Sunday, February 22, 2009

Life After F1

At one time, when a F1 driver hung up his helmet, it usually meant the end of his racing career, full stop. The likes of Juan Manuel Fangio, Guiseppe Farina, Phil Hill and John Surtees all called time on their professional racing life altogether around the time they quit Formula 1.

There were a number of reasons why it used to be unusual for drivers to go on racing beyond the length of their F1 career. Self preservation was probably high on the list. As the ticket stubs remind us spectators even now, Motor Racing is Dangerous. It used to be much more so. Some of the sport's early post-war stars I haven't mentioned above for the simple reason that they never made it to the end of their F1 career - Clark, Ascari and, in a sense, Moss, for example. Continuing to put your life on the line once you knew you were past your peak probably struck many drivers of that era as a gamble too far.

Perhaps just as important was the fact that racing drivers tended to be older by the time they retired. Fangio was 46 when he won his final title. Farina was nearly 50 by the time he entered his last F1 race. There were various reasons for this. In the early 1950s, the after-effects of the Second World War were still being felt and drivers whose 1930s careers had been arrested by hostilities still felt they had something to prove, while those might have spent the 40s in the junior formulae were only just getting started. Added to that is the fact that with the first go-karts still perhaps 15 years away, it was not possible for drivers to start as young as it would later be. Drivers didn't tend to reach F1 in their early 20s. It took longer for all but the most supernaturally talented to build up the kind of experience they needed to compete at the highest level.

Added to that is the fact that, at least until the late 1960s, the demands placed upon an F1 driver were not so great as to prevent him from competing elsewhere if he so fancied. So Graham Hill was able to do the Indy 500 and Le Mans at the same time as he competed in F1. Jackie Stewart frequently turned up behind the wheel of a sportscar at endurance events, and Jim Clark did amazing things with a Lotus Cortina both in touring car racing and, on one occasion, on the RAC Rally. There wasn't the need to go and do these things only after being finished with Grand Prix racing.

There were odd exceptions to the rule. Jack Brabham occasionally dabbled in touring car racing in his native Australia well into the late 1970s. In '76 he even teamed up with Stirling Moss, who came out of retirement to attempt the Bathurst 1000kms in a Holden and as late as 1998, he shared a VW Beetle in a 6hr race around the old Nordschliefe. Denny Hulme came out of retirement in the 1980s to race in TWR's Austin Rover squad and would go on racing right up to his death, from a heart attack, at the wheel of a BMW M3 in a touring car race in Australia. For the most part, though, through the 1960s, F1 drivers tended not to go on racing professionally once they were done with F1.

It was Emerson Fittipaldi who broke with this pattern. With a works Lotus drive, he became world champion at the age of just 25, in only his second full season of Formula 1. He would remain the youngest ever champion for over thirty years, until first Fernando Alonso and then Lewis Hamilton lowered the bar still further. A second title came with Mclaren in 1974, but after that his career went into freefall. Signing for his brother's Copersucar team in 1976, he would never win another race, and would score just one more podium, from 24th on the grid in a race of high attrition at Long Beach in 1980. By the end of that year, he was washed up, disillusioned, and out of the sport, at the age of just 33.

He was, thus, young enough to contemplate a come-back. In 1984, aged 37, he began racing in Indy Cars and carved out a very successful second career, winning the Indy 500 twice and taking the CART championship in 1989. His final victory came as late as 1995, when he was not far off 50 years old. In establishing his second career in the US, he became the first of a very small band of former F1 champions who went on to find success elsewhere in the motor racing world.

It could be argued that Mario Andretti falls into the same category, although he had established himself as a star in his adopted home country of the US before he ever made his F1 debut. He'd won NASCAR's Daytona 500 and was a front-runner in the USAC Champ Car Series and had a string of US sports car victories to his name. His F1 career is perhaps best seen as a particularly successful interlude in a largely US-based racing life. Like Clark and (Graham) Hill before him, he was one of the sport's real all-rounders and F1 was but one part of a long and immensely successful racing life.

