COOPER: Different Unknowns Surround Second Korean GP

Formula 1

COOPER: Different Unknowns Surround Second Korean GP

While teams and drivers knew what to expect when they arrived in Korea this week, Sunday’s race will be a voyage into the unknown...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted October 15, 2011 Yeongam (KOR)

Korea International Circuit hosted Formula One for the first time in 2010. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Last year when the Formula One circus came to Korea there were many questions to be answered. Nobody really knew what to expect from the brand new venue, which was still being completed as the teams arrived. Meanwhile, the battle for the World Championship was a five-way fight with only two races still to come after Korea, and it was impossible to predict how it would turn out.

That inaugural race was, of course, stopped and delayed by rain, and much of it was run under the safety car. With no rain expected, things should run more smoothly Sunday, and fans will be treated to an exciting contest over the full distance. Hopefully, this year the race won’t end in near darkness!

This time around things are different. The teams and drivers knew what to expect when they arrived here, while the destination of the 2011 World Championship was finally sorted out last week. But having said that, Sunday’s race will be a voyage into the unknown.

That’s in large part because rain on Friday washed out the first two practice sessions, and robbed everyone of three critical hours of dry running. The significance of that is that Pirelli came here with its soft and supersoft tires, and everyone knew that they would be pretty marginal in terms of degradation. There was talk of four or five pit stops being required to get safely to the end.

In the circumstances, the loss of Friday’s practice was critical because everyone needed that time to get a handle on the tires. Today they had just one hour to catch up, and that meant a compromise between preparing for qualifying, and for the race. And it was very hard to do both – and impossible to do any lengthy comparisons of both types of tire.

The lack of running may or may not have helped McLaren – after all, Lewis Hamilton could well have taken pole last week in Japan, had he gotten his final lap in. But the fact is this time everything worked out for Lewis, and he starts from the front. And as Sebastian Vettel has proven so many times this year, the best way to win a race 2011-style is to lead from the off and control things from there.

It’s no surprise that the fight looks likely to be between McLaren and Red Bull, with Ferrari hovering and waiting to pick up the pieces.

An engine failure on lap 46 of last year’s race was definitely a low point of Vettel’s 2010 season, and he’ll he keen to make amends tomorrow. The same goes for Mark Webber, whose own title hopes were hit badly when he crashed out in the rain.

Track safety vehicles attempt to dry Korea International Circuit during a rain delay of last year's first Korean Grand Prix. (Photo: Getty Images)

McLaren had something of a mixed weekend here last year. Lewis Hamilton started fourth and, benefiting from the demise of the two Red Bulls, moved up to second behind winner Fernando Alonso. In contrast, Jenson Button had a nightmare race. For once he felt uncomfortable in the wet and he never got the car up to speed, eventually finishing 12th.

Alonso won last year’s race for Ferrari, giving his title campaign some timely momentum. Ferrari’s biggest headache this year has been getting the prime tire up to temperature, but that’s been less acute with the soft/supersoft combination. One lap pace may still be lacking, but as Alonso showed in Suzuka, the package is stronger in the race. And the car is gentler on its tires, and that could be a benefit tomorrow.

Hamilton and Button start first and third, and Vettel and Webber second and fourth – from the dirty side. And here it really is the dirty side, given the lack of use of the track. Teams are also lacking information on how the start might go here, given that last year the race started in the wet behind a safety car. The left hand side of the grid – all those qualified in the even spots – could be badly compromised by the dirty track.

“Nobody’s actually started from those grid slots yet in an F1 car, with our type of rubber,” says Button. “And every lap we do we drive across the right hand side of the grid. We haven’t driven once across the left hand side of the grid yet. So the odd numbers should have an advantage.”

It’s also a relatively short run down to Turn One, which means that the field won’t be very spread out, and the pack will still be pretty much together as it heads down the long straight to Turn 3, where we could see some first-lap passing, even without DRS being enabled.

As ever, tires will be the key. The fascinating thing about qualifying Saturday was Red Bull’s decision to use supersofts all the way through, whereas normally everyone tries to save them. Vettel and Webber didn’t touch their primes during the session, and thus have three brand new sets. It was a pretty clear signal that after starting on their qualifying supersofts, they will make three stops and use those three sets of primes to get to the flag.

RBR did some long running on the primes on Saturday morning, and the team has clearly come to the conclusion that it has found the best solution. Others are not so sure, and believe that there’s still scope to make more extensive use of the supersoft over the race distance.

McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh points out that the track was still very green when RBR did that high fuel-running Saturday morning. Any information learned thus may not be very valuable, especially given that as we have seen so often this year, the track changes become more sympathetic to the softer compounds as the race goes on.

“You would have got a result, but whether that result was going to guide you correctly or incorrectly as to what’s going to happen in the race, I don’t know,” says Whitmarsh of RBR’s long runs. “We’ve very little information. We’ve been to this circuit once before, very different circumstances, very wet then, so we haven’t had a dry race on this circuit.

"It’s quite clear that from the last time we raced here, they shut the gates, and they opened them the beginning of this week by the looks of things!

As of three days before the inaugural Korean GP, last-minute preparations were still being made to Korea International Circuit. (Photo: Getty Images)

“I think the evolution [of the track] will continue through the race. It’s going to be very dynamic really; we’re going to be watching what everyone’s doing. The data we gather from the first stints of the entire field will in my view be more valuable than the data we could have gathered running with heavy fuel in FP3.”

The bottom line is that nobody really knows what’s going to happen, not RBR, and not McLaren, as Button admits.

“Whether they’ve done the right thing with the tires, we won’t know until tomorrow,” says Jenson. “I really don’t think they will know until tomorrow. They’ve taken the opinion that it was the right thing to do. We didn’t because we didn’t think it was the right thing to do. So we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

“It’s a strange one, because they’ve only done a long run on the prime tire. So they actually don’t know what the option tire is like on high fuel. Maybe the degradation is the same as the prime, but a quicker lap time. We have to wait and see, and it’s not a decision you can take before the race starts, because we really don’t know which direction it’s going to go throughout the race, and you’ve got to think on your toes throughout the race. So it’s going to be a busy, busy day out there, watching other cars on different strategies, because I’m sure some cars will start on the prime tire. So there’s a lot of information they need to take on board during the race. It’s tough for the strategy guys, and it’s tough for the engineers making the decisions, or sharing the decisions with us.

“We know there’s going to be degradation from the tires, but we have a good car, we have one of the best cars for looking after the tires, because it’s competitive, and because of the downforce level we have. The rest is down to strategy and down to Lewis and myself.”

One way or another, it’s going to be a fun afternoon.

Adam Cooper notched up his 26th season as a racing journalist in 2010. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Cooper

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