Norris McDonald's Auto Racing Blog

What's with all the geezers, retreads in F1?

What’s with Formula One’s signing of geezers and retreads these days when there’s a whole bunch of young tigers around, waiting for a shot at the Big Time?

Michael Schumacher (on the cusp of 43) is an exception, He’s won seven World Championships, so he gets a pass.

But the signing the other day of Pedro de la Rosa to a two-year contract by the HRT team was a shocker. The guy’s 40. If he was Superman, I could maybe understand it. But he’s not. He’s a very ordinary driver from Spain who’s had a very ordinary F1 career (one podium in 86 starts) and should be retired.

Kimi Raikkonen’s return to F1 as a Lotus-Renault driver in 2012, announced Tuesday, is also a puzzle. Does anybody seriously think he is going to be anywhere near the pace after a two-year layoff?

Remember Jacques Villeneuve? After getting his butt kicked by Jenson Button at BAR, JV was without a ride for 2004. For reasons never completely clear, Flavio Briatore signed him to drive the final three races of the '04 season for Renault and it was embarrassing to watch because not only did he fail to score points, he failed to finish any of the races on the lead lap.

He said it was the layoff that killed him and that was for less than a full season. Kimi’s been out for two years, so he doesn’t stand a chance.

(By the way, the Kimster spent his time the last two years in the World Rally Championship, where he was largely unnoticed. He took a crack at NASCAR and bombed out there also.)

Mark Webber will turn 36 next season and has already said it will be his last year. Good for him, because despite a victory in the last race at Brazil, he was clearly not the driver this year that he had been in 2010 and things will only get worse.

Jarno Trulli, 37 going on 73 (it seems), will again drive for Lotus in 2012 (when it will be called Caterham) and it boggles the mind that he still has a seat. He has done exactly nothing the last two years – no podiums, no poles, no nothing. He finished 21^st in the world championship of drivers in 2010 and again in 2011.

Who decides to hire these guys?

Poor Rubens Barrichello is 39 and counting and telling everybody that he will drive for food - er, I mean he'll sign to drive for anybody in 2012 for a very small retainer – whatever that means in F1 parlance. Williams hasn’t called him to say he’s still on the team and they were nogotiating with Raikkonen before he signed with Renault.

Presumably, Kimi was too rich for Sir Frank’s blood, hence Rubens’ public declaration that he comes cheap.

It’s a mystery that the old guys and the comeback artists are being courted, particularly when there are drivers out there of the calibre of Nico Hulkenberg, Robert Wickens, Esteban Gutierrez and others, who could properly be called "racers," rather than all the octegenarian "drivers" we’re stuck with now.

Meantime, here’s something to chew on. 

Renault is not anxious to have the injured Robert Kubica return to the team, particularly now that Kimi Raikkonen is the big name associated with it. Although Kubica has said that he won’t be ready for the first race of 2012, the suggestion is that he’s not far off and Autosport has speculated he could do some rehab work at Ferrari.

Now, Ferrari has poured cold water on the speculation but I have a friend who really knows his stuff, who says flatly that the Scuderia’s denial means something is definitely in the works. Writes my friend:

"If Kubica somehow rounded back to form, then the gamble would pay off in a huge way. . . It would put pressure on Felipe Massa if Kubica were to somehow get it back together. Ferrari would not hesitate to dump Massa."

I think he's on to something.

Other racing news: 

– There are problems with the new Dallara Indy car for 2012, the car that Dan Wheldon spent most of 2011 testing. In a nutshell, it’s been significantly slower than expected in tests at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and only marginally quicker in road course trim. Dallara and IndyCar have a mere four months to get everything right, with the opening race of the 2012 IZOD season scheduled for March 28.

– Old-time supermodified star Harvey (Leadfoot) Lennox was inducted into the London Sports Hall of Fame recently. Here’s a link to the induction video:

Harvey Lennox induction

– The NASCAR Canadian Tire Series will operate under a new points system in 2012, it was announced this week.The new structure awards points in one-point increments. As an example, race winners earn 43 points (equal to the maximum number of starters), plus three bonus points for the win. Drivers also can earn an extra point for leading a lap and leading the most laps, bringing the race-winning total to a possible maximum of 48 points.

The points system was simplified, NASCAR says, to make it easier for fans, competitors and the industry to understand. All series under the NASCAR umbrella, from Sprint Cup on down, will be scored the same way.

