of, more than a little bit, but a big surprise. Expectations were a little bit different. There is no reason to mask that. For sure, I remember very well that we had a problem of speed, lot of drag, lot of instability and a problem of traction. So a lot of things,” said Domenicali.

Domenicali had a lot to answer for even before the season got underway in Australia.

“We know that this kind of competition is a psychological game. If you shout outside the problem you have inside it doesn’t help. It was a moment where we had to regroup and try to solve. Knowing that you don’t have any magic touch you cannot solve the things from one night to the morning after.”

Massa wasn’t masking his disappointment in pre-season interviews but, despite the poor performance, he maintained optimistic that things would be turned around.

“In the new car you always have [unwelcome surprises], you know. It’s just the beginning of a big job to have a consistent and competitive car,” said the Brazilian driver.

Since returning from injury in 2010, Massa struggled to re-find his form that saw him come so close to a championship victory in 2008. His 2011 season was marred by several incidents with Hamilton.

The two collided on numerous occasions. But most damningly for Massa, it was the fact Hamilton was behind him so often for them to crash that criticism was levied at the British driver so much that year.

Massa (left) and Hamilton (right) both fell off their 2008 form that saw them compete for the championship.

The Sky Sports season review for 2011 dedicated an entire section to the bizarre series of incidents between the two, with Michael Wise writing:

“It must be said that this so-called ‘feud’ was small fry in comparison with some of the flash points we’ve witnessed in recent years. From the McLaren/Ferrari spying controversy of 2007, to Renault causing a deliberate crash and even the relative small fry that was last year’s Ferrari team orders row, F1 in 2011 brought little in the way of scandal.

“The ruckus that wasn’t started in Monaco before further skirmishes took place in (deep breath) Monaco, Britain, Singapore (during both qualifying and the race), Japan and India — more than enough to suggest something ulterior was happening and yet the reality was more mundane.

“Hamilton’s approach does tend to polarise opinion and it’s easy to see why: when it works he’s brilliant; when it doesn’t, the 2008 world champion still tends to look a bit like a boy trying to do a man’s job. Alas for him, the latter has more often been the case this year.

“Thus, given Hamilton’s habit of leaving himself with much ground to make up during races, he would dispense with midfield runners before happening upon the slowest car fielded by a ‘big three’ team. That car would invariably be driven by Massa, who seems more on edge than ever with his Ferrari future once more open to debate.

“What tended to follow next would best be filed under the category of ‘racing incident’ and although words would be exchanged via the media afterwards, they were never particularly harsh. Indeed, each driver still insisted on the qualification of affording the other respect.

“Just about the worst thing Massa could say about his rival’s gung-ho-edness was that it suggests he “cannot use his mind”. Does that really suggest a genuine loathing? When they were team-mates at Williams, Nelson Piquet called Nigel Mansell an “uneducated blockhead with a stupid and ugly wife”. Now that’s fighting talk.”

In the meantime, Alonso asserted himself as the leader of the team in his two years since joining from Renault in 2010.

Failure to overtake the Renault in Abu Dhabi cost Alonso the 2010 championship.

He was four points off winning the championship in his first season at Ferrari and despite the team’s poor performances in 2011 he was still consistently proving himself to be one of the most talented drivers on the grid.

If Ferrari were to achieve anything in 2012 it would have to be at the hands of the Spaniard. But if pre-season was anything to go by, then it would be a massive uphill battle from the start.

Raikkonen was the man who Alonso replaced at Ferrari. The Finnish driver had a contract with the team for 2010 but instead the team paid that out for the following season after a disappointing 2009 campaign.

Instead, Raikkonen spent the two years away from the sport and took up rallying along the way. For 2012, he returned with the Lotus Renault team — renamed to Lotus F1 team for the coming season.

Renault had a disappointing 2011. They got off to a horrible start as driver Robert Kubica was involved in a terrifying rallying crash that meant he was out for the entire year — and wouldn’t return to F1 until 2019. However, their car was promising. Two podiums in the first two races was the reward for what David Coulthard described as “a great innovation” on their car.

Heidfeld celebrates Renault’s second and final podium of the 2011 season.

