Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i AUTOSPORT

Put the best driver in the best car and, all other factors being equal, he will win races. This is a state of affairs which has prevailed since before Tazio Nuvolari was in short trousers. And yet it appears to come as an entirely new development to those who consume or report on Formula 1 on a casual basis, judging by the hand-wringing which has accompanied Max Verstappen’s third world title. Of course, the best drivers also have a knack of finding their way into the best cars. In our cover feature this month we examine how Max stands up in comparison with the other greats of F1. So far Max has been a (mostly) one-team man, living with some early disappointments as Red Bull re-engineered itself back to the…

WHY WILLIAMS BACKED SARGEANT OVER SCHUMACHER 01 Logan Sargeant’s rookie season in F1 was anything but successful: a complete ‘whitewash’ in qualifying, 22 defeats out of 22 against Alex Albon, and just one point to Albon’s 27 – and yet the American will remain a Williams driver in 2024. Not only that but the decision was expected: Williams boss James Vowles had repeatedly stated the team was prepared to give Sargeant more time to fulfil his potential. At the end of the championship the team boss was due to take what was described as a short break to analyse the driver’s progress – but, just a few days after the Abu Dhabi finale, Williams officially confirmed that Sargeant, a former member of the team’s junior programme, would remain as Albon’s…

HOW TO DEVELOP A CHAMPION’S MINDSET As F1 drivers take a break from racing, the next few of months provide opportunities to refresh and rejig the mental aspects of being among the most focused and identified motorsport heroes in the world. Triple world champion Max Verstappen’s mindset has been in a remarkable zone for several years, backed up by technical excellence from Red Bull and the unique relationship he has with race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase. As Le Mans winner and former F1 driver David Brabham said to me recently, “Max has got a very strong and stable mental approach to the whole weekend; he doesn’t allow any sort of negativity to come through – if it does it doesn’t last long. He’s extremely driven by perfection; he matured very quickly…

CV 2016-present Chief Executive Officer, MoneyGram 2012-2015 Chief Financial Officer, MoneyGram 2009-2012 Head of Corporate Strategy & Investor Relations, MoneyGram 2003-2009 Senior Vice President, First Data Corporation 2002-2003 Regional Director, Western Union GP Racing: Alex, you’ve been with MoneyGram since 2009, could you tell us about the company? Alex Holmes: In its various guises, MoneyGram has been around since the 1940s and our primary service operates across 200 countries to enable families to send money back home. A lot of the business is driven by migration – so people who leave their home country then look for opportunities in other markets. It’s an $800bn industry in terms of money that’s moved home every year and MoneyGram has a 5% market share of that. Traditionally money transfers were a cash-to-cash business where…

You were happy to see the back of 2023 and the Mercedes W14. But there must have been some positives from the season that you’ve held onto. There’s been a few. Getting pole position in Budapest – we didn’t think that was going to be possible when I first drove the car. The upgrade in Austin and the fact that given a couple more laps, we may have been in shooting range for a win. Just seeing that we were slowly morphing the car into a more competitive machine. It was more and more enjoyable to drive, fighting in a position where you’re actually going forwards rather than backwards. But it still fundamentally was not the winning car. That’s what we’ve got to change. The dream is to make sure…

Motorbikes My first dream was to work with motorbikes. I even had the idea of racing in the top category with my own bike, but that dream disappeared as I grew up and understood how the world works. I never had the budget to start racing myself, but I’ve always loved bikes and I still do. Although I have to say I was also fascinated by fast cars. Not F1, but just seeing a Ferrari or a Lamborghini on the road was like a dream for me – and it’s still one of my dreams to own one. I probably still have a good few years of working ahead of me, but I keep pushing! Watches I don’t just like wearing watches. I don’t have a collection or anything like…

