The sea change known as the 2009 Formula One season can best be summed up by one tidbit from Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix.
When Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen led laps in the middle of the race as a result of being off-sequence with the leaders' pit strategies, they were the first laps led this season by any of last year's top four teams (Ferrari, McLaren, BMW, and Renault). Mind you, this was taking place in the fourth race of 17, usually a point in the season where the two dominant championship-winning sides of the past 11 years in Ferrari and McLaren had found their perch on top of the standings.
In those last 11 years, Ferrari and McLaren have combined to win nine drivers' championships and nine constructors' titles (the formal name for the team title), with the exceptions being the Fernando Alonso-led double titles for Renault in 2005 and 2006.
And as bad as McLaren and defending champion Lewis Hamilton have struggled early on in 2009, Ferrari has had an even tougher go of it. Through the first three races, the most famous and most successful Formula One team had no points from either driver. With the top eight cars in each Grand Prix receiving points, and a field of 20 cars, Ferrari failed to even crack the top 40% of a race after having six chances (two cars in a team and three races).
This awful start for the team was its worst in over three decades, back when points were only given to the top six runners.
This season is a far, far cry from the team that had one of the most dominant spells in top-level sports history from 2000-2004, when Michael Schumacher won five straight world titles under the prancing horse banner.
If you don't follow F1, all of this begs the question, "Well, how come?" Formula One, like a large amount of motor sports series, rarely sees elite teams and organizations become also-rans over a winter and vice-versa.
The FIA, which governs F1, made huge rules changes to be implemented for 2009, which included the return of slick tires (the tires had been grooved for the last decade or so in an effort to slightly curb speeds), a larger front wing, smaller rear wing, and a maximum of eight engines used. All of these changes were made to lower the exorbitant modern-day costs of running an F1 team and to improve racing.
The result? In the first race of the season in Melbourne, Australia, a team that had only come into formal existence three weeks prior, won the race and took a 1-2 to boot, with Jenson Button winning and Rubens Barrichello second. In the process, it became the first team in three and a half decades to win its debut race.
The team was previously known as Honda, who pulled out of the sport in December as a business decision. Amazingly, even though no buyer had been found for the former team's assets and with the team's existence in the balance, work continued on the car that was to be Honda's 2009 edition under the tutelage of Honda team principal and former Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn.
For a while, it seemed like Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim was going to take over the team, but never came to fruition. So, Brawn bought the team himself and named the remnants of the old Honda team Brawn GP in eponymous fashion.
It is a common strategy in Formula One, in midseason when a team is doing worse than planned, to abandon development on that year's car in order to focus on making the next year's car a hopeful contender. This scenario usually plays out with a smaller team or underachieving big-money spender that traditionally wouldn't have a chance of winning races anyway. Its results have a less-than-stellar track record of working, partly due to the fact that the richest teams have so many employees and so much cash on hand that their development can be done in a fraction of the time of a cash-strapped team.
In a twist that pretty much stops the proper time-space continuum of F1, Ferrari have made statements alluding to the possibility that they may give up development on 2009 soon, a further testament to how ill-prepared the Italian team was for the next generation of Formula One.
Obviously, for Brawn, this strategy worked out perfectly, despite not having any sponsorship (a main source of revenue for F1 teams) until the day before the season-opener in Melbourne when Sir Richard Branson and his Virgin Group stepped up. The success of Brawn is interesting as well in the fact that Honda were largely serial underachievers except for a second-place constructors finish in 2004, despite winning no races.
So far, Button has continued his winning ways, also winning in Malaysia three weeks ago and Bahrain on Sunday. Button is also making huge steps toward shedding a personal underachiever tag, which may well have been a direct result of being under the previous Honda banner for over five years.
Some cynics that cover the sport have pointed to Brawn's success as a result of its controversial rear diffuser under the rear wing, which took advantage of a loophole in the regulations and helps with the aerodynamics and grip of the car. However, two other teams (Toyota and Williams) have similar diffusers and have been shown to be not as fast at the moment as Brawn.
All three teams' diffusers were declared legal by the FIA at the Australian Grand Prix and then upheld in a ruling by the FIA's appeals court earlier this month in a hearing that reportedly saw heated exchanges between Brawn and his former employers.
And while Brawn have the best car, and certainly the most ingenious team principal, the Red Bull team is close on Brawn's tail if the last two races are any indication. Red Bull takes the cake as far as what team has the best car designer, with the energy drink-funded group boasting Adrian Newey as its designer. Newey ranks as possibly the best car designer in the sport and has seen his cars win championship almost everywhere he has gone. It helps immensely that Red Bull has one of the best young drivers in the series in Sebastian Vettel, who, even at 21, is already the best wet-weather driver in the series.
Last season, the battle between Ferrari and McLaren came down to the last corner of the last race. This season would be hard-pressed to live up to the dramatics of what GrandPrix.com called, "The race of the century," yet the sport is already undergoing its biggest changes in decades through four races in 2009.
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