Motorsport Musings Ramblings of a racing enthusiast…

Nostradamus, I ain’t

It’s interesting to see just how many people appear to have an interest in motor racing these days. This year’s F1 season, with the feel good rags to riches story of Brawn GP, seems to have captured a much wider audience than ever before. That’s been my perception at least, as just about everybody I know has at some point during the course of this year asked me a thing or two about either a forthcoming race or continuing to pose the question: could Jenson Button win the championship?

But were these people right to come to me, their font of all F1 knowledge, for my opinion on how I envisaged things would pan out this year?

Well in a timely reminder, my chums over at Sidepodcast have delved into their archives and pulled out the various Nostradamus-like predictions its members made about the upcoming year. So without further ado, let's see how I fared.

Who’ll win in Australia?
Felipe Massa

Wrong. From the first practice session it looked difficult for Ferrari to fight for the win in Australia. Massa started sixth (thanks to the exclusion of the Toyotas) and ran the race mired in the midfield before retiring on lap 46 with a broken nose (the car of course).

Will Hamilton be able to retain his title?
Nope.

Correct. I had a suspicion that with McLaren throwing most of their resources behind Lewis’ assault on the championship until the final race of the season in 2008, things would not go so well for the Woking-based team. Sure enough, this year’s MP4-24 was more Driving Miss Daisy than Days of Thunder. Yet, credit where credit’s due, Hamilton did push the car to the limit and extracted the most he could from it each weekend.

Will the driver and constructor champions be from the same team?
Nope.

Wrong. As we all know, Brawn GP and Jenson Button clinched both titles this year, even if the latter of that equation was a little bit off-form in the second half-season. Next...

Will any contracts be torn up and ripped apart before the end of the year?
I believe there will be very little in the way of drivers coming-and-going in 2009 and will remain the same from Australia through to Abu Dhabi.

Wrong. Bye bye Sebastien Bourdais and Nelson Piquet. If there were any two drivers who looked least likely to see out the season in their respective teams, it would have been these two. Bourdais trounced by his rookie team-mate and Piquet, being, well, just Piquet really.

Will KERS make the impact it’s desired to?
No. Racing will still be very close and overtaking won't be vastly improved.

Correct. This year’s white elephant award must go to KERS. Those that jumped on the bandwagon early, then abandoned it (rather ironically in the case of BMW Sauber who prevented a voluntary KERS moratorium) and the only ones to reap some benefit from it were McLaren.

After all the regulation changes and the sleeker chassis designs, the gaps during qualifying were miniscule and the racing still lacking in the overtaking department as cars continued to struggle to follow one another in the dirty air generated.

How will Brundle and Legard get along in the commentary box?

Initially they won't gel, but as the season progresses they'll form a good pairing which that will be easy on the ears.

50/50. Both Jonathan Legard and Martin Brundle didn’t ‘gel’ at the start of the season and nor did they come the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi. Unfortunately, I did have to join the legions of folk out there whose eardrums could not take the punishment of Legard’s limited vocabulary worn out phrases any more.

Problem is, Captain Obvious’ services look set to be retained by the BBC next year. So, in an effort to make the droning more bearable, why not dabble in a spot of ‘Legard Bingo’ to brighten up your afternoon?

Simply click on the following cards and print out for hours of fun.

(And back to the main purpose of this article before I went off on a tangent...)

My other predictions:

Vettel will win Red Bull's first race within the first-half of the season.

Correct. Only three races into the year and the German wunderkind won Red Bull’s first race in a impressive display at the rain-soaked Chinese Grand Prix.

Kubica will finish within the top two in the World Drivers' Championship.

Wrong. In hindsight, BMW’s decision to switch focus from the 2008 car to the ’09 model, while Kubica still had a chance at the title, now looks disastrous.

We did see some glimmers of excellence by the Pole, but unfortunately the hopeless bit of kit he had to drive around for most of the year saw him finish a lowly 14th in the drivers’ championship with just 17 points to his name.

Honda will continue in F1, under a different guise, but will languish towards the bottom with Force India scoring more points than them.

Wrong (rather spectacularly). In all fairness though, who else back in December 2008 could have confidently said that a team who had for the past three or four years failed to deliver, would be able to turn things around in such a impressive fashion? Not me clearly.

Toyota will announce they will be leaving F1 at the end of the season. Also marking the end of Jarno’s career.

Correct-ish. The joyless, charisma-free, corporate publicity stunt, who had no feeling or understand of the sport, did decide to call it a day several weeks ago. Was inevitable really, given the absurd amounts of money they ploughed into their F1 project which returned very little in the way of success.

And what’s left for Jarno Trulli? The wine making, one-lap extraordinaire has been spotted stateside taking an invested interest in NASCAR recently, though there are rumours he could play a part within the new Lotus F1 team as well. Not even he knows what he’s doing next year yet.

So should my peers continue to harass me for my forecasting abilities? Only if they want to be guaranteed of success 50% of the time it seems. Appears that I’m probably more Russell Grant than Nostradamus - now there’s a thought.