Author: Mark Gillies

Qualifying for the Indy 500 is always an interesting affair, but the IRL’s latest attempt to spice up the proceedings wasn’t that great. Cutting the numbers of days that qualifying takes—from four to two—made a lot of sense, but the additional 90-minute session at the end of the first day’s qualifying for a shootout between the fastest nine qualifiers seemed contrived to me. And a little unfair, too.

Alex Tagliani did a great job for the new Fazzt team, lining up second after the initial round of qualifying. To give a measure of how well they performed, Tagliani outqualified the entire Andretti and Ganassi teams, as well as two of the three Penske entries. But having done the hard work in the morning, Fazzt then had to try again in the Fast Nine session in the afternoon and slipped to fifth place on the grid. It’s still a great result, but one gets the feeling that the amount of extra running that people like Penske and Ganassi can afford gives them a lot more data to comb through when they need to make setup decisions, which is especially vital at Indy, where track conditions can completely change how a race car feels to a driver. In the end, Helio Castroneves blitzed everyone to take pole and it’s hard to see if anyone can stop the Brazilian or teammates Will Power and Ryan Briscoe from winning the 500.

Indy qualifying was always great to watch because drivers could drop a time they had posted and attempt to go faster later on in the day. Of course, if they went slower, they had just said goodbye to their initial grid position. Luckily, Bump Day on Sunday continued that tradition and was utterly compelling. Both Jay Howard and, of all people, Paul Tracy outguessed themselves when they decided to throw away a decent qualifying effort and go out again in order to try to post a faster lap—which, in Tracy’s case was unnecessary because the qualifying speed he threw away would have gotten him into the field. In the end, both of them failed to make the field.

By the way, did anyone notice that Indy veteran Danica Patrick got outqualified by two rookies, both women? Ana Beatriz went quicker than Simona de Silvestro, which was something of a shock, along with the Andretti team’s deeply average performance. With Tony Kanaan just scraping into the field and the other cars gridded 16th, 17th, and 23rd, there must be a lot of head scratching going on. Especially when two cars that hadn’t turned a wheel prior to Indy—Graham Rahal’s and Bruno Junquiera’s—posted laps that were good enough for seventh on the grid and fastest qualifier from day two. Indeed, Junquiera’s time would have been good enough for seventh if he had run on the first day of qualifying. After just 14 laps of running.

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It’s amazing what confidence will do for a racing driver. After a couple of pretty sloppy drives in the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix, Mark Webber pulled it together at Barcelona last week to lead all the way after starting from pole position, comprehensively outdriving his more highly touted teammate, Sebastian Vettel. One week later at F1’s glamour event, the Monaco GP, Webber did the same thing: This time, he drove off into the distance in a manner that was reminiscent of a Senna or a Stewart or a Clark in their pomp.

It’s always difficult to know what to make of Webber, partly because he didn’t have the same kind of spoon-fed path up the career ladder that the likes of Lewis Hamilton or Fernando Alonso or even Vettel enjoyed. Webber never ran for a true front-running team in Formula 3 and had to seek employment in sports cars—admittedly with Mercedes-Benz, who were keen to put him in Indycars thereafter—before hooking up with Paul Stoddart to run in F3000. Even there, he looked good rather than great, and it was only because fellow Australian Stoddart purchased Minardi that he got a ride in F1.

Prior to 2009, he had spent a season with Minardi, two with Jaguar Racing, two with Williams, and two with a Red Bull team that was starting to gel. He had never been in a front-running car, which made it difficult to gauge just how good he is, except he had a tendency to blow off his teammates in qualifying and was regarded as a solid racer. But last year, the team came alive, and Webber did a really good job during the second half of the season. Over the course of the year, Vettel did even better, but it’s worth remembering that Webber broke his leg in the 2008–2009 off-season and that must have hampered his preparation, most notably his fitness regimen.

