Formula 1's Latest Rumours and Talk: Sauber's 2016 Car, McLaren-Honda and More
And then there were 11.
On Monday, Sauber became the final team to reveal their 2016 Formula One car, just in time for the second and final pre-season test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
The Swiss team recovered well from a pointless 2014 to finish eighth in the 2015 constructors' championship, claiming a couple of surprise results along the way.
And following the launch of the Ferrari-powered C35 car, they want more of the same this season as Sauber hope to reclaim their status as a solid, reliable, punchy midfield team.
At this stage, there is every chance that Sauber could still be ahead of McLaren-Honda in the pecking order.
McLaren's racing director Eric Boullier has revealed the team are satisfied with Honda's progress with its V6 turbo power unit over the winter, but they are still not happy enough after the MP4-31 proved to be increasingly unreliable and so very slow at the first test.
With Honda bringing an updated engine to the second test, though, Boullier believes McLaren will soon have a true understanding of where they stand.
Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa, meanwhile, have agreed that Williams appear to be in good shape after another under-the-radar display at the first test, claiming the Grove-based team have successfully addressed their 2015 weaknesses.
Elsewhere, Manor boss Dave Ryan has defended Rio Haryanto after the Indonesian endured an incident-packed start to his career at the first test.
Haryanto suffered two off-track excursions in consecutive days, but Ryan has insisted such errors are to be expected of a driver with such limited experience in F1 machinery.
Closing this week's roundup is Haas driver Romain Grosjean, who fears F1 is missing a trick by refusing to embrace social media.
Sauber Hope to Become Solid Midfield Runners with New C35 Car
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Sauber are aiming to re-establish themselves as a solid midfield team after unveiling their new car for the 2016 Formula One season.
While their rivals all launched their new cars ahead of last week's first pre-season test, the Swiss team opted to run a modified 2015 car at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, above, before revealing the new C35 chassis via their official Twitter account on Monday.
After failing to score a point in 2014, Sauber claimed eighth place in the constructors' championship last season, with lead driver Felipe Nasr finishing as high as fifth in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
Without the resources of their competitors, however, the team were unable to keep up in the development race, and Nasr told Crash.net how Sauber had decided to be "a little bit more aggressive" in terms of car design in 2016 in an effort to leap up the competitive order.
And while team principal Monisha Kaltenborn is reluctant to reveal any specific targets for Sauber in 2016, she believes the outfit should be capable of reclaiming their natural place in the midfield.
"We want to clearly improve," she told the team's official website. "Obviously, there’s a certain position we’d like to achieve. But, to start with, it’s important to become established in midfield. Only then are we going to focus on individual positions."
As Nasr told Crash.net, new technical director Mark Smith played an instrumental role in the team's decision to take a "different approach."
Although Smith, formerly of Red Bull, Force India and Caterham, has admitted the C35 is not a huge departure from its predecessor, he is confident that minor changes will make a big difference.
He told the team's official website: "For the development of the Sauber C35-Ferrari, we slightly changed the philosophy of how we developed the car aerodynamically. It sounds little, but the impact on the development of the car is significant. When looking at the Sauber C35, it is very much an evolution."
Sauber's late start to the season means they will have just four official days of testing before the C35 makes its grand prix debut in Australia on March 20.
Per Motorsport.com's Jamie Klein, Nasr has acknowledged the opening stages of 2016 will not be easy, claiming "it will take a bit of time to optimise everything" but reiterating his hope that Sauber will eventually make "a big step forward."
McLaren-Honda Still Hoping to Improve Performance Ahead of 2nd Test
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McLaren-Honda racing director Eric Boullier has admitted the team remain short on performance despite the improvements made to their V6 turbo power unit over the winter.
Honda's underpowered, inefficient and unreliable engine was behind the team's struggles in the 2015 season, when they finished a lowly ninth in the constructors' championship.
The team endured a test of two halves at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso completing a combined total of 203 laps on the opening two days before those familiar reliability issues returned on Days 3 and 4.
According to Sky Sports, McLaren's final tally of 257 laps was the second-lowest of any team, but arguably more worrying was the team's lack of pace, with the MP4-31's fastest lap—set with soft-compound tyres on Day 2—four seconds slower than the benchmark time.
Although Boullier is confident Honda has addressed the engine's main weakness and has admitted the team prioritised reliability in the first test, the Frenchman believes the lack of performance remains a concern, telling Autosport (h/t Eurosport):
"They have definitely fixed the main issue we had last year, which was deployment.
However, we are still not at the performance level of Mercedes and Ferrari, so there is still a lot of work to do.
But after the problems of last year, the week was more about making sure we could run, with so much to check on the car, to get out of the car and to send back to the factory.
From the end of last season in November through to the start of the test all we have been able to work on is simulation.
That means you tend to deviate all the time from the truth, so now the truth is coming back into the system.
That allows us to ensure the correlation is OK, and we know where we are and where we are going.
[The second test] will be interesting because everyone will have to do race simulation and qualifying runs at some stage, so then we will start to pick things up.
"
According to BBC Sport's Andrew Benson, Honda will bring a new engine to the second and final test, with the updated power unit "expected to be a reasonably significant improvement."
