2013 German Grand Prix Preview

After an eventful British Grand Prix last weekend, the Formula 1 teams quickly pack up and head to Germany for round 9 out of 19 at the legendary Nurburgring circuit! Lets talk a look at whats being spoken about going into this weekend's race!

Tires tires tires!

After 4 major blow outs during the race, and atleast two slow punctures that some drivers reported after the race, Pirelli came under a lot of criticism for such an incident which hasn't been seen in the recent past! The FIA and Pirelli were quick to react and changed the rules for this month's young drivers test, where teams can now test the cars with their race drivers. All in a hope to make sure such dangerous incidents do not occur again. The safety of the drivers is of the atmost importance to teams and the FIA. This is a great move in order to solve the tyre crises.

Pirelli claim that there were many reasons that caused the blow outs including low tyre pressures, sharp kerbs and high loads and putting tires on the wrong side of the car. Pirelli have put together a plan to solve such incidents. The first of this involves bringing tires with Kevlar belts that were tested during the Canadian Grand Prix rather than the tires that used steel structures at the Silverstone circuit.

From Hungary onwards, Pirelli will be bringing newer tires that combine the characteristics of the 2012 tires along with the performance of the 2013 tires.

Sebastian Vettel's July Jinx:

Three time World Champion Sebastian Vettel has never won a Grand Prix in the month of July. Coincidentally he celebrates his birthday on the 3rd of July! Also he hasn't won him home GP. This weekend Vettel will be looking to end this jinx just like he did by winning the Canadian Grand Prix for the first time last month.






Track:

The new Nurburgring track has 16 turns in total. It has a great combination of slow to medium speed corners and quite a few high speed straights! Drivers spend 60 percent of the lap on full throttle. To get in a good lap teams need to have the right speed with high downforce that will let their drivers push to the limit.

Pirelli will be bringing the modified Medium and Soft tires this weekend.

This weekend there will be two DRS zones, one on the start/finish straight and the other on the fast right hander between turns 11 and 13. The NGK Chicane at the end of the second DRS zones will give drivers the best opportunity to overtake

The weather this weekend looks warmer than it was at last weekend's British GP. There is a chance of a wet Friday as showers are predicted. Temperatures predicted for the rest of the weekend are around 25 degrees Celsius!


4 drivers namely Vettel, Rosberg, Sutil and Hulkenburg will be racing at home this weekend. Two of them surely have a good chance of winning so the German fans are in for a treat! The Mercedes team will surely have a lot of support after this being their home race of some sorts!

Sunday's race will be run over 60 laps and for sure will be a treat to watch! Have a great weekend! 

2013 British Grand Prix Review- Rosberg wins a dramatic race at Silverstone!

Round 8 out of 19! Time for the British Grand Prix! Only one of two races to have been featured in every Formula 1 season! There sure is something magical about the race. The name Silverstone circuit speaks for itself! What a circuit with high speed corners! Lets take a look at how the racing weekend panned out!

Practice:
FP1 was almost washed out! With only half the grid setting times there was not much to talk about. The session was topped by Torro Rosso's Daniel Ricciardo who was looking to impress the RBR team for their 2nd seat next year after Webber's retirement!  FP2 started on a drying track! The drivers came out and tested the prototype tires along with the usual hard and mediums for the weekend! Lotus tested out the Double DRS system, which is said to give up to 10kmph advantage on the straights! The session was topped by Rosberg in his quick Mercedes! Massa put his Ferrari into the wall, on the inside of Stowe, for the third Grand Prix in succession!  FP3 on Saturday started with clear skies and the teams were getting ready for Qualifying! The two Mercedes cars finished on top followed by the two Bulls!

The FIA President along with the Marshals and drivers observed a minute's silence in honor of Mark Robinson, the marshal who lost his life after the Canadian Grand Prix!

Qualifying:

Q1 saw the usual suspects fall out! Apart from the two Marussias and Caterhams, Gutierrez and Bottas did not make the cut! Ferrari looked like they were having a tough weekend at this point! Q2 saw the two Mclarens drop out along with Massa's Ferrari! It was turning out to be a disastrous weekend for the Brazilian. Vergne, Maldonado and Hulkenburg dropped out! Q3 saw a really good fight for pole between the two Mercedes cars with Hamilton coming out on top! They locked out the front row! The bulls were right behind them! Alonso had a disappointing qualifying and wasn't happy at all! Di Resta, Ricciardo and Sutil impressed after qualifying in 5th, 6th and 7th respectively! Hamilton was elated to be on top in front of his home crowd!

