My favorite team, Toyota, saw both of its cars retire. Trulli had what he referred to as a “stupid” fuel pump problem that stalled him at the beginning of the race, forcing the field to scrap a lap of the race. Trulli started from the pit lane, but did eventually retire. Ralf Schumacher retired after some 40-odd laps due from body damage to his Toyota, which left him relatively uncompetitive.
Another disappointment was for American Scott Speed in his Scuderia Toro Rosso Ferrari, who did tremendously well in terms of pace all weekend long, including qualifying. Unfortunately, a tire blow-out left him to retire during Sunday’s race.
However, I must admit that there were two tremendously bright spots in the weekend. Super Aguri Honda got their first championship point with Takuma Sato’s 8th place finish. And the brightest note of all to me was Red Bull Renault’s David Coulthard finishing in a strong 5th place.The economist has gotten the better of me. I had to sit myself down on Sunday night and realize that the comments from many internet forums may be right. The question is regarding how a team designs a car. For example, it has become popular opinion that Toyota and Honda subscribe to their own corporate ideology as to design a car using a group of engineers as a team. Now, other teams don’t disagree with this, but using Red Bull as an example, you can see that they also believe in having one person become an integral character in their car. That person for Red Bull Racing this year is Adrian Newey.
Toyota had tried a big superstar engineer two seasons ago with Mike Gascoyne. And in my opinion, it worked, but Gascoyne left at the beginning of the season last year. Why? Well, a lot of people said it was because Toyota could not keep going along with that genius-engineer-guy mentality. And if I understand the Japanese work paradigm properly, it makes sense for there to be a clash. Heck, a part of me wants to ask Ben Casnocha (whom I believe knows business methods about as well as anyone) if it is part of the Japanese work ethos to revolve around working only as a team.
In any case, does it mean that in Formula 1, to be a successful team you must subscribe to not having a good team of engineers, but rather, a superstar engineer or aerodynamicist? It seems as though the case for superstars is a hard one to compete against. Therefore, being in Formula 1, it would make sense that just being a good team and having a lot of funding would in the end not be good enough.
(picture of David Coulthard thanks to Grand Prix.com and The Cahier Archive)
5 comments:
What no mention of Hamilton? While you may not be a fan of McLaren, but you have to admit that the guy is a rock star and is clearly going to be a prominent figure in F1 for a long time.
BTW, nice blog you have here Mike ;) I linked to you from my site.
Thanks Dave. I'll admit Lewis is quite stout. What I'm most impressed with is his lack of mistakes. I've simply made an effort not to get caught up in just Lewis Hamilton this season.
That's a fair point, there is definately a lot to be excited about in F1 this year. One day I'll see a race in person.
I think so, yes!
Hey - I have lived in Japan for the past 4 years, and yes, Japanese people have a very strong team ethos. I've always admired how Japanese people instinctively know how to work together. For instance, when you are with Japanese people in an elevator, someone always steps up to open and close the door for the next person. When you go camping with a group of Japanese people, there isn't a lot of conversing about who does what. People just start pitching the tent, lighting the fire, etc. And somehow, tasks for which only one person is required tend to be carried out by 5 people or more. For example, it always takes at least 5 secretaries to cut and serve the cake at an office birthday party. It is like some kind of invisible silent choreography is going on. I also think the Japanese educational system facilitates this - children are made to clean up their classrooms together every day after school. It has its good points and its bad points.
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