The Ups and Downs of one crazy season.   

It started in Melbourne (Australia) and ended in Abu Dubai. This season is one of the most fascinating and craziest I’ve seen in my 16 years being an F1 fan, it witnessed a title fight till the end, a new star emerging, a few disappointments and new powers taking over. In this edition I will review the ups and down of one nerve wracking season for us all.

The downs:  

Disapointing Ferrari:

Where to start. When I wrote my season preview back in March I bigged the Scuderia up hugely and expect them to be the main challengers to Mercedes after a great 2015 season only to be left hugely disappointed. This season drivers Sebastián Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen have underperformed massively and at times looked like they didn’t want to be there. Ferrari looked knowhere near the times of Mercedes and even slipped under a resurgent Red Bull team, TBF (to be fair) to the red team they did achieve some podiums and at times looked competitive but when you are expected to be the main challengers to the Merc’s you have to deliver no matter what. The odd thing about Ferrari this season was giving Kimi Raikkonen another new one year contract when like many other Petrolheads expected them to go after guys like Valtteri Bottas, Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez only to hand Kimi another go but I’ll give Kimi credit at times he has done well and been on par with Vettel and been close to him in the championship so if he continues this then he deserves a crack. On Vettel what can you say. I expected him to challenge Lewis Hamilton and do for Ferrari what my hero Michael Schumacher did but to no avail this season. Vettel spent more of this season whingieng and swearing on team radio when things weren’t going his way in a race which left a sour taste in fans mouths. If Vettel wants to be champion again he needs to look at what his hero Schumacher did for the Scuderia and not presume that it will all be there for him but I doubt that’ll happen, at times Vettel has looked competitive but never enough to believe that he’d win the race which wasn’t surprising. Looking back at Vettel this season he needs a serious attitude change if he wants to win at Ferrari and spend less time telling Race director Charlie Whiting to F*** Off, if he wants to emulate Schumacher he needs to start treating people with a bit more respect in interviews and not act like a spoiled brat but that is only my view. For Ferrari to want success again next season they’ll need to be clear to Kimi and Vettel of what they expect at this team and need more authority figures at the team and maybe bring back a certain Ross Brawn if they want the success I grew up watching.

McLaren and Williams two titans underperforming:

From Ferrari to two phenomenal teams who badly underperformed this season and really need to get their act together for next season. When you think of McLaren and Willams you think of success, greatness and Championships but that has been the absolute opposite this season.

To start with I’ll begin with McLaren. When this season began I also mentioned that this had to be the year that the team based in Woking had to show signs of progress to make fans and viewers believe they were on the way back to the top and this season they at times showed signs but still lag far behind the others. Whe you have two world champion drivers in Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button you’d expect better from McLaren but again they could only do well as fifth and sixth place finishes which just isn’t good enough for fans, team personnel and the sport. Another thing you have to start questioning is Honda the great engine manufacturer who returned after years of absence but are really behind the likes of Mercedes and Renault in terms of how they have developed their engine, when you hear that noise it still sounds like an engine that still hasn’t adapted to the hybrid regulations which is astonishing for one of the greatest manufacturers of all time. Honda over the winter really need to get their act together as long as they have this works deal with McLaren because the hierarchy at both McLaren and Honda will start questioning why they are working with each other and might sever ties sooner rather than later. In terms of the drivers Button and Alonso at times did better than last season and managed more points but again looked nowhere near like challenging the big boys at the front and racing against Toro Rosso and Force India drivers who lets be fair shouldn’t be mixing it with two world champions but are because of how the car has been and the lack of competiveness in it. Alonso has one more year left on his deal and at 35 will want signs of an improved engine otherwise he might wonder why the hell he even returned to the team. For Jenson Button this will be his last season after 16 years in the sport. Button announced at Monza that he would be taking a year sabitical to make way for young team driver Stoffel Vandoroom who socred points at his first race in Bahrain which perhaps made the team hierarchy move fast. I’ll miss Button a lot and will further address his career in a later edition but the way his last season went it will perhaps be one he won’t look back on with great fondness, he had some good races but always lagged behind Alonso and at times looked demotivated perhaps why he wanted a break. In another point of McLaren’s crazy season we saw a power struggle behind the scenes which saw long term Chairman and Team Principal Ron Dennis removed in pretty spectacular fashion. There had been rumours for a while that Dennis had fallen out with long time business partner Mansour Ojjeih and had been looking for a while to buy his share back while also trying buy the majority stake hold of the Bahrainian sovereign fund but this didn’t end well for Dennis. After getting together a Chinese consortium to bid £1.5bn the bid was rejected and the powers that be tried to put Dennis on gardening leave or relinquish his position as Chairman, in the end after a high court bid was rejected Dennis decided to step down but still retained his stakehold and is still on the board but rumours are that he is stil plotting more legal action and could go for unfair dismissal which could get ugly for the team so watch this space.

