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April 7, 2017

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Will the F1 changes deliver much needed boost to Chinese motorsports?

IN its 14th edition now, the Chinese Grand Prix has now become a regular fixture on the international calendar. For this season, Formula One has packed a lot of novelty, both on and off the track, which should spice up the show for local motorsports fans.

Movement behind the scenes

Over the winter, the ownership of Formula One has changed with Liberty Group from the United States assuming control of the sport. This change in shareholding structure has led to a reshuffle in the senior management with Bernie Ecclestone stepping down as CEO and replaced by Liberty Group’s Chase Carey. Additionally, Ross Brawn, of Ferrari, Brawn GP and Mercedes fame, has been drafted as managing director of motorsports. His role will include mapping the technical and sporting road of the sport going forward in a bid to ensure the teams’ short-sighted interests do not hold back the long-term well-being of Formula One, which has been an issue in the past.

The new governance of F1 is widely expected to open up the sport to more fans and make it more accessible. Liberty Group certainly can draw on a wealth of experience from the US sports industry to make F1 more popular again. They are hoping that by relaxing access and bringing the cars and drivers closer to the fans, effectively making F1 less premium, they can appeal to a wider audience. Social media and TV broadcasts will also be a key point in Liberty’s strategy in F1. It is still too early to say if these measures will be successful and with a host of long-term contracts in place, change will be slow, but a fresh wind is certainly breezing and that is positive. The challenge will be to ensure the changes don’t alienate the core fans on F1.

Regulation changes

Changes will not just be limited to the backstage with one of the biggest technical regulations overhaul in years coming in force in 2017. The new rules were designed to address concerns from the public and the drivers by making the car bigger, more impressive and much faster. Indeed, the new-for-2017 cars feature a massive gain in aerodynamic performance and much wider tires from sole supplier Pirelli, producing a much meaner-looking machines that awe drivers and onlookers alike. Expect lap times to tumble by as much as 4 to 5 seconds at some venues as a result.

Another change for this year is coming from the Pirelli tire’s consistency. Indeed, F1 bosses have asked Pirelli to create a much more durable rubber to ensure drivers can push to the limit throughout the race instead of looking after the tires as was the case in the past seasons. This should certainly please the drivers and make the races physical in the extreme for the drivers: They will have to push throughout the race at a much higher performance than in the past, generating punishing forces on the body. To cope with this aspect, all drivers have had to up their training regimen over the winter.

Certainly the new regulations will weed out those drivers who have not prepared thoroughly enough as displayed by Pascal Wehrlein’s withdrawal from their Australian Grand Prix due to fitness concerns after the German had to skip some winter training to recover from a back injury.

Teams’ prospects

With the new regulations, the cards have been reshuffled to some extent and the situation offers an opportunity for upsets amongst the teams. While it is still very early days, an initial hierarchy has started to emerge from private testing and the season-opening race in Australia.

First of all, Mercedes Grand Prix still appears to be at the front of the pack, as evidenced by Lewis Hamilton’s pole position in Melbourne. However, Ferrari has closed the gap and seems to be able to bring the fight to the Silver Arrows, particularly on race day. Vettel’s victory for the Scuderia at Melbourne comes off the back of impressive pre-season testing and is setting the stage up for a two-team battle at the front. This will thrill fans who feared another Mercedes affair for the World Championship fight. While we are on the topic of Mercedes, the team had to go through some unexpected challenges through the winter following newly crowned world champion Nico Rosberg’s shock retirement. The team had to scramble to hire an appropriate replacement to Rosberg and ultimately decided in favor of Valtteri Bottas. The Finn coming from Williams is highly rated, but will take time to adapt to his new team, while at the same time being in the spotlight and under pressure to perform, which is never an easy situation to be in. Bottas has very big shoes to fill and will need to prove his team and onlookers alike that he deserves his seat. In the meantime, the lack of continuity will leave Mercedes more vulnerable to Ferrari until Bottas is fully up to speed.

A little in arrears is Red Bull with its new Renault powered RB13. Despite starting the season a little behind Mercedes and Ferrari, the Milton Keynes-based team should not be discounted and is always a threat. With the development race this year expected to be faster than ever, Red Bull still has plenty of opportunity to feature in the title fight.

