The so-called “silly season” in Formula One, where the teams name their drivers for the following season, used to happen in the summer. This year it was delayed until after the season ended, and a couple of seats have just been claimed.
Force India announced Friday that Nico Hulkenberg would replace Adrian Sutil and join Paul di Resta as regular driver next year. Sutil had been with the team for several years, and Hulkenberg had worked as reserve driver this year.
“It wasn’t easy to watch from the sidelines this season, but I did my best to help the team and show what I was capable of,” said Hulkenberg.
In the past few weeks we also learned the Kimi Raikkonen would join the Lotus Renault team, and that his teammate would be Romain Grosjean. That ended the long saga of whether or not Robert Kubica would be able to return to the team after sustaining injuries in a rally accident last February.
We have also learned that there will be three Frenchmen in the series next year, with Charles Pic and Jean-Eric Vergne coming in as rookies to join their more experienced countryman, Grosjean. Vergne has joined Toro Rosso, and will race alongside the Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo; they are replacing Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari.
Alguersuari has expressed surprise at not being retained for next year, justifiably, since he had an excellent season – as did Buemi. But Franz Tost, the team director, has said that Toro Rosso is a team meant for training rookies. It was here, of course, where the Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel learned the ropes, and won his first race before moving to Red Bull to win the title the last two years running.
Sebastien Buemi “has been with us for three seasons and Jaime for two and a half,” said Tost. “Both of them worked hard for the team, doing their very best and achieving some good results.
“However, Scuderia Toro Rosso’s ethos has always been that of the ‘rookie training school’ and with over two seasons under your belt, you are no longer a rookie,” he added. “In an ideal world, drivers would move from Scuderia Toro Rosso to Red Bull Racing, but there are no vacancies with our sister team right now.”
It is not just drivers who are being shuffled around. At the HRT team, which is moving from Germany to Spain this winter, the team director for the last two seasons, Colin Kolles, has been dropped and replaced by a Spaniard, the former driver Luis Perez-Sala. This is in keeping with the team, also known as Hispania, fulfilling its goal of operating as a wholly Spanish team.
Joining the recent flood of news before Christmas, the IndyCar series made public on Friday a report on the multiple-car accident at the Las Vegas Speedway that took the life of Dan Wheldon in October. The report said that the current car design and the design of the Las Vegas track both played a role in the accident, but played down the role of the track, saying the accident could have happened anywhere. At the time of the accident, drivers and the media had criticized the track for being too fast and too dangerous for the 34 cars that ran that race.
Although the report came with jargon-filled descriptions of what actually killed Wheldon, the conclusion in simple language is that his head hit a fence pole at the side of the track.