F1 braced for season of change and challenge
LONDON: A redecorated sporting bandwagon, complete with a roaring if not yet rampant Ferrari and a movie series on Netf lix, embarks next weekend on an extended season of change and challenge when the Australian Grand Prix opens the 70th running of the Formula One world championship.
Two years on from Liberty Media’s takeover, and 25 since the death of Ayrton Senna, defending five- time champion Lewis Hamilton goes into F1’s first race in Melbourne expect ing to be outperformed by his greatest rival Sebastian Vettel.
It may not be his or the sport’s only concern.
The prospect of a messy ‘ no- deal Brexit’ could upset t ravel logistics for the seven teams based in Britain while new technical regulations and tyres, widespread team changes including a new boss at Ferrari, the arrival of three r o okie s and a bloated calendar of 21 races wi l l deliver a daunting test of durability and, maybe at times, dignity.
The season will not end until the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on December 1, the latest planned finish since 1963 when Jim Clark took the title for champions Lotus, winning seven of the 10 races run from Monaco in May to South Africa at Christmas.
In that year, led by John Surtees, Ferrari finished fourth, a placing that would be a huge disappointment to new chief Mattia Binotto and both Vettel and his new tyro team-mate Charles LeClerc.
The German driver’s Italian outfit impressed most in preseason testing in Barcelona, leaving Hamilton and Mercedes, winners of the last five drivers’ and construct ors’ tit les, gasping to keep pace, but refusing to feel intimidated. “We don’ t mind the challenge,”
said
We will fight. It just mean we have to work harder, but I am really proud of what our team has done already. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes’ British driver
Hamilton who claimed his fourth title in five years and fifth overall last season. “We will fight. It just mean we have to work harder, but I am really proud of what our team has done already. “I’m not worried or disappointed. I’m incredibly encouraged and enthused that we are working as hard as we are. We have a hill to climb, but we know how to do it. “We’ve got the best team around us. We have experience and it’ s no coincidence that we are the champions.” The only man to have beaten Hamilton in the last five years was his 2016 Mercedes team- mate Nico Rosberg.
He promptly retired, to be replaced by Valtteri Bottas, leaving Hamilton to reign supreme as the record-breaking global face of the sport. But Hamilton is not the only man to face a challenge.
Vettel, himself a four- time champion, has a new team-mate in the scarlet scuderia following the team’s recruitment of Leclerc from the Swiss team Sauber, this year renamed as Alfa Romeo Racing. Fast and smooth, the Monegasque prodigy, 21, will pose a sharper threat than his pred ecessor, the 2007 champion Kimi Raikkonen, now 39, as Vettel, in his fifth Ferrari season, seeks to begin emulating the feats of his compatriot Michael Schumacher who won his first title with the team in his fifth year. — AFP