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A1GP: Mid-Season Report

As A1 Grand Prix reaches its halfway point in its inaugural season of the World Cup of Motorsports its time to make an assessment of the first six events held to date. Before I get into any subjective critique lets first look at the numbers from the first six events that include 12 races.

Sprints won: France 4, Brazil 1, Switzerland 1.
Feature races won: France 5, Brazil 1.
Poles won: France Brazil and Switzerland all with 3.
Fast Laps: France 3, Brazil 2, Ireland 1.
Top ten in points: 1 France 106, 2 Switzerland 75, 3 Brazil 60, 4 Great Britain 49, 5 New Zealand 42, 6 Portugal 39, 7 Ireland 37, 8 Netherlands 34, 9 Malaysia 33, 10 Canada 31.

Obviously in a series generally considered to be running “spec” engines, tires and chassis’ the dominating performance by Team France is surprising. And its made even more so by the fact the team alternates drivers each event. Nicolas Lapierre, who just won in Dubai, has five wins and co-driver Alexandre Premat four. Their performance can be called “spec” as well and there is little indication, unless Team Switzerland’s Neel Jani has his way, that Premat won’t add to his total in Indonesia next round.

A few words on the cars and associated mechanicals. As noted previously, during qualifying for round 6 in Dubai the Zytek 550bhp V8’s A1GP uses passed the 62,000 mile mark without a single mechanical failure. Based on the telemetry graphics they have been running in the area of 8300 to 8600 rpm’s. Not an incredibly high number I admit but still impressive a valve hasn’t been spit out or piston burned to date.

There have been several engine failures that have been traced to the electronic management system in use. A few electronic bugs have also shown up in the system controlling gearbox function. In a number of cases failures during Feature event starts, (Sprint races have rolling starts) gearbox glitches have left competitors at the line and a couple failures have occurred under green flag conditions.

Pit stops have been a Chinese fire drill and far from being restricted to Team China. As background, for those that have not had access to view any A1GP events, crew members are not allowed to service the car until it comes to a complete stop. The pit crew must remain behind a line that delineates the garage from pit row - in effect parallel with the garage door - once the car stops they do an old style “Le Mans start” and rush out to service the car. And that’s where the problems start.

Through the first two events the pneumatic wrench used to remove wheels either failed outright or hung up on the wheel nut. The problem seemed to be corrected after round three but reappeared during round 6 in Dubai. The best pit times have been in the 24-30 second range. When the wrench has acted up stops of longer than one minute have been common. I see no problem with the unique “Le Mans start” stops and assume it was introduced to increase safety along pitroad. It’s unacceptable to be having so many wrench difficulties in a piece of gear that is common in most, if not all, open wheel series.

The safety built into the A1GP cars has been put to the test, most notably by Teams Lebanon, China and Japan. All three have been involved on rollover accidents the worst being Japan at Eastern Creek Australia. Driver Hayanari Shimoda suffered a number of side over side flips before slamming into a solid concrete retaining wall. The impact totally destroyed the car splitting it in half just aft the drivers head. Shimoda was knocked out for a number of minutes before being stretchered to a waiting helo and taken to the local crash house. After an overnight stay he was released and was back behind the wheel two weeks later in Indonesia finishing 13^th and 14^th in the weekends events.

Let’s talk about media and TV coverage, or the lack of it. The recent addition of Comcast’s OLN Network to the schedule in North America obviously will help. But the problems may be bigger than that. From the first event in Great Britain there has been a lack of coverage by the online versions of the print media. AP’s coverage of round one, for example, consisted of noting the first three finishers only and no mention that America was even entered in the event. There has only been a slight improvement since then. Certainly the PR Dept. of A1 can’t twist the arms of every copy boy and editor on the planet unless they happened to subcontract The Sopranos. But, I bet an aggressive campaign that included inundating all news services, newspapers and online sites with stories to run in addition to highlight clips to TV stations may help.

A look through this thread at PitPass will give a good idea of the problems of TV coverage in other parts of the World. It generally breaks down as a fight between terrestrial and satellite TV. In many cases A1GP has taken the satellite option and that has produced a smaller viewership than expected. I assume from many of the comments in that thread cable is expensive in Europe and that has led many fans to be dependant on the web for news and results.

On the plus side of media coverage is access provided during events. During qualifying, before each race and between the Sprint and Feature races drivers and team officials are all available to be interviewed. It’s a refreshing change after so many years watching the prima-donnas of Formula One either run and hide from a microphone, or be placed in such a structured environment you you get is canned, rehearsed dialog.

Which brings me to web presence. The A1GP website is ok but can be improved. The design and basic information is very good, albeit very slow loading if you depend on dialup Internet access. I believe it should be updated on a more regular basis. At the moment it’s been five days since the last new entry has been added. Granted it’s 28 days until the next round in Indonesia but that should give a prime opportunity to add related content. Reactions on the operation of the new A1 Recovery system that saw its first use in Dubai is an example. In depth profiles of the drivers would be a welcome addition. Many things could be added with the object to simulate new or retain fans interest in the series.

Of the other web resources F1 Central has some A1 coverage however much of it is cut & paste from A1’s home page. By far the best has been provided by PitPass’ A1 coverage that includes photo galleries dating back to 2004 when the first test was held in Jerez. Also included is a forum and an extensive archive of team and Series announcements.

In summary, and if I were grading like your high school shop teacher, the lowest grade of “D minus” would go to the pitstop and elecrical problems seen to this point. A grade of “C” would be given for television coverage. Despite the claims that over 10 million, on average, have watched A1GP events it’s obvious many more have the desire to. The addition of OLN gives the series access to another 60 million potential fans. Even if only one half of one percent tune in that’s a significant increase.

And finally the most important grade of all, the competition. I give the racing an overall grade of “B minus”. The first three events saw little passing among the top five finishers and what passing was done down the filed was shown in replay as the director concentrated on the front of the field. The two most recent events in Malaysia and Dubai has featured side by side racing from those in the top five and two late race passes for the lead. A vast improvement and should it continue should warrant a higher grade on the year.

The next event on the Grand Prix of Nations calender is round seven at Sentul Indonesia on 15 Jan, 2006.

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