Now on to Williams. For the Grove based team I had slightly bigger expectations this year mainly due to how highly I rate Valtteri Bottas and believe he can be a world champion in the future. This year Williams really went backwards, some say that was due to Red Bull’s resurgence but with two top drivers in Bottas and Felipe Massa you would expect better, in races the best place that Williams cars could finish was outside the top four the only podium they managed was Bottas in Canada which after the last two seasons was underwhelming for the team. Deputy team Principal Claire Williams (daughter of team founder Sir Frank Williams) has always said that with the team’s budget they operate on they can’t constantly compete with the likes of Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari who have huge budgets to operate with so already the team is at slight disadvantage. Some big news to come out of Williams this year was that after fourteen years in the sport Felipe Massa was to retire which wasn’t a huge surprise, his replacement was announced as 18 year old Canadian driver Lance Stroll (son of billionaire Lawrence Stroll) it was also revealed that he will bring around £20-30m of sponsorship money on board which might be seen as what Williams need to compete with the bigger teams but my hope is that he’s talented and will prove it next season. As for Bottas he 100% needs to improve next year otherwise he might never win and he might not get a big team looking at him unless he shows more signs of the driver that has impressed me and fans all over.

TV Coverage (Mainly Sky):

Throughtout this season one thing I have been frustrated with was Sky’s coverage this year. I barely watched Channel 4 so I can’t really comment on that but with Sky when big moments happened especially with Hamilton and Rosberg when interviewing Toto Wolf and Niki Lauda they didn’t seem to have the nerve to ask the questions that fans wanted asking. Through many conversations I’d have with my dad he would be the more frustrated of the two of us because he just couldn’t understand why they would back off when we wanted questions. Two people that would normally frustrate people would be Damon Hill and Johnny Herbert. Hill most times would be seen to be fence sitting which didn’t sit well with me, when something big happened that seemed to be someone’s fault. Hill most of the time didn’t take sides not that I’d want to him to be biased to someone but when another driver was clearly in the wrong he just seemed to not say it. One issue that I wanted addressing was why Mercedes switched Lewis Hamilton’s mechanics to Nico Rosberg and Rosberg’s to Lewis, out of the many interviews they had with Wolf they barely mentioned it which I thought was crazy. On a positive side of things I still think Martin Brundle does a good job and continues to share his incredible insight into the sport and it would be terrible if Sky thought he was expendable. Simon Lazenby still does a good job as the main presenter plus Anthony Davidson is brilliant with the Sky pad and showing the time differences in a lap and making sure you understand how a vehicle works. Paul Di Resta has been a good addition at times bringing a modern knowledge of the cars to our screens, maybe when he retires from racing altogether there’ll be a job for him at Sky.

The Ups:

Max Verstappen What a year: 

 When I think of the one single standout thing this year it has to be one man or should I say young man and his name is Max Verstappen. In the preview I did earlier this year I talked about how after a spectacular first year Verstappen needed to raise his game and start doing things his car wasn’t capable of, little did I know that two months after I wrote this he would be driving a Red Bull and winning his first race for them in Spain. Every time I see him about to line up someone for an overtake I’m just in awe of this guy, at only 19 years young Verstappen just takes all of our breath away with just how fearless he is inside a race car and this year he has been more daring then ever. When it was announced after the Russian GP that he would be replacing Daniil Kvyat and Kvyat would go back to Toro Rosso the first thoughts at the times especially from me were thinking that Red Bull and Christian Horner had made a terrible mistake and it could ruin the young Dutchman. But boy were we all proved wrong. At the Spanish GP after the two Mercedes had taken each other out and teammate Daniel Riccardo had messed up the strategy Verstappen held off Kimi Raikkonen who had fresher tyres for around 40 laps to win his first GP and on his Red Bull debut. Since then Verstappen has proved to everyone including me that 100% he’ll be world champion and an exciting one. His moves past Nico Rosberg at Silverstone and his breathtaking drive in the wet at the Brazilian GP to claim third place having been down in fourteenth at one point was just absolutely spellbinding. What I’ve liked a lot about Max Verstappen this year is his carefree attitude when whinge bags like Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel have moaned and complained about his way of driving he hasn’t cared one bit about what they think and express it in post race interviews. I have throughly enjoyed watching Max Verstappen this year and next season will only get me more excited at the thought of what this young driver could do if he’s in a world title hunt next especially against Lewis Hamilton oh boy wouldn’t we all want that.

