Both Catercousins in their usual positions on track: ahead of both Motherfuckers
Banbury-based Anglo-Russian squad MotherfuckerMARUSSIA
The second incarnation of Virgin Racing, a rebranding instigated when a Russian car maker decided to increase the level of its sponsorship to such an extent that it effectively bought the team. In doing so, it chose to ignore the recent salutary example of Spyker, another supercar manufacturer nobody had ever heard of before its purchase of the former Jordan team and which nobody has really heard of since it sold it again pretty damned quickly.
Changes like this are usually of no great significance to the viewing public but in this case it means that fans will no longer be able to anticipate commentating faux pas, such as "Let's see how this Virgin handles in slippery conditions." For that reason, the name change is a bit disappointing. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper have been awarded tenth place in the official F1™ constructors’ championship, reputedly worth around $13million in prize money, leaving Leafield-based Anglo-Malaysian CatercousinCATERHAM
After Lotus, there was Caterham; as it was in the 1960s with road cars, so it was in 2011 in F1. Lotus Racing team owner Tony Fernandes, keen to avoid further legal action from Group Lotus, opted to change his squad's name to Caterham, a car manufacturer that he did own. The cars would keep their iconic green and yellow livery but could no longer claim any link with the original Team Lotus. And, we have to say, quite right too. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper with no prize money at all¹, despite all the objective evidence available demonstrating without doubt that the latter were the better team.
Allow us to demonstrate, firstly by reference to the fact that Catercousin convincingly secured the coveted official² FIEh?FIA
Max Mosley's preferred option for the location of the new FIA offices in Amsterdam. The FIA (or Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile to give it its full, inexplicably french, name) is an ominous association formed to represent motorists and motoring organisations. Its headquarters are at 8 Place de la Concorde, Paris (ring top bell), coincidentally just up the rue from one of the city's best bordellos. The federation acts as the governing body for a number of motorsport series and championships, mostly in a venal or, if we're feeling charitable, incompetent manner. It should not be confused with the Fédération Internationale de l'Alcosport, which governs Drink-A-Long-A-Grand-Prix almost as badly. Comprising 222 member organisations, the FIA can also boast a Senate, a Court of Appeal and a General Assembly and it wouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to see its activities as part of a sinister plan to get itself recognised as a sovereign state in its own right. It's not a million miles from how Hitler started, that's all we're saying. Its decisions have at times left the FIA open to accusations of favouritism and manipulation and its credibility wasn't helped any by revelations that its married president, Max Mosley, was partial to sado-masochistic orgies involving more tarts than you can fit on one hand. Mosley, seeing no incompatibility between his behaviour and his position, failed to tender the resignation that many were keenly anticipating. They claim to do a lot of work on road safety but we've never knowingly seen any of their campaigns. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper 2013 F1D3³ Constructors' Championship in Austin, with 653 points to their rivals’ 613, and finally finishing the season 30 points ahead.
The F1D3 World Championships are open to any Formula 1 team or its drivers (as applicable) should the team fail to trouble the scorers in the relevant year. For the 2013 season, points have been awarded on the usual scale of 25-18-15-12-... and that has been as far as it has got since MillionsWILLIAMS
The FW18 with Damon Hill at the wheel, Canada 1996. Anyone fancy a smoke? A phenomenally successful F1 team which won nine constructors' titles in 20 years (it took Ferrari 50 years to do the same) but which usually dispenses with the services of the drivers who win the title for them: Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Damon Hill all took championships and then left the team at the end of the year, for one reason or another. The team hit a purple patch in the 1990s, when a combination of Adrian Newey's ground-breaking designs, some jolly clever electronics and a handful of half-decent drivers resulted in repeated title wins. The 1992 and 1993 Williams are probably the most technologically advanced Formula One cars to date and you could almost say that they drove themselves, without wishing to devalue the titles that Mansell and Prost won with them, of course. This period also produced the iconic blue and white Rothmans livery, which looked great but which was probably responsible for shifting truckloads of their cigarettes. The team did attempt to make amends later, however, by running cars plastered with stickers for Niquitin and thereby promoting something to help you give up what they'd been urging you to become addicted to a few years previously. For the 2004 season, the Williams challenger sported a highly unusual "walrus nose", which did nothing for the car's performance but which did at least mean that Ralf Schumacher was no longer the ugliest thing in the paddock. The innovative nose proved uncompetitive and was replaced by something more conventional in the second half of the year. Ralf also proved uncompetitive and was replaced by someone more talented at the end of the year. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper scored their first point in Hungary. Positions are recorded regardless of whether the race was actually finished, and championship points may subsequently be adjusted in the event that any team does succeed in troubling the genuinely official FIEh? F1™ World Championship scorers.