'Crazy Leo' tackles the Tall Pines

Photo by Mèlina Lamoureux (www.melinalamoureux.com)
'CRAZY LEO' URLICHICH LETS IT ALL HANG OUT DURING A RALLY EARLIER THIS SEASON

 

The 41^st Rally of the Tall Pines, taking place in Bancroft this weekend, is featuring the winners of the last five TPs – Antoine L’Estage, who's won three of them, including last year’s, and Pat Richard, who's won two – as well as a new kid on the block, 26-year-old Leonid Urlichich, a.k.a. “Crazy Leo.”

 

Urlichich, who’s sitting third in this year’s Canadian Rally Championship and hopes to make a run for second at the final rally in the national championship this weekend, insists his nickname has nothing to do with marketing.

“Everybody thinks I named myself that for publicity,” he told me during a telephone conversation we had this week, “but that’s not what happened. When I first started rallying, one of my teammates asked me why I didn’t take better care of my car. They said, ‘Your car’s all scratched up, aren’t you going to paint it?’ and I said,'Not until I roll it,' and they thought I wasn’t serious.

"But then I did and they said, 'That's it, you’re crazy,’ and that’s been my name ever since.”

One of the largest fields in Tall Pines history will start the rally Saturday morning - 60 cars and driver/co-driver combinations are entered - and although L'Estage and his co-driver, Nathalie Richard, have wrapped up the 2011 title, that doesn't mean there won't be plenty of action.

The Tall Pines covers more than 500 kilometres of twisty roads (including 200 km of stages) around Bancroft, a town about mid-way between Peterborough and Pembroke.

The big matchup of the weekend is expected to be between national champion L'Estage, who was runner-up this year in the Rally America championship,  and British rally driver David Higgins, who won the Rally America tiitle.

And the Tall Pines is no picnic. Those roads around Bancroft at this time of year can be muddy, icy and sometimes snow-covered.

Urlichich, who came to Canadian from Russia nine years ago to attend Trent University in Peterborough, thinks he might have an edge in the Tall Pines.

"The Tall Pines is based out of Peterborough," he said. "When I left Russia, I had the choice of three countries - the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. I chose Canada and I came to Peterborough, which is the home of the biggest rally in the country.

"So I know these roads. I have a better knowledge of these roads than any other. I don't want to sound too optimistic but if I stand a chance at any rally, this is the one."

Urlichich nearly wasn't around to follow his dream of rally driving. A big crash on the street three years ago last summer left him seriously injured with six broken bones, including his spine.

"It took me a year to recover," he said. "Thank God that nobody else but me got hurt and I learned my lesson and that's the last time I drove fast outside of motorsport. I have a metal plate in my arm, all sorts of things, as a result of that.

"I like to think that it made me better because the one thing it really made me do is exercise regularly. If I didn’t go to all that physio, all that recovery, I wouldn’t have been able to race."

Besides his success in rallying, Urlichich has also taken a crack at auto racing. His rally team, Can-Jam Motorsports, treated him to an outing during a round of the Castrol Canadian Touring Car Championship at Mosport on the American Le Mans Series weekend in July.

"The road race was a bonus from the team because I didn't crash a rally car this year," he laughed. "The deal was that if I kept the rally car in one piece, and they didn’t have to spend money fixing it, I would get a road race as a bonus. So we went to Mosport.

"I qualified second to last, but finished the first race in eighth place and the second race in seventh. I was off the track, but for me I considered that normal. But the marshals weren’t impressed. One marshal said he counted that I went off 11 times and maybe I went off once but not 11 times. Anyway, I was in a Subaru, so I knew how to handle it in the run-off areas."

Urlichich said he has plans to go rally racing in the United States next year and would like to take a crack at the X Games. 

"Next year, we almost certainly have secured the funding to do U.S. events that would allow us to go for the North American rally cup," he said. "I'm really excited about that. Obviously, the X Games would be a dream come true sort of thing, too." 

(With a monicker like "Crazy Leo," I don't know how he could miss.)

Urlichich, who works for a Toronto media company and is busy these days promoting it on social media, says his ultimate ambition is to rally race on the world stage - the World Rally Championship.

"Every day I eat, sleep and dream to become a good competitor in WRC. That’s the goal. Between myself, the team and my family, we’re pushing so hard to make it happen. Maybe nothing will come of it, maybe I’m just not fast enough or I don't have enough talent, but we’re doing everything we can to make it there. I’ll do whatever it takes to get there."

"Crazy Leo" says he's still single but he wonders how long he's going to be able to hold out.

"My mother starts into me, you know, saying that maybe I should find a permanent girl, but not yet. She's not pushing for grandkids yet, but I’m starting to feel the vibes."