United States Grand Prix

The Belgian GP follow up was all about the last 3 laps of the race and the Lewis Hamilton (non)win. However there were other things going on behind the scenes.

Failure of Bernie Ecclestone and Tony George to find some common ground lead to US GP elimination from the F1 calendar. We had no US GP this year, there is no US GP featuring on 2009 provisional race calendar. It looks like last weekend in Belgium some first steps were taken to bring the US GP back, perhaps as early as in 2010. Bernie Ecclestone held talks with team principals and the topic was the return of F1 race to United States. There is hardly any team principal happy with the current sitaution and it looks like the F1 team bosses made this clear (yet again) to Bernie. I am not sure if the current economic climate has anything to with it, but this time Bernie seems to be listening.

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F1Wolf

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There are no North American drivers on Formula 1 grid this year and it is hard to see anyone joining anytime soon. The United States GP has been omitted from calendar this year and at the moment does not feature on 2009 calendar either. Except for few sponsors the Canadian GP remains the only connection between North America and Formula 1. Here is a brief overview US and Canadian contribution to Formula 1:

1) First of all America created some chaos in F1 statistics . In the early days, between 1950 - 1960, the Indy 500 race was part of the world championship. European drivers usually did not take part in that race. Also the drivers and teams that raced at Indy did not take part in the European F1 races. The race was therefore pretty much irrelevant to the F1 World Championship. The Indy 500 winners from those years however feature in Formula 1 history charts.

2) Including the Indy 500 drivers mentioned above Canada and USA have supplied Formula 1 with 163 drivers. Three of them - Phil Hill, Mario Andretti (both USA) and Jacques Villeneuve won the F1 drivers titles.

3) The North American drivers claimed 50 race wins (11 of them are the Indy 500 wins), 54 pole positions (11 are Indy 500 poles), 53 fastest laps (again 11 of them are from the Indy 500 races) and 165 drivers made it to podium (here 36 came from Indy 500 as drivers could change in the cars those days). In total US drivers collected so far total of 998 points, Canadians 342 points.

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F1Wolf

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Felipe Massa’s Turkish GP win last weekend was his third in a row on the Istanbul track. I wrote in my previous post that this the first time this has happened since Michael Schumacher… Well I was not exactly right …

Michael Schumacher’s most recent hattrick of wins on the same track was his United States Grand Prix string of wins from 2003 to 2006. These were actually 4 race wins in a row. The hattrick came after the “great” win in 2005 …

There is however one more, even more recent hattrick - Kimi Raikkonen’s 3 Belgian Grand Prix wins in a row. Raikkonen won in Belgium in 2004, 2005 and in 2007. There was no Belgian Grand Prix in 2006.

Photo: Daimler Media

F1Wolf

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