How To Become Formula One’s Next Big Star
Before
he becomes a globe-trotting racing god, the modern Formula One driver
competes in GP2. It’s a racing series removed from the madness and
attention, created to breed talent for the ultimate challenge of F1. We
spent a Grand Prix weekend in GP2 to see the lives of Formula One’s
future stars.
Interludes of Cacophony
In the summer heat
of Central Europe, in the thrum of a racing weekend, it is cool and
hushed in Sauber’s garage. On my left is the Formula One racing car of
Kamui Kobayashi, the Japanese driver who
debuted in F1 with a swashbuckling, overtaking bang
on the afternoon Jenson Button won the 2009 world championship in
Brazil. Barely an hour after qualifying for the 2012 Hungarian Grand
Prix, the car, a Byzantine assembly of pipes, tubes, bottles, gold foil
and carbon fiber, is in a myriad pieces, which is the way most racing
cars spend most of their time. Mechanics tune away on the exposed bits
in no great hurry. On my right is Ines Koschutnig, the general manager
of
Racing Engineering, a Spanish motorsport team who compete in GP2, and now it’s not quiet anymore.
It’s
a screaming, devastating fury of GP2 racing cars out there, the wail of
24 4-liter V8’s reverberating off the roof of the grandstand above the
Hungaroring’s start-finish straight, the plexiglass panes separating the
track from the pit lane shaking violently, like willows in a sonic
boom, and there’s a great cloud of dust above the track, glittering and
whirling in the hot sun. Ines is unperturbed. She’s wearing the Racing
Engineering summer uniform of red shirt and black shorts, black
sunglasses, she’s looking at four screens at the same time, and then,
two seconds later, it is quiet again.
Her cars are out there, racing.
In
the back of the garage is a rack with a dozen pneumatic wheel guns and
there’s a Sauber mechanic who does nothing for the entire duration of
the 38 lap GP2 race but polish them to gleaming perfection. Sauber’s is a
white world with a dash of black and a sprinkle of red. They’re Swiss.
The floor of the garage is space station white. It is a relief to see
the occasional skid mark here and there.
Ninety seconds or so
later, the field blasts by again, the sound not quite as violent and
compressed as before because the cars had dispersed a bit. Over the
laps, the field will spread out. The boundaries between silence and
noise will blur.
The fabulously named Johnny Amadeus Cecotto Jr.,
son of retired Venezuelan racing driver Johnny Cecotto and winner of
the previous GP2 race in Germany, a week before, crashes his Barwa Addax
car into the tire wall. It’s a violent crash made disconcerting and
eerie by the complete silence it happens in. It’s very real but even
though we’re within walking distance of the accident site, we see it on a
screen and we know nothing about Cecotto until he removes his steering
wheel and emerges from the cockpit, unhurt. Later, in the paddock, I
will see the remains of his car’s nose cone discarded on the floor of
the Barwa Addax garage, a twisted mess of carbon fiber. When broken, you
can see carbon fiber for what it really is, fabric soaked in resin,
then baked in an oven. The nose cone looks like a pair of old jeans.
The Racing Engineering cars come in for their pit stops. The stops may not be as fast as
McLaren’s recent 2.3-second world record but the human mind is not a stopwatch and what the pit crew does looks athletic and fluid and impossibly fast, like
an East African marathoner at full throttle.
The new wheels are placed on aluminum stands to position them at just
the right angle. The car comes in, the driver gliding it to a stop with
sub-inch precision. The old wheels come off. With the same movement, the
mechanics grab the new wheels, the nuts already inserted, and wheelgun
them into place. They signal with their hands. The driver then takes
off, a shrieking, sliding, violent exit from a confined space. It’s all
over.
Then,
suddenly, the race is all over, too. It begins in cacophony and ends in
silence. The Racing Engineering cars finish 7th and 9th. Ines and I
leave the Sauber garage. Out there, in the heat and the dust, a blond
British boy born in the 1990s just won his first serious motor race.