Force India: 

This one might be a bit of a surprise to you but i thought I would include it because I have been very impressed with this team this year. For the last few years now Force India have been on the outside in terms of racing with the big boys due to a small budget but that didn’t stop them this year as they clinched fourth in the Constructers championship for the first time in their history since they became a team eight years ago. Formally the Jordan team who are still based at the same Silverstone headquarters of there predecessors the team who are owned by Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya and run by team principal Bob Fernley and designer Andrew Green have slowly climbed the ladder and are that small team that any racing neutral would root for if they had a chance to win a race. With drivers Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenburg Force India had a stellar year with Hulkenburg getting big points and Perez getting on the podium twice which is a huge boost for him after being dumped by McLaren three years ago after being deemed reckless and would never learn he has definitely come a long way since then. During the mid-season when Ferrari announced Raikkonen’s extension a lot of people were surprised that Perez hadn’t even been looked at after his great performances over the years. In that time he has learned more about tyre management and fuel saving which you wouldn’t have thought would happen three years ago but hey we can all learn something every day. For Hulkenburg some would say that it was another underrated year for the German driver whilst fellow countrymen Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel were at the front of the grid and racing for the lead Hulkenburg was coming outside the top 5 and later on in the season stunned a lot of people by announcing that he would be leaving Force India to go and join the works Renault team which even surprised me but I did understand it. What this didn’t stop was Hulkenburg helping out his team to get a 4th place finish ahead and Williams which will secure the team a bit more prize money to operate with in their budget for next season which I think is great for them.

Title fght till the end: 

One positive this season was a great title fight till the last race of the season in Abu Dhbai. A great season IMO is when you get to the last race and you don’t know who’ll be champion when it’s over. This seasons title fight was once again between Mercedes duo Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg and boy was it enthralling, at one point you thought it wa going to be an easy ride for Rosbeg then Hamilton came back, then had a few bad races and then Rosberg took it back. This kind of fight will draw any kind of sports fan in including new ones, every great title fight is one that goes the long distance and keeps us glued to our TV and that’s what we got this year. Other factors in this were the two incidents between Hamilton and Rosberg in Spain and Austria plus the backstory of them knowing each other since they were kids, all that roles Into a title War and you are hooked. Even at the last race in Abu Dhbai I had scenarios in which Hamilton won or if Nico encountered problems or got stuck behind someone for ages. As a fan this is what I wanted and enjoy as a wannabe Journalist and fan and if this continues next season wiith more drivers added Formula One will be more watched next season.

Looking forward to next season: 

As I finish this I’ll be pumped for next season when it all begins again in March at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. A few things I’ll look forward to is the new rule change which will focus more on aerodynamics which could put Red Bull back at the front with the technical genius of Adrian Newey at the helm. Ferrari could suddenly rise again after an underwhelming season with the rule change with a talent like Vettel we could see the Scuderia on the top step again who knows. Another thing to look forward to is whether Lewis Hamilton can rise from the ashes and reclaim his title, Hamilton will be fiercely competitive next season and will want a fourth title to further validate himself as an all time great and a ultra competitive Hamilton is the worst enemy you can face. One of the last things I’m looking forward to is whether Max Verstappen can win more races and challenge for the championship which would have all fans drooling. I’ve already stated how big of a fan I am of Verstappen but the thought of  him in a title battle with drivers like Hamilton and Vettel will have my eyes on my TV, I think he’s ready for a title push and he is attracting new fans to the sport and is great to market and has an inner steel in him that people like me are in awe of. The last thing I’m looking forward to is the new season as a whole. Nothing for a Petrolhead beats the buzz of that first race week and reading loads of previews and exclusives in newspapers and magazines when the new season is on the horizon. By then winter testing is done and we start getting an idea of who looks good and who are the front runners and with that I look forward to previewing the new season when we get close to it and watching all the races.