James Allen's half-term report

After a 2009 season overshadowed by political in-fighting, it’s the racing action that has taken centre stage in Formula 1 this year – and what a season we’ve had so far, with five different race winners already, a succession of absorbing races and even some memorable overtaking at the front of the field.


This is a terrific season, with close racing and unpredictability going into every race.

This is largely due to the fact that the best drivers are in the best cars and that several teams are doing a very good job, as opposed to the Schumacher/Ferrari years where only one team did a good job and ran away with it.


McLaren

The team of the moment. There is a confidence about McLaren this year, combined with a calmness, which frankly wasn’t there when Ron Dennis was running the team, as he set people on edge.

With two world champions in the car, the whole squad seems to have an assurance about it, which makes them hard to beat.

As with last year, McLaren have done an impressive amount of development on their car since the season started.

They have innovated this year – being the pioneers of the F-duct rear wing – but they have also brought a lot of performance to the car on a race-by-race basis.

That said, they have tended to have a faster race car than qualifying car and it has taken them a long time to get on top of qualifying pace. There were some operational errors earlier in the season too, like the horrendous qualifying session in Malaysia.

Button is driving with real confidence and enjoying himself more than at any time in his career so far, while Hamilton has gone up a gear after a tough 2009 and is now probably the strongest driver in F1.

Red Bull

The fastest car for most of the season – they have only missed pole on one occasion – but they haven’t done a good enough job of converting this pace into results.

They have dropped a lot of points partly due to mistakes; by the drivers, operationally and in terms of reliability. That said it is great to have Red Bull in the thick of the fight with their combination of edgy image and top-secret technology.

I sensed from the end of last year onwards that the team had decided to throw the kitchen sink at trying to win the title this year and they are giving it absolutely everything.

The mechanics are up into the early hours at every race fitting new parts and you can feel that pressure they have put on themselves. If they don’t do it this year, I think they will be quite demoralised.

Vettel and Webber have been jostling all season, and the doors blew off in Turkey when they collided.

Vettel is growing as a GP driver and I think he’ll take the championship battle down to the wire. Webber had a great run of form but he’ll do well to bounce back quickly from that horrendous shunt in Valencia.


Ferrari

The season’s most enigmatic team.

They had the fastest car in winter testing and won the first race with a 1-2, but then went backwards, showing that there is still a problem with the technical direction at Maranello.

They put effort and resource into copying McLaren’s F-duct wing, which took away from other areas of development. Recently they seem to have regrouped and taken a step forward again and it will be interesting to see whether they can get onto McLaren and Red Bull’s level for the second half of the season.

Fernando Alonso has had an up and down season, outperforming the car at times, but also making mistakes, which is unusual for him.

He seems to feel a pressure driving for Ferrari, which he didn’t feel at Renault or McLaren. I also think he’s a bit frustrated not to have won a title since 2006.

Operationally there have been mistakes too. It’s a team that isn’t quite comfortable with itself in this iteration and after the horror season last year you can feel a sense of fear that this year could slide backwards.

I don’t think they will let it do that and I hope we see Ferrari win some races in the second half of the season.

Massa hasn’t had a great year at all but still got his contract renewed which may boost his confidence. He hasn’t figured in the battles at the front so far and his body language speaks of feeling a bit out of it.

Mercedes

I said towards the end of last year that I felt Mercedes would be behind the top three this season because of the effort Brawn put in to clinching the 2009 title on limited resources.

Mercedes took over during the winter and we have seen the team come up with more developments recently, but all is not quite right with this car and it seems to have a similar problem with tyre warm-up issues as the 2009 car suffered in the second half of the season.

Michael Schumacher has had some good days, but he’s had some awful days too where he seemed powerless to make things happen, which is not like him at all. He was unlucky with strategy calls in Valencia, but generally I think he’s finding it much tougher than he expected.

Nico Rosberg is no doubt frustrated that his car isn’t able to challenge the front guys, but he’s shown some real quality and I firmly believe that this team will be very strong in 2011.

Not sure how much effort they will put into development in the second half of 2010.


Renault

I really like the way this team has come out of the traps in 2010.

Last Autumn was about as bad as it gets for a racing team, short of a fatality. They were utterly busted for the race fix in Singapore and the morale was already low from a serious decline in the aero department, due to tunnel issues and Flavio Briatore’s staff reductions.