F1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND 22 THE LAS VEGAS GP IN 5 KEY MOMENTS 1 Mixed feelings over Sin City gamble Did Formula 1’s return to the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world hit the jackpot? Liberty Media’s gamble included a purchase of a piece of land, construction of a £500 million pit and paddock building and a ten-year commitment to race on the Las Vegas Strip. But in the days leading up to the event, it was notable that F1’s share price continued to fall. The reboot in the Nevada desert wasn’t to everyone’s taste — and perhaps the most vocal was race winner Max Verstappen. He described feeling a “clown” at the welcome party on Wednesday and, when asked whether he liked driving on the long straights and tight…

MONGRIP MZ96 MICHAEL SCHUMACHER LEGEND LIMITED EDITION Price €8000 mongrip.com It’s the season for rarefied limited edition gifts and Monegasque memorabilia company Mongrip has the perfect high-end jewellery for the ardent Michael Schumacher fan. The company has patented a process by which it transforms racing tyres into wristwear, embellished with precious metals. Now, in partnership with the Keep Fighting Foundation, it has produced a strictly limited-edition bracelet in which the main material is recycled from a left-rear tyre used by Michael Schumacher en route to victory in the 1996 Italian GP. This was the race in which several drivers, including leader Damon Hill, struck the tyre barriers which had been placed to discourage entrants from taking liberties with track limits at the chicanes (nowadays, of course, this is measured electronically…

ALEX KALINAUCKAS Alex compares and contrasts Max Verstappen’s strengths with the other 10 three-time world champions (p34) OLEG KARPOV Oleg 'grilled' F1’s 'man on fire' Romain Grosjean about his career before that fateful race in Bahrain in 2020 (p50) ANDY HONE With the dust settled following F1’s return to Las Vegas, Andy gives us a snapper’s eye view of the race at the city that never sleeps (p62) JAMES ROBERTS This magazine’s former Associate Editor is on the freelance beat but has been our race report guru for the second part of the season (p96) Thanks to Rebecca Banks, Anne Bradshaw, Connor Bean, Jess Borrell, Davide Casati, Luca Colajanni, Theo Conru, Will Hings, Tess Laughlin, Roman De Lauw, Bradley Lord, Adam McDaid, Stuart Morrison, Will Ponissi, Kevin Tee, Tom Wood…

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT… Several races in the latter part of the 2023 season introduced extreme temperatures to the roster of challenges: Las Vegas, although not as cold as feared, was still one of the coldest races of recent years and Qatar was both hot and humid. Qatar highlighted that when certain facts align the outcome can lead to exceptional conditions that really stretch the abilities of the drivers in an athletic sense. It’s common practice these days for drivers to have to manage their way through a race. The car will generally be fuelled on the assumption that there will be periods when it is not flat out and the best strategic outcome will nearly always occur from stretching stints beyond the length of the tyres’ full…

Those who worked with him will insist that Romain Grosjean had the speed to win races in F1. “On his day, he was as fast as anyone out there – nobody could drive better than him,” says his former engineer Ayao Komatsu, who worked with Grosjean throughout his entire F1 career and helped him achieve his 10 podiums. “But it’s just that not every day was his day.” Many people probably won’t remember his career for those podiums – they were all achieved, as he puts it, in the “pre-Drive to Survive era”. For many ‘new’ F1 fans, he’s the guy who became a figure of fun after his opening-lap spin in Spain in 2017, or, most likely, the one who had that crash in Bahrain in 2020. So the…

At the start of the season you had to adjust the construction because car performance over the winter had exceeded expectations. Has the direction of development panned out as you expected since then? Yes. The decision to homologate a new construction was the right one. In Melbourne we realised the downforce levels were what they estimated for the end of the season. We were already developing the new material with the idea to introduce it in the no-blanket tyre [a ban on tyre blankets had been due to be introduced in 2024]. So we knew it was more resilient without changing the behaviour of the tyre in terms of balance and other parameters which are important for the teams. We didn’t change the profile, which is a very sensitive element…

