2009 has brought on a seachange for Formula One as a raft of technical changes have dropped from the sky to alter the entire shape of the F1 cake. So while the teams pack up their DVDs from their city apartments and move their couches to their new coastal village shacks, Patronise has a glance through the new rulebook.
Technical - Everything that makes the cars look uglier
As you tune into Melbourne for the first time this year, the first thing you'll notice is a Ferrari F60 charging at you to poke your eyes out. The new aerodynamic regulations have forced the teams to design an outrageously wide, low slung front wing. In an effort to stop the teams being their cheaty selves the front wing has a standard middle part, while further out towards the endplates the designers are free to go nuts as before in an effort to coax the airflow around the front tyres.
Further down the car a bit of nip/tuck has taken place, as the FIA has placed 'boxes' where the teams can't add any bodywork. The box spans basically the entire car. Gone are the flickups and indy wings of the past, now there's a nice clean shape the chassis which goes some way to making up for the front wing, but as you'll see and be blinded by, not quite far enough.
Down the back the rear wing has been put on the rack and ended up all skinny and outrageously tall. Lets hope it gives us some good racing, because it throws the proportions of the car so far out it's comical. The easiest way to imagine the end result of these changes for a 2009 F1 car is to think of Robert Kubica with a Mohawk. And in Force India's case, gout.
Just below the wing the diffuser has been widened and limited to a certain height, but you'll be hearing enough about that over the Melbourne weekend so I'll not go into it here.
The only other obvious visual change is the slick tyres on the four corners of the car, or in Piquet's case probably only three. In this area F1 has abandoned it's roots and appeased the "Ah yes, the good old days...but not too old!" crowd. The idea behind this change is to cut down on 17.3% of internet based moaning and move the cars grip ratio away from the aerodynamic side back towards the warm embrace of mechanical grip.
Under the hood, the first little change is a slight tweak to the rev limit which has now come down to 18,000rpm to hopefully stop those pesky Ferrari engine failures, err, I mean make everyone's engine more reliable and thus cheaper.
There's also the much talked about KERS system, which according to a video released by Red Bull Racing allows the boffins to capture energy from the friction of heavy braking, this gets stored in a couple of AA batteries placed about the car (or in Williams' case, a spinning top), then the driver can mash a button on his wheel and through an electric motor he gets an extra 60-80bhp for 6.6 seconds a lap. All in a slightly uninterested German accent too.
Sporting - Administrating uglier cars
There's also been a change in the management of the sport. Before you unfurl your 'Yay Max and Bernie are gone' banner and put in your nomination for FIA presidency the same old crew are still running the show, but there's been a minor tweak or three to the way the cars go racing.
Teams are now (not only rev) limited to 8 engines for the entire year, which I'm certain is less than Kimi Raikkonen broke in 2004. The twist is that they can use those 8 engines however they please, for instance they could use two engines for just qualifying stuff and Monaco then the other 6 for the rest of the Sunday afternoons if they please. Teams will be madly mashing buttons on their calculators to work out the best engine plan before Melbourne, while commentators and misinformed and lazy Patronise writers will no doubt be left discombobulated by the entire thing. More so than usual.
This should save everyone a Kovalainen-sized hat full of money however, as should the ban on in season testing. That's right, with a week to go until Melbourne there's now no more testing time available to the teams until after Abu Dhabi, the last race of the season.
This would be a good time to mention that Abu Dhabi is the new race on the calendar for '09 and will also be serving as the season finale. I can't wait for the nail-biting finish to the season, and the atmosphere at the track should easily outshine anything Sao Paulo can put together, the way those Brazilians all wear brown and just sit there on their hands quietly munching bagels just doesn't seem a fitting end to the F1 show each year.
The last major change is to the safety car rules, as for 2009 the pit lane is losing the chastity belt it has been donning each SC period for the last two years. No longer will cars have to pit and get a penalty just for a bit of gas, as the pits will be open at all times. This should avoid a lot of moaning and is a top rule change.
To keep the cars from racing back to the pits, the FIA is using the standard ECU to set a time for each car to get back to the pits when the SC board is shown. Through advanced programming (the type that gave us Tetris) each car will have a figure come up on their dash that gives them a minimum time to get back to the pit lane. Any faster than that and you'll get a penalty. This rule is basically designed to stop Fernando Alonso running into any stray wheels Mark Webber leaves sitting in the middle of the road. Here at Patronise, we like to think that any time a driver is going back to the pits too slowly the steering wheel will send a recording of Jeff Goldblum saying "Must got faster, must go faster!" into their headsets.
This final paragraph was going to be dedicated to the folly of the winner takes all points system put forward by the FIA last week. That has now been cut and pasted into the 2010 preview file, so you can read it then.
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