Now Gerard Lopez has restructured the team, hired where necessary and lets the engineers get on with it. The engineers have always been good here; Bob Bell, James Allison, Alan Permane, Tim Densham.

They won the title in 2005 and 2006 and they still have a lot of quality. They have got their self confidence back and they seem to have got the bit between their teeth again.

The car is being upgraded constantly and who knows where they might end the season? They have been ahead of Mercedes and Ferrari recently on pure pace.

Robert Kubica has been outstanding this year, especially in Monaco and seems happy in the team. Vitaly Petrov has had some strong performances, but seems quite up and down. With another strong driver in the second car they would be challenging Ferrari for third in the constructors’ championship.


Force India

Again hats off to these guys. They have been very credible this year.

With the budget they have it has been a great season for the team which was Jordan once upon a time and has since been to the bottom of the pile and back.

They are fighting well with a good car and a very good technical unit, with sound engineers like Dominic Harlow making the car work at the race tracks.

Adrian Sutil and Tonio Liuzzi are both up and down drivers, but they’ve scored points on a regular basis. Sutil had strong runs in Malaysia (5th) and Valencia (6th). With 43 points on the board after half a season they look very comfortable in that sixth place space behind the big teams but well head of Williams, Toro Rosso and the rest.

It’s a bit of a glass ceiling because it’s a big step from there to challenge Renault and Mercedes. So that’s pretty much it for them.


Williams

It’s a bit of a sorry tale what has happened with Williams, with only four points scoring finishes out of a possible 18.

Their form was hard to read in testing and they were making noises like ‘don’t underestimate us’ but they’ve not had the pace most of the time to do anything.

Valencia was the exception, where Barrichello showed his quality and when presented with a chance he took it. He and Hulkenberg did very well in Q3 and then used the chaos around Webber’s accident to grab track position. From there Rubens steered home to an excellent fourth place.

There have been rumours of unhappiness internally and you get the feeling that changes somewhere are likely. But Williams is everyone’s second favourite team in F1 and many people’s favourites and no-one wants to see them struggle.

Toro Rosso

The first year of building their own car was always going to be tricky after years of keeping close to the Red Bull mothership.

I still don’t really understand what this team stands for or why they are in F1. It seemed a distraction before, from the main business of winning with Red Bull Racing.

Now it just looks like an indulgence.

They’ve not done much this year except for some odd days when Sebastien Buemi comes to life. He’s qualified consistently well and I’ve begun to see him as a proper F1 driver, who might be able to get the job done in a good car.

Jaime Alguersuari has given Schumacher a run for his money a couple of times and has scraped a point here and there.


Sauber

I’m sorry to say this but I thought Peter Sauber needed his head examining first when he took on the responsibility of saving this team from the mess left by BMW and then when he picked De la Rosa and Kobayashi as his drivers.

Kobayashi finally came to life in Valencia (and then some), but he’s struggled to express himself in this car.

De la Rosa isn’t really fast enough and his ability as a test driver is of limited use in an era of no testing. However as an employee of McLaren until the New Year he will have tipped Sauber engineers off early about the F-duct and so it’s no surprise that they were the first to copy it.

The car has been hyper-unreliable with four double retirements, some of them engine related.


The new teams

With only a few days of testing in February, it’s been incredibly hard for the new teams to get close to the established runners, especially with the late start two of them got.

Lotus only had their entry accepted in September and they have done a remarkable job to get a margin over Virgin and Hispania.

They keep bringing new parts to the car and I hope they can score a point somewhere and finish the season within half a second of the slowest established team. They will have deserved it.

Like all the new teams using Cosworth engines and XTrac hydraulics and gearboxes they have been let down by the reliability of the hydraulics in particular.

Virgin has had a hell of a time, with all sorts of teething issues. The mechanics must be exhausted.

Really the new teams should have been given some more time to test at the start of the year as a one-off introductory offer.

Since Virgin had to fit a bigger fuel tank, the car hasn’t had the speed. But there are some good people there and time will tell whether the CFD-only design model works.

The best you can say about Hispania is that it has survived, so far, which is entirely down to the determination of Colin Kolles.

Looking at on-board camera shots of the car you feel for the drivers, but this is a long road and if they continue in 2011 I’m sure Geoff Willis’ team will make a decent fist of the car.