Article: 2013 Driver Line-ups, News & Rumours | Formula one

Like DH said there are two tiers. Liked talented drivers, and unliked paydrivers.
Grosjean, Pastor etc.

 

Looks like Razia is definitely driving at Marussia now.

 

I don't think it's as clear cut as that.

Vettel, Webber, Alonso, Massa, Button, Hamilton, Rosberg, Di Resta, Raikkonen, Hulk, Ricciardo, Vergne, Bottas are all there on talent.
Perez, Grosjean, Maldonaldo, Pic are all reasonably talented, but come with significant sponsorship.
Chilton, Razia, van der Garde are all pure pay drivers.

Guttierrez I'm not sure about, having not seen him. That still means that over 50% of the drivers deserve to be there, which is good but not great. This might be worthy of another thread, but if you could pick 22 drivers to make up the grid, purely on talent, who would you pick?

 

Couldn't agree more. I realise that these teams may need cash badly and now but it seems very short-termist to me: how are they going to push ahead, and therefore get a bigger slice of the F1 pie, if they don't employ talent?

 

That's a very good idea, my guess is that almost all of the front half of the grid would still be there and then most of the bottom 4/5 teams would have alternative line ups, judging by most people's thoughts on here.

 

Yes, last year we had Kovalainen-Petrov and Glock-Pic. Those very decent driver line ups that gave me some hope for their future. Now you look at Pic-VDG and Razia-Chilton and its just horrible.

Obviously as a Senna fan i wanted him in one of the seats, but i could have accepted the likes of Vitaly, what we have actually got sickens me a bit.

Thee sooner they both join HRT in racing hell the better.

 

It seems incredibly stupid to go having line-ups entirely of inexperienced pay-drivers this year too. Each year, Marussia and Caterham have closed the gap to their nearest rivals, and with very stable regulations, you'd expect them to close the gap still further, especially when Marussia have added KERS. When your getting close to the other teams, the driver could make all the difference. To take the backwards step of employing drivers of dubious quality is very odd.

Having said that, I actually quite rate Pic, and his performances against Glock last season were quite impressive, so Caterham may still have at least 1 driver of the same quality as the departing Glock and Kovalainen, we'll see. Petrov must have really lost backers though, I'd have thought a Russian in a Russian car, with a Russian GP next year, would be highly appealing to Russian sponsors. He's also not too bad a driver.

 

I can't believe Caterham still got rid of Petrov despite his 10 million dollars and the fact he saved them from just missing out on 10th place last season.

 

I'd have been very happy to see Senna and Petrov in those seats, likewise Alguersuari. I felt Petrov deserved better treatment from Caterham after clinching them 10th place. They must be banking on Pic, who looks impressive and who I like too, but he still lacks experience.

 

Pic looks like a decent driver, faired reasonably well against Glock, but still IMO a step down on the other 3 back-markers who have lost their seats, certainly not ready to lead a team. He does at least deserve his slot on the grid, but nothing less than thrashing VDG will do.

 

Anyone know how much money van der Garde brings? Or either of the other pay boys.

And another thing: are they going to cause crashes or other safety issues?

 

Word from Force India on Bianchi

Force India has admitted that it had planned to run Jules Bianchi as its reserve driver for two years before considering him for a Formula 1 race drive.
The Silverstone-based team launched its 2013 VJM06 on Friday, with only lead driver Paul di Resta in attendance.

Bianchi, who drove for Force India in free practice on nine grand prix weekends in 2012, is one of several drivers in contention for the second race seat, with Adrian Sutil and Bruno Senna both considered leading contenders as well.
Speaking at the launch of the new car, Force India deputy team principal Bob Fernley told AUTOSPORT that the departure of Nico Hulkenberg had disrupted the team's long-term driver plans.

"The idea of the Nico/Paul partnership not continuing into 2013 wasn't our plan," said Fernley. "Obviously it slightly de-railed our programme.

"If we'd had an ideal world we'd have liked to run Jules for two years as a third driver.

"Is Jules ready to go into a primary seat? Yes, he is. Absolutely. But we've just got to make sure we tick all the boxes now."

Fernley said that having two drivers on board for the first test of pre-season at Jerez next week was not as important as getting a revised long-term plan in place with its line-up.

"We have all these long-term plans and we want to make sure the decisions we take are the right ones," he said.

"And we don't have to rush those decisions. Today [at the launch], a lot of the talk is about why we don't have other drivers here.

"Well, the key objective today is to launch the VJM06 and two new partners with our programme. We only needed one driver to do that.

"When we go to Jerez, there's no better person to do all the baseline work and get the car ready for Barcelona, than Paul.

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"Paul will be the key focus for Jerez. After that, the shareholders will be ready I think to announce the three-driver line-up, which will see us into 2013 and hopefully longer term."

No shootout

Fernley dismissed the idea of holding an on-track evaluation of the various candidates for the 2013 line-up.

"We've got a number of people pooled that we want to look at for the primary drive, and a couple of people that we want to look at for the third driver programme," he said.

"We don't need to evaluate the people we're looking at - we'll make the decision and they'll go straight into the programme.

"As long as the baseline work is done and we can bring the second and third driver in for Barcelona [on February 19], they're going to be competitive straight away."

 

Apparently a tweet from Di Resta yesterday welcoming Senna was almost immediately taken down. Word has it that might have been fake though.

 

The tweet was fake, but the situation is getting concerning now. Even the backmarkers have shown their hand but not an established team. The longer it drags on and with that news yesterday i'm wondering if they're wanting to stick to their original plan for Bianchi and bridge the gap with a better funded driver, of which Senna is the most obvious option and he was mentioned again by autosport having not really been considered since December.

Does anyone know how many of Sutil's backers stuck with him post-glassing?

 

I think Capri Sun did, saw him still wearing their caps when he was at GPs last year, on FI though they are stupid for getting into this situation as they should have known that Hulkenberg was likely to be hot property last year and they should of had a back up plan as soon as Hamilton made his move to Mercedes as it was clear one of Di Resta or Nico would be on the move.

 

Alonso has lost some serious weight:

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He's got someone else's legs, they're further forward than his body <think>

 

Looks like photoshop, thats a lot of weight lost. He will need to start on muscle gain after.

 

Doubt it seeing as it's from his official twitter.

 

It is from his official twitter.