From the early 1980s, it has seemed almost the rule that the sport's leading F1 drivers go on to race elsewhere when they have tired of the globe-trotting Grand Prix life, or else, have run out of options at the very top of the sport. Alan Jones dabbled in Australian touring car racing. Nelson Piquet was set to make an attempt at the Indy 500 after retiring from F1, only to fall victim to a career-ending crash in practice for the event (though he did return a few years back to share an Aston Martin sportscar with his son at the Mil Milhas Brasleiras, which they won.) Keke Rosberg tried his hand at sportscar racing with Peugeot, a few years after his retirement from F1, but never seemed at home there and switched to DTM where he raced for some years before finally retiring from racing at the end of 1995, nearly ten years after he left F1.

Other former champions have trodden rather less travelled paths. For years after retiring from the sport as reigning champion at the end of 1993, Alain Prost did not race competitively, not least because his time was taken up with running the ill-fated Prost GP team. A brief sojourn in the French GT championship brought little in the way of results and in 2005 he turned to the peculiar world of ice-racing. It seemed an odd choice for a man famed for his smooth, unhurried style at the wheel of a racing car, but he turned out to be rather good at going sideways, and won the Andros Ice-Race trophy twice. Michael Schumacher, meanwhile, perhaps feeling that he has nothing left to prove in cars, has switched to motorbike racing. Strictly for fun, he says, but he's no slouch and rumours persist that he'll make an appearance in the World Superbike Series at some point.

In recent years, former GP winners Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jean Alesi have been joined by double World Champion Mika Hakkinen in the DTM. With their high-tech aerodynamics and around 500BHP, the DTM machines are perhaps about as close as touring cars are ever going to get to being thoroughbred racing cars. However, it is notable that, like Rosberg before them, Frentzen, Alesi and Hakkinen all performed respectably, but not one of them was an out and out front-runner in the series.

In fact, it is remarkable how few former top-F1 drivers who went on to race elsewhere ever found real success. Perhaps it is not surprising. Did, say, Hakkinen really have the same level of motivation as young guns like Mattias Ekstrom, Paul Di Resta or Gary Paffett? Come to that, was there the same will to win as drivers of his generation who never got the breaks they deserved in F1, like Bernd Schneider?

This might go some way to explaining why some of the ex-F1 drivers who have met with the greatest success elsewhere in the sport have been those who didn't achieve what they might have done in F1. Perhaps it's because they feel they still have something to prove, and perhaps it's because, unlike the big stars they have to show they are worthy of a paid drive on their own merits, rather than because they are a star name who will bring people through the gates and guarantee press interest. After all, Schneider, a man who had but a couple of seasons in an awful Zakspeed, was the dominant force in DTM for years. Of the ex-F1 drivers who have plied their trade in S2000 and Super-Tourer spec touring cars, it has been Gabriele Tarquini and Nicola Larini who have done best. Two drivers who showed flashes of real pace in Formula 1, but who never really had the equipment to show what they might be capable of (though Larini, to be fair, did get a couple of runs in a Ferrari in 1994 - his best result, a second place at Imola being understandably overshadowed by the deaths of Senna and Ratzenberger that weekend.)

Perhaps the one exception to this rule was Nigel Mansell. Fresh from winning the world title with Williams in 1992, he was unable to agree terms with Sir Frank to carry on at the team, who had a rather differing view on Mansell's worth to that of the man himself. The result? He went off to race in Indycars with the all-conquering Newman Haas team and duly won the Indycar title at his very first attempt. Why was Mansell different? Well probably it helped that he went straight into one of the very top cars - though that wasn't enough for Michael Andretti, who left Newman Haas for Mclaren in F1 and found himself out of his depth. I suspect, though, that Mansell's chip on his shoulder, the way that nobody rated him as highly as he himself did, gave him a drive and motivation which other retiring F1 champions might have lacked in their post-F1 careers. When he came out of retirement again in the late 1990s to race a Mondeo Touring Car, he might have lacked a certain finesse, but there was no doubting that, when the mood took him, he was certainly very spectacular.

