All the rookies of 2010, Senna, Hulkenberg, Petrov, di Grassi and Chandhok – what to expect?
The 2010 grid has five new drivers on it, that’s a lot for one season but there could have easily been more had US F1 made the grid. Nico Hulkenberg joins the Williams team, Vitaly Petrov joins Renault, Lucas di Grassi joins Virgin Racing and both Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok join HRT Cosworth. Most of these come directly from GP2 with Nico Hulkenberg the reigning champion.
Nico Hulkenberg has risen to stardom very quickly showing a talent that Willi Webber says reminds him of a young Michael Schumacher (who was it who said the same about Vettel?) and took the GP2 title impressively in his first season, will he have a similarly explosive start to his F1 career? Petrov and di Grassi have been around in GP2 for much longer and have finally made the leap into F1. Both need to prove that they are capable of competing at this level and won’t get as much slack as the younger entrants. Karun Chandhok is going to have to fight to stay in F1 from the outset – he’s never achieved much and I don’t any reason that might change though he can work hard to turn that around. Finally Bruno Senna who hasn’t really been racing in the last year to concentrate on getting this F1 seat has the task of hauling the HRT car off the bottom of the times – we don’t know that it’s at the bottom yet but I have a hunch.
With Jaime Alguersuari and Kamui Kobayashi having competed in a few races but not a whole season and Michael Schumacher and Vitantonio Liuzzi both returning to F1 there are a lot of drivers on the grid that haven’t had much experience of racing in F1 over the last few years – that’s going to mean a few nervous faces going into that first corner and Bahrain – it’s not long until we find out if they can all hold their nerve.
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