After qualifying Di Resta's car was found to be underweight in the post qualifying checks! This demoted him to last place! A very disappointing result after a great qualifying!

Race:

German driver Nico Rosberg won the British Grand Prix this year which turned out to be one of the most dramatic races seen in the recent past! Rosberg was up there all through the races and capitalized on others failures!

At the start everything seemed fine for Hamilton, who headed the field for the first 8 laps, but then a rear-left tire failure resulted in the Briton being dropped to the tail end of the field! This was not all, two laps later Massa suffered a similar result when his rear left blew up into the entry of the Wellignton straight! A few laps later and again there was a similar rear-left tire failure, this time for Vergne! The debris were too much that the Safety car had to be brought out!

In the mean time Vettel, who made up one place at the start, was having a clear lead from Rosberg! The safety car brought the bunch back together! Adrian Sutil was up into 3rd at this point!

Vettel's teammate Webber had a bad start and dropped back to 15th after a incident with Grosjean at the start! He along with Hamilton started making up places!

After the safety car was back in, the race restarted and was going great with Rosberg closing in on Vettel but then on lap 42, Sebastian Vettel suffered a gearbox failure and stopped on the start/finish straight! A big blow to him and his team after a great race! This put Rosberg into the lead with Raikkonen and Sutil behind him!


Massa, who had made up the most number of places after the start, was disappointed that the tire failure put him back. He made a late race charge after the safety car went back and finished in 6th!

In the closing stages of the race, Webber was going all guns blazing and he passed everyone in his sight. He finished just 7 tenths behind Rosberg! He set the fastest lap of the race on the very last lap! A great race for the Australian considering his early mishap!

Alonso and Hamilton too had great final stints. Both of them were moving up the field from 8th and 9th! Alonso managed 3rd while Hamilton bagged 4th! A great race for Alonso after starting in 9th! Hamilton started in 1st and finished in 4th! He surely wont be happy with that, then again it could have been much  worse!

Raikkonen and Sutil who looked set for a podium suffered tire degradation and were over taken by the rest! They finished in 5th and 7th! Sutil's teammate and home hero Di Resta made up 12 places to finish in 9th! Another great performance from the young driver! Hulkenburg was the last of the points scoring drivers!

Late in the race Perez suffered his second rear left tire failure of the weekend and 4th victim of the day! He later retired due to extensive floor damage! His teammate Button failed to score any points! Their season seems to be getting worse!

Willams, who are celebrating their 600th GP this weekend, finished in 11th and 12th and are still yet to score points this season!

Kimi Raikkonen manged to set the new record for the most consecutive races in the points! He doesn't really care about the records! He needs a better car from Lotus or for sure he will be off to RBR to replace Webber!

After the race Rosberg was reprimanded for going to fast in a yellow flag zone!

A major talking point during and after the race was how so many tires could fail in a single event! This could have been one of the most dangerous days in recent racing history where we saw tires going out! The teams were unsure what caused this! Some suggested it has got to do something with the kerbs on turn 4 but again if it was the kerb, it should have resulted the in previous sessions too!

Many drivers called this dangerous and Race Director Charlie Whiting admitting that the race could have been red flagged on safety grounds!

The FIA have called for an emergency meeting to sort this out and make sure something like this doesn't happen again! Lets hope Pirelli find out what went wrong and fix it because this is just unacceptable! Pirelli claim this isn't because of the new construction of the tires but nothing can be ruled out at this point!

Rosberg got a great birthday present while Vettel will be looking to win his home race next weekend at the Nurburgring and celebrate his own birthday in style!

Have a great week!

