PARIS — The 2013 Formula One season has not really begun. The first race takes place on March 17 in Melbourne. But with the launches of the new cars and the first four days of test sessions ending on Friday, the seeds have been planted. What kind of plant is not easy to figure out.
I have been observing from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, watching the fanfare of the car launches —or rather, the lack of fanfare — and watching the lap-by-lap action on the track in Jerez, Spain. And I have, every day, kept throwing around ideas in my head and saying: So what’s the conclusion? What’s to say? The cars, most of them, are merely the technical evolutions of last year’s cars.
They all look fairly similar — although some, thank goodness, have smoothed out that ugly nose problem of last season — and there is a good reason for it: There is very little change in the technical regulations from last season. The big changes will all occur next year, especially with the change in the engine specification. So what is there to say about these cars?
Had to wait to see them on the track. Now, it is common knowledge within Formula One and to most fans that the first winter test sessions of the new cars reveal and mean very little. The engineers are not forced into running their cars to racing specifications, and they can test parts that would be deemed illegal in a race. They can run on low fuel to get great results to attract sponsors, or they can sandbag — run heavy with lots of fuel and ballast — to hide how fast their cars are to the competition.
That said, the tests often do give an idea of who is strong, and who is not. Last year, Ferrari was clearly off the pace — by 1.6 seconds, no less — and that weighed on the whole season for the Italian team. The Lotus was fast, though, and that showed early in the season too. So what about the last four days?
None of it seemed to make sense: Jenson Button started the first session as the fastest car in the McLaren Mercedes, setting his fastest time on the hard tires, which begged the question: “What could he do on the faster soft tires????”
Felipe Massa, days later, when he was the fastest car of the day, in a Ferrari, still moaned about the speed of Button’s lap, even though it was slower than his. But it all had to do with tires and track conditions. Then there was the Lotus, with Romain Grosjean setting a fastest lap, and then Kimi Raikkonen doing the same. And there were the amazingly fast laps of the new Toro Rosso car and the Force India.
And there was Lewis Hamilton’s first test as part of the Mercedes team. (Many people criticized him for changing teams while he was secure in his seat at McLaren.) Hamilton ended up running off the track with broken brakes after his first few lap. But he came back strongly and left the session on Friday smiling.
It was after taking all of this action in that I finally realized that there was a take-away, despite the story seeming to change ever day. And that was it: the story this coming season may well change from one race to another, one session to another, as it had for the first part of last season.
The cars are currently so close together — except for the ones like the Marussia and the Caterham, the smaller teams — that there could be a lot of shifting around of the powers that be.
If this be the case, we’re in for another great and interesting season. On the other hand, this was just the first winter test session, and we have two more to go, starting with the one in Barcelona on Feb. 19.
Oh, and another thing that left me asking myself metaphysical and existential questions in the last few days is that this whole first test session week happened at a time when a very little talked about, but significant thing happened in American journalism regarding Formula One.
I’m talking about an 8,152-word article in the Feb. 4th issue of the The New Yorker all about Formula One. “The Art of Speed; Bringing Formula One to America,” by Ben McGrath, is a well-written and entertaining, but surface-scratching story introducing Formula One to America.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt really stimulated seeing the great New Yorker magazine, a high-brow literary colossus of American journalism, giving this much space and interest to the sport I have been covering for so many years for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. One of the things that intrigued me was that unlike, for instance, The Economist, or other major publications that don’t usually write about the sport, when they do they blast it for some scandal or another, the New Yorker story read like a beginner’s guide to F1.
It was, as the title suggested, an introduction to America of this series that has never pierced the American consciousness the way other forms of auto racing — like Nascar — have, probably simply because there are no American heroes involved in it today.
On the other hand, like the season testing, it also left me wondering just how often Formula One has to be introduced to America after a history that goes back more than 60 years, and two Formula One world champion American drivers, one of whom is named Mario Andretti.
Well, with a New Yorker magazine anointment, I’d say that’s a pretty big step right there.
Of course, this idea of how many times F1 has to be re-introduced to America also reminded me suddenly that 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of my own beginning covering the sport for the International Herald Tribune, when I published my first ever story in the paper on the series: Grand Prix Racing: 1993 Is Shaping Up Great Despite FISA
