Less than a week to go

March 11, 2007 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

The 2007 Formula One season kicks off next weekend in Melbourne, Australia (see the whole schedule) and it’ll be interesting to see which teams have made the most improvement.

It could be hard to choose who to support with their being four Brits in the driver line-up: David Coulthard (still with Red Bull), Jenson Button (Honda), Lewis Hamilton (paired with Alonso at McLaren) and Anthony Davidson (Super Aguri), but I’m sticking with Button – he needs to really build on last year’s successes. Despite his confidence, I certainly don’t think we’ll see Ralf on the podium very often.

As for the teams, I’ll follow Honda because of Jenson but I’d like to see McLaren do well again, and with World Champion Alonso alongside newbie Hamilton it’ll be interesting to see how they fair. I’m not sure how Ferrari will fare now that Schumacher’s gone – how long will “his team” stick around? Ross Brawn’s on sabbatical and he had a major hand in MS/Ferrari’s victories.

Some of the most significant changes for this season are probably going to be missed by anyone who’s not an avid fan – Bridgestone is now the sole tyre supplier, which could be an advantage for last year’s Bridgestone users like Ferrari; and engines used during the last two races of 2006 must now be used during the 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 seasons, with the FIA only permitting “minor development”. On the plus side, the two-race engine rule no longer applies to the (newly extended) Friday practice sessions.

Anyway, here are the team/driver line-ups (alphabetically):

BMW Sauber	Nick Heidfeld	Robert Kubica
Ferrari	Kimi Raikkonen	Felipe Massa
Honda	Jenson Button	Rubens Barrichello
McLaren	Fernando Alonso	Lewis Hamilton
Red Bull Racing	David Coulthard	Mark Webber
Renault	Giancarlo Fisichella	Heikki Kovalainen
Scuderia Toro Rosso	Vitantonio Liuzzi	Scott Speed
Spyker	Christijan Albers	Adrian Sutil
Super Aguri	Anthony Davidson*	Takuma Sato
Toyota	Ralf Schumacher	Jarno Trulli
Williams	Nico Rosberg	Alexander Wurz

(Names in bold denotes World Champion, 2006; names in italics indicate newbies; Davidson has been a test driver for ~6 years but this is his first season as a full driver; Spyker was bought from Midland (MF1) last year, which in turn was previously Jordan.)

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