David Coulthard finally hung up his helmet at the end of last year. He's apparently still a test driver for Red Bull - though he has not been seen at the wheel of the car since Australia, and since the testing restrictions agreed by FOTA kicked in, it would appear he's surplus to requirements on that front. Of course, newly married and with a young child, he might have other things to occupy him for a while, but I wouldn't bet against him reappearing eventually, in a touring or sportscar. Rubens Barrichello didn't appear ready to retire at the end of last year. In fact, he had one of his best seasons in years. Nonetheless, with the collapse of Honda Racing, the decision may have been made for him. Perhaps a ride with the Acura ALMS squad would be up his street...

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Racing As Testing

Musing on the Finn's rather lacklustre performances at Ferrari last year, one F1 journalist asked "where is Kimi Raikkonen? If he can't take this seriously, why should I?". Watching the latest round of the GP2 Asia series in Qatar last weekend, I found myself asking much the same question of it.

Is it really a championship in it's own right or is it merely a glorified series of test sessions for the GP2 series proper? Take the three leading teams in GP2 at the moment. Champions Racing Engineering aren't doing the championship at all. ART have run no less than four drivers in their cars this year, with Champ Car refugee Nelson Philippe sharing the second car with prospective European series drivers Pastor Maldonado and Nico Hulkenberg while former F1 pay-driver Sakon Yamamoto continues his unsuccessful bid to revive his career in the lead car. ISport, meanwhile, have kept the same two drivers throughout the season, but Giedo Van Der Garde's team mate, Hamad Al Fardan, a man whose previous greatest achievement was finishing 3rd in the hardly hotly contested B class of the British F3 championship frankly makes last year's ART makeweight Stephen Jelley appear qualified by comparison. If even the GP2's leading teams are struggling to attract two good quality drivers, it doesn't reflect well on the series' credibility.

Further down the grid, things get even worse. Trident have had no less than five different drivers in their cars this year of whom only Chris Van Der Drift has a worthwhile racing CV. Fisichella MotorSport's Kevin Nai Chia Chen has taken part in all four races but has been so embarrassingly slow that it is a wonder he has been given the requisite licence at all. In Qatar he was 7 seconds away from pole!

The fact that, in spite of missing the opening races, Hulkenberg is within striking distance of the title is down, in no small part to the lack of serious runners doing all the races. That he will not compete in the final two races but will instead hand the car over to Pastor Maldonado merely goes to show that even the drivers themselves don't much value the series save as a useful training ground for the 2009 European series.

Part of the problem is that GP2 Asia is to my mind a fundamentally flawed concept from the start. Dazzled by Middle Eastern oil wealth, those behind the championship ignore the fact that the only Asian country with a serious racing history and culture is Japan - a country that the series doesn't even visit. Name a Qatari racing driver of any consequence... Or one from Dubai... The championship is aimed at an audience that isn't listening.

I do think though that there is room for a major winter single seater series, and the vagaries of weather suggest that Europe really isn't the place for it. Whether there is space for both GP2 Asia and A1GP I'm not so certain. What I do think A1GP have got right, which GP2's winter series would do well to emulate, is not sticking solely to Asia, but adding races in South Africa, South America and Australasia. Unlike the UAE, Brazil, South Africa and Australia all have a history in the sport, a significant motorsports culture and at least one past F1 champion each. Unfortunately, there's enough wrong with A1GP, that it's far from clear to me that either series will survive. It has been suspected that GP2 Asia was set up in competition with A1GP, but the end result may be that the two championships cancel each other out and both might be gone within a year or two.