Results:

Pos.	No.	Driver	Constructor	Laps	Time/Retired	Grid	Points
1	9	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	52	1:32:59.456	2	25
2	2	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	52	+0.765 secs	4	18
3	3	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari	52	+7.124 secs	9	15
4	10	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	52	+7.756 secs	1	12
5	7	Kimi Räikkönen	Lotus-Renault	52	+11.257 secs	8	10
6	4	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	52	+14.573 secs	11	8
7	15	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Mercedes	52	+16.335 secs	6	6
8	19	Daniel Ricciardo	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	52	+16.543 secs	5	4
9	14	Paul di Resta	Force India-Mercedes	52	+17.943 secs	21	2
10	11	Nico Hülkenberg	Sauber-Ferrari	52	+19.709 secs	14	1
11	16	Pastor Maldonado	Williams-Renault	52	+21.135 secs	15
12	17	Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Renault	52	+25.094 secs	16
13	5	Jenson Button	McLaren-Mercedes	52	+25.969 secs	10
14	12	Esteban Gutiérrez	Sauber-Ferrari	52	+26.285 secs	17
15	20	Charles Pic	Caterham-Renault	52	+31.613 secs	18
16	22	Jules Bianchi	Marussia-Cosworth	52	+36.097 secs	19
17	23	Max Chilton	Marussia-Cosworth	52	+67.660 secs	20
18	21	Giedo van der Garde	Caterham-Renault	52	+67.759 secs	22
19	8	Romain Grosjean	Lotus-Renault	51	Gearbox	7
20	6	Sergio Pérez	McLaren-Mercedes	46	Puncture	13
Ret	1	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull-Renault	41	Gearbox	3
Ret	18	Jean-Éric Vergne	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	35	Puncture	12

Webber announces Formula 1 exit!

Red Bull Racing driver Mark Webber has announced his exit from Formula 1 at the end of this season and switch to Porsche's sportscar programme in the World Endurance Championship and next year's 24 hours Le Mans race!

Webber who has competed in 205 races over a 12 year Formula 1 career has had most of his success in the Red Bull team winning 9 races and scoring 35 out of  his 36 podiums with the Milton Keynes based team! 

Webber says " It’s an honour for me to join Porsche at its return to the top category in Le Mans and in the sports car World Endurance Championship and be part of the team". 

"Porsche has written racing history as a manufacturer and stands for outstanding technology and performance at the highest level. I’m very much looking forward to this new challenge after my time in Formula One. Porsche will undoubtedly set itself very high goals. I can hardly wait to pilot one of the fastest sports cars in the world."

For a while now it has been speculated that Kimi Raikkonen will move from Lotus to Red Bull next year and now it looks like Red Bull will need a top driver like him to partner Vettel! 

The Porsche WEC LMP1 team will pair Neel Jani, a former Red Bull development driver, alongside the Australian Webber who is looking for new challenges!

It doesn't look like Webber will return to Formula 1 after his WEC stint  unlike his rivals Raikkonen and Schumacher who returned to the sport after a hiatus!

Good Luck Mate!

2013 British Grand Prix Preview

So after quite a long 3 week break, which involved the Tribunal's decision to ban Mercedes from the Young Driver's Test in July, the teams are ready for the 8th Grand Prix this season! This weekend we will see the 64th edition of the British Grand Prix on the famous Silverstone Circuit. This will be a home grand prix for many of the teams, some of whom are based only a few minutes from the circuit! Lets take a look at this famous Grand Prix!

Circuit:

This track has some of the best corners on the Grand Prix calender! The Maggotts and Becketts section of the track is really fast and shows who has the most traction at high speeds, Red Bull have mastered this over the years!  There will be two DRS Zones this year, one on the Hangar Straight and the other on the Wellington Straight. So if the weather is dry on Sunday, which will most likely be the case, those that have good straight line speed could ease past their rivals!


Race Preview:

The British Grand Prix has been won by a Ferrari or a Red Bull in the last four years and this year too its going to be a battle between the two of them for the win as they are the strongest team on the grid! Ferrari need to up their game if they want to take the title challenge to Red Bull! Lotus are going to bring major upgrades in order to give Raikkonen a chance to catch up before the leaders pull away in the championship!



Mercedes are coming into the race after the International Tribunal's decision to reprimand them and ban them from the young drivers test! So for sure the team will be looking forward to making use of the practice sessions and stay up there with the leaders and not fall back after a good start to the year! Home Hero Lewis Hamilton will have to fight really hard if he wants to win his Home Grand Prix! Right now it looks tough but Lewis will fight hard to finish on the podium to give the fans something to cheer about!

