Nabil Jeffri Makes F1 History With Lotus Racing
Nabil Jeffri
A 16 year-old has made motor sport history by becoming the youngest to drive a Formula One car in an official test.
Nabil Jeffri took part in a day of straight-line aero testing for Lotus Racing at the Imperial War Museum runway at Duxford.
For young Malaysian Jeffri, who does not turn 17 until October 24, it is the first step on the road to becoming an F1 driver.
Jeffri, who is a member of the AirAsia ASEAN (Association of South East Asia Nations) Driver Development programme, also took part in pitstop practice with the team.
Jeffri said: “I have had an incredible day, one of the best days of my life.
“I have to admit the first time I went out it was pretty scary.
“Everyone told me the acceleration would be unbelievable, and the braking would be so much greater than anything I’ve experienced, and it took a while to get used to that.
“But Heikki (Kovalainen) and (test driver) Fairuz (Fauzy) gave me some advice on how to settle into it, and after a while I was more comfortable, and was able to get through the day’s plan.
“It’s such an honour to have had this opportunity, and it’ll be a long time before the excitement wears off.
“But I’ll keep on working hard to one day join Heikki, Fairuz, Jarno (Trulli) and the rest of the F1 grid.
“With the support of people like (team owner) Tony (Fernandes) and Lotus Racing, I’ve a great chance of doing so.”
Fernandes feels a taster of the high life will result in Jeffri working twice as hard over the coming months and years to become an F1 driver.
“When I first offered Nabil the chance to drive our car he couldn’t tell if I was joking or not, but I was very serious about giving a young Malaysian the chance to step up to the big time,” said Fernandes.
“He’s repaid my faith in him and has performed incredibly well.
“That’s a source of real pride for me as he proves what I’ve always believed – keep dreaming, work hard to achieve what other people tell you is impossible, and your dreams will come true.
“I suspect Nabil will head back to Malaysia with his head spinning from everything that’s happened to him today.
“But now he can say he’s driven an F1 car, and that will set his sights at the very top for the rest of his life.”
Courtesy of The Telegraph
Sebastian Vettel’s Costly Mistakes
Sebastian Vettel of Germany
Starting from the fourth slot on the grid after mistakes in the qualifying session, he survived the slipping and sliding of the opening lap and two laps later forced his way inside Robert Kubica to snatch third place.
But a dozen laps of sitting behind Jenson Button, whose stout defence of his position was enabling Lewis Hamilton to build a cushion at the front, clearly frayed Vettel’s patience. An attempt to challenge the second-placed McLaren as they approached the Bus Stop chicane saw him losing control under braking before spearing into the flank of Button’s car.
With some frustration he looked for a run up the inside into the final chicane. Button fairly closed the door so Vettel violently flicked to the other side at 200mph.
He was further into the braking zone than he realised, and there was a little moisture on the track (although Button did insist afterwards that the track was “bone dry”). Add in the swerve, braking, and downshifting, and he slewed into the side of the McLaren, immediately damaging its radiators.
Luckily for Vettel, he had only damaged the front wing and he was very near the pit-lane entry. The stewards were not so impressed and rightly gave him a drive-through penalty.
It was a clumsy error, born of frustration and intemperance, and not unlike the one that caused him to crash into his team-mate, Mark Webber, while trying to force his way into the lead in Istanbul in May. This time the perpetrator was lucky to be able to limp in for a new front wing while the world champion’s race ended amid clouds of steam from a ruptured radiator.
The stop dropped Vettel to 13th, and he found himself even further back after serving a drive-through penalty for provoking the accident that severely prejudices Button’s chance of defending his title.
Impatient to work his way back through the field, the young German chopped so brusquely across Vitantonio Liuzzi that he punctured a rear tyre against his rival’s wing. Later he took a risk on fitting a set of full wet-weather tyres in anticipation of a predicted shower but wore them out on a mostly dry track and, with six laps to go, came in for a second set, which suited the worsening conditions well enough to allow him to finish an undistinguished 15th.
Vettel is now 31 points behind Hamilton in the drivers’ standings and 28 behind Webber, who failed to capitalise on starting from pole position but drove a canny race to secure second place.
Vettel’s Race Beginning
Having made his Formula One debut as BMW’s reserve driver in 2006, Vettel became the youngest driver in history to win a world championship grand prix two years later when, at the wheel of a Toro Rosso, he mastered difficult conditions on a rainy weekend at Monza. It was a victory that owed nothing to luck and everything to touch.
