Archive for February, 2011

How to get the best out of Nick Heidfeld

Amid much speculation as to who may replace the injured Robert Kubica at Renult/Lotus for at least part of the 2011 season, the driver often inexplicably known as “Quick Nick” threw his hat into the ring with a brisk performance during testing at Jerez over the weekend.

Heidfeld has always been a bit of an enigma to me: a tricky interviewee, on account of being rather shy, and on track a somewhat hot-and-cold performer in the Fisichella mould.

Given a sub-standard car Heidfeld, like Fisichella, could turn on the style. I was watching at the Esses during the truncated Sunday-morning qualifying session at Suzuka in 2004 (Saturday’s activities having been cancelled on account of an impending typhoon) and Heidfeld was remarkable in the Jordan. The car was pretty awful; Heidfeld seemed to be cajoling it into changing direction through sheer force of will alone. He was a second and a half quicker than Timo Glock, who was driving the other car.

I saw very little of this determination once he got his foot in the door at Sauber, where the general feeling was that he had a tremendous ability to work with the engineers to develop the car, but that this capacity was almost completely offset by his lack of a killer instinct while racing. He just seemed to be happy enough to be driving a quick car.

Should this factor in Renault’s decision-making process? Perhaps it should. At Sauber the driving arrangement worked because Mario Theissen hit on the perfect way to get the best out of Heidfeld: structure his salary according to results, so he was on a low flat fee but with a considerable points bonus. Heidfeld, therefore, delivered a succession of solid points-scoring finishes in strict accordance with the timetable Theissen had laid out for the team – that is, get in the points occasionally in the first year, get on the podium in the second, then start winning in the third.

At Sauber, though, the other seat was occupied by someone who genuinely did want to win races: Robert Kubica. Indeed, when Kubica replaced Jacques Villeneuve in 2006 Heidfeld immediately upped his game. This won’t happen at Lotus/Renault with Vitaly Petrov driving the other car…

Ferrari joins the Sierra club

When Ferrari announced that its new Formula 1 car was to be called the F150, many car-savvy folk commented on the fact that Ford has a long-lived US-market model of the same name, give or take a strategically placed hyphen. Today’s news that Ford is taking legal action against Ferrari – citing trademark infringement and claiming punitive damages under anti-cybersquatting legislation – was therefore almost inevitable.

This situation is not without precedent in F1 and the car industry as a whole. 20 years ago Porsche got uppity when Leyton House gave its new Ilmor-engined chassis the designation CG911.

Looking further back, Ford itself ended up at the wrong end of a lawsuit when it launched the Sierra in 1982. A kit car manufacturer called Dutton had been marketing an incredibly ugly soft-roader (ironically enough, based on Ford Escort mechanicals) called the Sierra for three years.

It would have been a classic David vs Goliath victory, save for the fact that neither side quite got what they wanted, although Dutton was awarded costs. Neither managed to prevent the other from using the name, on the basis – said the judge in the case – that kit cars occupied an entirely different automotive category to production cars. Perhaps there will be a similar outcome in the Ford vs Ferrari tangle?

Edit: Ferrari has acted quickly to defuse the issue and tweaked the nomenclature of its car. It also issued a statement which said:

On the subject of the name of the new Ferrari Formula 1 car, the Maranello company wishes to point out that it has sent a letter of reply to Ford, underlining the fact that the F150 designation (used as the abbreviated version of the complete name, which is Ferrari F150th Italia) never has, nor ever will be used as the name of a commercially available product – indeed there will definitely not be a production run of single-seaters.