2013 F1 Grand Prix Season

[TBWG]

YAWN !!

Brazilian GP: Vettel grabs record-equalling ninth straight F1 victory
By Matt Beer   Sunday, November 24th 2013,



Sebastian Vettel ended the 2013 Formula 1 season with a ninth consecutive race win, as his Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber said goodbye to the championship with second place.

Fernando Alonso gave gallant chase to the Red Bulls and got Ferrari back on the podium, in a race in which rain regularly threatened, but never materialised in sufficient doses to cause a problem.

It was not a totally straightforward win for Vettel, who had to do some overtaking and overcome a pitstop drama.

He lost the lead at the start as both Nico Rosberg and Alonso got away better.

Rosberg led out of the Senna S, but Alonso ran out of space and lost third to the German's Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

Both Mercedes were overtaken at the end of lap one though, with Vettel easily reclaiming the lead from Rosberg as Alonso passed Hamilton in their wake.

Webber, who had won a first-lap battle with Felipe Massa, quickly followed Alonso past Hamilton, with both soon overtaking Rosberg as well.

Alonso put up a fight against Webber and did not lose second place until lap 13. He then regained it when the Red Bull had an issue on its right rear wheel at the first pitstops, but Webber only needed two laps to catch and re-pass the Ferrari.

Although Webber was able to chip away at Vettel's lead, the champion was always able to respond.

Vettel's big lead turned out to be crucial as both Red Bulls made simultaneous final pitstops - to the apparent surprise of a crew prepared for Webber, not Vettel.

That halved Vettel's advantage to six seconds, and the lead battle then threatened to come truly alive as rain appeared to loom and both Webber and Alonso started closing in.

In the event, the thick clouds refrained from opening over the final laps, and the top three spread out again, allowing Vettel to take a record-equalling 13th win of the year.

With Rosberg steadily dropping back through the field, Hamilton and Massa began battling for fourth until both hit trouble.

Massa was left furious by a drive-through penalty for crossing the pit entry line on flying laps, while Hamilton tangled with Valtteri Bottas as the Williams driver moved to un-lap himself into the Descida do Lago.

While Bottas was sent crashing into retirement, Hamilton picked up a puncture and was given a penalty for causing the collision.

Those dramas played a part in McLaren's best result of its painful 2013 season, though Jenson Button and Sergio Perez's progress from 14th and 19th on the grid to fourth and sixth was mainly down to excellent race pace from their unloved car. The duo sandwiched Rosberg at the flag.

Romain Grosjean

Massa and Hamilton recovered to seventh and ninth, split by Nico Hulkenberg's Sauber.

Daniel Ricciardo gave Toro Rosso the final point in his last appearance before leaving for Red Bull, holding Paul di Resta, Esteban Gutierrez and Adrian Sutil at bay.

Lotus's promising season came to a miserable end. Romain Grosjean lasted just two laps before a massive engine failure while running eighth, while Heikki Kovalainen was outside the points again in 14th having fallen to 18th on the opening lap.

Marussia beat Caterham in the constructors' championship's tail-end battle for the first time.

Caterham had been the quicker of the pair at Interlagos, but Giedo van der Garde was penalised for ignoring blue flags and Charles Pic had a late suspension failure, meaning Jules Bianchi gave Marussia the 'win' in the race day battle too.

PROVISIONAL RACE RESULTS

The Brazilian Grand Prix
Interlagos, Brazil;
71 laps; 305.909km;
Weather: Cloudy.

Pos  Driver               Team/Car                  Time/Gap
 1.  Sebastian Vettel     Red Bull-Renault      1h32m36.300s
 2.  Mark Webber          Red Bull-Renault          +10.452s
 3.  Fernando Alonso      Ferrari                   +18.913s
 4.  Jenson Button        McLaren-Mercedes          +37.360s
 5.  Nico Rosberg         Mercedes                  +39.048s
 6.  Sergio Perez         McLaren-Mercedes          +44.051s
 7.  Felipe Massa         Ferrari                   +49.110s
 8.  Nico Hulkenberg      Sauber-Ferrari          +1m04.252s
 9.  Lewis Hamilton       Mercedes                +1m12.903s
10.  Daniel Ricciardo     Toro Rosso-Ferrari          +1 lap
11.  Paul di Resta        Force India-Mercedes        +1 lap
12.  Esteban Gutierrez    Sauber-Ferrari              +1 lap
13.  Adrian Sutil         Force India-Mercedes        +1 lap
14.  Heikki Kovalainen    Lotus-Renault               +1 lap
15.  Jean-Eric Vergne     Toro Rosso-Ferrari          +1 lap
16.  Pastor Maldonado     Williams-Renault            +1 lap
17.  Jules Bianchi        Marussia-Cosworth          +2 laps
18.  Giedo van der Garde  Caterham-Renault           +2 laps
19.  Max Chilton          Marussia-Cosworth          +2 laps

Retirements:

     Charles Pic          Caterham-Renault           58 laps
     Valtteri Bottas      Williams-Renault           45 laps
     Romain Grosjean      Lotus-Renault               2 laps


World Championship standings, round 19:               