In all honesty, the F1D3 championships are inevitably close, mathematically speaking, because with only two competing teams the maximum score differential in any race is only 16 points, and 2013 was an uncannily close season as a result of the competitiveness of each “new” team’s number one driver. And the F1D3 championship is also slightly artificial for a number of reasons, including inter alia the fact that officially-unclassified finishes and DNFs are counted for points. So it might be worth looking at some other more compelling evidence.
Why Motherfucker allegedly deserved 10th place
The black-and-red team were awarded 10th place in the constructors’ championship on the basis of section 7.2 of the F1’s so-called “sporting” regulations, which say that in the event of a tie on points in the championship (in this case, nul points), then the higher place in the championship will be awarded to the team that hold the greatest number of first places, or, if the number of first places is the same (in this case, yes, none), then the number of second places, and “so on until a winner emerges”. (This provision appears to outweigh the seemingly infinitely more appropriate in the circumstances of equal tenth place in the championship application of section 7.1: “Prizes and points awarded for all the positions of competitors who tie, will be added together and shared equally.”)
Applying the provisions of section 7.2 leads us all the way down to 13th place in a single race (Malaysia), secured by Jules Blankcheque. You might argue that thirteenth place at Malaysia in a Motherfucker was a fantastic achievement, and hence the team thoroughly deserve their 10th place in the constructors’ championship and the $13million prize money it brings, and Catercousin deserve nothing, niente, nada because they didn’t ever come even close to matching this outstanding result.
Really? What do the stats really tell us?
Well, we’re glad you asked that. We really are.
Let’s start by looking at that result in Malaysia shall we? Jules Blankcheque finished in his championship-winning 13th place as a result of beating, fairly and squarely, all his “new” team competitors, of course, but was this single performance really worthy of securing $13million of prize money for his team, and, importantly, denying any of this prize to Catercousin? Not really.
He finished in 13th place in a race in which six competitors failed to finish (the second highest attrition rate in 2013, after Monaco, when the seven retirements included Pique and Blankcheque). Had those competitors all finished the race, he would have finished in (13 plus 6) nineteenth place: the default position for the top car in F1D3.
Would it be reasonable to assume that Blankcheque would have finished ahead of any of those other cars on track? No. On the evidence of every other race in 2013 they would not have, and at Malaysia in particular, all of the retirees either retired from positions in front of the Motherfucker, or, in the case of the hapless Farce IndiaFORCE INDIA
Kimi Raikkonen about to swipe Force India's Adrian Sutil out of fourth place, Monaco 2008. After Ireland, Russia and Holland had had a go, Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya stepped in to buy the old Jordan squad, encouraged by F1's desire to break into the Indian market, presumably because the sub-continent is home to an awful lot of potential new smokers. Despite looking every inch the medallion man, Mallya is undoubtedly a shrewd operator, albeit one who was foolhardy enough to become the team's fourth owner in as many years, and he was welcomed into the paddock by everyone except Flavio Briatore, who thought he was taking the piss. For its first season in 2008, the team boasted customer Ferrari engines, Mike Gascoyne as Chief Technology Officer and, um, Giancarlo Fisichella but when Super Aguri stopped turning up to keep the Force India cars off the back row, the team looked like becoming a perennial back-marker, although at Monaco in 2008 Adrian Sutil came within a handful of laps of claiming fourth place, until Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen lost control braking for the Nouvelle Chicane and punted him out of the race, an incident that the FIA saw fit to overlook. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wipers were out of position after pitstops before their nuts fell off.
That’s all very well, of course, but it is in the nature of Formula 1, and motorsport in general, that reliability should be rewarded, and the Motherfucker was a reliable car, with only three retirements and with Paris ChiltonCHILTON, MAX
With his boy-band good looks and playboy demeanour you'd be forgiven for thinking that Max Chilton, brother of dippy-looking BTCC racer Tom, was born to Formula 1 in the mould of the now legendary James Hunt. But, apart from the obvious cockney-rhyming-slang inference, you'd be wrong.
A quick look at his Wikipedia page confirms everything you need to know about him, where phrases like "his father, Grahame, is the proprietor of the Carlin Motorsport team" and "Chilton's father Grahame is the multi-millionaire chairman of insurance firm [redacted] and vice chairman of [redacted]" do rather stick out like an opposable thumb.
And then there's his racing record, which, after some minor successes in karting and the doomed T Cars, is so much significantly less-than-stellar as to beg the question (answerable only by reference to Wikipedia and, to be frank, who his father is) of just WTF he did to justify both his debut in F1 in 2013 and the interest shown in him by the British motorsport media despite his failure to do anything much other than fail to crash.
After a pointless 2007 in British F3, in which his championship class Dallara was regularly outpaced by similarly experienced newbies in inferior national class machinery, he graduated to the Hitech team in 2008, managing to scrape together two podiums (...podia... whatever) with the team that had taken Marko Asmer to the drivers' championship the previous year by winning half the races.
