F1 Fanatic

I don’t see why Williams would want to get rid of either of them.

Money. Sad to say but Williams are not in the best financial condition at the moment. They are an independent team that needs to book profits for the owners and investor – so they do not have the benefit of backing from a manufacturer who can afford to sink in a big budget. They have also lost almost all of their high-profile sponsors in the past few years, and do not have the equivalent of what McLaren have with Vodafone, or Ferrari with Marlboro, holding up the bottom line.

BAR will be there next year, likely on less money, and the Hulk will probably need to either spend a year on loan at a lower team or will take a seat at Renault/Lotus. If Massa is ousted at Ferrari, there could be a merry-go-round that would see the Hulk get a better drive, but I don’t see it happening any other way (I think the chances of Massa not being at Ferrari next year are increasing each time he gets in the car)

If anyone needs to be booted the hell out of their seat, it’s Petrov.

He is alright, just give him another year. He might not ‘arrive’ in the same fashion that Hulk just did, but he is only an offseason plus a few more races away from being a good driver who can deliver points.

Petrov has more points.

One more point. In a car capable of six times as many points as he currently has.

I mean, come on, even Piquet scored about 1/3 the points of Alonso in 2008, and I don’t think Kubica is better than Alonso. Petrov simply cannot block such a good seat when there are far better drivers on the grid in worse seats, including Hulkenberg and Kobayashi. He’s been shocking. Vitaly doesn’t deserve to drive anything better than an HRT next year.

No. He was already safe. A couple of races ago Patrick Head said he’d done enough on the track to retain his seat, meaning that sponsorship and money was an issue. This merely reinforces his seat in F1, and if Hulkenberg isn’t retained by Williams then Renault could do a lot worse than him.

Petrov isn’t better than Hulkenberg. He has better racecraft, but that’s it. Also Petrov has been much the same throughout the season – fast, but crashprone. Hulkenberg has shown that he can learn and improve, which is critical for rookies. Petrov is my no means a bad driver and I’d like to see him in F1 again next year, but he doesn’t deserve that Renault seat.

Has it saved his Williams seat? Only time will tell, has it kept in F1? Almost definatley.

Petrov certainly hasn’t been as good as Hulkenberg, but the “rookie” argument comes very strongly into play when talking about Petrov. Unlike Kobayashi, Hulkenberg, DiGrassi and the other new drivers, not only is he a rookie F1 driver, he’s a rookie open-wheel driver – his background is in a totally different type of motorsport. He hasn’t had the benefit of years toddling around in smaller formulae, learning how single seat open wheel cars behave, how teams go racing, how to work with engineers and designers, how to set up these cars, racing on these tracks, or the F1/Gp2 culture. It’s a pretty incestuous grid out there, we tend to forget.

Petrov hasn’t done the job for Renault from a results point of view, but I still think given his situation he’s been a better driver than Piquet or a lot of the others. He’s a true rookie in a way the others aren’t.

I’ll say it here: if Williams ditch either Hulk or Rubens for next year in favour of a pay driver, they’re flushing the team down the drain. This is one of the dominant names from F1, who have fallen by the wayside due to a general slide into mismanagement – they lost Adrian Newey because they wouldn’t give him Patrick Head’s job, despite the fact that Newey even then was acknowledged as a golden man to have. Then they ditched Hill in the most callous and unnecessary fashion, and poisoned their ability to attract top line drivers. Then they let the technical side of the team slip into disarray.

Barrichello is something the team needs – a proper technical expert who can not only drag the team along by demanding results but by teaching the engineers where they’re going wrong. That’s worth far more than the 8 or 10 million that a driver like Maldonado can bring in.

Hulkenberg proved this weekend his reputation built up in GP2 is one he’ll continue into F1, he’s a potential top rank driver with a long career ahead of him. Again, he’ll win points for the team that are worth a lot more than 8 or 10 million that his ex GP2 team-mate can bring in.

Frank Williams started admitting his own weaknesses this year by bringing in a new investor and handing over the CEO reins. Those new heads shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

Hulkenberg qualified that car miles past where it was supposed to be.

Which would have been impressive if qualifying was run in the same conditions as the race. But it wasn’t – Hulkenberg qualified in variable conditions, and it wasn’t the first time the rpevailing weather scrambled the grid. Ever watched the Malaysian Grand Prix? It’s almost as if the race has been deliberately scheduled to be run in the middle of a monsoon.