Drivers:                    Constructors:             
 1.  Vettel        397        1.  Red Bull-Renault          596
 2.  Alonso        242        2.  Mercedes                  360
 3.  Webber        199        3.  Ferrari                   354
 4.  Hamilton      189        4.  Lotus-Renault             315
 5.  Raikkonen     183        5.  McLaren-Mercedes          122
 6.  Rosberg       171        6.  Force India-Mercedes       77
 7.  Grosjean      132        7.  Sauber-Ferrari             57
 8.  Massa         112        8.  Toro Rosso-Ferrari         33
 9.  Button         73        9.  Williams-Renault            5
10.  Hulkenberg     51       
11.  Perez          49       
12.  Di Resta       48       
13.  Sutil          29       
14.  Ricciardo      20       
15.  Vergne         13       
16.  Gutierrez       6       
17.  Bottas          4       
18.  Maldonado       1       
       

TBWG

[nookiebear]

I honestly think this season was  easily the most boring to date..........Sorry David!

[TBWG]

Unfortunately have to agree Nookie.

TBWG 

[TBWG]

The Secret Diary of Adrian Newey Aged 53¾: Sulky Teenager

Well trusty tome, it really is back to the drawing board for this pesky new set of regulations and the little tinker of the RB10. After 21 laps of Jerez in four days many of the mechanics have made suggestions about what the RB stands for - the first letter being Right, with a goodly variety of suggestions for the letter B. None of which I would care to repeat in print.

Deary deary me (and almost double crikey), I have never been to such a depressing test, with so little achieved. Even when McLaren decided to fit aero parts on their car upside down last year they got more done than we did. And the ironic thing is that when they set their car up incorrectly it went faster, unlike ours which just sat in the garage flashing warning lights and refusing to cooperate.

In a rare moment of levity afterwards I said to Jana that perhaps we should nickname it 'the sulky teenager' but as she logically pointed out. It's only ten.

It doesn't help when Renault haven't got their act together and are busy passing 'le buck' to the teams. I seem to be taking most blame for the kerfuffle, along with my love for neat aero packaging. The press seem to have latched onto this as a central foible of mine - as though no other designer on the grid even thinks about it, which is most irksomely irritating.

Autosport even ran a feature this week, 'When Newey Got It Wrong' listing the handful of cars that I've designed that haven't turned out satisfactorily. The title was unnecessarily dramatic, almost on the lines of 'When Good Cats Go Bad'. In amongst the list of my woeful designs was the Williams FW16 which picked up a constructors championship. The feature really got my dander up. Quite frankly I don't need to be reminded by some donut-munching keyboard jockeys about the cars I've designed that have been slightly below par. All three of them.

As the good lady has oft pointed out, the only time I get it seriously wrong is when I'm allowed to go clothes shopping on my own and return with items such as velvet trousers and tweed underpants. Which seemed like a good idea at the time... It turns out that whenever I stray beyond items from Blue Harbour I get into trouble. My idea of 'raffish' can be interpreted as something entirely different. Most unfortunate.

One thing I am proud of on the new car is our nose. Goodness gracious the launches at Jerez were less about showing off the new car and more about checking out each other's equipment - down there. It was like the showers after games in the first year at secondary school. Caterham would definitely get the flicked wet towel treatment for theirs. Jeremy Clarkson did a hilarious take on the "new noses" in the first Top Gear, which is watched by many at the factory.

I know it's only Last of the Summer Wine with cars, but I particularly liked the feature they did on hot hatchbacks and the Volkswagen Golf. One of the dreadfully irritating aspects of the old Golf advert on television in the 1990s was a particularly anal German engineer - let's call him Norbert - who loved the way his door closed. And so Jeremy deliberately got a Golf whose front door wouldn't close first time. Some may not have got the joke but I found it most rib ticklesome.

One thing that has been seized upon by the geriatric F1 fans is the lack of a throaty roar from the new 1.6 litre engines. Obviously we weren't in a position to produce a throaty purr, or a rorty torty turbo in Jerez, let alone a throaty roar but I cannot for the life of me understand what people don't like about the new sound. The thing to complain about is getting 5000 volts pumped through your chief mechanic, not the noise it makes when it comes tonking down the main straight with an eerie turbo woosh

You don't get people at air shows complaining that the new advanced fighter jets don't make the sound of the old Spitfire. Or that the speed of the jets is very impressive, but it would be so much better if they could sync the vision with the sound.

If Bernie really wanted it to be like the old days we could put some straw bales in front of the TechPro barriers, swill a bucket of Castrol GTX over every garage floor in the pitlane, and get the drivers' girlfriends to fill in timecharts on the pitwall.

Anyway, I'll have to sign off as I have a troublesome teenager to deal with. Melbourne is still a prodigiously long way away and with the aid of the house beverage and some all-nighters we can get this fixed. I have noted many times the comments of my acerbic Slavic PA, Jana, who often chides me for my obsession with putting endless data into the simulator. On my return from Jerez she said to me. "Are you going to put engine data into simulator or do you want me to do it? I've got three minutes."

If the problems with the car weren't enough to give me sleepless nights I'm also having trouble with our expensive new Eider duck duvet. Christian caught me in a corridor the other day and told me I had rings under my eyes.I explained that we'd bought this new duvet but it wasn't staying on the bed.

"You know what your problem is Adrian," said Christian, smiling his slow, easy smile. "Not enough downforce..."