MJ's Blog

It was with a slightly nervous disposition that I went into this years championship, after all Schumacher had dashed all my hopes in '04 by literally going through the competition as smoothly as a knife through butter. If that was not bad enough Ferrari had put their poor pre-season testing effort behind them and the modified F2004M started the season after some record breaking laps around Mugello.

From my perspective it seemed as though there was very little out there capable of catching them, even though Renault and McLaren were setting some awesome times. Williams pre-season testing was going reasonably well, if not rather slowly compared to the ultimate pace, but the biggest surprise was BAR. The surprise team of '04 were having some pace issues but these were overshadowed by huge reliability problems with the engine. The new for '05 engine regs specify that an engine must last for 2 race weekends with only very minimal work carried out between the two races. BAR had had reliability issues in '04 but only towards the beginning of the year and only on Sato's car- to the relief of the British fans who realized he was there just to keep the boys at Honda happy. But now in build up to a year that they had hoped would bring them so much they were unable to get a single race distance out of a unit, let alone two. On one weekend in Jerez they 3 engine failures, this compares to Renault who had 2 (or maybe just 1) during the whole of pre-season testing and McLaren who had none.

further down the grid and there were a number of teams seemingly fighting to be best of the rest, these including- Williams, Red Bull, Sauber, Toyota. The top times were coming from the Sauber boys as switched to their new rubber and put plenty of laps down to prepare what was the first car to be produced in their ultra high tech wind tunnel. I say the Sauber boys but honestly I mean just Felipe Massa as Jacques Villeneuve was producing very little and there were daily stores that he was to get the boot before the Australian GP in March. Another team with obvious problems was Williams, who like the year before were having a very slow start to their development programme but unlike BAR it was not a reliability issue but a very noticeable lack of downforce which was causing their problems. Thankfully they had chosen Nick Heidfeld to pilot the second Williams, a worryingly simple choice that took several months to come about. The other two midfield teams were doing a reasonable job, both Red Bull (RBR) and Toyota seemed reliable and both had a decent pace- Toyota in particular. This was a very positive sign as there had been voices suggesting that Toyota would drop out of the sport if they did not start producing soon and the increase in performance was mainly due to the excellent efforts of Mike Gascoyne. Gascoyne had turned Jordan and Renault into race winning teams in only a couple of seasons and it was hoped he could do the same at Toyota. Red Bull's problems were not in terms of speed or reliability (thanks to an excellent Cosworth V10) but drivers. They had 2 drivers and 1 seat, neither candidate looked suited- Luizzi was a rookie with no experience and Klien had a year under his belt but looked just plain slow.

At the back of the grid Minardi were doing their usual job of holding up the back but they were to be joined by Jordan. Jordan's '04 campaign was EJ's last as he had sold up sticks to some Russians who apparently had big plans for F1 (although the rumors of them wanting to sell the team began to surface around the time of the Monaco GP). In '04 the Jordans were a second a lap quicker than the Minardi's but it was soon clear that the gap had closed. However, both teams had yet to bring their new cars out (both ETA'd at the San Marino GP) and there was considerable hope that the new Russian owners would turn it all around.

All this tension, all this angst and the season had yet to begin.