FORUMula1.com - F1 Forum

[What's Burning?]

It's difficult to have an apples to apples comparison between drivers in F1, but it can't hurt to have a measure of your success in a given team, be that you soundly outperform your team mate. Anything else is an apples to oranges comparison. The closest thing we have to a "comparison" is end of year new driver testing and that's far from perfect.

[Jabberwocky]

Comparing what drivers have done in other series is flawed as well. Look at Bourdais' record compared to Kobys?

[Jensonb]

Yeah I don't get why Toro Rosso is a career killer? Only Sebastian made it true, but that's because he performed exceptionally well and stood out from everyone else. No one else has done that.

Sorry, but an opportunity to drive for a junior team and prove yourself to potentially get yourself in the best car on the grid...is never a bad deal. Your 'point' doesn't make sense.

Have you not noticed that Toro Rosso treat their drivers with thinly-disguised contempt? They jettisoned Sebastian Bourdais, on the pretence that he wasn't performing. Two things: first, they treated him like crap. Second, if he wasn't performing, it was their fault - Bourdais is inarguably a fantastic driver.

[zurich_allan]

Yeah I don't get why Toro Rosso is a career killer? Only Sebastian made it true, but that's because he performed exceptionally well and stood out from everyone else. No one else has done that.

Sorry, but an opportunity to drive for a junior team and prove yourself to potentially get yourself in the best car on the grid...is never a bad deal. Your 'point' doesn't make sense.

Have you not noticed that Toro Rosso treat their drivers with thinly-disguised contempt? They jettisoned Sebastian Bourdais, on the pretence that he wasn't performing. Two things: first, they treated him like crap. Second, if he wasn't performing, it was their fault - Bourdais is inarguably a fantastic driver.

Completely agree. One only needs to look at Bourdais' track record before he came to F1 (some like me watched him race) where he won 4 consecutive Champ Car championships. In fact, let me rephrase that, he didn't just win - he dominated. From memory, his first championship was close and then he won the next three by large margins - two of which by about an 80 point margin over the runner up! (about 30 points in old F1 money!!), in seasons where there were only 14 races!

He was racing and winning / dominating against proven excellent drivers such as Will Power, Ryan Briscoe, Paul Tracy, Alex Tagliani, Graham Rahal and Jimmy Vasser. Those are just off the top of my head.

Since being disrespectfully dumped from F1, he has finished 2nd at Le Mans, and won races in the Superleague.

So why was he so different in F1 at Toro Rosso then? Not from a lack of ability. I mean he showed real promise on his debut - running in 4th until his engine blew a couple of laps before the end - qualifying 4th at Monza before his gearbox refused to select first (since proven not to have been his error), utterly unfairly punished and demoted for an incident Massa should have been penalised for. etc.

Then, the final straw, he was going to take Toro Rosso to court for not fulfilling various contractual obligations (the nature of which was never made public), and they paid him over £2million to avoid it going to the court - what does that tell you? Tells me that they knew they were in the wrong and didn't want it all to come out in the wash.

As others have said, the blame is always levied (and publically so) at the drivers after any incident a Toro Rosso car is involved in, they never do the dignified thing and keep it behind closed doors.

All my opinion of course, but one I feel strongly about.

[Jensonb]

Completely agree. One only needs to look at Bourdais' track record before he came to F1 (some like me watched him race) where he won 4 consecutive Champ Car championships. In fact, let me rephrase that, he didn't just win - he dominated. From memory, his first championship was close and then he won the next three by large margins - two of which by about an 80 point margin over the runner up! (about 30 points in old F1 money!!), in seasons where there were only 14 races!

He was racing and winning / dominating against proven excellent drivers such as Will Power, Ryan Briscoe, Paul Tracy, Alex Tagliani, Graham Rahal and Jimmy Vasser. Those are just off the top of my head.

Since being disrespectfully dumped from F1, he has finished 2nd at Le Mans, and won races in the Superleague.

So why was he so different in F1 at Toro Rosso then? Not from a lack of ability. I mean he showed real promise on his debut - running in 4th until his engine blew a couple of laps before the end - qualifying 4th at Monza before his gearbox refused to select first (since proven not to have been his error), utterly unfairly punished and demoted for an incident Massa should have been penalised for. etc.

Then, the final straw, he was going to take Toro Rosso to court for not fulfilling various contractual obligations (the nature of which was never made public), and they paid him over £2million to avoid it going to the court - what does that tell you? Tells me that they knew they were in the wrong and didn't want it all to come out in the wash.

As others have said, the blame is always levied (and publically so) at the drivers after any incident a Toro Rosso car is involved in, they never do the dignified thing and keep it behind closed doors.

All my opinion of course, but one I feel strongly about.

I agree with you completely, I really liked Bourdais and I was monumentally ticked off with how he was treated.

[Jabberwocky]

Zanardi struggled on his return to F1 as well, and that was with Williams!

[darwin dali]

Hm, this all sounds like a trip down memory lane - and it started from: see thread title
At least no LH or McLaren vs. FA or Ferrari or vs. the world in here yet.
Oops! Did I just jinx it?

Carry on...

[F1er]

Alonso???? Where????

[zurich_allan]

Zanardi struggled on his return to F1 as well, and that was with Williams!

Zanardi's return to F1 was probably the biggest example of an organisational cockup Williams have ever been responsible for. The number of mistakes Williams made on the personnel side of things that season was simply unbelievable. They gave Zanardi a race engineer who had never set foot in an F1 garage before, and then didn't allow him to directly supervise the technical work that went on with his car - he was ordered to leave those things to his race team.

Zanardi got more and more frustrated as that season went on with the incompetence of his race team and eventually refused to comply with his instructions and instead, along with the engineers under his personal supervision stripped the car to its bare bones then put it back together, setting it up purely as per his instructions without deviation.

Anyone guess at what point the season that was? It was around Spa / Italy race weekends, when those that remember that season might remember what seemed like 'out of the blue' his car became competitive for the first time. Well there's the truth - it wasn't out of the blue, it was because he went against Williams (specifically Patrick Head's) orders. I can understand Head's logic in wanting to develop new talent on the engineering side, and I can kind of understand his logic in giving Zanardi the rookie engineering team as Zanardi had just come back to F1 after winning championships in the states, however hindsight (and indeed other recent examples) tell you that a driver can't just walk back into F1 after several years away and start winning, let alone with a team who are inexperienced. Had Zanardi been given better support (I'm fairly sure even Williams would tell you that they made pretty bad mistakes in Zanardi's case!), and an experienced team around him, I think he would have been successful. As it was, he's the other obvious example that always comes to my mind when I think about driver who have been done a disservice in F1.

[Jabberwocky]

the NASCAR Truck Series does seem a rather odd route back to the F1 grid, to say the least. On second thoughts, a four-speed, pushrod V8, 700bhp, 1565kg truck is probably ideal preparation for the HRT that will start the 2011 testing season

[Robert12010]

the NASCAR Truck Series does seem a rather odd route back to the F1 grid, to say the least. On second thoughts, a four-speed, pushrod V8, 700bhp, 1565kg truck is probably ideal preparation for the HRT that will start the 2011 testing season

well it cant get any worse!