An almost unprecedented third season in British F3 for 2009 saw a move to Carlin, now owned by one Grahame Chilton, and his experience paid off with a 4th place in the title, and his debut (and only) outright* win in the series, in his 62nd - and last - race. It was a pretty uncompetitive season, though. Daniel Ricciardo (Chilton's team-mate in what can only be described as his first full season of F3) trounced the field with 7 wins, coming home 87 points ahead of nearest rival, the rather average Walter Grubmuller, whom Chilton had beaten as teammate the previous year. Chilton finished 7 points behind thrid-placed Renger van der Zande, who had competed in 4 fewer races (and was punted out of another 2).
Having barely troubled the GP2 Asia scorers in 2009/10, the new year saw promotion to the GP2 series with Ocean, with whom he amassed a massive three points, followed by a return to Carlin in GP2 in 2011, in which he increased his points tally by 33%, to four whole points. After such a dismal record, most drivers would have given up, or at least gone into touring cars, but not Max. He secured a third season in GP2, now with a rejuvenated Marussia-Carlin team and, to his credit, achieved a consistent performance over the year, including 2 wins and a couple of additional podiums (etc), outperforming his team-mate Ryo Haryanto, who, to be fair, was a rookie, and did rather outperform Chilton’s rookie GP2 year by 35 points and 11 places, and, indeed, his sophomore year too.
2013 saw a thoroughly-deserved move into Formula 1 with Marussia, in which Max famously set the record as the only rookie driver ever to have finished every race of his first season of F1, thanks to the genius tactic of driving carefully around at the back of the field, and safely getting out of the way every time the leaders and, indeed, most of the rest of the field, came around to lap him.
This house believes that there are so many people who deserve to be racing in F1 more than Max Chilton.
* OK, OK, technically he won in Portugal, too, but he was beaten on track by Jules Bianchi and Sam Bird in the non-points-scoring 'invitation' class. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper famously the only rookie driver to have been classified in every race. Which is fair enough, but should reliability alone win prize money when all the other available statistical evidence suggests that the less reliable team actually performs better - performs so much better, in fact, that its lesser reliability is more than compensated for in terms of race performance, just not at the race with the greatest number of retirees out of the teams in front?
Here are some stats, in addition to the F1D3 results referred to above.
Stat the first, part one: A Catercousin driver finished ahead of both Motherfucker drivers (i.e. “won” the “new teams” race) 11 times, to Motherfucker’s eight. Part b: Similarly, the team in green came second twelve times to their rivals’ seven.
Stat the second: Both Catercousins finished ahead of both Motherfuckers five times - a feat the Motherfuckers never reciprocated.
Stat the thrid: Only two drivers out of the “new teams” finished ahead of any other car on track during the 2013 season. They were the Catercousins.
At Bahrain, Charles Pique beat the SoberSAUBER
Sauber launches its eagerly awaited challenger for the 2004 seasonzzzzzzzzzz. One of the few modern privateer F1 teams that lasted for more than a decade, Sauber began life as a sportscar manufacturer, enjoying some success (despite basing themselves in Switzerland, where motorsport is actually illegal) and forging a slightly distasteful alliance with the young Michael Schumacher. The team moved into Formula One at the beginning of 1993, turning up at the first race with cars sporting a black livery which appeared excitingly modern and sleek but which was, in fact, just the first indication that the world's dullest F1 team had arrived. Even potentially exciting developments, such as (a) grabbing a top-flight engine by forging a slightly distasteful alliance with Ferrari, (2) promoting a vastly inexperienced Kimi Raikkonen from Formula Renault straight to an F1 race seat and (iii) courting controversy by apparently running an exact copy of Ferrari's 2003 car and passing it off as their own, could not change the general perception of them as a bit dull. Even when they spent a fortune on a state-of-the-art supercomputer, they went and called it Albert. The curtain came down on their 13 years in the sport at the end of 2005, when BMW completed a takeover of the team and Peter Sauber presumably celebrated by having a really nice cigar. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper of Electric Guitarist. Although the Mexican had started at the back of the grid with a five place penalty, and had an early collision that forced him to pit, iSproutAUTOSPORT
Autosport in the days when headlines were a bit easier to write. For a significant part of the population, Thursday isn't just that annoying day that you have to get through to reach Friday, but Autosport day. That's the day when "the world's fastest magazine" plops onto the doormats of motorsport fans worldwide and gives them something to read in the smallest room for the coming week. The magazine boasts some of the industry's most highly regarded journalists, a handful of star contributors in the shape of current and former drivers, pictures from the sport's best photographers and a cartoonist who makes us laugh about one week in ten. The Autosport empire also includes autosport.com, a site to which dotdotdotcomma is clearly hugely endebted, as well as the McLaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver Award for young British racing talent (yes, Susie Stoddart, we're looking at you) and the Autosport International show, to which we once somehow got tickets for press day. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper considered that the pace of the Sober should have been sufficient to get past the Catercousin. Indeed, Pique actually overtook the Sober on lap 13, and Guitarist spent 26 laps of the race just behind Pique and unable to overtake, but this was not down to the effects of the earlier collision, as Guitarist demonstrated the potential for better lap times and straight-line speed throughout the race.