It doesn't help either that, unlike the GP2 series proper, most of the races do not dovetail with Grand Prix weekends, and so drivers do not get an opportunity either to impress watching F1 bosses, or to learn the tracks that they might race on if they were to make the jump up to F1. All this might not matter so much if the series visited really top rate race tracks, but the brutal truth is that it doesn't. Take away the novelty of racing under floodlights, and there's no getting away from the fact that Losail circuit really is horribly mickey mouse. In daylight, it would look very uninspired. About the best that can be said for the place is that it is no worse than Dubai, and that unlike the race at Sentul, Indonesia, that it replaced on the calendar, the circuit at least didn't break up.

Whatever my reservations and doubts, though, there was a race last weekend and there were some points of interest and positives to emerge. Sergio Perez might have been overshadowed last year by F3 rivals Turvey, Hartley and Alguesuari, but the Mexican impressed me in the Barwa Campos machine, picking up two podium finishes (including a win) and comprehensively overshadowing his more experienced team mate Vitaly Petrov in the process. His move to secure second place in the feature race stood out as one of the highlights of that race.

The race also served as a reminder that the old GP2 cars were much more amenable to overtaking than the 2008-vintage machines with their more sensitive aerodynamics. The track wasn't exactly ideal for passing, but nobody seemed to tell Alvaro Parente, or the increasingly impressive Davide Valsecchi, who continues to get his Durango machine far further up the order than it really has any right to be.

Valsecchi is now Kobayashi's closest rival in the championship battle. Kobayashi's done his reputation no harm either. He's started picking up feature race wins (he was always something of a Sunday morning reverse grid star until now) and while he doesn't appear to be from the very top drawer, he's Japanese, part of the Toyota Driver Development Programme, and must surely have a covetous eye on the second Williams seat, which current occupant Kazuki Nakajima hasn't exactly done a great deal with.

Have we seen any pointers as to the form book for the season proper? Well perhaps. Remember, after all, that Romain Grosjean dominated the GP2 Asia Series last year, but proved rather less impressive in the European season. That said, though, there are ominous signs that Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg, could dominate next year in the manner of Hamilton a couple of years back. If anyone's to stop him, it certainly doesn't look like it will be Renault World Series champion Giedo Van Der Garde, on current form. I'd expected him to win races, driving for ISport, but as it has turned out, he has struggled even to score points, and lies a distant 12th in the title race.

It appears too that Campos might have made that last step forward to become genuine title contenders. Last year, had Lucas Di Grassi been there from the start of the year, they might have been able to give ISport and Racing Engineering more of a challenge. Last weekend, they looked very much the strongest team - with both Petrov and Perez finishing in the top 3 in both races. With Grosjean back for a second bash, and driving for them this summer, this might be the year for the former Minardi driver's team. With the creation of the rival F2 championship, and with leading lights from British F3 electing instead to race in the Renault World Series, GP2 might not be as strong as it has been, but I'm still looking forward to when the real action starts in Spain in May.

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Sticking With What You Know

With the news that Toro Rosso have re-signed Sebastien Bourdais for 2009, it is quite possible that the final seat on the F1 grid has been filled. If nothing can be rescued from the ruins of Honda's F1 dream - and with each week that passes I become more doubtful that they will make the grid in Melbourne - then we have our final line up for 2009. Bad news for Takuma Sato, Jenson Button, Bruno Senna, Rubens Barrichello and any number of others who might have hoped to be in F1 this year.

I'm glad that Bourdais got the Toro Rosso seat. For all that Takuma Sato's management made out that the team's decision was driven by financial imperatives, I think Mateschitz and Tost made the right call. Bourdais might not have had the explosive pace of Vettel at his best last year, but in race conditions, especially, he really wasn't far off the pace of the young German star. There can be no doubt that the Frenchman had the lion's share of any bad luck going Toro Rosso's way last year: The refusal of the car to fire up away from the grid at Monza; the fatuous penalty at Fuji and the last minute rain at Spa which cost him places to drivers who had gambled on switching to wets all helped to ensure that his points tally didn't really reflect his perfomances last year. There was less to separate the two Sebastians last year than it might have appeared.

