Editorial

Upwardly Mobile?

It could well be that when the majority of our competitors review their 2009 season that they regard the Donington Park round as a high point. There are benefits in being the 'blue riband' event at CSCC meetings, but in the motor sport pecking order being part of a televised F3 meeting, at a track about to host the MotoGP, and on next year's F1 calendar, carries a certain cache.

One can only wonder about the machinations that have lead the big businesses that run F1 and MotoGP to exchange tracks for 2010. Many share the view that each discipline is moving to a less suitable venue, and that the modifications being made to Donington Park will probably make it an inferior circuit. Most consider the club circuit at Donington superior to the GP circuit, the Goddards Loop having little to recommend it to those who don't enjoy sequential hairpins. In my experience having the longer circuit considered inferior is unique. Many consider that more character will be lost with the introduction of the new Micky Mouse section, introduced to satisfy the requirements of F1. It also seems quite perverse to transfer from a circuit with upgraded access to one surrounded by country lanes, apart from the main access road which is shared with an airport.

It is many years since the Monoposto championship shared a meeting with a grid of F3 cars. One could even ponder which of the cars now racing with our club would have featured on this past F3 grid, I am told that it was well before the Dallara era. For Monoposto, sharing a meeting with the professional teams is a mixed blessing. One immediately looses any access to the pits and prime paddock locations, these naturally being earmarked for the use of the professional teams with their wall to wall pantechnicons and impressive clubhouses. I am not sure that clubhouse is an appropriate term for a temporary structure, even if has the appearance of being designed by Bauhaus architects, but I do wish that I had taken some photographs to illustrate the luxury that the professionals are used to! Then there are those who look at the way that the professional cars perform and compare the performance to that of superficially similar Monoposto cars.

We must all admire the way that the professional young gentlemen, and occasionally the young ladies, conduct their cars, round the circuit. A lap time of 1:10.7s for a wingless FF Duratec 1600 is most impressive (the range was from 1:10.7 to 1:13.5, 2.8s) . But this speed is bought at a price, by our standards a very high price.

It is probably more true in motorsport than in other sports that money equates to speed. The days of the top line gifted amateur, are long gone, if they ever existed, and this applies to any sport with a decent sized following. The first advantage a professional has is time, time to spend directly on the activity, and time spent on investigating aspects that could improve that activity. One suspects that the majority of our competitors would benefit from spending more time on track. My advice to any young driver would be to spend as much time in the car as possible. Unfortunately, test sessions are of equivalent cost to race meetings, and wear out the car and consume consumables, a reasonable test programme with a reliable car will easily double the cost of a season. Misfortune during a test session can ruin your weekend, ask David Parkinson. However, a driver needs to be completely at home in the car if he or she is to exploit it to the full. Similarly one needs complete familiarity with the track both drive it effectively and exploit it. For most of us this takes time.

And then there is the machinery and its condition. Monoposto drivers can only run new machinery if they run in Mono1000 or Mono1400, in any other class the cars must be older than any of the cars running in F3 or FF1600 Duratec races at Donington. But even at this level many of the cars were not 2009 models, an observation, that may be a reflection on the current financial situation, or may be a comment on race car evolution. The majority of the F3 Dallaras were 2008 models, there were only three 2009 Dallaras and one 2009 Mygale racing, and they were all well down the grid (all the National Class used 2007 chassis). The situation in the FF1600 race was similar. The evolution of F3 and FF cars may have slowed, but one must expect a new or near new car to be a faster prospect than a ten or twenty year old model.

No names no pack drill, but it surprises me how long some of our cars continue to race when they have a chronic problem, the sort of problem that a professional team would cure rapidly because they have the time, the manpower, and the spares to throw at the its solution. New engines, tyres, and brakes all offer the opportunity to produce incremental but significant improvements in lap times. There can hardly be a better illustration of the gap between the professional and the amateur than the mountain of discarded FF slick tyres outside the Avon truck, scrap to the FF1600 Duratecs and Avon. By 5pm the mountain had disappeared via the Monoposto membership!

The true amateur needs to look beyond maximising the speed extracted from a particular specification, to speed per pound spent, this is where our cars excel. Anyone tempted to debate the difference in performance between the superficially similar F3 car cars and a Mono2000 car needs to consider the effect of 10% less power, and an increase to 40mm ride height etc. will produce in lap times, and when they have done that, contemplate that the Monoposto car's annual budget is probably a hundredth or some smaller fraction of the budget of the F3 car.

Changing topic, any driver who has ever made a catastrophic tyre choice was able to draw comfort from events that occurred during the MotoGP at Donington a week after our visit. For those of you who don't follow MotoGP, and in my opinion you should, and need a good excuse not to, for example a weak heart; the works Ducati rider Casey Stoner is in, or more correctly was in contention for the title. With it spitting with rain, and with all their competitors on soft slicks, the Ducati riders chose wets, and stuck resolutely with their choice as they went rapidly from the front to the back of the field. Eventually they finished lapped, in last place and next to last place. The commentators, and many others, were incredulous at the inappropriate initial choice, and the failure to address the problem throughout the race.

Following the serious accident to Felipe Massa and the fatal accident of Henry Surtees, safety is once again at the forefront of thinking in motor racing. However, I am at something of a loss to know how a driver of a formula car (or a motorcycle rider) can be protected from a projectile that comes straight at their helmet. In WW1 the soldiers had a phrase about a bullet or shell that 'Had their name on it', and the errant Brawn spring certainly had Massa's name on it, it speaks volumes for the quality of his safety equipment, and the medical services that he survived. Unfortunately, the wheel that hit Henry Surtees was larger. I was made aware of the type of problem when I used to ride a motorbike on the road. One day a large clod of earth fell from an oncoming lorry. I ducked and the clod glanced off my helmet without doing much damage to anything but my peace of mind. During a race, drivers are used to being bombarded by lumps of rubber, gravel and insects when on track, the small mass of these objects usually means that they do little damage. The only large object that I have experienced was a large pheasant flying at head height, and at right angles to my direction of travel. Our paths crossed at Cadwell and collision was avoided by approximately one metre, neither bird or driver having time to react. The pheasant did not have my number on it, and I did not have its number. While every effort should, and will be made to prevent race cars shedding parts there are some risks inherent when driving an open cockpit racing car or riding a motorcycle. Unfortunately, chance has served up two serious incidents within a week. As well as being unpredictable, sometimes the laws of chance are cruel.

Patrick Huston
5/08/09

Pictures: FOTA.co.uk, Norwich Photo, Ducatti, A-Z Formula Racing Cars, FelipeMassa.com

ps Get well soon, Felipe, from Startline.

Crowds pack the multi-lane entry Donington infrastructure, queuing in the hope of seeing Mono 1600's in action. (Irony)

Daniel Ricciardo's F309 with numerous 2008-F1-style aero bits

Daniel Mackenzie's National class car

By comparison, Neil Harrison's F398 looks clean and straightforward

Casey Stoner at Donington - we leave it to bikers to decide whether this is tail sliding or opposite lock

The 1967, wooden chassis'd Frank Costin-designed Protos had a semi-enclosing cockpit, reminiscent of some current safety ideas