McLaren recently conducted a Straight Line test with upgrades that will help them boost the car's downforce. After their first non-points finish in 65 races, this team has to dig deep and really word hard to make sure this year's failures don't affect the team next year as well! A good points scoring race on their home circuit will really boost their confidence!

Force India is another team who has its base just down the road from the circuit so this will be a special race for them! They have been doing well all through the year but they haven't had good results at this track before! This weekend that could very well change and they can produce excellent results!





Williams are celebrating their 600th Grand Prix this weekend! For a team which has had such a glorious past, this year there is nothing to cheer about until now! After 7 races with no points, this weekend they can try their best and put some points on the board and celebrate their 600th GP in some fashion!






The rest of the teams too will bring upgrades in a hope to gain vital tenths against their rivals! Lets wait and watch if any of them make a major jump which could reshuffle the pack!

Sunday's race will be run over 52 laps and is expected to be dry whereas Friday and Saturday could be a wet day out on track! So its going to be an exciting Racing Weekend! Enjoy the Race!

2013 Canadian Grand Prix Review

The Formula 1 circus cross the Atlantic for their first visit to the America's this year! This time for Round 7 of the 2013 Formula 1 season! The teams and drivers got ready to blaze the Circuit Giles Villeneuve and avoid crashing into the famous "Wall of Champions"! Read on to find out how the weekend panned out!

Practice:
Friday Practice started off drivers going around the track on intermediate tires courtesy the rain that had made the track very wet and slippery! This meant that Pirelli's newer prototype tires dint get tried yet. Force India, who were celebrating their 100th GP start this weekend, were more than happy when Di Resta topped FP1 in the changing conditions! FP2 started off with a dry track so the drivers could try on the new tires. This gave a us clearer idea of how fast the teams were and who was yet to improve! Alonso topped the session and edged out Hamilton by just 0.012s! It looked like Ferrari and Mercedes were going to have a good weekend at this point! Free Practice 3 on Saturday was cut short to 30 minutes due to the delay in repairing the damage on the barriers at Turn 11 caused by a support race car! Mark Webber and Red Bull showed how good they can be and topped the session! They were looking for their first win at this track! The track was damp at this point with more rain expected for Qualifying!

Qualifying:

Just before Q1 started, it started raining! The drivers came out on Supersofts and came right back in to switch to Intermediates. With both drivers from the bottom two teams not making the cut, Di Resta  and Grojean  made a shock exit at the end of first part of qualifying! Rain was getting harder in Q2 and Massa got it all wrong sliding into wall at Turn 3! This brought out the Red Flag with less than 2 minutes to go! When it was time to restart the session, all drivers made their way out to the end of the pitlane in order to get a good time! Button misjudged this and couldn't cross the line before the Chequered Flag. Neither of the Sauber's or Mclaren's made the cut! Q3 was just about to start and the pitlane queue formed again! This time Kimi jumped Webber when the session went green. He was later penalized. Vettel set the pace followed by Hamilton. The surprise this time was William's Bottas who put his car in P3 before the rain came out! After this noone could really improve their times! Alonso qualified in 6th while Raikkonen managed only 9th! After Qualifying Raikkonen and Ricciardo were penalized two grid places for not exiting the pit lane in a proper way! They both eventually dropped just one place on the grid!

Race:
It was race day and the sun was out! Fans came out in full swing and everybody were ready to see if Vettel could hold of Hamilton and what surprises the others could spring!

As the lights went out Vettel managed to stay ahead of the pack and that's it! After that his Red Bull just kept pulling away with some amazing pace! Bottas who was the star of qualifying immediately dropped back and others made their move! Those who couldn't get past initially were stuck and we could see a long train of cars behind him!

Vettel had an amazing lead over the rest! Almost 18 seconds at one point of time! Nobody could  even get close to him! On lap 10 Vettel just kissed the Wall of Champions. On lap 52 Vettel pushed very hard, even though he had a comfortable lead, and went off at turn 1! On the last lap Vettel was going for the fastest lap but later backed off when his engineer Rocky said this " Monaco, 1988, Senna". In that race Senna lost focus and crashed! Vettel replied " Ok ok, I'm just kidding"! He really needs to listen a lot more to his team!
All in all Vettel lead the race from start to finish without making any costly mistakes and finally scored Red Bull's maiden victory in Canada!

