Lewis Hamilton in Turn Four – perfect use of steering and throttle, plus the correct minimum speed, gives him a straight car mid-corner. The rest, from the point, is a piece of cake

Barcelona looks lovely in the late winter, and so it is that 2012 F1 cars gleam in the yellow sun, starbursts of florescent orange, or a deep aquatic blue suddenly catching the shaded eye.  For all that, I actually found it quite difficult to see the cars in action on Tuesday, February 21.   I headed straight for Turn Nine of course, because I love to watch F1 cars swallowing blind, fifth-gear corners, but I came away confused.  Lewis Hamilton flew through first, in that chrome-and-orange -“No plans to change the nose at this stage” – McLaren – and he was impressive enough: he tore into the corner without a lift in fifth, then grabbed fourth two-thirds of the way through it, as the tyres scrubbed away speed.  Astonishingly, though, Nico Hulkenberg , to my eye, looked every bit as good at this point of the circuit in the Sahara Force India – as did Fernando in the Ferrari.  It was only when Bruno Senna appeared in the Williams FW34-Renault, car understeering pretty much from entry to exit, that I could see the first three in any kind of relief. On the plus side, they were all mind-blowingly quick – quick, neat and very, very tidy.

I didn’t see Daniel Ricciardo on the limit at this point, but I did see him grind to a halt right in front of me.  Good, I thought, he’ll climb out and we’ll have a bit of a natter.  Not a bit of it.  He stayed strapped into the cockpit of the STR7 until “help” arrived – help in the form of fire marshals, track marshals, two circuit vehicles, a lifter-truck and a bunch of STR mechanics.  Excellent, I thought:  they’re going to fix the broken throttle or the duff electrics and send him on his way.  Not a bit of it.  The bulk of the next 15 minutes were spent covering the car in a blue cover and raising it carefully onto the back of the truck.  By this point Daniel had magically disappeared and had returned by car to the garage.  I stopped by the STR boys once the day was over and asked surreptitiously about the cause of the problem.  The response, after much deliberation, was the earth-shattering news that it had been “a technical issue”.  F1 teams – even the mid-fielders – are today paranoid about “secrecy” – more’s the pity.  If I had to guess, I’d say that they ran him out of fuel.  That’s what it looked and sounded like – and so that should be taken into account when assessing the STR times from Tuesday.

(As the sun went down, incidentally, several teams decided to embark upon pit stop practice.  Very impressively, I thought, Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren all had last year’s cars ready for the purpose – which is not an easy thing to achieve in a world in which racing cars are generally only in one piece when they’re on the circuit, let alone the garage.)

Anyway, back to the lap.  The approach to Turns seven and eight (the left and then right flick at the bottom of the hill) is usually quite fun but today was again strangely neutralising.  Charles Pic looked pretty good in the Marussia at this point – as did Bruno.  About the most noticeable thing, as they came off the power and dived into the left, was the exhaust note of the McLaren.  It still has a distinctive rasp, I’m pleased to say.

Turn Five is the very slow left-hander.  I didn’t stay here long, because the viewing angles weren’t right, but I did see Sebastian Vettel, all balance and timing, suddenly light up his left front Pirelli and run wide.  Ha!  A Vettel mistake!  2012 has begun!

Turn Four is a nice corner – a long, long third/fourth gear right-hander with a long enough piece of straight road on exit to make it a key ingredient of the lap.  Again my viewing angles were imperfect but here, mid-corner, it was at least not difficult to see the genius of Lewis Hamilton.   This corner is all about rotating the car at precisely the right moment (which by definition is different from lap to lap, of course) and using the steering and throttle to produce a twist in the car mid-corner – all a function of having exactly the right amount of brake pedal pressure at the initial turn-in point and finding exactly the right minimum speed.  In Lewis’s case, the result was a McLaren that mid-corner was pointing virtually straight towards the exit, giving him a nice, clean run onto the straight with the minimum of load.  Lewis would probably say that he has too much oversteer here; my point is that he used that oversteer to his advantage:  he managed it perfectly.   With Bruno, Pic and Perez (the only other drivers out when I was watching), there was telltale mid-corner understeer, a sure sign that too much had been asked of the loaded front in the first phase of the corner….which in itself can be traced back to the initial steering and brake pedal movements and pressures.

