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Formula One
VARSHA: Australian GP - The Final Word
SPEED's F1 announcer Bob Varsha believes that teams should focus on matching the pace of Brawn GP rather than attempting to slow them down in a courtroom.
Bob Varsha  |  Posted March 30, 2009   Charlotte, NC
It's not Brawn's fault that they're quicker than the rest, says Varsha (LAT)
In two weeks or so we’ll all learn whether what we saw in last Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix was an accurate picture of the state of play in Formula One.

The performance of the new Brawn GP team was a great story, even a historic one, as the shambles of the former Honda F1 team, working under the calm, logical methods of technical guru Ross Brawn, produced a car that swept both qualifying and the race. Not since the mid-fifties, when the Mercedes factory stamped their postwar comeback with a debut 1-2 sweep in the French GP, has a team new to the grid simply rolled out a better mousetrap and put a beatdown on everyone. And, in a nice twist, did so with Mercedes power once again.

Among other things, Brawn and his team proved that the problems at Honda F1 lay somewhere other than the shops in England. How else can we explain how essentially the same people who sent some horrible grand prix cars into battle the last couple of seasons suddenly hit the bullseye, and did so while the future of their company, their paychecks, and their families’ futures, was being endlessly kicked around by a bunch of marketing and accounting types in Tokyo? Wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the wall Monday at the first meeting of the guys at Honda who decided to bail on F1?

The more important point here, however, is that the results in Oz are in doubt until the International Sporting Court of Appeal meets in Paris on the 14th to decide whether the stewards in Melbourne acted properly in denying the protests of three teams against the legality of the diffusers on the winning cars, plus those of the Toyota and Williams teams. I’ve done this long enough to know that anything can happen when racing teams go to court, so I’m not predicting anything. For what it’s worth, I know what I’d like to see happen: the judges come back and say “Ladies and gentlemen, you have your rules, and you all agree that all the cars met the letter of those rules. Your public is waiting. Go race.”

I thought Australia was a great example of the fascination of Formula One: it’s not for everyone. In F1 you don’t buy a car off the shelf; you build your own. That fact implies that there is the constant threat that somebody is going to build a better car, maybe a MUCH better car, than the rest, and he’s going to lap the field.

If he does, you have to react and get better, not go running to a lawyer and say “make him be worse so I can compete.” It’s about competition before and between race days, as well on them. And here’s the thing about what we saw in Melbourne: as good as Brawn GP looked, I think it was a lot more competitive than the results might indicate.

You can build a long list of “what ifs” that night have significantly changed the outcome of the race: if the safety car hadn’t come out for Kaz Nakajima’s crash when it did, Jenson Button might well have fallen back in the pack on the pitstops… if Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica hadn’t tangled with three laps to go, Rubens Barrichello finishes fourth at best… once again Ferrari was out to lunch in Melbourne, but we all know what they did after that last year. Sure, you can write such a list for any race, but my point is it may obscure a more important fact: that things weren’t as one-sided as they looked on Sunday.

The relative speed of the cars seems to be more competitive than we’ve seen in recent years. In second-round qualifying, always the best test of lap time with all the surviving cars from Q1 on low fuel, fourteen cars were covered by nine-tenths of a second! If Lewis Hamilton hadn’t lost a gear and failed to turn a lap in Q2 it might easily have been all 15 cars, different in design and construction, with and without the KERS energy-boost systems, powered by five different engines, covered by less than a second.

Let’s also consider that this is just the first race of the season, on a difficult track to get a handle on: a street circuit. The coming weeks on permanent circuits in Malaysia, China, Bahrain and Turkey will give a truer picture of where things stand. And then it’s back to Europe. The game is just beginning.
Let’s just hope the lawyers let the kids play.

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