Brains & Brawn makes a heady F1 combo!

NEW DELHI: It is almost five months to the day that the snarl and bark of the 2.4-litre V8 engines powering today's F1 cars went silent but normal service would be resumed from today when the first Grand Prix of the season gets underway in Melbourne, Australia at around 10.30 a.m. I.S.T.
For the enthusiasts this staying away from the action has been dire and to a great extent Saturday's live qualifying treat has whipped up both the latent passion as well as heightened expectations.Rule changes to promise more overtaking and closer racing while also trying to slow things down have turned the technical side of F1 on its literal head. The cars appear different with large ungainly front wings and tiny rear units, an almost clean mid-riff with no engine louvres which characterized the racy sport and of course the most important - a return to full slick tyres has all of us rabid F1 aficionados drooling at the prospect.
And presto, the rule changes seem to have humbled the established set while making the minnows charge to the front. It is ironic the way F1 can make fact look even stranger than fiction especially when you consider the McLaren of World Champion Lewis Hamilton and the hastily put together-from-the-ashes Brawn Grand Prix team. Let's take the latter first and no one could have given this team a hope in hell of even turning a wheel with pace to make it beyond Q1 in qualifying just a month ago. In fact the engineered buy-out of what used to be Honda's F1 team took ages and while Mercedes-Benz V8 engines were immediately penciled in, the ability of the renamed team to have two cars out on the circuits with a minimum of testing clearly did not make them favourites for Melbourne. In fact McLaren were riding high but then all of a sudden in the final official F1 tests before the teams packed off to Oz, the brainy Ross Brawn with the two capable but highly suspect (in the eyes of many) drivers in Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello certainly gave notice of their pace and potential.
In what must be the most stunning debut for a new car and team since Jody Scheckter and the Wolf-Ford in the 1970s, the manner in which Button and Barrichello humbled every car and driver combination in qualifying today augurs well for the sport. Also for the new rules which right now might be giving everyone the indication that F1 does indeed have an innate ability to shot itself in its foot (the present diffuser row threatens but it is thankfully an interpretation issue rather than the blatant stretching of rules we have seen from so many in the past) but I don't why but I do have a gut feeling that 2009 could be different. In the sense that it is not just two teams and four drivers fighting for the win at every GP but six to seven teams and 12 to 14 drivers in contention, this has been a heady concoction which F1 had done without for way so long.
The grandee teams like Ferrari and McLaren on the strength of their single qualifying performance may not have covered themselves in glory with the latter just making it into Q2 while the two Ferraris are on rows 4 and 5, not the normal starting spots for the scarlet prancing horses. However, one shouldn't miss out the fact that among the top 10 qualifiers, only Massa and Raikkonen are using the revolutionary KERS set-up and maybe we could see some fireworks at the start. Also it is nice to see some of the top teams try to be innovative, sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't as the Pansonic Toyota team found after qualifying - the FIA technical stewards found their front wings to be flexing rather more than the standard specified and both Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock were excluded from the qualifying results and would start from the back of the grid.
So there you have it and the first Grand Prix of the year hasn't even got underway! For sure the new rules have injected some early new appeal back into the fastest sport in the world but on one count the new rules have already been deemed a failure - thankfully! Let me explain. One of the objectives was of course to cut speeds and therefore lap times, the Brawn BGP 001s of Button and Barrichello thundered past the ultimate lap record set by Michael Schumacher in 2004 with ease. I said this is a thankful failure because it highlights the technological progress made by the wizards which inhabit F1. With smaller engines, all new aerodynamics to slow things down and of course super sticky rubber, you can see where this is taking us all to.
I can't wait for the lights to go green tomorrow and the F1 season to make us all breathe strong and fresh again.