As Yogi Berra once apparently opined, it's déjà vu all over again. For the third time in as many seasons, Ickle Nick Heidfeld appears to be heading towards the towering and ignominious door marked 'Do One' in the latest round of Formula One seat-shuffling, once again appearing to face the very real possibility that his F1 career is at an end.
After eleven races with the Lotus Renault GP squad in a role that was admittedly always temporary, being as he was a stand-in for the injured Robert Kubica, Heidfeld has been moved to one side in favour of the money, the marketing potential and the blue cap of Bruno Senna. The Brazilian will now replace the German for the Belgian GP at least, and potentially the remaining eight races of the 2011 season, forming one of the most underwhelming paydriver partnerships in F1 history with Vitaly Petrov.
As it was in 2009, when he was left seat-less when BMW withdrew from the sport, and then again at the end of 2010, when his late-season cameo with Sauber and his extra Pirelli tyre experience from his brief return to testing duties during the middle of last year failed to yield any serious job offers before Kubica's accident, Heidfeld is facing the prospect of his F1 career spluttering to an abrupt and unwanted end.
The bearded German could be forgiven for retreating back to his bedroom with a jumbo tub of ice cream, a bottle of rosé wine and a Celine Dion CD, to mooch about wailing to his friends over the phone about why, no matter how promising the relationship might start, they always dump him in the end. But why does it keep happening to Ickle? The quietest and most unassuming driver on the F1 grid.
Well, largely because of precisely that issue. Heidfeld, as we gleefully pointed out some years ago over on Patronise F1's sarcastic predecessor, appears to revel in his anonymity more than a man on a witness protection programme who has been placed under house arrest in a flat full of libidinous supermodels, whiskey and chocolate spread.
That is not to say that Ickle is a bad driver, or indeed to say that he is a particularly good one. In fact, he is the very picture of middle-of-the-road dependable averageness. If he was a music album, he would be The Killers covering the Travis back catalogue in the style of Snow Patrol. Heidfeld is a definition of a 'finish where you ought to' driver. Give him a car capable of 8th-10th, he'll finish 8th-10th. Nothing more, but rarely anything less.
Which makes Renault's unhappy grumbling about Heidfeld's perceived underperformance this season hard to really take seriously. If the car is finishing races lower than they want, the blame is likely with the car rather than the driver, based on the evidence of every single one of Heidfeld's seasons in the sport to date. Blaming Heidfeld for a string of bad results is as counterintuitive as blaming a bad plate of spaghetti bolognese on the water you boiled the pasta in, rather than the fact that you substituted the passata for custard.
But unfortunately, Heidfeld's sort of driver, which not too many years ago formed the staple diet of the Formula One midfield, is now increasingly becoming an endangered species. In the current F1 climate, where teams are pretty much digitally split between 'super-rich frontrunners' and 'cash-strapped detritus', F1's midfielders have become forced to look for one of two qualities from their drivers. Signs of genuine future potential to give them a shot at some shock results, or a massive wedge of sponsor-sourced cash to help keep them afloat.
Heidfeld, who has shown little signs of suddenly developing into the next Juan Manuel Fangio since joining the grid way back in 2000 and who almost certainly considers himself above such matters as begging sponsors for money to buy a ride, falls into neither of those categories. He is a dependable points-absorber, but little more. And that won't cut it in F1 any more, especially not in a team as apparently strapped for funding as Renault reportedly are.
Ickle, then, is an easy target for the team to poke some blame at, being a temporary replacement for Kubica and a provider of nothing more than a moderate wage bill to the team's finances. But claiming that he is the main source of their woes, and that the ill-prepared and formerly underwhelming Senna will somehow turn the situation around is nonsense.
Instead, with the R31 increasingly appearing to be a busted flush in the 2011 season, it looks like the team is opting to simply bolster their finances for the rest of the year, hoping that the cash will provide the development boost to allow them to hopefully come up with a slightly less cack-handed R32 car for the hopefully-returning Kubica next year. Not that any of that helps poor Ickle.
Now, after dodging the bullet in 2010 and 2011, the bearded wonder might have to face up to an F1 retirement package of DTM racing and the occasional media job, given the apparent paucity of seats that would fit his particular brand of driving. Many of the midfield seats are already spoken for as far as 2012 goes, and any drives at the teams further back would involve some sort of sponsor money.
It almost seems ironic that the German's final contribution on track, for this season at least, was his spectacular and explosive retirement in Hungary. If there is one word that you would rarely use to describe his F1 career as a whole, it was spectacular. And that is Ickle's problem in a nutshell. Too quiet a performer and too poor a source of income to keep his place in the sport.
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