Nonetheless, for much of the winter, it seemed that Bourdais might have been out on his ear after just a single season. The team might have been keen to ensure some continuity and retain Bourdais to partner new boy Sebastien Buemi but with money crucial to the decision, it appeared that Takuma Sato, who had a huge following in Japan, and was thought a better bet for attracting sponsors, or Bruno Senna, who has substantial backing from Embratel, were more likely candidates for the drive. In the end, neither of them got the seat. One can only assume that, in the current economic climate, Sato was no more able to find backers than Bourdais. Senna might have been better placed on that score, but his chances of claiming the drive were, ironically, probably stymied by FOTA's cost-cutting measures, and in particular, the in-season testing ban agreed by the teams.

Sebastien Bourdais

This had a double impact. On the one hand, along with the other measures agreed by the teams, it will have saved Toro Rosso a substantial sum, and helped them to balance the books for this season. Secondly, it will have made the team rather wary of the idea of running two men with no previous F1 experience in a car radically different from its predecessor. It is noteworthy that, unlike its sister team, Red Bull, Toro Rosso has been running throughout the winter testing with last year's car (supposedly with 2009 downforce levels, but I find it unlikely they would be 3 seconds faster than anyone else if this were the whole story). They haven't said why, but I expect that they want GP2 graduate Buemi to get as much seat-time as possible before the in-season testing ban kicks in. Running not just one but two drivers who were new to F1 would be too much of a gamble. And so Senna's chances of a drive fell away.

For all Sato's management say that the team's decision came down to the money, I'm not sure that this makes sense. I rather doubt that Bourdais is bringing cash to the team. He had, throughout, made clear that he is a professional racing driver who expects to be paid for what he does. I haven't heard any announcement of new sponsors coming on board at Toro Rosso as a result of Bourdais' continued presence there. Indeed, I wonder if the team's willingness to release him to take part in Peugeot's assault on Le Mans in June might be a consequence of their recognition that Bourdais has to earn a living, and the team aren't in a position to pay him (or at least, to pay him as much as he would want). Either way, it will be good to see a current F1 driver back at La Sarthe for the first time in years (Off the top of my head, I'm not sure it's happened since Lotus' Johnny Herbert and Jordan's Bertrand Gachot teamed up to win Le Mans for Mazda in 1991).

It's striking how little change there had been in F1's driver line-ups since last year. Coulthard has gone off into retirement, Vettel has been shifted over into the senior Red Bull team and Buemi will make his debut with Toro Rosso. Other than that, leaving aside the implosion of Honda, it's very much a case of 'as you were'. Even the rather underwhelming Nelson Piquet Jr. and Kazuki Nakajima have been retained.

A number of factors are at play here, I suspect. Firstly, with the biggest changes to the rules in a decade or more, teams will be keen to have a driver line-up that is a known quantity. No team wants to be left scratching its head, wondering whether there is something amiss with the car, whether they have got the new aero rules wrong, are struggling with KERS or whether it is simply that their new young signing is out of his depth.

Secondly, with the in-season testing ban, as I have pointed out above, things are going to be notably harder for new F1 drivers than they were for such as Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel or Robert Kubica. What testing time the team have this winter they would really rather spend getting to grips with the new aero-package, the slick tyres and KERS, not just giving their new driver time to get acclimatised to driving an F1 car.

Finally, there is the unavoidable truth that, while there are plenty of young drivers in the junior ranks who look as if they wouldn't embarrass themselves in an F1 car, none have really stood out as exceptional. If Renault were minded to replace Piquet, could they really be sure that Lucas Di Grassi or Romain Grosjean, without the benefit of a year's experience, would do a better job? Di Grassi, after all, was soundly beaten by Glock in GP2 in 2007, while Grosjean flattered to deceive last year. Bruno Senna did a reasonable job in GP2 last year, but in the end, despite driving for 2007 champions ISport, he was beaten by veteran Giorgio Pantano. A man who has already been found wanting at the highest level. ABout the best that can be said for any of these drivers is that it is not clear that Sebastien Buemi deserves an F1 drive ahead of them.

