F1 Today – 11/01/2023
F1 Today – LIVE Edition – 11/01/2022
Andretti hits out against opposition to entering F1
Michael Andretti has hit out against the teams who have not welcomed his joint bid with Cadillac, insisting their resistance is “all about greed” and “not looking at what is best” for the sport.
Andretti, who was the last American to score points in F1 and is now a successful team owner, has taken a big and long-awaited step towards getting on the grid after securing a partnership with General Motors and luxury brand Cadillac, with the aim of competing by 2026 at the latest.
However other teams have posed significant opposition to his plans because of the dilution of prize money it would bring. Andretti told Forbes, “It’s all about money. First, they think they are going to get diluted one-tenth of their prize money, but they also get very greedy thinking we will take all the American sponsors as well.”
“It’s all about greed and looking at themselves and not looking at what is best for the overall growth of the series.”
He has been insistent that the tie-up between Andretti and General Motors, which brings together one of America’s most successful motorsport teams and biggest car company, has enough money to dilute the prize fund. Andretti says the only piece of the puzzle missing before the team was not having an OEM behind them which has been resolved with the tie-up with GM.
Adding, “They are going to bring a lot to the party to help us get a race car on track. We are very bullish at this moment. There is still a long way to go, and we are willing to follow every procedure that needs to be done. We are in a good position for it.”
Over the weekend, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem took to Twitter to express his support for the tie-up, and also hitting out at the opposition despite there being no public record of it. To complicate matters, F1 has been far warier of the FIA in their statements.
In response to Ben Sulayem’s comments, Andretti accused the owners of teams of looking after themselves and not the interests of the sport, while saying the Emirati is looking out for the future of the sport.
Adding “Mohammed gets it. He’s a racer and he understand the series needs to have one or two more teams. It is an FIA championship, and it holds most of the cards to get the expression of interest going.”
Andretti said he has support, though, from existing teams McLaren and Renault-owned Alpine. He insists rumours that this is because his team would have Renault engines is “not true”.
Adding, McLaren Racing CEO, “Zak Brown and Alpine are two very good allies. Zak has been very supportive. Zak has been a great friend and ally. He gives me advice and is there to help. We help each other. I’ve been helping him a lot when he came to IndyCar racing. It’s a friendship that works both ways.”
Giovinazzi, Shwartzman set to share Ferrari reserve role
Antonio Giovinazzi and Robert Shwartzman are set to share the role of Ferrari’s reserve driver role this year. After missing out on an F1 return for this year, Giovinazzi was announced as part of Ferrari’s driver line-up in the Hypercar class of the World Endurance Championship on Tuesday.
Although WEC will be the Italian’s main focus this year, he remains the team’s reserve driver, according to the Italian language edition of Motorsport.com. Giovinazzi became a reserve driver at Ferrari last year after losing his seat with Alfa Romeo at the end of 2021. He had previously shared the role with Mick Schumacher, who has left Ferrari and joined Mercedes as reserve.
Giovinazzi had been one of the drivers in contention for the Haas seat this season, but in the closing months of 2022 his chances faded not helped by his crash in practice in Austin.
Confirmation of Giovinazzi as Ferrari’s Le Mans Hypercar line-up on Tuesday came as little surprise, marking his return to Le Mans after a one-off appearance in the GTE-Pro class for AF Corse in 2018. He will race alongside GTE-Pro champions James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi in the #51 Ferrari 499P this year.
Five WEC weekends clash with F1 when Shwartzman will fill the role of reserve. The Russian switched to Israel last year following the FIA ban on Russian drivers, following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Verstappen outlines early frustrations in 2022
Max Verstappen has further outlined the early frustrations he had with last year’s Red Bull, saying “a car cannot be fast with understeer.” Although the Dutchman wrapped up his second title with four races to go and eventually fifteen wins, his he retired with reliability in two of the first four races.
Meanwhile, his title rival Charles Leclerc won two of the opening three events for Ferrari and might have won more early on, before his season unravelled through driver and strategy errors as well as unreliability.
In the opening rounds, Red Bull struggled with the heavy car and handling issues in slow-speed corners. This was on top of the handling issues from the new tyre construction which in the slow-speed corners where ground-effects cars do not perform at their best.
The issues meant that Verstappen was unable to have the front end he wanted, he likes the car to be extremely pointy and nimble front end he prefers until Red Bull was able to get the RB18 under the weight limit and could apply ballast to load up the front axle and create Verstappen’s wilder, oversteer-happy approach.
He explained to Motorsport.com, how his driving style fitted in along with the requirements of the new ground-effects machines, with the understeer issue felt most when running on near-empty tanks in qualifying.
Verstappen said, “Well, now it was just related to the weight of the car. Being really overweight created an understeering balance and once we started to get rid of that, it started to be more agile again.
“Not just twitchy but more agile. You could really use the front end. At the end of the day, that’s also how you really drive a fast car. A car cannot be fast with understeer. It’s impossible. Especially with the tyres we had this year being a bit more understeer limited as well. You cannot have a car like that.”
Asked how he had adapted to work around the understeer issues – Verstappen would win six races in the season’s first half before the lightened RB18 really allowed him to produce his best from the summer onwards – he replied: “To be honest, most of it came from the weight.
“But also the updates we did to the car [helped]. [It was about] trying to learn the tyres, trying to really understand how we can preserve them better, which hasn’t been the easiest for sure.”
