Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i AUTOSPORT

@BenAndersonF1 By the time you read this, F1’s most thrilling title race in nearly a decade will have been settled; but at the time of printing, the inaugural Saudi Arabian Grand Prix has only just concluded, so everything is still to play for in Abu Dhabi between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. Events in Jeddah were certainly dramatic, and Saudia Arabia’s makeshift layout will probably receive plaudits for creating a compelling TV spectacle, but from a sporting perspective it was a difficult race of questionable driving standards on a highly dangerous circuit. Many would argue F1 needs more of those, because it has become too sanitised, but any grand prix where the championship leader is penalised multiple times for erratic and unsporting behaviour, two red flag periods are required to…

Formula 1 has a lot in common with a travelling circus – as you’d reasonably expect, given how much travel is involved and the fact that all the participants know each other well. There’s an interesting dynamic between the team people and the media people – it’s a complicated relationship because the media is trying to tease out information the teams want to keep quiet. Generally you only see the professional side on camera so I was amused to capture this little scene during FP2 in Saudi Arabia where Christian Horner was lounging in his seat, saw Sky Sports F1 reporter Ted Kravitz, and gave him the finger. Then they both had a giggle… Where Jeddah, Saudi Arabia When 8:21pm, Friday 3 December 2021 Details Canon EOS-1D X MkII 70-200mm…

You’ll no doubt have spotted one of the Jeddah Corniche’s landmarks during the inaugural Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend – the plush 100-floor Golden Tower, described to potential tenants as “an iconic yet subtle crystal sculpture”. We had access to an apartment on the 44th floor (the penthouse would have been asking a lot, even of a powerful telephoto lens) which gave a great spot for a different perspective on the action, as well as this tribute to the late Sir Frank Williams. F1 laid on a demonstration run of historic Williams cars on track and team personnel also gathered to honour one of F1’s greats. Where Jeddah, Saudi Arabia When 7:18pm, Sunday 5 December 2021 Details Canon EOS-1D X MkII 600mm lens, 1/640th @F4…

PICTURES F1 HAS A PLAN FOR NO REPEAT OF SPA SHAM As we look back at what has been an extremely exciting season involving the closest inter-team competition that we have seen for many years, several events will stand out. Most of these will be positive as even the circuits that normally struggle to produce good racing seemed to throw the mantle of dullness off this year. Unfortunately, the one negative that will be discussed for some time to come is the events that occurred at Spa. The circuit is renowned for wet weather, with prevailing westerly winds picking up moisture as they transit the sea and then meeting the hills of the Ardennes, causing them to drop that moisture as rain. We have raced at Spa for years and always…

PICTURES FRANK WILLIAMS AND I GREW UP TOGETHER. Not in the sense of boyhood friends, but as wannabe members of the Formula 1 establishment; Frank as a respected entrant; me as a journalist. During the time I was a salesman in the early 1970s, Frank was also using fast talk to inveigle money from whoever might help him go racing with a variety of cars that retired more often than they finished. But I’d seen a rare exception at first hand when a keen fan in 1975. My weekends were spent going to motor races, with grands prix high on the agenda if they were within reach. The Nürburgring was always a favourite, particularly since it was easy to blag your way into the paddock once the race had finished.…

Let’s go back to 2011 and your days in karting. If back then, before you met Ricardo Gelael, who eventually became your sponsor and ‘second father’, someone said you’d end up spending three years in F1, would you have believed it? When I was a kid my dream was to make it to F1. I was convinced that if you have a talent and work really hard, you can achieve that. But as I was growing up I started to be more realistic about it. It’s only 20 drivers, you need a lot of luck and a lot of money. So in 2011, no, I wouldn’t believe. I was 17 and still in karting but, luckily, I found Jagonya Ayam [an Indonesian fast food chain] and this man, Mr Gelael,…

THIS IS JOST CAPITO 68 GP RACING JANUARY 2022 young people in their twenties and thirties are trooping through reception, products of the talent pipeline that is the UK’s motorsport valley. Most will have been born after Williams won its first drivers’ and constructors’ world championships in 1980. Some might yet have a been a twinkle in their parents’ eyes when the team scored its last such success in 1997. Jost Capito, 63 years young, the team’s CEO and team principal, is sitting upstairs in a large open plan office, sharing a joke with a colleague. Relaxed and smiling, the German executive charged with turning around the fortunes of the iconic British team is less than a year into the role. He is clearly enjoying the opportunity to apply 40…