In lots of ways, Webber reminds me of Jack Brabham, his countryman who won three world drivers’ titles in 1959, 1960, and 1966. Like Brabham, Webber is a hard racer who takes no prisoners and he had to graft to get to F1. And I think that both drivers are sorely underrated. “Black Jack” raced against and beat some of the best ever, men like Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks, Dan Gurney, Jochen Rindt, Jim Clark, and Jackie Stewart, yet few critics hold him in the same lofty regard despite his three titles. I once asked Brabham if he felt sore about the lack of critical acclaim and he just grinned and said, “Can’t have been all that bad, can I?” Webber, too, has beaten the likes of Schumacher, Button, Hamilton, Alonso, and Vettel, so he can’t be too bad, either.

This will probably put the hex on Webber, but it would nice if the hard-working but underappreciated Aussie can become the third world champion from Down Under, along with Brabham and Alan Jones. It would also be good to see one of F1’s elder statesmen putting it to the 20-somethings who seem to make up most of the grid.

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It doesn’t matter how hard race series try to equalize the performance between cars, some teams will always do better than others within the boundaries that are placed around them, i.e. the rules. Which means the only way to judge a driver’s true talent is to compare them in equal equipment. It was interesting to see how various teammates in top teams are reacting to each other in both F1 and NASCAR this past weekend.

NASCAR first. There’s little doubt that Rick Hendrick’s organization is the best in the sport, week in and week out. But are we seeing signs that the love-fest between Jeff Gordon and teammate (and one-time protégé) Jimmie Johnson is in danger of cooling off? Both drivers were pretty outspoken after a wheel-banging incident in yesterday’s rain-delayed Texas race, which caused Johnson to pit out of sequence with a flat tire. Both drivers were disappointed with each other, they said, although Johnson really didn’t have much of an ax to grind, as he caused the incident. Despite talk of sorting things out, I wonder if the relationship has broken down irreparably: In the past three years, during which Johnson has won every NASCAR title, Gordon has won just one race—that has to hurt. It’s going to take a firm hand, probably applied by Hendrick himself, to keep the boys in line.

In F1, it’s interesting to see how the McLaren and Mercedes teammates are shaping up against each other. Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton appear very evenly matched, with Button’s current advantage in the points race coming down to his ability to make judgment calls on his own, rather than relying on the McLaren team’s brain trust as Hamilton does. (Speaking of the brain trust, how many millions are they making to screw up on a weekly basis?) Hamilton seems to be very stoic about his fortunes relative to Button, perhaps because he hasn’t actually been blown away by his teammate.

Over at Mercedes, Nico Rosberg has done just that, however. In view of the blown-away driver being Michael Schumacher, that’s a bit surprising. Anyone who followed Rosberg in the junior formula series—GP2 and F3 Euroseries—knew he was super quick, in the same league as one-time karting rival Lewis Hamilton. But I think even Schuey is in shock over how quick the younger German is. How many times in Schuey’s career has he been decimated in both qualifying and races by his teammate four times in a row? (The answer is never, at least not since 1992.) He’s already making excuses about not understanding how the intermediate tires work on the new generation of cars, neatly sidestepping the fact that Rosberg and everybody else are also getting used to the changes for 2010, such as driving with a full fuel load and narrower front tires.

In essence, it makes one wonder about how great Schuey is. Despite seven world driver’s titles, the one blot on his career is that he has avoided head-to-head competition within his team with another great driver. In 1992, Martin Brundle kept him honest at Benetton, but Schuey was a rookie and Brundle was much better than his record shows. In 11 years at Ferrari, Schumacher made sure his number two was just that: a driver who performed boring donkey work for him and was there to pick up the pieces if it all went wrong for the team leader. Other multiple title winners such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna, and Alain Prost all had teammates at one time or another who were equally quick. Schumacher, for many years in the best car at Ferrari, shied away from real competition. Now, perhaps, we’re seeing why.