These things tend to come in waves. Between 2000 and 2002, many major new talents arrived in the sport - Raikkonen, Alonso, Massa, Button, Webber. Then, for several years, no major new drivers appeared. Drivers like Da Matta, Wilson, Albers and Karthikayen came and went. Then, between 2006 and 2008, a new generation of drivers, in particular, Robert Kubica, Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel have burst onto the scene. In a few years, yet another new generation will appear...

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Monday, February 02, 2009

You Pays Your Money...

Kimi Raikkonen, the highest paid driver on the F1 grid, is reputed to earn upwards of £25 million a year. While it's not quite on a par with the world's highest paid sportsman, Tiger Woods, it's still a staggering sum of money for a few hundred hours of work. It would take someone earning the median annual salary for a full time employee in the UK (such as your correspondent) a millennium to match the taciturn Finn's earnings. Someone on the minimum wage had better pencil in another 1000 years.....

There are plenty people who find the earnings of Raikkonen and, no doubt, other celebrities, obscene. Personally, I don't much care one way or the other. Whether merely driving racing cars, no matter how good you are at it, merits £25m or more a year I rather doubt. But if someone is prepared to pay you an eight figure sum to do something you actually rather enjoy doing anyway, chances are you wouldn't turn down the offer. And, at least unlike the captains of banking and investment, they haven't earned their money by inflicting untold damage on the global economy.

The recent economic turmoil engulfing the wider world has not escaped F1, however. No surprise really, given that the car industry has been seriously affected, and given that banks, such as Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland and ING are amongst the sport's major sponsors. With the sport's major backers facing serious financial difficulties, it is more than likely that not a few people within the sport are looking at the sums being paid out to such as Raikkonen, Alonso and Hamilton and wondering how it can continue to be justified.

There have been suggestions that F1 should take the bull by the horns and impose a salary cap on what drivers can earn. I have my doubts about whether a scheme could actually work. Even someone with as little business acumen as myself can see ways around it. Are personal sponsorship deals to be covered by any such arrangement? and if not, what's to stop a team determined to snare a particular driver from 'coming to an arrangement' with regard to team sponsors becoming personal sponsors? Or payments in kind, for example, of winning race cars?

The only way this can work is if it is a deal made between the top teams not to pay more than a certain amount for a driver. Anything imposed by the FIA without the full support of the teams themselves will almost certainly be side-stepped one way or another. All that aside, though, I can't help thinking that the scheme is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The teams who are paying top-dollar for the likes of Raikkonen, Hamilton and so on are not the ones facing the most serious financial difficulties. If the incomes of Ferrari and Mclaren are falling, then doubtless this will be a factor when it comes to renegotiating their drivers' contracts, but the its highly unlikely that either team will fall over simply because of the sums it is paying out to its drivers.

The teams in real financial difficulty - if the rumours are anything to go by - Williams and Force India, would be unaffected by any salary cap on drivers because their drivers aren't earning anything like enough money to be affected by any plausible limit on what drivers can earn. Adrian Sutil, for example, is still at Force India despite a rather lacklustre second season in the sport because he actually brings a lot of money to the team. Williams' Kazuki Nakajima has his seat chiefly because Williams' engine suppliers Toyota were prepared to cut the Didcot team a more favourable deal if they took Satoru's son on.

Formula 1 teams aren't charities, so why are the sport's biggest stars so well rewarded? The answer to this one is rather interesting. With a sport like football, the answer is straightforward. The best players are, by definition, better than their rivals. Having better players than anyone else should, all else being equal, ensure that a team wins more often than not. If you want them to play for your team and not your opponents' squad, then all else being equal, you're probably going to have to pay them more. And there are not really many other options open to a football team manager when it comes to spending the team's cash. Work to improve the stadium might help the club's commercial prospects, and so generate still more money, but it isn't going to make a difference to the performance of the players on the pitch.

