Full year report: Mercedes

Mercedes bought the Brawn team and convinced Michael Schumacher to return to F1 but have achieved little else. They have been the fourth best team on the grid for most of the season and they’ll be disappointed by that. Ross Brawn will be pushing hard to improve things for next year but it remains to be seen whether they can build something that can challenge the other teams. They seem to have got bogged down in the midfield to many times this year, whether that is because the car is hard to use in passing or whether it is just a lack of pace we’ll never know.
Nico Rosberg has had an impressive season, he has continually bettered Michael Schumacher and has impressed the team. That said he hasn’t set the world on fire, but that could be the car too. He needs to beat Schumacher in 2011 too if [...]

Driver movements for 2010, the ongoing merry-go-round

2010 sees the most changed grid in a long while and whereas the new teams and drivers receive a lot of press there are also a good few drivers who’ve changed teams over the winter. Some of them for the better and some for worse.

Jenson Button – Brawn to McLaren
Rubens Barrichello – Brawn to Williams
Nico Rosberg – Williams to Mercedes
Fernando Alonso – Renault to Ferrari
Timo Glock – Toyota to Virgin
Jarno Trulli – Toyota to Lotus
Heikki Kovalainen – McLaren to Lotus
Robert Kubica – BMW Sauber to Renault

Some of the moves were forced such as Timo Glock, Jarno Trulli and to some extent Robert Kubica because of the demise of the team though in Kubica’s case Sauber re-emerged later on. Glocks move sees him end up at Virgin and Trulli’s at Lotus – two of the new teams – only time will tell whether these moves make sense and a lot of [...]

How the FIA failed entirely in expanding the grid

When it was announced that the FIA would be looking for new teams to bolster the F1 grid I was surprised – isn’t this a club where you have to know Bernie and have had dinner with him a few times plus have filled his pockets with gold before you can fill in the form? But no, they were indeed opening up F1, and they had a lot of applications.
The FIA (and Bernie) should have looked at the applications that were tabled and then thrown away the financially unsound ones and then looked at what was left, there was a lot of talk about due diligence  at the time. This process was obviously not through enough, two of the teams that were granted entry have been sold and bought before the new season has even started (Campos Meta and Manor), and a third is rumoured to have mounting financial problems [...]

The surprising speed of Sauber and de la Rosa

This weeks F1 testing has shown that the Sauber C29 is no slouch, I said that they might just pull something out of the bag but I wasn’t expecting that. Sauber firmly planted themselves in second place for all three days.