The Official 2009 Australian Grand Prix Thread
Australian Grand Prix Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit
Laps: 58
Circuit length: 5.303 kilometre (3.295 mi)
Race length: 307.574 km (191.110 mi)
2008 Winner: Lewis Hamilton - McLaren-Mercedes - 1h 34m 50.616s (194.577 km/h)
2008 Pole Sitter: Lewis Hamilton - McLaren-Mercedes - 1:26.714
2008 Fastest Lap: Heikki Kovalainen - McLaren-Mercedes - 1:27.418
TV Schedule (Mountain Time)
Free Practice 2 - March 26 11:30pm (Speed)
Qualifying - March 28 12:00am (Speed, TSN)
Pre-Race - March 28 11:30pm (Speed)
Race - March 29 12:00am (Speed, TSN)
After 5 long months of winter testing, Formula One is back! 2009 brings a huge number of rule changes for the cars (http://forums.beyond.ca/st/251894/re...9-regulations/), and with the new rules, it looks like there's going to be a huge shift in performance of the teams. Top teams such as McLaren is expected to struggle as a backmarker, and teams that barely made it on the field, Honda, now Brawn GP, topped the timesheets of almost every session they participated in. Every team started with a blank sheet of paper, with their own interpretation of the rules, which made performance completely unpredictable.
As with every Formula 1 season, this weekend brings a nice dose of controversy. 3 teams, Brawn GP, Toyota, and Williams are expected to be protested by the remaining 7 teams. These 3 teams used a loophole in the regulations to build a diffuser extension using the space from the crash structure, thus increasing the amount of exiting airflow, creating more downforce. It is said that there's a 10% overall downforce improvement from this loophole alone, good for 0.5s per lap. Most likely, the 3 teams will race under appeal, which means we won't know the official results until months after the weekend is over.
There's also rumors that one of the teams will be protesting Ferrari on their KERS system. Apparently, it's retribution for the diffuser protest, and is more political than technical. We'll know more tomorrow morning.
Defending Champion Lewis Hamilton will have a tough road ahead of him this weekend. It is said that the McLaren is suffering from a lack of downforce... as much as 20% and over a second a lap slower than the top group. McLaren has made in various press release statements that they expect to be eliminated from the first qualifying session, which means they will not qualify better than 16th. This is a huge blow for the newly crowned champion in the start of his title defense. On the bright side, critics of Hamilton will see how well he does in an underperforming car, so hopefully he'll be able to silence some of those critics.
The big news is the jaw dropping performance of Brawn GP. Honda, which pulled out of F1 in late 2008, was sold to Ross Brawn, and gave him $100m to run the team for this year. Because Honda dedicated their resources in the 2009 contender early on, their leadtime in CFD and wind tunnel research resulted in a car that's nearly a second faster than the 2nd place car (most likely BMW or Ferrari). All this WITHOUT having KERS in their car. Their aerodynamics is so strong that with a switch to Mercedes power (which would've definately upset chassis balance as it was designed for a Honda motor) they topped the timesheets almost everyday by over a second. In comparison, they were nearly 2 seconds a lap faster than McLaren with the same engine. Will Button finally be able to win races, or will Rubens be able to show the winning performance from his Ferrari days?
Ferrari and BMW has been doing well in winter tests too, and it's expected that they'll be the teams right behind Brawn GP, but Ferrari has been plagued by reliability gremlins over the winter so I don't think they'll do too well at the opener. BMW has been fast and consistent, they should be the 2nd best team on the field.
The rest of the teams? A big question mark. There's really not enough data from winter tests to really gauge how well everyone is doing since we have no idea what program they're testing. What we do know is that McLaren and Force India were the slowest teams. Williams, Toyota, Renault, Red Bull, Torro Rosso sit right in the middle. We'll know more after the first day of free practices. Who knows... maybe Williams, who clocked the fastest Jerez test time in the last day might be ahead of Brawn GP.
If you're looking for a place to watch the F1 race live with a few of us beyonders, shoot me a PM and I'll add you to the mailing list. I'm hosting the first race at my place, it'll be a great way to start off the season.
Go McLaren!
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