Motor racing isn't like that. Spending money on drivers isn't the only way, or even usually the best way, that a team can improve its' performance. Hiring more engineers, investing in improved computer modeling techniques, a new wind-tunnel or any number of other programmes are every bit as likely to make a car faster, and they have the added advantage that, while the advantage that a driver brings leaves the moment your expensive superstar heads out of the door, gains found by your technical team are a long-term investment - they also improve the performance of both cars, and not only the one that your expensive lead driver is in. Ron Dennis once said that one of the reasons Mclaren fell into a slump in the mid-1990s was that it had been spending so much money keeping Ayrton Senna on board that they had allowed investment in other areas to slip. So when Senna left the team at the end of 1993, they began a three year period without a win.

So why, when a team could be making long term investments in its engineering strength, do Mclaren, Ferrari and Renault, to name but 3 teams, spend so much on their number 1 drivers? The answer, in short, is the law of diminishing returns at work. When you have a budget of £40m to run your racing team, an additional £10m will buy far more time if spent on the car than on the driver. When you've got a budget of £250m, that additional £10m isn't going to buy nearly as much improvement in performance as it would for a smaller team. Ferrari or Mclaren would find no shortage of competent professional racing drivers, and probably not a few current F1 drivers, who would be delighted to be offered a drive for them, and who wouldn't care whether they were paid at all. After all, even Ayrton Senna once offered to drive for Williams for free when they were dominating the sport in the early 1990s (he wasn't prepared to extend the same generous offer to Mclaren, it must be said.) The top teams, though, must reckon that the money they would save would, if instead spent on the car, not buy back the time they would lose by replacing an Alonso or a Hamilton with a Sutil or a Piquet Jr.

Fernando Alonso has said he reckons he's worth 6 tenths of a second a lap. One might quibble with the exact figure. Autosport's stats boffins reckoned he was, on average, about 4 tenths of a second a lap quicker than his team mate Nelson Piquet Jr. at Renault last year, and even leaving that aside, there is a more awkward question to be asked. 6 tenths of a second faster than whom? He certainly wasn't 6 tenths faster than Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren the previous year. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that a driver the calibre of Alonso (or Hamilton) is worth a few tenths of a second.

Teams spend vast sums of money chasing a few tenths, and hiring a man with the ability of an Alonso, Hamilton, Kubica or Raikkonen is a more reliable way to find this kind of time than most. Research and development might produce improvements, or it might not. And unlike money spent on the car, it has the added advantage that, if you're in a position to hire the best driver in the field, you not only have that man on your books, you make sure that none of your rivals do. If, for example, Lewis Hamilton is a tenth of a second a lap quicker than anyone else on the grid (I'm not suggesting he is, I'm just illustrating a point), hiring him really buys you 2 tenths - the extra tenth you find, and the tenth your rivals would have had if he were driving their car. One reason Ron Dennis might have felt inclined to take the chance of pairing up Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna in the late 1980s must have been the thought that neither man would be racing against him.

That's not to say that every mega-bucks deal a team has ever done has made sense. One can question whether Kimi Raikkonen was really worth all the money Ferrari have shovelled his way, especially since the much less well-remunerated Felipe Massa outpaced him as often as not last year, or whether the team might have got someone quicker for rather less money. That is debatable, whereas the silly money Toyota paid for Ralf Schumacher back in 2005 was utterly inexplicable, and quite who thought Eddie Irvine was worth his multi-million pound retainer at Jaguar I don't know. In both cases, one suspects this was the result of corporate suits from the automotive world with deep pockets and little real understanding of the sport getting their fingers burnt.

None of this is to say that driver salaries won't fall in the coming years. In the current economic climate, teams are not going to have the kind of money to spend that they once had. In that context, it simply won't make sense to offer eight figure sums to the guys who drive the cars. Like Clive over at F1Insight, I'm not convinced of the need for salary caps, though. The limitations of free markets might have been shown up rather painfully in the real world over the last year or so, but this strikes me as one area where there is no need for intervene. Let the teams decide for themselves what the worth of having a really first-rate driver on the payroll is.

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