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Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman, was present at the company’s Milford proving grounds today as Chevy let us loose in its Cruze compact for the first time on North American soil. It was, he said, “The last time I will address a bunch of automotive journalists on a ride-and-drive, so forgive me if I burst into tears later.”

Now, the idea of Lutz bursting into tears seems about as likely as a squadron of pigs flying past my office window, but it was actually a sad day. Whatever one thinks of Captain Bob—and I’ve been on the end of dressing downs as well as convivial conversations—he’s one of the most impressive figures I’ve come across in more than 25 years of being a motoring hack. He can drive; he loves cars and really knows them; he understands business, particularly the car business; he’s passionate about car design and marketing; and he’s refreshing for speaking his mind and, thank goodness, for not being “on message” all the time, that bane of modern corporate behavior. Much as I like Mark Reuss, last time I saw him he was searching for a PR person to ensure he was speaking with the corporate line. Er, Lutz doesn’t care for that and he’s all the better for it.

When Chevy launched the previous Malibu in 2003, Lutz and I got into a spirited knock-down fight over what was good and bad in the American car industry, especially the GM part. Lutz told me how great the car was and I pointed out that, while he had to act as a booster for it, I wanted to see what came out in five years’ time before judging his impact—he had only been at GM for a year at that point. And, you have to say, he has done a brilliant job of dragging GM’s product portfolio up by its proverbial bootstraps. In 2003, only the Corvette and the big SUVs and pickups were competitive; now, GM’s offerings have a fighting chance in Car and Driver comparison tests, save for a few clunkers such as the Chevy Impala, Buick Lucerne, and the Cadillac DTS.

As for the Cruze, it’s a competitive compact. GM had brought along a Honda Civic and a Toyota Corolla for comparison with three turbocharged 1.4-liter Cruzes: an LTZ with the sport suspension; a 2LT; and the Eco model that was announced at the New York show. The LTZ and 2LT had six-speed automatics and the Eco had a six-speed manual transmission. We can tell you that the Cruzes have better appointed interiors, more rear-seat legroom, bigger trunks, and drive in a more refined manner than the Honda on hand and are more pleasing when the road turns twisty than the Corolla. (All right, that may be damning with faint praise as almost anything is more entertaining than a Corolla on a curvy road.) Perhaps the most notable features of the Cruzes were the ride and general refinement. The wind and engine noise are muted, tire slap is minimal, and they cope really well with bumpy pavement. The turbo engines are willing, too, and mated to excellent six-speed transmissions. Check back early next week for a full write-up of the Cruze.

Whether the car will drive as well as the upcoming Ford Focus remains to be seen, although my Euro friends tell me that the Cruze isn’t in the same league as the current European-market Focus. But we think that Chevy is being more realistic with this car. Lutz says it will be priced comparably with its best competition—think Mazda 3, Civic, and Corolla—whereas we suspect that Ford will be pitching the Focus above its rivals. If you want evidence for that, the Fiesta hatchback is coming to market a couple of grand more expensive than the Mazda 2, which is basically the same car underneath.

As to why the Cruze will be more expensive than the outgoing Cobalt, we’ll leave the last words to the outgoing Lutz. “When the 35-mpg standard came in,” he says, “I said we can do anything the legislators want, but it’s going to end up costing the consumers money. A finance guy from the old days of General Motors would die if he saw this car.”

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It was a good weekend for racing junkies, with NASCAR in Phoenix, the IRL at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, and MotoGP making its season debut in Qatar. Here are some personal pet peeves and pleasant surprises from the weekend.

NASCAR: The pleasant surprise is that the open-wheel converts are getting there at last. Well, Juan Pablo Montoya and Marcos Ambrose have been doing a good job already, but the fact that five road racers were among the top seven qualifiers was shocking. Sam Hornish, Jr., A.J. Allmendinger, and Scott Speed didn’t fare quite so well in the race, but JPM was fifth and all five finished among the top 21 cars. The pet peeve was yet another green-and-white checkered finish. All these do is cause an utter crapshoot at the end of the race. This may sound weird, but if there’s a yellow 10 laps from the finish of the race, why not declare the result at the point the flag came out? At least a driver’s hard work in the race would be rewarded, rather than lose a race because he spun the rear tires on a restart.