1 Hamilton draws level with ‘over the limit’ Verstappen Relations between Mercedes and Red Bull descended further into rancour as Lewis Hamilton won the Saudi Arabian GP with Max Verstappen a penalised second. Hamilton also scored a point for fastest lap, enabling him to pull alongside Verstappen in the championship standings. The stage was set when Max locked his leftfront wheel under braking into the last corner on his final Q3 run, smacking his right-rear into the barrier at the exit. The physical damage was minor – no need for a second new gearbox of the weekend – but the botched lap put him third on the grid, behind Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, when he had been easily quick enough for pole position. That enabled the Mercedes duo to control…

MARK GALLAGHER Mark managed to snare a face-to-face chat with Williams team principal and CEO Jost Capito for our long interview this month (p68) LUKE SMITH Guanyu Zhou’s promotion to a 2022 race seat with Alfa, to become China’s first F1 driver, is given the once over by Luke (p64) ROBERTO CHINCHERO Roberto investigates Alfa Romeo’s recent trials and tribulations of a supposed takeover, new recruits and unhappy drivers (p54) ALISTER THORPE Alister shot Williams' Jost Capito this month (p68), but his passion is for gardens, trees and plants. He’s also a fully qualified drone pilot… Thanks to Connor Bean, Harry Bull, Maurice Hamilton, James Mann, James Newbold, Sophie Ogg, Will Ponissi, Charlotte Sefton, Tom Wood…

This being a circuit built to host MotoGP, you’re miles away from the action and the run-off areas are vast. That posed quite the conundrum when it came to finding photo opportunities on F1’s first visit to Qatar. The pitlane entry was one of the few exceptions where you could get up close to the cars, so I headed off there with the intention of getting an almost Monaco-style shot, where you’re up close to the car as it comes in and you can capture a real feeling of movement. With this sort of shot you’re working with a wide-angle lens and a slow shutter speed to give motion blur, the trick is to get Seb’s helmet pin sharp. Where Losail, Qatar When 5:06pm, Saturday 20 November 2021 Details Canon…

PICTURES 01 FIA/RED BULL/MERCEDES: THE FIGHT GOES ON 02 MERCEDES MAY REVIEW KINGSPAN SPONSOR DEAL 03 PORSCHE/AUDI GO SHOPPING FOR TEAMS 01 As you read this issue of GP Racing the identity of the 2021 world champion will have been decided (unfortunately the most recent set of calendar changes pushed the final round outside our print schedule). But this title run-in, the most tense in years, has opened wounds which will take a long time to heal – indeed, the resentment between Red Bull and Mercedes, and their mutual angst with the governing body, is likely to fester over the closed season. Accusations of cheating have dogged the final rounds of the championship and in several instances the FIA appears to have fudged the issues rather than solving them decisively. Technical…

@_markgallagher F1 DEPENDS ON CLIMATE CHANGE RESOLUTION If you found the blanket coverage of November’s COP26 UN climate change conference in Glasgow hard to take, beware. My topic is grand prix motor racing’s role in helping to combat climate change caused by human activities. While mainstream media brought us deep insights on driving an electric car from London to Glasgow and asked politicians why they use aeroplanes, the world of motorsport was walking the walk. Formula E, Extreme E and other motorsports EVangelists led the way. Meanwhile Formula 1 heads towards a future in which its highly efficient hybrid engines will no longer be powered by fossil fuels. It may seem counter intuitive that senior figures in F1, the FIA and the teams care so much about climate change. This…

PICTURES Formula 1 established a foothold in China with the first grand prix in Shanghai in 2004. But the crowds took their time coming. What the series’ bosses have always craved is a local star to help properly tap into the latent riches of the world’s second-largest economy. In 2022, F1 will finally get its first full-time Chinese driver when Guanyu Zhou graduates from Formula 2, joining Alfa Romeo as Valtteri Bottas’s team-mate. The announcement of Zhou – colloquially known as ‘Joe’ – was heralded as being “fantastic news for F1” by head honcho Stefano Domenicali, who was delighted that “the millions of passionate Chinese fans now have a home hero to cheer all year long”. It’s certainly a breakthrough moment for F1, but Zhou’s signing was anything but a…