FRÉDÉRIC VASSEUR MIGHT have been just 14 years old but he must have been doing something other than paying attention to the Italian Grand Prix in September 1982. Had he done so, the current Ferrari team principal would have been as astounded as everyone else when Mario Andretti made an F1 comeback at the age of 42, stuck his Ferrari on pole at Monza and finished third. Andretti’s late substitution massively boosted flagging ticket sales in a confusing and catastrophic year that had seen the deaths of Riccardo Paletti and Gilles Villeneuve. When Didier Pironi – the ’82 champion apparent – was seriously injured at Hockenheim and Patrick Tambay began struggling with back pain, Ferrari needed another star driver. Cue the call to Nazareth, Pennsylvania and an invitation for Andretti…

F1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND 23 THE ABU DHABI GP IN 5 KEY MOMENTS 1 Whatever he might say, Max pays attention to his stats Three laps from the end of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Max Verstappen achieved a remarkable statistic: he led his 1,000th lap in a single season. To put that into context, only 18 other drivers in the history of the FIA Formula 1 world championship have led that many laps in their entire career. Seasoned veterans such as David Coulthard (897) and Rubens Barrichello (854), never reached that milestone, despite the 568 F1 starts and 24 wins between them. Verstappen closed out the season in the same sweep of ruthless dominance with which he began the year. Under the floodlights of Yas Marina his 19th win…

@mattkewF1 facebook.com/gpracingonline A CHARM OFFENSIVE, BUT LIGHT ON THE CHARM Liberty Media and the Formula One Group are publicly listed companies, which means a green or red number next to their stock price indicates just how well life is going. Naturally, this leads to plenty of PR spin to soften any bad news so the value is protected. This is nothing new and hardly exclusive to F1. But recently, the charm offensive bordered on the offensive. When the championship was ascending the popularity mountain as Drive To Survive viewers tuned in to the 2021 dogfight between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, F1 was content to disclose the size of its TV audiences. On the eve of each season, growth and percentage gains were shouted about. Granted, contentious and compelling campaigns…

Photographer Jake Grant You can spray that again Another season where Red Bull wrapped up a title in Japan, though this time there wasn’t any confusion about whether it had actually happened or not. As is traditional, the team got together on the grid with the trophies for a celebratory picture… and then started throwing Red Bull all over the place. It’s become as much of a fixture at races as the Dutch and Austrian anthems, but it doesn’t get any easier to clean off your clothes and cameras. I got this image mere seconds before the dousing. Where Suzuka, Japan When 6:04pm, Sunday 24 September 2023 Details Canon EOS-1D X MkII 70-200mm lens, 1/800th @F3.5 Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em While poor old Charles Leclerc was instructed not…

A POIGNANT ANNIVERSARY IS ON THE WAY Martin Brundle doesn’t often take to social media since, with over a million followers across the main platforms, he understands both its importance and pitfalls. Particularly as the sport’s pre-eminent English-language commentator. When he does post something, it’s usually an insightful comment or column worth reading. So it was when a 2 November photograph of him kneeling by Ayrton Senna’s graveside appeared on my phone. “I visited Ayrton’s grave to pay my respects,” he wrote, adding, “It’s Dia dos Mortos in Brazil and the Cemitério do Morumbi Park was serene and beautiful. He must surely be resting in peace here.” In the first months of our New Year many more will join Martin in reflecting on the 30 years that have passed since…

But how does he shape up against the ones who have gone before, and why does he resist comparisons with them? Does he redefine greatness? And where might he stop? Very little fazes Max Verstappen. As Formula 1’s current dominator, and now a triple title winner, he’s wise to rivals’ attacking moves and the media’s probing work. Indeed, he’s instantly dismissive of comparisons with other world champions – publicly at least. Repeatedly on the weekend he sealed his most recent triumph, in Qatar, he insisted “I find it very hard to compare world champions”. But that’s consistent with his messages every time the subject has been broached on his waltz to the 2023 crown. He’s sensible to avoid the PR pitfalls of winding up fans with long memories. Plus in…