Behind Vettel it was Hamilton who was holding off Webber and later Alonso for most of the race! In the final stint he had a good 10 second lead over his competitors and that's when Alonso started closing in on him! Alonso's final stint was brilliant! He had a good fight with Webber for P3 and then later challenged Hamilton for P2 which saw them touch a couple of times!

Webber was looking set for 3rd after he passed Rosberg early in the race . It went all wrong for him after his move to lap Caterham's Van Der Garde at the hairpin! The Caterham touched Webber's Red Bull and damaged his front wing! Webber was going faster after this but later decided to drop back and settle for 4th!




Rosberg started in 4th and suffered from tyre degradation. He was the only front runner to make 3 pit stops! He surely wouldn't have been satisfied with just 5th! Amazingly Lewis dint suffer from as tyre wear so Mercedes need to look into that!

Jean Eric Vergne started the race in 7th and amazingly finished in 6th! This is his best finish yet! The team will be really happy with his performance!

Paul Di Resta finished in 7th after starting from 17th! That's an amazing feat by the scot! He made just one stop on lap 57! Just 13 laps before the end. He drove superbly and had enough pace on those medium tires till the end of his first stint! He won many hearts and gave Force India a lot to be happy about! His teammate Sutil started out in 8th and after a spin in the beginning while trying to overtake Bottas he dropped back and later recovered for 10th!


Massa will be really happy with his performance. He made up 8 place after stopping twice. He needs to avoid making mistakes and stay up there if he wants to driver for Ferrari next year. A mediocre 8th for him!

Raikkonen started out in 10th and finished in 9th! He had a problem during one of his pit-stops and also had a problem with his brake pedal. In the end the only thing he can be happy about is equaling Schumacher's record of finishing in the points consecutively for 24 races! Not that Kimi cars about these records!

Perez and Button finished in 11th and 12th! This was Mclaren's first non point scoring finish in 65 races! That speaks for itself! They still have a lot to improve!

Grosjean who started in 22nd made his way up the grid and finished in 13th! It looked like he too was on a one stopper but he made a late race stop for fresh tires!




Van Der Garde and Hulkenburg had a  moment on track and later they both retired! Gutierrez collided with the barriers at turn 2 and retired with 4 laps to go!


This was Vettel's 29th Grand Prix win and his first at this circuit! A very dominant victory by the young German!

Results:

Pos.	No.	Driver	Constructor	Laps	Time/Retired	Grid	Points
1	1	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull-Renault	70	1:32:09.143	1	25
2	3	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari	70	+14.408	6	18
3	10	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	70	+15.942	2	15
4	2	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	70	+25.731	5	12
5	9	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	70	+1:09.725	4	10
6	18	Jean-Éric Vergne	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	69	+1 lap	7	8
7	14	Paul di Resta	Force India-Mercedes	69	+1 lap	17	6
8	4	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	69	+1 lap	16	4
9	7	Kimi Räikkönen	Lotus-Renault	69	+1 lap	10	2
10	15	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Mercedes	69	+1 lap	8	1
11	6	Sergio Pérez	McLaren-Mercedes	69	+1 lap	12
12	5	Jenson Button	McLaren-Mercedes	69	+1 lap	14
13	8	Romain Grosjean	Lotus-Renault	69	+1 lap	22
14	17	Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Renault	69	+1 lap	3
15	19	Daniel Ricciardo	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	68	+2 laps	11
16	16	Pastor Maldonado	Williams-Renault	68	+2 laps	13
17	22	Jules Bianchi	Marussia-Cosworth	68	+2 laps	19
18	20	Charles Pic	Caterham-Renault	67	+3 laps	18
19	23	Max Chilton	Marussia-Cosworth	67	+3 laps	20
20	12	Esteban Gutiérrez	Sauber-Ferrari	63	Accident	15
Ret	11	Nico Hülkenberg	Sauber-Ferrari	45	Collision damage	9
Ret	21	Giedo van der Garde	Caterham-Renault	43	Collision	21

After the race there was sad news that came out from the paddock! A marshal who was helping in the recovery of Gutierrez's Sauber had come under the crane that was lifting the car and later succumbed to the injuries. Condolences to his family and friends. Thank you for making tracks safer! RIP!



Next up will be the British Grand Prix in 3 week's time! Stay safe and keep reading and following F1!