I’ve never watched from the famous Turn Three at Barcelona, so here was my chance.  Many drivers in the past have claimed to have taken this very fast right-hander “flat” on a pole lap, or on some desperate lap near the end of a race, on light tanks, but of course we’ve only ever had their word for it.  How would Turn Three greet the 2012 F1 cars?

Well, the good news is that it isn’t “flat”.  Not from what I saw and heard this Tuesday, at any rate.  (I suspect that most of the quick runners were carrying quite a lot of fuel and that Three might indeed be lift-free when the cars are lighter.)  Indeed, I hadn’t been there long, chatting to the marshals and waving to the eight spectators behind me – the eight fans behind me –  when Heikki Kovalainen suddenly ran right out of road and kicked up the exit dust in the run-off area.  I pictured him telling the engineers later – should they have asked him about it – than he had just “run a bit wide”.  In reality, I thought, as I watched the sunset and awaited the last 30 minutes of testing, this was the sort of mistake that probably cost Peter Collins his life at the Nurburgring in 1958.  Racing drivers have been “running out of road” for as long as they’ve been sitting behind the wheel and pressing pedals.  It’s just that there’s no penalty these days and the matter is very quickly forgotten.

Finally, then, I found the right place to watch in Barcelona:  it is on the outside of the track, on the section just before Turn Three.  You see them exiting Two (a left-hander) in third gear before a very tricky direction change for Three.  The more stable the platform for the car into Three, the better your chances of manipulating the forces through to the corner’s exit, and therefore to the longish straight that follows it before Four.   Again, Lewis was peerless at this point, as I think the adjoining photographs show.  Whilst Ferando Alonso darted almost back to the centre of the road before giving the Ferrari his signature flick into Three, Lewis kept the McLaren much straighter on exit, freeing the car of load, and was then much less ambitious with his turn-in territory.  Given the radius that Fernando would proscribe, how did Lewis get the McLaren’s nose to tuck into Three?  By superbly soft initial steering inputs and velvety use of the throttle.  Fernando was on full power sooner than Lewis but I daresay Lewis was quicker, thanks to the load he wasn’t thrashing through the car, about 50m after the exit of Three.  Seb Vettel was great to watch here, too:  he chose road between Lewis and Fernando, with an aggressive flick to the left from the exit of Two, but then made a very gentle turn into Three.  I suspect that the RBR8 already has a little more bite than the McLaren – thus Seb’s ability to jink the car almost at will.  I should add, of course, that the Ferrari also has plenty of grip:  there’s no way Fernando would be doing what he was doing into Three if he was driving a bus.  Or a Ferrari 150^th.

Nico Hulkenberg also looked very good here, as did Heikki Kovalainen (yellow wheels aside).   As on the other corners, Perez and Senna just seemed to be asking too much of their cars, weaving them out almost to the centre of the road before giving them lots of steering input for Three.  They were fun to watch, of course – but were a world away from Lewis at this point.

A lover of all things Italian – cars, food, design – Colin most of the time lives in San Francisco, where he is a major player in a blue-chip car club called The Candy Store.   Members of TCS meet regularly at local circuits to drive their hardware – and also to enjoy the company of such special guests as Parnelli Jones and Gordon Murray when the moon is in the seventh house.

The reason I bring Colin to your attention is that he regularly attends F1 races, is extremely well-connected to many of the F1 teams and is putting together a number of selected F1 tours, for limited numbers, in 2012.  The prices will not be cheap – I leave that for you to discuss with Colin (colinbach@msn.com) – but I know he his planning tours at the very least to the Monaco, Canadian and Italian GPs.