The following summer he won a memorable standing ovation from a Silverstone crowd yearning for a home win by Button or Hamilton, when he started from pole position and took a flag-to-flag victory as imperious as anything produced by the great Jim Clark in the Scot’s four wins (all from pole) on the same track. His speech at the subsequent press conference, which showed a graciousness to go with his quick sense of humour, earned him more admiration.
“This is what I was dreaming of when I saw the Grand prix here in the era of Mansell and so on,” he said then. “It’s kind of unreal now to think I am here and I have won this grand prix. I regret a little bit that I am not an Englishman as the fans are fantastic.” His listeners swooned, momentarily forgetting that there have also been glimpses of a darker side to his temperament.
It was Nigel Mansell who, as one of today’s race stewards, imposed the drive-through penalty, and Vettel’s summary was appropriately downbeat. “What happened happened,” he said, “and we can’t change it now. Obviously I’m not proud of it. I lost the car going over a bump as I was braking and unfortunately hit Jenson. I’m sorry for him.”
In terms of sheer ability Vettel ranks with Hamilton and Fernando Alonso as the best of the current generation but he is currently being outperformed by the more mature man in the other Red Bull. Until the 23-year-old learns to focus his gifts at all times the brilliant will continue to be mixed with the best forgotten and he will have to wait to become Formula One’s second German world champion.
Vettel is an unbelievably quick and talented driver. At 23 years of age, he has shown he can win races. And in some style too. I don’t think there are many in the paddock who believe he will never win a world title. He may still win it this year.
Experience Rivals
Where he is badly lacking, in comparison with the four other guys in the championship fight, is experience. Vettel has 50-odd grands prix to his name. Button is a world champion with 180-odd races under his belt; Alonso is a double world champion with more than 150 grands prix behind him; Mark Webber has a decade more experience than his young German Red Bullteam-mate.
The only title rival with a comparable race tally is Lewis Hamilton, but he arrived ready to go, having been groomed at McLaren since the age of 12.
He arrived from GP2 and did not have to move from team to team learning the ropes.
Sebastian moved from BMW-Sauber to Toro Rosso (where he became the sport’s youngest race winner) and is now in his second season at Red Bull, where he is in title contention for a second year running.
I want to make it clear I am not trying to excuse Sebastian’s recent high-profile errors. He reacted poorly in Turkey after his collision with Mark. He made a silly mistake in Hungary when he fell too far behind the safety car. And he was clearly at fault in Belgium last weekend when he shunted Button out of the race. He lost control.
His performance showed uncontrolled emotion that can undermine a great talent.
Courtesy of BBC Sport, The Guardian and The Telegraph
Sport Dies When Cheats Join The Game
Mohammad Asif of Pakistan shakes hands with England players after England defeated Pakistan during day four.
Corruption has a long tail in that part of world, only a fraction of which is contained within the sporting landscape.
Not even cricket, a sport cast as a bastion of rectitude, is able to resist the consequences of state-backed economic, educational and cultural impoverishment.
A year ago almost to the day the first hint of the Renault race-fixing controversy that ripped through Formula One emerged at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, a sacred racing precinct revered by Grand Prix men. Here, on the vast asphalt straights and rapid corners that cut through the forests of the Ardennes, the greats of the game have made their name.
It was not deeds of derring-do played out at 200mph that made our hair stand on end but a vile tale of organised sporting crime that had Nelson Piquet Jnr, the son of three-time world champion Nelson Snr, deliberately ramming his car into a wall to facilitate victory for his team-mate, Fernando Alonso, at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.
The development cut F1 to the quick, following as it did on the heels of the “lie-gate” scandal that snared our own Lewis Hamilton in Australia at the opening race of 2009, in which the McLaren driver changed his evidence during a routine steward’s inquiry; and the “Ferrari-gate” affair of 2007, which resulted in a record £50 million fine for McLaren after the team was found in possession of an 800-page dossier detailing the working of their rival’s car.
Though the motivation to cheat was not financial, as in the case of Pakistan’s cricketers, the shameful F1 trilogy revealed base practices that infringed the deeply ingrained notions of fair play central to our understanding of what sport is. It is not over yet.
The sport returns to the courts next week when Ferrari are called before the F1 beak to answer for the result at this year’s German Grand Prix, where race leader Felipe Massa was instructed to let his team-mate, Alonso, through for victory on the grounds that the latter was better placed to win the world drivers’ championship.
The cynical manipulation of that outcome demonstrated contempt for the spirit of competition as well as an infringement of the rules. Equally pernicious is the erosion of trust between participant and observer that results from episodes such as these. The moment fans no longer believe what their eyes are
telling them is the point at which sport perishes, losing its value and its meaning.
We have seen how cycling and athletics, following the widespread use of drugs to enhance performance, have had credibility eroded.