“They had a great innovation at the beginning of the year, blowing the front of the diffuser which then energised the whole under-body of the car. But for some reason they weren’t able to develop that during the course of the year so their performance stalled and they found themselves firmly at the back end of the top ten,” said Coulthard in the BBC’s 2011 season review.

Renault were stuck in the midfield battle, but for 2012 were looking to chase the front of the field and grab more podiums and maybe even a race win or two.

The French team ditched both of their 2011 drivers, Nick Heidfeld and Vitaly Petrov, and replaced them with Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean. The Frenchman initially joined the team in 2009 following the release of Nelson Piquet Jr. but, after two years away from F1, this would be his first full season with the team.

Their rivals in the midfield in 2011, Mercedes, were also expecting to close up the gap to the front pack. Between a shakeup on their engineering side, as well as their experienced driver lineup, the hope was that the German manufacturer could start delivering consistently and compete with the Big Three.

In the previous two years the team was comfortably quicker than the rest of the midfield but struggled to keep up with Ferrari, let alone McLaren or Red Bull.

Two German drivers, young vs. old, with a German manufacturer.

Since they returned to the sport as a constructor, they have managed just three podium finishes all of which have come from Nico Rosberg. Seven time world champion Schumacher simply didn’t have the pace he had before his initial retirement in 2006.

However, there was optimism in the team. Any side led by Ross Brawn was sure to have a few engineering tricks up their sleeve. Richard Williams had high expectations following pre-season testing that the changes to the team would bring them closer to their rivals.

“Mercedes is another that made big changes on their engineering side. Ross Brawn, the team principal, brought in three very experienced designers from other teams so they have a very very experienced superstructure on the technical side and Brawn is pretty confident that they’ll make the significant increase in performance that they need if they’re to justify Mercedes’ involvement in the team,” said Williams.

“If the Mercedes does turn out to be a front running car, it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens because they’ve got two extremely good drivers more or less opposite ends of their careers. Michael Schumacher now coming back in his early 40’s, having had two disappointing seasons.”

There was also optimism that Rosberg would be able to lead the team if Schumacher continued to struggle.

“I think Rosberg is a serious talent and is a potential world champion. He’s come up quite quietly with several unspectacular seasons with Williams, but in the last two years with Mercedes he’s looked very good.”

Adrian Newey is Chief Technical Officer at Red Bull and credited with their car’s stellar performance.

There were also some interesting technical regulation changes brought in for the 2012 season, which Williams of the Guardian also expected to play a big role throughout the campaign.

“There are rule changes practically every year and that the principle one this year is to ban the use of what are called blown diffusers. Adrian Newey made the first and best use of blown diffusers last year and that was really the fact that they gave last year’s Red Bull it’s great advantage,” said Williams.

“He’s not quite going to be able to do the same thing this year. All the designers have spent the winter working out how, while staying within the boundaries of the new rules, they can use the same thing to perhaps recover some of the effect that the rule makers wanted them to forfeit.

“I went to see Ross Brawn last week in Mercedes, and he admitted that loopholes are what Formula One is all about. They’ve got to find the loophole in this regulation, find a way of using the exhaust gasses to produce the downforce that they’d lost. That could be the key to the whole season, who’s got the best answer to that.”

There was also a change to the driving regulations for 2012.

“The change to the rules [is] around blocking maneuvers. You can make one move off the racing line in order to block another driver. However, if you then move back onto the racing line, say as you’re coming into the entrance of the corner where you’re looking to take your line again, you have to leave one car’s width between your car and the edge of the track,” explained Giles Richards.

“This is incredibly complex, it’s more complex when you’re in a motor racing car and you’re trying to decide how far it is exactly one car’s width between the edge of my car and the edge of the track. The purpose of course is to leave that car’s width so that you can move back towards the racing line but that a car who is following can still overtake on that racing line.”

With all of these factors going into the 2012 season, there was a lot of expectation that it would be an upgrade on the poor 2011 campaign. Not many people were thinking it could be as intense as the four-way championship battle of 2010, but there was certainly a hope that it would be a much closer contest between more teams throughout the year.

The season began in Australia and ended in Brazil. Who would ultimately come out on top, and what would be the big surprises along the way? The expectation was that it wouldn’t all be wrapped up with four races spare again but could it get to Sao Paulo with the championship still on the line?

Next week: Australia and Malaysia