Location is everything, of course, when you attend an F1 race, so here is an example of the sorts of grandstand seats he has secured:

Monaco practice from the tribune opposite the pit lane, overlooking the swimming pool exit; qualifying from Tabac, overlooking the harbour;  and race day at Monaco from the outside of Casino Square.  And in Canada he has obtained seats with a panoramic view of the Turn One complex (see below).

The Front Row Tours (as Colin calls them) will include dinners and cocktails with special F1 guests and hotel accommodation where the drivers stay (the Columbus at Monaco, for example).

If you love F1, therefore, and if you want to talk, think and eat F1 with like-minded people, contact Colin.

Oh yes.  And he also owns a Williams FW12 (passive-suspension)-Judd, as if you hadn’t guessed.

Jenson Button at Turn Five – relatively late approach but beautifully balanced

• A nice circuit, Jerez, for the spectator.  Two hard braking areas – into Turn One and also into the hairpin – allow uninterrupted views of the entire braking and turn-in process;  and Turn Five – a fast, uphill right-hander, can be watched from the outside in all its glory.  The wind was chilly on Day Two, when I finally managed to have a decent look at the action, but the sunshine was non-stop.  Stunning were the Andalucian hills and sky.

• Michael Schumacher was supremely good into Turn One, staying way over on the right of the straight, accelerating through to seventh gear with the car unloaded, before angling back to the left at the last possible moment.  Granted, Michael on this day still had the benefit of a blown diffuser.  Relative to the Michael of 2010/11, however, this was an altogether different driver.  He braked to a point on the left of the road, still with the car at perhaps 15 deg from “straight and parallel”, then nudged the Mercedes into the right-hander, downshifting against increasing steering load.  This plainly asked a lot of the car – but the grip was there and Michael used it almost to perfection in a long run in the middle of the day.  Only at 4:45, and then again at 5:50, when the shadows were long and the Pirellis were getting a little tired, did I see Michael revert to a little of what we saw a little of in the last two years.  Catching diResta, he braked a metre or two late into Nine, ran wide…but still minimised the damage with some nice manipulations.  In short, Michael was Michael this day in Jerez.  I think he likes the new Pirellis.

• Mark Webber also looked sharp and very quick, although out of the last corner, and towards Turn One, he began his diagonal perhaps 50 metres earlier than Michael (as is Mark’s regular style).   Perhaps 200rpm go missing here.   Slightly too-early throttle application against abrupt steering load also gave him quite a lot of mid-corner understeer in the middle of One, but, into Two, a downhill, right-hand hairpin, Mark was faultless.  Always looking for an earlier upshift, and a master of “floating” the car – letting it settle for a millisecond, with minimal inputs – Mark in Jerez looked every bit the winner of the previous race.  And then, through Turn Five, Mark showed just how phenomenally quick he can be.  He and Michael dominated the afternoon on this fast corner, the substance of which is almost blind when you’re sitting in an F1 car.  Superb to watch.

• Kimi looked great in all the slow corners, even if he twice missed his braking point into the chicane just before day’s end.  All the old Kimi was on show – the great use of a decreasing brake pedal pressure against steering load, the exquisite feel for the right moment to load-up the car with steering.  He was almost in Michael’s wheeltracks on the stretch from the last corner into Turn One – almost but not quite.  Kimi’s E20 was straight as it crossed the timing line but he began his diagonal to the outside perhaps 20m earlier than Michael.  Maybe 50rpm lost here.  Out at Turn Five – the daunting, fourth-gear corner – Kimi was a tad disappointing, frequently leading the car in from a point about a metre later than Michael or Mark and thus effectively running out of road mid-corner.  I’m sure he was saying afterwards that the car suffers here from understeer but to my eye his initial manipulations were not helping the problem.

• Paul di Resta looked very good, I thought.  He’s developed into a sort of Barrichello-Button hybrid.  His general approaches are not as soft – as late – as those of Rubens but he has all of Rubens’ rhythm and timing.  His engine sounds also suggest that he has much of Jenson’s suppleness of footwork from mid-corner to exit, even if he does put a lot of energy onto the loaded, outside front at the expense of the torque that Jenson generates from the inside rear.  Paul looks like a driver who can go round and round all day without varying his lap times (given the inevitable variables) by more than a tenth or two.