“The
realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total
commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of
almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and
pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is
very small.”
— David Foster Wallace: “
The String Theory”,
Esquire, July 1996
The Hungaroring is
shaped like a eukaryotic cell undergoing cytokinesis,
with turns 2 and 12 forming the cleavage furrow. Sandwiched between
these turns, on a flat rectangle of asphalt normally occupied by a
parking lot and a go-kart circuit, is a swarm of transport trucks, tarps
and makeshift garages making up the GP2 paddock during the Grand Prix
weekend. It is a microcosm of Formula One, and if you stand in the
middle and look southwest, towards the start-finish straight, you will
see Formula One’s gleaming, gigantic motor homes, like so many castles
in the sky, floating above the GP2 paddock. There is a symbolism to the
geography. The reason to be in GP2 is to aspire to drive a Formula One
car one day.
Formed
in 2005, the GP2 series took over Formula 3000, which had itself taken
over Formula Two, as the last step for a driver on his way to Formula
One. The vast majority of the current crop of young talent in Formula
One has graduated from GP2. Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, Sergio Pérez,
Bruno Senna, Kamui Kobayashi, Pastor Maldonado, Romain Grosjean—the only
name missing is Sebastian Vettel, who came straight from the Renault
World Series. Driving in GP2 is not a career in itself, it is a stepping
stone: If you win the championship, you cannot race in GP2 again.
The
path to Formula One is, of course, not straightforward. While there are
informal alliances between F1 teams and GP2 teams—Racing Engineering,
for instance, is friendly with Sauber—there is no equivalent of a yearly
draft. Formula One is a secretive, complicated, devious business, and
deals are struck individually. Talent by itself
is not enough.
There’s also been a heavy influx of rookies to Formula One over the
past few years, limiting the number of seats likely to come on the
market in the coming years.
Compared
to the hundreds of people who man a Formula One team, a GP2 team is
almost a family business. Racing Engineering, for instance, has less
than two dozen people working for it, and that includes the drivers.
What makes this possible is that, unlike in Formula One, the teams don’t
build their own cars but buy them from the series, who also handle
repairs and upgrades. The teams are responsible for setting up the cars
and racing them.
To the untrained eye, a GP2 car would probably
pass for an F1 car. They are, in fact, the fastest things around a track
after F1 cars and IndyCars. The current chassis are carbon fiber
monocoques manufactured by Dallara, powered by a 612-hp, 4-liter Renault
V8 rev-limited to 10,000 rpm, and raced on the same capricious Pirelli
compounds used in Formula One. They are, to put it mildly, crazy fast.
The
GP2 season is a little over half as long as the Formula One season and
most of its races are twinned with F1 as support events for the Grands
Prix. To complicate things a bit, there are two races each weekend.
After a 30-minute practice and a 30-minute qualifying session on Friday,
the first race is run on Saturday afternoon. It’s called the feature
race and it’s structured like a shorter Formula One race: 180
kilometers, at least one pit stop, the same points system.
This
is where things get tricky. There’s a second race on Sunday morning,
called the sprint race. The grid is determined by the results of the
Saturday feature race, with a twist: the first eight finishers are
ordered upside-down, and a shorter race with no pitstop for ⅔ the points
is then run. This is why Racing Engineering’s Fabio Leimer was so
unhappy with his 9th place finish on Saturday, which Ines and I watched
from the Sauber garage. A single overtake would have put him on pole
position for Sunday, which, in turn, would have paved the way for
victory on the Hungaroring, where overtaking in the dry is notoriously
hard. And this is also why Nathanaël Berthon, the team’s other driver,
was happy with 7th: it put him on the front row for the 120-kilometer
sprint race, where he finished second.
In all, it’s a smaller,
cozier, less crazy Formula One, with the focus on the drivers, not the
cars. “We’re here to promote the drivers,” Alexa Quintin, GP2’s head of
communications, tells me after Sunday’s sprint race. She’d worked for
the Renault F1 team in the past and when she talks about GP2, she sighs
with obvious relief.