New venues like to explore ways of adding some distinctive razzle-dazzle to the grand prix spectacle, particularly those elements which are quite generic. In recent years we’ve had Mexico’s rotating podium with a DJ booth behind it, but the Saudi Arabian promoters really pushed the boat out for the podium ceremony with massive video screens, dry ice, and a spectacular laser light show. The build-up went on for quite a while and I noticed the drivers waiting for their cue to come on. Lewis briefly stepped out to have a look, and one of the spotlight arrays gave a really nice red key light effect on his profile, so I decided to seize the moment… Where Jeddah, Saudi Arabia When 11.54pm, Sunday 5 December 2021 Details Canon EOS R3 100-500mm…

@benedwardstv PICTURES CAN AMERICA’S FINEST STILL MAKE IT TO F1? Max had a key win in early November. He started from pole position on a classic track, led from start to finish and won by just under three tenths of a second. Later that night he learned that Verstappen had just won a crucial race in Mexico. Max Esterson became the fourth American racer to win the prestigious Walter Hayes Trophy at Silverstone that day. The 21st running of an intense junior single-seater contest came one week after the similarly competitive Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch, where Esterson snatched the runners-up spot having started 13th. It was a significant achievement at the 50th Festival, where former F1 drivers Roberto Moreno and Jan Magnussen were also competing. On the evening…

PICTURES The drawn-out wait for the decision everybody knew was coming, that the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix would not restart, was for many characterised by consumption of snacks and complaining on social media. But for F1’s medical car driver Alan van der Merwe it was an intensely busy time. He and safety car driver Bernd Maylander completed more laps than the F1 field, regularly taking to the track to evaluate whether conditions were such that racing could get under way. It’s all part of the job for the 2003 British F3 champion, who has been transporting F1’s medical rescue coordinator to incidents since 2009 – a gig which arose from an impromptu meet with then-F1 race director Charlie Whiting at Heathrow. “I get attention for the oddest things on social…

PICTURES WHILE THE RESULTS ON TRACK were thoroughly unexceptional, for Alfa Romeo Racing 2021 was a year destined to play a very important role in the future of the team. Behind the scenes of the Sauber Motorsport-operated organization in Hinwil, Switzerland, cogs have been turning with the express purpose of executing great change on the financial and technical front – and, of course, the driver line-up. As Kimi Räikkönen and Antonio Giovinazzi laboured in vain to secure points on track, around the boardroom table the top management laid their plans. But among the various news to come out of the team, paradoxically the most important event, one which attracted great interest, was a decision… not taken. And it was a huge one: to sell or not to sell. For many…

Oscar Piastri has been a victim of his own success. When the Australian joined the F1 support ladder in 2019, racing in F3, Alpine made the plan clear: two years in F3, two years in F2, and then we’ll see about a possible F1 seat. Piastri blew that apart. He won F3 at the first attempt, and quickly surged into F2 title contention this year. His success meant that Alpine decided regardless of whether he won the F2 title or not, he wouldn’t be returning next year. “It’s clearly turned out a lot better than expected,” Piastri says. Without bags of cash behind him, Piastri knew securing an F1 drive for 2022 was always a “very outside chance”. He will spend 2022 as Alpine’s reserve driver, completing an extensive test…

PICTURES THE BROWN OF THE FACSIMILE HELMET… wasn’t dark enough, but never mind: the pole position trophy won by Bottas in Mexico was something to savour, and Valtteri – the epitome of Finnish calm – had a crack in his voice as he accepted it from Jackie Stewart. The power of Juan Manuel Fangio endures, and always will. “The greatest racing driver who ever lived,” commented JYS, and many would concur. Once, at Interlagos, I saw him tap Senna on the shoulder, and Ayrton – momentarily annoyed – swung round, then saw who it was and, tears glistening, put his arms round the old man who was his earthly god. I first met Fangio at Monaco in 1971, on the morning after the grand prix. Outside Rampoldi’s, a lovely old…

@CoddersF1 facebook.com/gpracingonline PICTURES SIR FRANK: F1’S LAST TRUE ENTREPRENEUR The passing of Sir Frank Williams definitively brings down the curtain on a particular era of Formula 1: a time when teams were run not by salaried employees of large corporations but by gritty, tough, resourceful entrepreneurs whose names were above the factory door. An era, indeed, when the over-riding priority was to get to the next race, not to appease shareholders with sales projections and suchlike. We live in a singularly polarised age, one which deals in absolutes. Readers accustomed to categorising racing folk into heroes and villains may therefore baulk at the tales of sharp practice recounted by Maurice Hamilton in his excellent tribute to Frank (p34). Surely a racing hero, a veritable secular saint, wouldn’t stoop so low…