• Daniel Ricciardi to me did not look comfortable in the Toro Rosso.  Into Turn One there was a nice, late diagonal but this was followed by a frantic-looking, last-minute dive for a bit of “flat car” to get the thing stopped.  He was very (relatively) late turning-in into Two, and heavy on the loaded front – and the pattern was similar into the much-faster Turn Five.  This gave him a nice, clean, safe exit, of course, but if you freeze-framed Daniel mid-corner alongside, say, Mark you’d see a Toro Rosso with lots of room between it and the marbles and a Red Bull with about 2cm to spare…

• Pastor Maldonado was out late in the Williams FW34 – around 4:00pm – but at Turn Five, where I was watching at that point, he was sensationally fast.  The Williams looked very good at this fast corner, which I think augers well for the season ahead.  The car seemed less effective into the hairpin, and through the slow-speed chicane, although Pastor was on hard tyres  and a very heavy fuel load at this point so it was difficult to judge.  In terms of his driving, Pastor looked excellent, I thought -  neat, precise and efficient.

• Heikki Kovalainen was similarly concise in the new Mike Gascoyne car, although I have to confess that I found it quite difficult to watch him in detail because of the eyesores that are those yellow wheels.  They worked on Lotus 18s and 25s but even Colin Chapman switched to black wheels for the 33; and no-one with any feel for Lotus would run either a Caterham or a Lotus 7 on yellow rims.  Change, please!

• Jenson Button, as ever, just made the whole thing look absurdly simple.  There were none of Michael’s straight lines or Mark’s mid-corner high-speed flicks.  The McLaren just went round and round, di Resta-like, always on the conventional racing line, always under perfect control.  Does it have any vices?  Is it quick?  I have no idea.  Jenson makes bad cars look just as good as quick ones.  It didn’t appear slow;  I can tell you that.

• Felipe Massa looked very good late in the day, when he was finally able to string some laps together (prior to that, Ferrari were in telemetry mode:  out-lap, in-lap, out-lap, in-lap).  The new Ferrari gave the impression of being fast on both slow and fast corners – and I say “gave the impression” because Felipe appeared to be driving well within the car’s limits at every given moment.  And he was doing so with a nice, taut entry phase, just as he used to have in the good old days.  No reason to be anything but positive about Ferrari at this early stage of the day.

• Strange how the “ugly” nose sections of the 2012 cars blend into the background when you’re watching them on the circuit.  I barely noticed, them, I must say;  and the Williams FW34, into the sun, looked fabulous, as I say.

• It was fun to bump into two “locals” in the Jerez paddock – Malaga residents Dave Price (who gave Nigel Mansell his first big F3 break in 1979 and in 2012 will be running McLaren GTs) and Jo Ramirez, the Mexican who played important roles in the careers of the Rodriguez brothers, the Gulf Porsche 917s, Francois Cevert and Ayrton Senna.  Both looked to be in the peak of condition, which only goes to prove that winter sunshine is not only good for new F1 cars but also excellent for us humans, too.

The one-off Alfa retro Alfa designed by former Ferrari Technical Director, Enrique Scalabroni. Gorgeous aluminium bodywork was hand-hewn by Giorgio Giorda

Argentine design engineer, Enrique Scalabroni, is one of the most creative people I know.  Following successful careers at Williams, Ferrari and Peugeot, and more recently as the man behind Asiatech Engines and the BCN GP2/F3000 team, Enrique is today working for a number of different clients on a variety of interesting projects.  Here are his original drawings of a one-off “retro” Alfa Romeo he completed recently.  Note the neatness of hand and the attention to detail.  The curvaceous aluminium bodywork has been beautifully rendered by another Spanish-based artisan from Argentina – Giorgio Giorda.    The steel tube chassis is  30mm X 30mm (section) X 1mm (thickness) and the power unit is from the Alfa Montreal.