Drivers mustn’t use FIA for their ‘agenda’
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem says that F1 drivers must not use the platform given by the governing body to make statements for their own “personal agenda”. This year, drivers will need prior written permission from the sport’s governing body to make “political, religious and personal statements” from next season following an update of the International Sporting Code.
Unless the FIA grants approval in writing, drivers who make such statements will now be in breach of the rules. Ben Sulayem has told reporters, “We are concerned with building bridges. You can use sport for peace reasons… But one thing we don’t want is to have the FIA as a platform for private personal agenda.”
“We will divert from the sport. What does the driver do best? Driving. They are so good at it, and they make the business, they make the show, they are the stars. Nobody is stopping them. There are other platforms to express what they want. Everybody has this and they are most welcome to go through the process of the FIA, to go through that.”
In recent years, what could be described alliance has developed between Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel on racial equality, human and LGBTQ rights as well as climate change, has developed following the events of 2020. As well as in the sport’s own politics.
Ben Sulayem rejected the notion that the FIA was shutting down drivers, saying he wanted to “improve and clean up” the sport.
Ben Sulayem added, “I have my own personal things, OK, but it doesn’t mean I will use the FIA to do it. The FIA should be neutral, I believe. We need the superstars in to make the sport. If there is anything, you take the permission. If not, if they make any other mistake, it’s like speeding in the pit lane. If you do it, it’s very clear what you get.”
F1 will not go back to one race director – Ben Sulayem
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has suggested that F1 will keep having multiple race directors in the future, following the change of approach for 2022. Following the controversy in Abu Dhabi in 2021, then race director Michael Masi was sacked.
Masi was replaced by two race directors Niels Wittich and Eduardo Freitas dividing up the F1 season between them. The idea of splitting the role proved unpopular with both drivers and teams, raising concerns about consistency. Both drivers and teams suggested that having different people as race directors meant there was a lack of consistency in processes and decisions.
However, from the Japanese Grand Prix, after an investigation into why a crane was released onto the live track, the FIA elected to stick with just Wittich through to the end of the campaign.
Speaking about the alternating race director, GPDA director George Russell said, the drivers “believe that having the rotation isn’t the best thing for a sport, for that consistency. We’ve never had a steward from a previous event at the following race to talk about any certain decisions, I believe.”
But rather than go back to a system of installing a single race director, Ben Sulayem thinks it is essential for the governing body to have multiple people involved to ensure there is a smooth transition should a problem occur with the incumbent.
Speaking in Saudi Arabia, where the Dakar Rally is taking place, Ben Sulayem said: “There is a process now and I have a team who is going through a proper process and training for stewarding, and for race directors.”
“You cannot just have one race director and rely on them. I see that we should prepare the second role. We cannot rely in the biggest discipline that we have, or any other discipline. What if something happened? If we are going to sustain motorsport, we have to be ready with training.”
Ben Sulayem says he believes that there are many talented officials operating at grassroots level who could go on to help manage F1 races.
The way Masi was sacked by the FIA following the inquiry into the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, their were questions about whether the Australian was made the scapegoat. But Ben Sulayem suggested that Masi also wanted to go because of the toxic social media.
Better to have overlaps in management – Szafnauer
Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer says it’s better to have an “overlap” of management duties within a team. After trying a non-conventional management structure in 2021, last year the teams CEO Laurent Rossi changed the structure to a more traditional structure.
Szafnauer reports to Rossi, who has overall responsibility for the road car division as well as the racing team, and as such has a hand in big decisions such as driving hirings.
After leaving Aston Martin at the start of last year Szafnauer said a team couldn’t have “two Popes,” referring to the arrival of Martin Whitmarsh, but he insists that the situation is different at Alpine, with the two key players working well together.
Asked about those comments by Motorsport.com, in relation to Alpine, Szafnauer said, “Working with Laurent is really easy, because we’re like Popes of separate churches. He’s CEO of Alpine, the car company, and I report to him.”
“One of the pillars of the Alpine car company is a F1 team, or one of the entities underneath him. So I just report to him there. He’s got all sorts of other direct reports, to sell cars, design cars, manufacture cars, market the cars, all that stuff. It’s kind of like Toto [Wolff] reporting to Ola Kallenius.”
Rossi noted in September that Szafnauer was one of the hires that he was “most proud of,” and the latter says that the division of responsibilities within Alpine is clear.
he noted, “The last thing you want when you first come in is to have underlap. Overlap means I do this and you do this, so we overlap on this stuff. Underlap is I don’t do it, and you don’t do it. And it just falls through the cracks. So that’s worse. At the beginning, there was some overlap.
Szafnauer cited his early involvement in getting Pierre Gasly on board of an example of how things work within the team, with him doing much of the ground work. He says that Franz Tost initially said no to releasing Gasly, before getting a deal with Helmut Marko.
Williams announces launch plans
Williams has become the latest team to announce it 2023 launch plans, the team will launch online at 14:00GMT on Monday 6th February via its website, social media and app.
The announcement made no mention of the team’s new car being presented at the launch, with the first proper look at the FW45 due to come at a later date. This year the team will have a new line up, with Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant moving up from F2.
Williams is currently going through a number of internal changes following the departure of team principal Jost Capito and technical director FX Demaison last month, both having spent two years at Grove. Their replacements have yet to be confirmed, as the team looks to improve on finishing last in the 2022 constructors’ championship, scoring just eight points.
The Williams FW45 is due to make its extended on-track debut at the start of pre-season testing, taking place at the Bahrain International Circuit from 23-25 February, one week ahead of the opening race.