Ben Johnson lost more than his medal when his sprint to gold at the Seoul Olympics was found to be fraudulent. His character, like that of the cricketers presently under the moral microscope, is forever stained – in his case, over 9.79 seconds.
Only last week, Dr Wendy Chapman was forced to relive her part in the Bloodgate scandal that took down one of English rugby’s best-loved figures, Dean Richards. The exposing of the Harlequins coach, not only as a cheat but as a liar attempting to conceal his role in the feigning of a blood injury with a cover-up, was the more alarming given his past as a
police officer.
The miscreants roll out their excuses, pressure to succeed, blah, blah, blah, without a thought for the victims, losers as well as winners. How will the record for an eighth wicket set by England’s Jonathan Trott and Stuart Broad be regarded now? Both etched their names on to the Lord’s honours board, Broad with an innings of 169 that surpassed anything his Test-playing father posted in a distinguished career. And Chris was a batsman.
Broad and Trott are not the only victims. We are, since each tawdry episode on the field of play holds a mirror to society. The erosion of standards in sport does not happen in a vacuum, as the expenses scandal in British politics, revealed in this newspaper, demonstrated.
At least the perfidy of our politicians came as a shock. Pakistan’s cricketers have been this way before. The Qayyum inquiry into match-fixing 10 years ago put an official stamp on the problem of betting on results in Pakistan, confirming what many had suspected.
Depressingly, the failure of the authorities to follow it up with any real conviction permitted its recurrence last Friday at, of all places, Lord’s, the spiritual home of cricket.
Courtesy of The Telegraph
Inside Track With Lewis Hamilton
McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton gives a behind the scenes preview of the Belgian Grand Prix.
Fresh from his summer break, the British driver takes time out of his hectic training schedule to give his thoughts ahead of this weekend’s race; on why the track at Spa is such a popular one for drivers and fans; his highlights of the season so far; and how important it will be to perform well this weekend, with only seven races to go in what has been a very exciting season.
Get behind the wheel with Lewis as he gives the ‘Inside Track’ ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix.
Belgian GP A Challenge
Jenson Button believes “big b***s” will be required to tackle one of the most fearsome corners in F1 this weekend.
The legendary Eau Rouge represents a different challenge to the 24 drivers on the grid for Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix around Spa as they will have up to 150 kilos worth of fuel on board.
That makes the uphill left-right sweep an even more hair-raising proposition than normal, particularly if running side-by-side with a rival.
Due to the weight there is a serious risk of bottoming out, the car losing grip and with it increasing the chance of a collision should there be a duel through the corner where speeds can hit 180mph.
“With 140 to 150 kilos in the tank it’s going to be pretty tough, really tricky,” said Button.
“We need to make sure people know where the edge of the circuit is because you’re going to get a lot of people trying to go straight.
“They’ll be thinking it won’t get noticed because it’s a massive benefit, so we need to make that clear to (FIA race director) Charlie Whiting beforehand, which I will do.
“The first lap is pretty manic anyway, with a wide start but then it narrows up at turn one.
“Then you have Eau Rouge, side by side through there on 150 kilos hitting the floor, it’s going to be pretty crazy.
“It will be a buzz. You have to have big b***s, and I’ve brought them this weekend.
“It will be F1’s version of chicken going through there. It will be a case of how stupid can you be, rather than how brave.
“But at least there is a bit of run off on the exit and if you do have to go side by side you can take avoiding action.
“Hopefully I’ll be so far in the lead that it won’t really matter.”
Button goes into the race 14 points behind Championship leader Mark Webber and without a win since mid-April, a run of eight races, when he took the chequered flag in China.
There is hope, that despite being trounced by Red Bull in the last outing in Hungary almost four weeks ago, that McLaren can claw back some of the deficit so glaringly lost in Budapest.
The reason being that Spa is a relatively low downforce circuit, so aiding the McLarens in comparison to Red Bull and Ferrari.
The flipside is that if McLaren are not as strong as they hope here and in Italy, then the titles will start to slip away from them.
After recovering from the tonsilitis he suffered during the recent summer break, reigning World Champion Button added: “This is a good circuit for us, as well as Monza for the next race.
“I’m very happy these two races have come at this point because it gives us time to work on developing the car for the last five where you have to run a lot more downforce.
“I can’t see any reason why we can’t be competitive here because we don’t have the excuse that we don’t have enough downforce.
“So if we don’t score heavily at these next two races then it will hurt us a lot.
“It doesn’t end the Championship if we don’t score well here and we’re not leading, but they are important, and it will make the last five even more difficult.”
Courtesy of The Bleacher Report
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