IRL: On the good side of the ledger, Marco Andretti led a ton of laps, which made a nice change to Will Power’s Penske car or one of the Ganassi boys riding off into the sunset. Oh, and Helio Castroneves won, which was pleasing. On the bad side? The IRL’s obsession with putting a pace car out when a local yellow would make more sense on road courses. Every single IRL race is a fuel-mileage strategy battle, when one would rather see a flat-out drive between pit stops. Mind you, with the lack of overtaking opportunities at Barber, perhaps they just wanted to spice up the show.

MotoGP: Nothing bad here. Sorry. These boys are stellar in every regard, none more so than Valentino Rossi, who picked up yet another win after Casey Stoner crashed his Ducati. From an American perspective, Nicky Hayden had his most competitive showing on the Ducati yet, a reward for the hard work he has put in during the past 12 months. A lesser rider would have looked at the difference between his speed and Stoner’s and gone crazy, but Hayden has gradually got the Ducati working to his liking. Ben Spies showed why he got a ride with the Tech 3 Yamaha team, finishing in a fine fifth place. And Jorge Lorenzo’s charge from fourth to second in the last few laps was something to behold, too.

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So I was up again in the early hours of a Sunday to watch the Malaysian Grand Prix live.

At the time (4 am), I thought the talking points were the storming drives through the field by the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, and the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso, from grid positions 20, 17, 21, and 19, respectively. Indeed, Alonso’s drive, where he was compensating for a grearbox downshift malfunction, was truly spectacular.

But after the event, the real news occurred. Essentially, everyone thinks Red Bull Racing is cheating because it has far and away the fastest car in F1 this year. Sebastian Vettel would have won the first three races, but for a spark plug problem in Bahrain and a brake issue in Australia. Eventually, he romped away to a win in Malaysia.

If they’re not cheating, the thinking goes, they have at least found a clever way of getting around F1’s insane parc fermé regulations. These dictate that teams can’t alter the configuration of their cars after qualifying. This wasn’t a problem in the past, where teams qualified with race fuel on board, but has led to a ridiculous compromise under the 2010 rules, where cars can qualify on fumes but go to the grid loaded with 350 pounds of race fuel. Run the car in the optimum condition for a low-fuel qualie run, and it will be bottoming out with a full tank of gas. Conversely, set it up for the race, and the car will be set too high for the aerodynamics to work properly on a qualie run.

Other teams feel that Red Bull has found a way of running the car low in qualifying and then raising the suspension for the race, without touching it after the qualifying session is over. There’s a lot of supposition that the team could be adding extra gas pressure to the dampers or has found a clever mechanical way of raising the ride height. There are rumors that McLaren and Mercedes will appear in China with active suspensions and that Red Bull will protest them.

In the good old days, if you suspected someone was cheating, you’d raise the money to make a protest and if you were right, you’d get your money back. Wrong, the money goes away. Nowadays, though, a team makes snide remarks through the press which leads to an FIA investigation, and any smart way of getting around the rules is gone, instantly. (Unless, of course, said device is on a Ferrari.) Much prefer the old way, myself. Put up or shut up, McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes.

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Back at the Chicago auto show, Hyundai’s North American CEO, John Krafcik, promised us that the 2011 Sonata hybrid would use a different approach to the parallel gas-electric system popularized by Toyota.

He wasn’t lying. Most other automakers have had to either pay Toyota royalties to use a parallel system similar to the one that’s fitted to the Prius and other models (Nissan does so with the Altima hybrid, and Mazda has just announced it will too), create their own Toyota-esque parallel system like Ford has done, or take Honda’s approach and come up with a series system that is cheaper but less fuel-efficient.

