On tap this week:
- Button classy to the end
- Ricciardo was F1 star of the year
- Vettel’s impressive numbers
- Canada’s next F1 team principal?
- Quote of the Week: Christian Horner’s spitballs on 2016 F1 engines
- Don’t count Gordon out yet
When your boss is treating you badly, it's pretty easy to find yourself coasting at work. Well, that's if you are not Formula One driver Jenson Button.
With his McLaren team keeping him in contract limbo for next season, the 2009 world champion demonstrated on Sunday why he is one of the classiest competitors ever to pull on racing overalls.
Facing what could be his final grand prix without a proper send off, not only did Button get the maximum out of his McLaren in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, but his fifth place finish also ensured his team ended the year fifth overall in the constructors standings ahead of Force India.
"All you can do is go and do your best out on the circuit and your best for the team – I feel that I am on the top of my game and I proved that this year and I can't do anything else," said the 15-year F1 veteran when asked if he could do anything more to show he deserved to stay with McLaren.
"I would like to thank everyone in the team, it's been a real pleasure working with the guys for five years and nice to end the year on a relative high."
It is thought that McLaren has signed two-time world champion Fernando Alonso for next season, with his teammate still undetermined. Button, 34, and his 22-year-old teammate Kevin Magnussen are likely front runners, with the latter seeming to have the inside line.
While Button insisted that he approached Abu Dhabi "like every other weekend," things got tougher before the race.
"I got in the garage and the mechanics looked at me and gave me a smile and a hug and then it was like: 'Wow, I am just about to get into an F1 car guys and this is not what I need right now'," he said.
Random Thoughts
Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton may have taken the driver's world championship on Sunday in Abu Dhabi, but many would argue that he wasn't the star of the 2014 Formula One season.
That honour just might be better placed on the shoulders of rising star Daniel Ricciardo of the Red Bull squad. Unlike Hamilton and his Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg, the 25-year-old Australian Ricciardo didn't enjoy a huge car advantage over the rest of the field to help him fight his rivals and he still won three times to end the year third overall in points.
Saddled with a less potent Renault motor compared to the Mercedes engine also powering the front-running Williams cars, the Red Bull driver usually went into most grands prix outgunned by the guys beside him. The point was punctuated by the fact that Red Bull failed to score a single pole this year and both its cars started outside the top two rows on the grid in nine of 19 races.
When it came to races, Ricciardo drive the wheels off his car, pulling off spectacular passes to drag his Red Bull up the time sheets by sheer force of will.
"It's been pretty much a perfect season, as perfect as it can be without holding a world title, so no real regrets, no complaints," Ricciardo said after Sunday's grand prix "It's nice to not only start the season well, but to finish it well also and I think all the way through it was good – we had a strong summer as well, so the start, middle and end were pretty good."
By the Numbers
There's no doubt that Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel experienced a tough 2014 season, scoring no wins or poles and just four podium finishes. Many feel the lack of success this season played a huge role in Vettel signing a three-year deal with Ferrari that sees the German join the Italian team in 2015.
Although he had a bumpy end to his five seasons with Red Bull, there's no doubt that Vettel put up numbers that just about any F1 driver would be pleased to see for their entire career.
In his 133 grand prix starts with Red Bull, the 27-year-old scored 38 wins (29 per cent success rate), 44 poles (33 per cent), 65 podiums (49 per cent) and 95 finishes (71 per cent) in the points finishes on his way to four driver's titles and four constructors championships.
In addition, he became the youngest ever world champion (23 years, 134 days old) in 2010, established the mark for most poles in a season (15) in 2011, and set the record for consecutive grand prix wins (9) and tied Michael Schumacher's record for most wins in a season (13) last year.
Technically Speaking
A few minutes after the end of Sunday's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Toronto's Gavin Ward announced on Twitter that he'll no longer be travelling with Red Bull Racing after taking a new job with the team.
"After nine years living the dream trackside with RBR, moving into the aero dept. Exciting challenge and still living the dream," he tweeted.
It's a significant move for Ward, who spent this season as the performance engineer for Daniel Ricciardo after filling that same role for Mark Webber previously. It's well-known in the paddock that any engineer who wants to move up through the ranks in F1 and become a team technical director needs to have aerodynamic experience.
Ward began working for Red Bull as a student intern in 2005 while attending Oxford Brooks University and landed a full-time job with the team when he graduated. He was there for pretty much all of the team's firsts: podium, pole, win, and world championship.
In his 152 races working trackside at Red Bull Racing since 2005, he watched the team take 50 wins, 57 poles and 116 podium finishes as well as sharing in four driver and four constructor world championships.
Quote of the Week
"If we kept the V6 you could go to a twin turbo and that would address the noise, you could go to a standard KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) that would take out a huge amount of cost of development, and maybe even standardize some of the components and that way you can have a much cheaper, better sounding engine, keeping perhaps some of the architecture of the existing V6s. That's just an idea we have, but I am sure it would be met with a gasp from one of our competitors."
–Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner on F1 engine changes that he'd like to see in 2016 when only a majority of manufacturers are needed to modify the rules, unlike 2015 when there must be unanimous agreement on any new powerplant rules.
The Last Word
With Hendrick Motorsport resigning Kasey Kahne to a new deal and NASCAR Nationwide champion Chase Elliott waiting in the wings, speculation was rampant last week that four time Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon's time with the team may be coming to an end.
Although team owner Rick Hendrick continues to talk about the18-year-old in glowing terms and certainly has a plan for the son of 1998 Cup champion Bill Elliott, it would be just plain silly to think it involves pushing one of NASCAR's most successful and popular drivers out of the sport.
The reality is that the team will keep Gordon around and field a Cup car periodically for Elliott to help him get his feet wet as he stays in Nationwide for another year to get more seasoning, something Hendrick said would happen in an August radio interview.
"I think you'll probably see him run a few races next year," he said.
"I think he's going to do a super job whenever the time comes. I think we'll surely, probably the second half of next year, we'll probably see him in some races."
A more likely possibility is seeing Elliott start his full-time Cup career with the Stewart-Haas outfit, which gets its engines from Hendrick, for a few seasons before moving to the big team once Gordon decides to call it a career.
When that decision comes from Gordon is anybody's guess. The 43-year-old is coming off a great year where he took four wins and 14 top-10 finishes on his way to sixth overall in the new Chase for the Cup championship format. Under the old non-Chase rules, Gordon would have won the 2014 title.
Jeff Pappone