Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Review

The perfect circuit presentation was one thing, along with its myriad of potential layouts, electronically-bannered light gantries, pit lane exit tunnel, and so on. The concept of having barriers and crowds close by was a welcome change to acres of run-off. The day-to-night concept worked an absolute aesthetic treat without causing the drivers any difficulty. And to top it off, there were the luxury yachts in the marina, the mammoth Ferrari World next door, and the Yas Hotel with its shimmering lights and colours.

Anyone would have run out of superlatives. Yes, it did raise the bar and set a standard so impossibly high that no other Grand Prix in the foreseeable future will be able to match it. And yet ... there was something not quite right about it. For one, it was the ostentatious, gratuitous display of affluence. Yes, Monaco has that too, but Monaco also has history and glamour. Yas Marina had neither. Everywhere you look, every camera shot, simply screams out "Wealth!" and "Money!" and little else.

If we inserted a comment here about global poverty, it might be considered a cliche, but it is a point worth making. In this time of financial crisis and cost-cutting, when there is an increasing groundswell of support for a return to "motorsport" as opposed to "motorbusiness", this was the Hollywood, picture-perfect CGI Grand Prix, the whim of the rich, but devoid of soul. Give us the passionate supporters at a rundown Silverstone, Monza or Interlagos any day. And give us the quality of racing we saw in Brazil as well.

This is not to deny Abu Dhabi's tremendous achievement. But at the same time, this is not a brave new world for Formula One. Dare we go so far as to say that it is a cowardly path, the veneer of outrageous presentation hiding the fact that, in the bigger picture of motorsport and the world in general, there is little reason to spend this much money on a facility of such a scale and to host a Grand Prix in such a location, other than because Bernie has prostituted F1 to the highest bidder at the expense of its heart and soul.

But, at any rate, this was the playing field, and Red Bull came out on top. Once their tyres had got into their optimal zone, they were the closest challengers to the rampant Lewis Hamilton, and both Vettel and Webber put huge pressure on the McLaren in the first stint, to the point where Sebastian got past at the first stops. It was another well-deserved victory in a year where, perhaps aside from Malaysia, Spain, Valencia, Belgium and Italy, most races have had one dominant driver and no real battle for the win.

That's some 20 points gone begging due to driver errors, not the mention the blown engine in Valencia. On paper, arguably Vettel should have won the championship. Although Red Bull may well be competitive again in 2010, there will still be Brawn to contend with as well as a resurgent McLaren and Ferrari. Decent title challenges don't come every year - as the likes of Eddie Irvine, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Robert Kubica can attest - and might Sebastian look back at 2009 with regret in years to come?

The problem is the same for Webber, who will wonder how that terrific momentum after Germany and Hungary fell into a black hole of five scoreless races when he then rebounded with a win and a 2nd in the last two. Compounding the missed opportunity is that in 2010 he will still have Vettel to contend with in the same machinery. Abu Dhabi was another demonstration of the inconvenient truth for us Australian supporters that, on equal terms, Mark is a very good battler but Sebastian really is championship class.

Whereas Vettel cruised to the chequered flag in the final stages, Webber fell back into the clutches of Button, resulting in that marvellous duel in the final laps when Jenson should on several occasions have made it past but Mark simply nailed each and every braking point. Having overtaken Rubens Barrichello on the first lap and survived another scare from the one-stopping Kamui Kobayashi, it was a strong drive from Button which gave his championship-winning season a fitting finale.

Barrichello's front wing damage from his first-corner collision with Webber meant that there was little real prospect of mounting a sustained challenge to the eventual top three or to Vettel's runner-up spot in the championship, and 2009 may also have been his last real title campaign unless Williams makes an astounding revival in 2010. Indeed, in all probability neither Brawn would have made the podium had Hamilton not encountered his brake dramas. Lewis' qualifying pace had simply been incredible.

Reliability has also adversely affected Heikki Kovalainen, the Finn's gearbox failure in qualifying and gearbox change as well as average pace on a one-stop strategy putting paid to any chance of a points finish. Heikki has also suffered because the pace of McLaren's development has sometimes meant that Hamilton has had more updated machinery. Kovalainen was saying that in the press to anyone who would listen, but one suspects it was also an attempt to divert the blame for his own insipid driving in 2009.

Making something of a mockery of the yet-to-be-completed Ferrari World, the red cars were not competitive in Abu Dhabi; indeed, it has been a testimony to Kimi Raikkonen that at least his car has been regularly in the points in the second half of the season, and of course a winner at Spa, despite Ferrari giving up on the F60 early on. But the Prancing Horse was beyond help here, The Iceman rounding out his time at Maranello by missing the Q2 cut and driving an uninspired race on a one-stop strategy.

In the end, the battle between Raikkonen and Hamilton for 5th in the drivers title, and between Ferrari and McLaren for 3rd in the constructors title, turned out to be an anti-climax as none of them scored points and the men in the silver corner edged both fights. Ferrari's case was not helped by yet another pathetic outing from Giancarlo Fisichella. For sure, the F60 has either not suited him or it has been a difficult beast to tame, but last on the grid and a pit-lane speeding drive-through penalty was yet more humiliation.

