Rubens Barrichello: A backmarker turned frontrunner in Melbourne (LAT)
This has already been one of the strangest starts to a season I can remember, at the time of writing, we still had qualifying and the race to come. For so many years we’ve travelled to Melbourne wondering whether Ferrari or McLaren had the edge over the other, with Renault maybe also figuring in the plans.
And yet after Friday practice the Italian team barely scraped into the top 10, and the Renaults and McLarens were way down the order. The past three World Champions all look set for a tough weekend...
Meanwhile there are some unexpected names at the top, or least they would have been unexpected in early January, before the new cars came out and before one of them even existed in its current form. Melbourne has demonstrated that for the moment F1 is competition for two classes, with those running twin diffusers clearly ahead of everybody else. And the latter category can itself be divided into two with seven cars – those of the aforementioned teams and the BMW of Nick Heidfeld – running KERS.
On Thursday the diffuser story ran out pretty much as we predicted on this website the previous day. Except that in the end there were 12 rather than nine protests against the three twin diffuser cars, thanks to BMW getting its wording wrong and then being a minute late when it tried to resubmit its paperwork! Nevertheless the complaints from Red Bull, Ferrari and Renault were enough to kick the process into gear.
After that it went as we expected. All six teams came and stated their cases to the stewards – typically Ferrari had brought a high powered lawyer rather than relying on an engineer or two to explain things – and the process dragged on towards midnight before the stewards came up with the inevitable conclusion – the three cars were legal. Inevitable because they were always highly unlikely to overturn a decision made by the FIA representatives in the form of race director Charlie Whiting and Jo Bauer to the effect that the diffusers were legal.
Last time such a thing happened was after Malaysia 1999, when Ferrari’s bargeboards suddenly became legal and the World Championship miraculously went, after all, to the finale in Suzuka. On that occasion you didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that other forces might have been at work...