Yet Hyundai and Porsche/VW have come up with neat systems that produce considerable mileage advantages—Hyundai says the Sonata hybrid gets 37 mpg in the city and 39 on the highway—while retaining a conventional planetary automatic transmission and having a battery pack that can sustain electric operation at quite high speeds.

We spoke with Hyundai/Kia R&D’s Woong-chul Yang, who gave us an overview of the system in the Sonata Hybrid (the same powertrain will also make its way into the hybridized Kia Optima). It uses a 169-hp, 2.4-liter gasoline engine that drives to a six-speed automatic transmission via a wet-plate clutch and a 40-hp electric motor. The motor is housed between the engine and gearbox.

On start-up, the Sonata uses the electronics to decouple the engine and motor via the clutch, relying solely on electric power. The car can travel up to 62 mph on electric power alone, providing that throttle inputs are light. When more power is needed, the clutch is engaged and the gasoline engine provides the motive force. In this mode, the permanent-magnet electric motor acts as a flywheel. If the electronic control system detects that more torque is needed—such as when climbing a hill or passing—the electric motor then provides additional horsepower and torque.

The Hyundai is the first car to use a lithium-polymer battery, made by LG, which has a greater energy density than a lithium-ion battery and is also 20 percent lighter. If the battery level becomes depleted, the car’s computer can “tell” the electric motor to act as a generator rather than a flywheel and then sends current to the battery.

Hyundai says that the key to its system is the speed with which the electronic controls can engage and disengage the clutch. We also think that another key was the company’s desire to avoid paying royalties to Toyota at any cost.

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Back in 1999, Ford paid $6.5 billion for Volvo at the height of its luxury-brand spending binge. (It also bought Jaguar, Land Rover, and Aston Martin.) Just over ten years later, it took $1.8 billion, or less than a third of that, for Chinese automaker Geely to acquire the Swedish automaker.

While the infusion of cash probably looks very good to Ford, which has a mountain of debt to service, I think that Geely got a very good deal with this, and here’s why. First, the Chinese automaker gets access to a lot of quality technology and, particularly, to Volvo’s safety expertise. The Swedish company has been at the forefront of automobile safety for the past 50 years and it would take a fortune to gain that knowledge. We wouldn’t say that Volvo makes cars that we swoon over, but they are a ways ahead of the best that the Chinese can offer and, we venture, somewhat better in a collision.

Second, should Geely ever decide to build its own cars in Europe, it gives the company a manufacturing base. Volvo built about 333,000 cars in 2009, down from its peak of more than half a million. So there’s some spare capacity sitting around in Sweden and Belgium, where Volvo has its factories.

And finally, perhaps most important, Geely has bought an established luxury brand. In developing markets such as India and China, old-name European luxury brands have real cachet because there’s little or no indigenous high-end luxury industry. If you want to show you have made it, sitting in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes while outfitted in Chanel and toting a Louis Vuitton bag makes that statement. Geely has already said that it plans to double Volvo’s annual production by making another 300,000 vehicles in China. It can charge a lot more for those cars than it can for ones with a Geely badge on the hood.

That volume sounds a bit ambitious, but as an Chinese automaker, Geely (and thus Volvo) has access to government contracts. A few top politicians driving around the streets of Beijing in Volvos would do wonders for the brand.

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Well, rain didn’t help the NASCAR boys in Martinsville or the IRL crowd in St. Petersburg, who were both rained out, but a sprinkle prior to the start made the F1 race in Australia a whole deal more interesting than it might have been. This was especially important to me because my son, a.k.a. Lewis Hamilton’s number-one fan in the U.S., made sure I was awake to watch the Australian GP live at 2 a.m. EST—and if the race had been as dull as the one in Bahrain, I would have nodded right back to sleep again.

Instead, here was an F1 race that held one’s attention. Because of the rain shower before the start, everyone started on intermediate wet tires and had to judge the appropriate moment to stop for slicks. And having done that, they then had to work out if they could run most of a race distance on one set of tires, or bolt into the pits halfway through for a second set. A first-corner incident added to the excitement because the starting order was scrambled and we had the sight of delayed drivers such as Fernando Alonso charging through the field.

