Saturday, May 10, 2008 Down to 10 By Steve SLater Special Contributor
JUST 10 teams will line up for the start of this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix, following the withdrawal of the Super Aguri F1 team this week. In my opinion it is a sad loss to Formula One.
While Super Aguri may not have featured in the World Championship standings in their brief two years of existence, “the little team that tried” quite often gave us some great sporting moments at the tail of the field, not least when Takuma Sato was in his regular fighting form.
Remember last year’s Canadian Grand Prix? That was the race when Sato overtook Fernando Alonso to claim sixth place. Not only that, the Super Aguri blasted past the Championship-leading McLaren on the straight. On the track, that was the team’s finest hour.
Ironically, it was also about that time when the team’s problems began, when the check from their main sponsor, SS United Oil & Gas Company, failed to materialize. It was only thanks to the assistance of Honda that they made it to the end of the 2007 season.
They’ve been on borrowed time ever since.
The team’s demise of course means that both Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson are robbed of their places on the starting grid. I suspect that Sato might leave F1 altogether and head to the US to race with Honda support either in Indycars or in the ALMS sports car series.
Customer cars
For Davidson, the future is less clear. He is thought to have turned down a job as test driver for BMW in order to race for Super Aguri this season.
Unless another team makes him similar offers soon, he too may be a loss to F1.
More serious for F1, is another background reason which has led to the team’s demise.
Since late last season, there has been an increasing amount of lobbying from independent teams to outlaw the use of “customer cars” handed down from one team to another at the end of the season.
Although, on paper, the Super Aguri and Toro Rosso cars are produced by their respective teams, it is generally recognized in the sport that the former is last year’s Honda and the latter is a reincarnation of a Red Bull, albeit with a Ferrari engine. Teams such as Force India, who design and build their own cars from the ground up have always said that the use of customer cars is unfair, as it undermines their significant investment.
Right or wrong, the result of that lobbying is less cars on the starting grid.
This season, there could have been 12 teams and 24 cars on the grid. Now we have just 10 teams and 20 cars. Even before the season started, the
Prodrive team, which would have run second-hand McLarens, pulled out.
Their boss, the ever-astute David Richards figured that this would happen and decided not to waste millions of dollars. Now Super Aguri has proved him right.
Perhaps the one redeeming feature of this, is that McLaren will have a little more space at the bottom of the Istanbul paddock. And speaking of this weekend’s Grand Prix, I believe that McLaren will have to fight hard to match the pace of the Ferraris once again.
The Istanbul track requires a little less downforce than Bahrain or Barcelona, so straight line efficiency—always a Ferrari strongpoint—is the key to victory.
So is tire wear. Last year if you remember, Hamilton punished his right front tire so hard on the long, high-G, turn 9, that a blowout cost him the Championship lead, while Felipe Massa scoreda victory for the second year in succession.
This year too, my money is on Massa to make it three in a row and get himself back in the title race. The Brazilian will have a new engine in the back of his Ferrari, while Raikkonen is on the second race with the engine that gave him victory in Spain. Watch out for Robert Kubica too. He is a star in a car with low downforce and could give both the Ferraris and the McLarens a big surprise!
(Steve Slater is the expert half of the popular F1 commentary duo on Star Sports. Slater is a veritable encyclopedia of motor racing and has been involved in the sport at many levels including as journalist, race-organizer, radio broadcaster, and now commentator.)