It was enough to earn him the 'Reject of the Race' award. Even the very best can be hamstrung by a car that is uncompetitive or not to their liking, but champions push to the limit and search for a way around the problem. Not so with Fisi, who has not only seemed to meekly accept the F60's idiosyncrasies, content in merely having been a Ferrari driver, but he has contributed a litany of his own embarrassing gaffes which prove that Luca Badoer wasn't such rubbish after all.

Strategic decisions haven't always helped the Pole, but here Robert dropped places after a comparative early first stop, and after the second round of pit activity he spun whilst trying to atone for the fact that Sebastien Buemi's Toro Rosso had leapfrogged him as well. Nevertheless, with the Qadbak-owned squad now likely to make the grid in 2010, there is decent momentum behind the team given a bit of a resurgence over the final third of the year, and also behind Heidfeld should he stay with them.

The question is whether Qadbak is the real deal or another team-buying enterprise of uncertain repute, the likes of which we have seen many times before in F1. But Qadbak now look certain to fill the 13th team spot in the 2010 field, following Toyota's announcement to follow Honda and BMW out the exit door. This should have come as no surprise. Despite John Howett's protestations, the inability to confirm a budget for 2010, or to meet Jarno Trulli's pay demands, should have sounded alarm bells.

On the Autosport website, Dieter Rencken has written an insightful piece as to why Japanese companies have pulled out of international motorsport en masse. Not only has Honda and Toyota left F1, but Bridgestone will not be renewing its tyre supply agreement after 2010. Mitsubishi, Subaru and Suzuki have already departed from the World Rally Championship, and Kawasaki are out of MotoGP. Rencken suggests that one reason is that regulations stifling ingenuity are unattractive to the Asian mentality.

He has a point. Western culture celebrates the success of the individual. What better way to foster that in motorsport than to have series where the rules are fairly tightly controlled so that the variables are minimised and development is incremental? The best individuals will shine through in those environments. Asian culture, however, prefers the triumph of the collective. In motorsport terms, the ideal situation is for a team of people to come up with a revolutionary idea and to make it work.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Giancarlo Fisichella
Last on grid and a pit-lane speed penalty

For one thing, the importance of face in Asian culture means keeping a relatively low profile lest one stirs the pot unnecessarily, and this has been part of Toyota's problem in F1. Often we have made fun of Toyota's lack of fans, their commercial motives, their conservative designs and appearance, their bland driver choices, and their mediocre engineering staff filled with committee men rather than instinctive decision-makers, ultimately dictated by the Tokyo boardroom.

But regardless of the volume of yen which Toyota was throwing at F1, without an element of risk or passion, without any do-or-die instinct, they were always going to find it difficult to succeed in the sport. And thus the lack of results - 13 podiums in 8 seasons with no wins - only brought about further loss of face. Add to that the genuine economic considerations, which also claimed non-Asian casualties such as BMW, and there was every reason for Toyota to pull out.

The great pity of Toyota's withdrawal is that Kobayashi looked set to cement a drive in 2010 after another fantastic display in Abu Dhabi on top of the impression he made on debut in Brazil. Here's a man whose zest behind the F1 wheel goes uncharacteristically against the grain of his culture. From 12th on the grid, he was the only man to really make a one-stop strategy work. His move on Button after Jenson's first stop was a resumption of the spirit he showed against the Brawn driver at Interlagos.

That put him in 3rd, everyone with one stop to go, and Kamui's pace made him a genuine contender for the podium. But having made that one remaining stop earlier than his two-stopping rivals, he could not quite keep up the pace to avoid the Brawns and Heidfeld staying ahead of him. Nevertheless, 6th place in his second race, leading home two-stopping team-mate Trulli, showed that this man deserves a place in F1 even if his record in junior categories, especially GP2, is nothing to write home about.

But the teenager made headlines for the wrong reasons when he accidentally drove into the Red Bull pit just as Vettel was about to pit, being ushered out quickly only to stop on track with a gearbox failure. This was to some extent excusable, given Alguersuari's tender age and inexperience, given that his own crew had not come out to receiving his ailing STR4, and given that Toro Rosso and Red Bull are next to each other in the pit lane and their uniforms are not exactly dissimilar...

Heidfeld's points for BMW Sauber dropped Williams to 7th in the constructors title, which is galling for several reasons. One is that the FW31 was a frontrunner early in the season and was competitive at other times, but performance has somewhat tailed off as evidenced by Nico Rosberg's quiet race starting and finishing 9th. The other reason is that Rosberg scored all of Williams' 34.5 points this year. Kazuki Nakajima started 13th, finished 13th, and probably has had his last chance to stay in F1.

That only leaves the two teams that were at the back of the field. One was Renault, as fresh doubts surface over their continuation in F1 next year, and as Fernando Alonso gave the team the most anti-climactic farewell imaginable, including his first-ever Q1 elimination and a quiet drive to 14th. Romain Grosjean got caught up in several tussles against Alonso and Fisichella, but why his junior category speed has translated into such F1 nothingness remains a mystery. He'll be lucky to get an F1 drive next year.

Despite the low-downforce flourish at Spa and Monza, Force India's rapid improvement has not carried through to the final races of the year in medium-to-high downforce configuration, and the VJM02s were back to the back. Vitantonio Liuzzi out-qualified Adrian Sutil, in Liuzzi's first sign of anything remotely impressive since his eye-catching Monza return. He raced decently too, finishing unlapped in 15th whereas Sutil languished at the back most of the race, passing Grosjean on the last lap to take 17th position.