In the end, the two Ferraris, the Renault of Robert Kubica, and the McLaren of Jenson Button ran virtually the whole race on one set of tires. Yet they weren’t sitting ducks to cars that had stopped for a second set of slicks because passing in F1 is so tricky. Following another car closely results in a loss of front-end downforce, a problem exacerbated by the narrower front tires mandated for the 2010 season; as you follow another car, the harder you have to work those front tires to stay close enough to attempt a pass. Hence, once Lewis Hamilton got his McLaren onto the tail of Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari, he was on the radio complaining that his tires had gone away. He then complained that it was a dumb decision to bring him in for a second set of tires when his teammate stayed out on his original tires and consequently won the race.

Do we detect the start of bad things at McLaren? Button made his own decision to take slicks earlier than anyone else, the move that effectively won him the race, whereas Hamilton seemed to indicate that he was at the team’s mercy when it came to staying out or getting a second set of slicks. That’s the one rub on Hamilton: He seems to rely on the team to decide his race strategy, rather than taking his own decision. Why, you wonder, if it was such a terrible decision to come in for a second set of tires, didn’t he overrule the team?

McLaren had better hope that Button doesn’t make too regular a habit of beating his younger teammate, otherwise the toys will start being thrown off the stroller—and in a hurry.

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In my 15 years in the U.S., I had never attended either of the great endurance races—the 12 Hours of Sebring or the 24 Hours of Daytona—so I was glad to be able to fill in a gap in my racing education by going to Florida this past weekend to watch the event at Sebring.

Why this race rather than Daytona? Simply because the cars in the American Le Mans Series are sexier than in the Grand-Am races, with the added bonus that Peugeot sent a brace of its wicked 908 HDI FAP prototypes to Florida. Now, I know that Peugeot had a walkover because it wouldn’t agree to Audi competing with the 2009 R15, which is illegal under the 2010 rules, but I’m not sure that most of the 100,000-plus people at the event really cared that much about the closeness (or not) of the racing.

That’s because Sebring is effectively a party cunningly disguised as a motor race. We braved the infield at the track and can report that the only sporting event at which we have seen more dead beer cans and bottles was the Le Mans 24 Hours—and the French event didn’t win by much. A lot of the spectators were very knowledgeable, for sure, and a lot were rooting for their favorite makes, but the racing did seem to be subsidiary to the partying. I particularly liked the posse of drinkers who were dressed as Fresian cows . . .

For those of us who were sober, though, the biggest disappointment was how the race for the GT2 class unfolded. The BMW M3s, lead Risi Ferrari, Falken and Flying Lizard 911s, and the works Corvettes were all incredibly close in qualifying and ran as a train for the first couple of hours. Then the Falken car started shedding wheels, one of which clobbered the Flying Lizard car, causing it to lose a tire. Normally, this wouldn’t have been too big a problem, except the Flying Lizard car came into the pits under a full-course caution and had to sit there because the rules say the car can’t be worked on in those circumstances.

The Corvettes were running well, too, until they ran into each other at a pitstop. Oops. At that point, we were left with the two BMWs chasing the Risi Ferrari and it looked like a great race was brewing. Until, with about five hours to go, there was a full-course caution. Unfortunately for BMW, the leader was stationed between its cars and the Ferrari, so under ALMS rules, the Ferrari was waved around to the tail of the train of cars following the pace car, effectively gaining a lap on the M3s and ending the race.

BMW driver Bill Auberlen had a remedy for the situation—adopt the Grand-Am pace car rules, whereby all cars between the pace car and the class leaders have to drive past the pace car and onto the rear of the train. When it’s time for the restart, the cars line up in class order, with the fastest classes at the front, so the quicker cars don’t have to fight their way past slower vehicles. Seems like a good idea to me.

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