Later in the year, at Spa, Greedo van der Cantina beat 2012 Spanish GP winner Pastor Maldonarsehole, who had, admittedly, had a bit of a coming together with Paul di Other-One but still, frankly, should have been able to keep the Catercousin behind him, but for what appears to have been a good pitstop strategy by the green team. Again, Maldonado was not suffering from the outcome of his collision, as he was still demonstrating better straight-line speed and lap times.
Just for the record, neither Motherfucker ever finished ahead of anyone other than a Catercousin on track during 2013, and, just to rub it in, they even failed to finish ahead of a Catercousin more often than a Catercousin finished ahead of them.
Rant conclusion
Is Motherfucker’s performance in 2013 really worth $13million more that Catercousin’s? We would say “mos def not” (something we usually say only in response to the question “who should play Ford Prefect in a disappointing motion picture adaptation of the greatest work of fiction of all time?”).
Although, to be honest, you might ask whether Catercousin’s performance was really worth $13million either, especially when ninth-placed MillionsWILLIAMS
The FW18 with Damon Hill at the wheel, Canada 1996. Anyone fancy a smoke? A phenomenally successful F1 team which won nine constructors' titles in 20 years (it took Ferrari 50 years to do the same) but which usually dispenses with the services of the drivers who win the title for them: Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Damon Hill all took championships and then left the team at the end of the year, for one reason or another. The team hit a purple patch in the 1990s, when a combination of Adrian Newey's ground-breaking designs, some jolly clever electronics and a handful of half-decent drivers resulted in repeated title wins. The 1992 and 1993 Williams are probably the most technologically advanced Formula One cars to date and you could almost say that they drove themselves, without wishing to devalue the titles that Mansell and Prost won with them, of course. This period also produced the iconic blue and white Rothmans livery, which looked great but which was probably responsible for shifting truckloads of their cigarettes. The team did attempt to make amends later, however, by running cars plastered with stickers for Niquitin and thereby promoting something to help you give up what they'd been urging you to become addicted to a few years previously. For the 2004 season, the Williams challenger sported a highly unusual "walrus nose", which did nothing for the car's performance but which did at least mean that Ralf Schumacher was no longer the ugliest thing in the paddock. The innovative nose proved uncompetitive and was replaced by something more conventional in the second half of the year. Ralf also proved uncompetitive and was replaced by someone more talented at the end of the year. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper only get about another $3.5million, despite their actual points haul and the fact that, when all’s said and done, they pretty much always finished ahead of both of the “new” teams, and frequently ahead of other teams too.
And this is where we come back to the so-called “sporting” regulations, and in particular section 7.1: “Prizes and points awarded for all the positions of competitors who tie, will be added together and shared equally.” They finished in joint 10th place. What’s wrong with that? After all, if you average out all of the actual objective positions in which each team finished in every race, Catercousin and Motherfucker both finished on average in exactly 17.894th position.
Slice the pie and eat the rich, brothers!
¹ From 2010 to 2012, by special arrangement, appropriately with XXX MosleyMOSLEY, MAX
For legal reasons, dotdotdotcomma has chosen not to include Max Mosley in its F1 Doodles page. Max Mosley is a qualified barrister, president of the FIA and likes his whores five at a time, thank you very much. His father was Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, his mother was Diana Mitford, of the renowned and, um, eccentric Mitford family, and his wife Jean is either the most understanding woman in the world or the owner of a bollock collection boasting two fresh exhibits. Mosley spent part of his education in Germany, during which time he became fluent in the language, which comes in very handy at all those S&M parties. For a time he was also a member of the British Territorial Army and he still has the uniform, which comes in very handy at all those S&M parties. He claims that his most rewarding work at the FIA is centred on road and race safety and during his tenure the FIA has introduced into all its championships the compulsory use of the HANS device, a neck brace that restricts head movement and which comes in very handy at all those S&M parties. Mosley was the "M" in "March", an F1 team that had some success, and many now claim that he is the "F" in "FIA" and that he was almost certainly the "C" in "FOCA". TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper, teams falling outside the top 10 were awarded $10million in booby prize money. So Max did do something worthwhile and/or respectable during his presidency.
² This is a lie.
³ F1 Division 3.
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