FORCE INDIA MERCEDES
--- TEAM INFO ---
TEAM OWNER - Vijay Malliya
TEAM COLOURS - White, Green & Orange
CAR - Force India VJM-02
ENGINE SUPPLIER - Mercedes
TYRES - Bridgestone
TECHINCAL DIRECTOR(S) - Mark Smith, James Key
MAJOR SPONSORS - Kingfisher, Medion, Whyte & Mackay, ICICI, Bangalore Royal Challengers Cricket Team
--- STATS ---
FIRST SEASON - 2008
GRANDS PRIX - 18
WORLD DRIVERS TITLES - 0
WORLD CONSTRUCTORS TITLES - 0
WINS - 0
POLE POSITIONS - 0
POINTS SCORED - 0
--- DRIVERS ---
20 - Adrian Sutil (Germany)
21 - Giancarlo Fisichella (Italy)
TEST DRIVER - Vitantonio Liuzzi (Italy)
With the new Grand Prix season less than 3 weeks away, its time to start looking forward to the new season and i will do so by looking at each team individually, starting with last season's backmarkers Force India.
Indian Billionnaire Vijay Malliya, the owner of a Brewery company and Kingfisher Airlines, bought the team formerly known as Jordan (1991-2005) Midland (2006) and Spyker (2007) and has invested a lot of his own fortune in trying to get the team further up the grid, and last season, there were signs of great potential, Chief designer at the time Mike Gascoyne had designed a neat chassis coupled together with Ferrari's latest spec V8 engine in an attractive white, red and gold livery, yes the car was mostly to be found at the back of the grid battling with the Super Aguri's before that teams demise due to financial difficulties but on average they were only between 1.5 and 2 seconds off the pace of the leading cars which is quite an achievement.
It helped also that the team had 2 very talented drivers, and for 2009, they will keep the same lineup, their lead driver will be the Italian Giancarlo Fisichella, a F1 veteran of 13 years and 3 time race winner whilst with Renault, easily the most successful Italian driver of modern times with his smooth racing style, he curtails his Grand Prix racing nowadays with the running of his own team in F1's feeder series GP2 (Fisichella Motorsport International) in partnership with ex F1 team owner Enzo Coloni and his son Paolo Coloni.
And joining Fisichella will be the German youngster Adrian Sutil for his 3rd season with the team after joining when the team was called Spyker in 2007, he was a frontrunning driver in Formula 3 and is a friend of ex F3 team-mate Lewis Hamilton, and like his friend, Sutil has driven his best races in wet conditions, msot notably at Monaco last season when in changable conditions, he managed to get up to as high as 4th place with a handful of laps remaining before beign cruelly taken out by Kimi Raikkonen after the finn misjudged his braking for the harbour chicane and crashed into the back of Sutil's car.
They do hope though to be higher up the grid, and most of the pundits agree tha they probably will be up in the midfield this season too, mostly because of a brand new techincal partnership with McLaren, after signing an agreement with the Woking based frontrunners, they will have use of McLaren seamless shift gearboxes, use of McLaren's KERS system, assistance of loaned out McLaren engineers and most of all, a customer engine deal with McLaren's engine suppler Mercedes. The only problem with that deal was because it was signed so late and that the team had already sacked Mike Gascoyne as designer, the team had to re-design a new car to fit the Mercedes powerplant and to conform to the new strict aero' regulations in just over 3 months. The result is a simple design with main features being bargeboards underneath the nose section and a high chassis/high nose concept which brings about its own fears over the car's centre of gravity and load on the front suspension which would mean the front tyres going off more quickly.
But the fears over the car's late completion have so far not materialised as in pre-season testing, the new car (the VJM-02) has been quick straight out of the box posting times within a second of the Ferrari's and McLaren's. But with 2 extremely talented drivers on board and with this years cars being more focused towards driver skill, its to be expected. I can see Force India mixing it in with the midfield runners and hopefully for their sake, nicking the odd points finish too
2009 PREDICTION FOR FORCE INDIA
DRIVERS
Giancarlo Fisichella - 19th
Adrian Sutil - 15th
CONSTRUCTORS
9th
No comments:
Post a Comment