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

I was just making a joke. I don't even watch DTM, so I don't know how good Ralf is now..

 

please log in to view this image

 

Sutil says Force India's 2013 driver-line up will be decided before the final test, but I thought the most revealing thing he said was "there’s one more competitor in there and for sure it’s not all about driving, maybe it’s also a little bit of business behind it but I can’t do anything else."- to me this sounds like he's covering himself in the event that Bianchi gets the seat - a sign that he's not confident in Force India's decision?

There are also rumours that Razia is no longer with Marussia. One possible reason is Razia's sponsors haven't paid up yet. The other is that the car is so bad that Razia thinks he'd be better off going back to GP2. There's obviously something going on for Chilton to do all four days of this test when the team had previously announced Razia and Chilton would do two days each.

 

A couple of interesting points from Autosport magazine:

• "All-out one-lap pace is a Bianchi strength, to the point that his chief F3 engineer, who also worked with Sebastian Vettel, believed Bianchi was faster."
• "AUTOSPORT understands that Sutil is the favoured choice of the Force India technical team. He’s experienced and has a good enough understanding of set-ups to give him the clear edge over Bianchi in this area."

 

With 2 seasons in the best team (ART) he should be.

And Formula Renault 2.0 is less of a stepping stone to Formula 3 euroseries than Formula BMW which is less aero dependent and slower.


Helmut Marko suggested that Seb just jump straight into F3 rather than spend a year in German F3 and waste a year was his thinking.


Tbh I think Hulk is the only driver win to the F3 euroseries after being in Formula BMW, but he did enter German F3 and A1 GP before entering the euroseries version, so I guess he got an extra year of practice for it. Where as Seb skipped German F3 and I think he was too young to do it in the past so he had to do another year of Formula BMW, then he jumped to the euroseries.

No disrespect to Bianchi though, the kids **** hot and needs to be in F1. It's just in his country the starting period in the lower series was better structured than the German version. In Great Britain it was standard to go into Formula Renault for a couple of seasons then do euroseries and aero was introduced much earlier unlike Formula BMW.

 

I can't believe you're trying to defend Vettel.

This engineer only has an opinion, and F3 isn't exactly representitive of F1 potential as we know from Di Resta.

 

Surprise?

 

So who will replace Razia?

If he cant find the dosh then who will fit in?

 

Pretty hard to say, They'd still need the funding so Petrov is the obvious candidate, but has always been overlooked/may have run out of money, Senna's already turned them down and all the half decent GP2 rich kids have been taken.

Fear Karthikeyan.

 

please log in to view this image

 

Its confirmed that Razia missed a payment date and thats why he sat out the test last week.

 

The bottom teams have become and absolute joke, quality over quantity is always better just have 20 competitive teams like we used to.

 

20 Teams?

Agreed but its not the teams that are greedy for the money. They just need the money to survive and pay the greedy top dogs.

 

Now that would be a nightmare!

 

Did everyone here know that Esteban has never driven a single seater in the rain?

I mean come on wtf....

 

Nice fact!

So mid race in malaysia, the heaven fall. What will 'The Chosen One' do?

 

Would laugh if he wins.

 

Either crash or get overtaken by Caterham and Marussia by the looks of it....

Did you see his times at Barcelona when it was wet? he was 6-7 seconds a lap slower than the front runners.

 

That's probably not actually that unusual. Kimi had only done about a dozen single seat races before moving up to F1, Esteban is a comparative veteran! Equally, anyone who comes through the lower formulae pretty quickly stands a good chance of doing the same.

 

All I see from Esteban is another Grosjean and Maldonado with less talent and more crashing. You can get comments from 4-5 years ago saying he's fast but he crashed at almost every race he got involved with, that or he spun off with losing control.