Behind the top three teams is the midfield with Williams, Toro Rosso, Haas, Renault and Force India locked in a very tight fight for “Best of the rest” title. If early indications are anything to go by, there is little to pick between these teams and driver performances will have a dominant influence on the outcome.

On the back foot we find McLaren Honda and Sauber. McLaren Honda has endured a disastrous pre-season testing at Barcelona, suffering from Honda reliability problems and poor performance. This is even more disappointing following high hopes in the winter coming in the form of a new Honda engine design that was expecting to yield performance gains over their 2016, only to fall way short of those targets. The Japanese will be scrambling to turn around their fortunes as the relationship with McLaren is already strained in the extreme.

Sauber, meanwhile, comes off a very difficult 2016 season that saw the team’s ownership change, bringing in vital capital to ensure a healthy development. The newfound stability will hopefully soon allow Sauber to mix it with the rest of the midfield.

Newcomers

In 2017, two rookies are making their F1 debuts with Lance Stroll filling Bottas’ shoes at Williams and Stoffel Vandoorne replacing Jenson Button at McLaren-Honda. Stroll is the reigning European Formula 3 Champion and has long been groomed by Williams to step up to a race seat after undertaking extensive testing on the simulator as well as track testing last year. The young Canadian, son of a billionaire, has been under fire following multiple off track excursions in pre-season testing that have cost Williams and himself valuable track time. He will have to prove to his critics that his talent, and not his financial backing, is what got him into Formula 1.

Stoffel Vandoorne is not exactly a rookie in Formula 1 after replacing the injured Fernando Alonso at McLaren-Honda last year in Bahrain. On that occasion, the Belgian produced a very solid performance scoring points with a 10th place finish. Placed by Honda in the highly competitive Super Formula Championship in Japan last year, Vandoorne will be looking to do the best he can in his first full season as a F1 driver but can expect a difficult season given the challenges his team is going through.

Another new face to keep an eye on will be Frenchman Esteban Ocon who transferred to Force India after a partial season with Manor F1 last year.

China perspective

Only time will tell if, under its new leadership, Formula 1 can revert the decline in public interest it suffered in the last few years but it is encouraging to see fresh ideas being brought to bear. Formula 1 is aware that it needs to stay technologically relevant in this day and age while retaining its core values that make it popular to so many people around the world. The sport is undergoing a transformation and hopefully it can bring it closer to the fans because the technical prowesses of the engineers, as well as the feats of the drivers behind the wheel of those incredibly fast machines, are a sight to behold.

In China, much is happening in the motorsports arena with a noticeable interest in GT racing in particular. While single-make championships such as the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, Blancpain Lamborghini Trofeo or the Audi R8 LMS Cup remain popular options, 2016 has witnessed the launch of the China GT Championship. China GT is a multi-class (GT3, GT4, Cup cars) championship featuring hour-long races with two drivers per car. It allows amateur drivers to team up with professional drivers in their quest for victory, thereby creating an environment for newcomers to learn faster. This new championship is going from strengths to strengths and is set to announce a record grid for 2017.

But Chinese motorsports is also going strong on the international stage. KCMG, based in Hong Kong, became the first Chinese team to secure victory in the famous Le Mans 24 Hours in 2015 and this year’s World Endurance Championship will see two Chinese-backed (4 out of 10 cars!) teams in the LMP2 class with CEFC Manor Racing and DC Racing. DC Racing will enjoy continued support from Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan who is a co-owner in the team.

Last but not least, the search continues for the first Chinese F1 superstar, with promising young talents having started to appear in the last few years. A prime example is 16-year-old Ye Yifei, who was Chinese karting champion in 2011 and 2012 before heading overseas to further his career, notching several eye-catching results in international karting from 2013-2014. After stepping up to single seaters, the Xi’an native immediately impressed with wins in his first year of Italian and French F4 Championship before dominating the French F4 season on his way to the title in 2016. With a lot of hard work, a good amount of support and some luck, we may yet have the chance to finally see a Chinese driver competing for victory in his national F1 Grand Prix in the future.




 

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