Valtteri Bottas, Felipe Massa Believe Williams Have Made Good Improvements
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Valtteri Bottas feels Williams have addressed the weaknesses of last year's car following the first pre-season test of 2016.
The Grove-based team claimed their second consecutive third-place finish in the constructors' standings in 2015, claiming a total of four podium finishes in Canada, Austria, Italy and Mexico.
Despite their lofty position in the championship, the team's FW37 was a rather temperamental car, often struggling at high-downforce circuits as well as in wet conditions.
Upon the launch of the FW38, chief technical officer Pat Symonds told the team's official website how Williams focused on addressing the vices of the 2015 car while maintaining everything good about the FW37.
After competing a total of 214 laps over the course of the first two days at last week's test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Bottas is confident Williams have solved their main problems, telling Autosport (h/t Eurosport): "We can feel improvements in areas we attacked. If it's going to be enough, it's too early to say. The car feels better than last year's car, I'm feeling positive, but we still have no idea where we are. The main thing is we can see we have improved many of the weaknesses of last year."
Felipe Massa, meanwhile, racked up 163 laps over the final two days of the test. And while the Brazilian has admitted he was also impressed by the new car, the former Ferrari driver believes it is too early to say whether Williams have met their targets.
Massa told Autosport: "I could feel some improvement but on the first morning I was not happy with the balance. I couldn't make the tyres work but in the afternoon I could. Everything I did now is not 100 per cent enough to say [if we succeeded]. We are working to improve and to have the car ready."
Symonds, meanwhile, has confirmed that Williams will introduce a revised nose design in 2016, but is not "completely certain" when the new concept will appear on the FW38, per Motorsport.com's Jonathan Noble.
Noble claims the new nose is "likely to appear at some point" during this week's second pre-season test.
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Manor Relaxed over Rio Haryanto's Testing Spins
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Dave Ryan, the Manor racing director, has insisted the team are unconcerned about Rio Haryanto's eventful start to life in Formula One in pre-season testing.
After reigning DTM champion Pascal Wehrlein participated in the opening two days of the first test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Haryanto took to the track for the first time since being confirmed as a Manor driver last week.
Despite completing a combined total of 129 laps, Haryanto's week was marred by two spins in successive days, the second of which brought Manor's test to a premature end after the Indonesian damaged the MRT05 car.
With two rookies, Manor are competing with the least experienced driver lineup on the grid in 2016—although Wehrlein has tested for Mercedes and Force India over the last 12 months—and Ryan believes Haryanto's errors are to be expected at this stage.
When asked if the driver's mistakes were simply a function of Haryanto pushing the boundaries in F1 machinery, Ryan told Motorsport.com's Jonathan Noble:
"Yes, I think so. To be honest, I would be surprised if they haven’t had a couple of incidents. But as long as he learns from it, that’s fine, and it doesn’t cost us, let’s get on with it.
Obviously, Pascal has come in from winning a championship, he has done a lot of mileage in an F1 car, in the class F1 car on the grid, and so he’s got a lot of experience and he knows what to expect.
So for him, it was probably the transition into Manor which was a big issue.
For Rio, it is just the opposite. He’s making a move up. So, pretty different approaches, but both are great kids, just having fun, and enjoying it.
"
Per ESPN F1's Nate Saunders, Ryan has revealed why Manor have persevered with a long nose design while many of their rivals experiment with the shorter concept, explaining there "didn't seem to be too much difference from an aero performance."
Romain Grosjean Criticises F1's 'Narrow-Minded' Approach to Social Media
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Romain Grosjean has vented his frustrations with Formula One's restrictive policy toward social media, claiming he was recently ordered to remove video footage from his Facebook account.
F1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone has been a vocal critic of social media in recent years, referring to the various platforms as "nonsense" and admitting he "couldn't see any value in it" in an interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific magazine (h/t Sky Sports' James Galloway and Mike Wise) in 2014.
The sport, however, has increased its presence on Twitter and YouTube over the last 12 months, inviting fans to vote for highlights packages of classic races throughout the 2015 season.
Despite such initiatives, F1 continues to rely heavily on teams and drivers to increase the levels of interaction between the sport and its followers, but Grosjean has revealed even they face too many restrictions.
The Haas driver is among the most prominent F1 personalities on social media, offering a first glimpse of his new helmet design via his official Twitter account prior to the first pre-season test.
And the Frenchman has called for the authorities to offer greater freedom to F1's competitors to broaden its appeal, telling Motorsport.com's Jamie Klein:
"I ran a live video on my Facebook page during our filming day, as well as from my room yesterday.
And the FOM asked me to remove all the videos. We had more than a million views on all the videos.
I think it's great, it allows people to see F1, what it's like inside, behind the scenes, but we're not allowed.
F1 is too narrow-minded—we say that we lose fans, but nowadays, social networks have so many billion people in the world—and we're not allowed to make the most of them.
"
The FIA recently announced that a "Driver of the Day" campaign will be launched in 2016, with viewers encouraged to vote for the best driver during the race before the winner is presented with an award following the chequered flag.
And Grosjean has welcomed the move, telling the same source: "It's rather cool."
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