The crowds who flock to the Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park on March 28 will see something Australian fans been waiting for since 1986 – a Grand Prix-winning Australian driver in action.
Mark Webber made his long-awaited breakthrough in 2009, winning in Germany and adding a second success in Brazil on his way to fourth place in the Drivers’ World Championship.
Not since 1986, when Alan Jones ran his final race in Adelaide, has there been a race-winning Aussie in the field, and Webber is on course to become the first local driver to win a World Championship race in Australia.
More Formula 1 cars than the Melbourne crowds have ever seen are due to line up on the Albert Park grid on and with them will come a clutch of new drivers, several new teams and some mighty names on the comeback trail.
As 26 cars prepare to do battle through 2010, no fewer than four new team names will appear on the Entry List for Melbourne’s 15th FIA Formula 1 World Championship race, though two of them have links to a glorious past.
One is Mercedes GP, the latest incarnation of the legendary ‘Silver Arrows’ that dominated Grand Prix racing before the Second World War and again in a brief but brilliant two-season spell in 1954-55. The ‘new’ Mercedes is itself the latest identity of the Brawn GP outfit which morphed from Honda into a dual title-winning team last year.
To make Mercedes’ return as a full-scale constructor even more mouth-watering, they are bringing with them the greatest driver the sport has ever seen. Even after seven titles and 91 Grand Prix wins – four of them in Melbourne – Michael Schumacher could not resist the temptation of trying to become the first German driver to win a World Championship F1 race in a Mercedes.
Michael climbed aboard his new Silver Arrow for the first time in Valencia last week as 2010 testing got under way – and was third-fastest overall on the final day.
“It’s a new challenge and a new experience for me this year,” says the 41-year-old, “but knowing Ross [Brawn, the Mercedes GP team principal] so well and working with him again has made it very easy for me and I feel at home in the team already.”
The other team name that arrives with F1 pedigree is Lotus, especially as this new outfit based in the UK but with strong Malaysian ties will be powered by Cosworth engines. Lotus-Cosworth, winners in Holland with Jim Clark on the Ford-Cosworth V8 engine’s debut in 1967, were the most feared partnership in Grand Prix racing in the decade after that initial success.
The outright newcomers on the team front are Campos Meta of Spain, run by former F1 racer Adrian Campos himself, Virgin Racing from the UK and, intriguingly, US F1 based out of Charlotte, North Carolina and boasting well-known Australian journalist Peter Windsor as part of its management set-up.
While former Ferrari legend ‘Schuey’ will be the focus of many fans’ attention, at least five F1 rookies are in the 2010 line-up.
Nico “The Hulk” Hülkenberg, who joins Williams after a test role with the team on top of his stellar achievements in junior formulae, culminating in last year’s GP2 title.
The name that dominated F1 immediately before the Schumacher era is also back in 2010. That’s Senna, in the shape of Bruno, nephew of the late, great Ayrton Senna. The younger Senna makes his F1 breakthrough with Campos Meta after his own successful apprenticeship in Formula 3, GP2 and sports cars.
Also from Brazil comes Virgin’s Lucas Di Grassi, a multiple race-winner in GP2, while fellow-South American Jose Maria Lopez earns his graduation to the US F1 team on the strength of back-to-back touring car titles in his native Argentina.
Last but not least, we have our first Russian racer in Formula 1: he’s Vitaly Petrov, signed to partner Robert Kubica at Renault after finishing 2009 as GP2 runner-up to ‘The Hulk’.
More cars, more drivers – and more points to play for as this year the top 10 finishers in each race will earn points and there will be a greater reward than ever for being a race-winner in 2010. With the first man home earning seven points more than the second on a sliding scale of 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1.
In technical terms the major changes for this year is that there will be no refuelling, the front tyres on each car are slightly reduced in width, and the top 10 qualifiers will be required to start the race on the tyres on which they set their fastest qualifying lap.
The number of sets of dry-weather tyres available is reduced from 14 to 11, in a move which should encourage more Friday running.
Melbourne fans will remember the controversy over ‘double diffusers’, which will remain legal for 2010, but out goes KERS, the kinetic energy recovery system sporadically used in 2009.
