The year of motor racing is finally, conclusively over. Now is the season for the Kimi to lie down with the Fernando. Notaries of the celebrity P-list have switched on Christmas lights up and down the country, and the image of Clark Gable has once again fulfilled his part in the annual ritual not-giving-a-damn.
But there's time for one more ritual before you leave your hotel room/basement/fortress of solitude.
It's the Semi-Official Autosport Forum Awards and Memories Thread! Post them below. Who or what stood out, thrilled, disappointed or otherwise pierced the greasy membrane of your consciousness. Use the divine sunbeam of intellect to analyse and rank them, make them into gongs, plaudits, wreathes or awards. Or don't! Write a poem about Lewis Hamilton's dog. Recall with fondness what you were doing when you realized that Daniel Ricciardo was Red Bull's number one driver. Tell us how many days it took after the 6 Hours of Silverstone to feel fully dry again. I've done some starters below.
Driver of the Year
Lewis Hamilton, who Vetteled everyone in sight.
(Honourable mentions: Marc Marquez. The undoubted star of 2013, which is the main reason he doesn't win this year. Andre Lotterer. Killed it wherever he went.)
Max Wilson Award for Outstanding Participation by One Country
The United Kingdom. Self-pitying Brits had to dig deep to find things to pity in 2014, as the United Kingdom dominated the world in the world champion stakes (Hamilton, Davidson, Palmer, Lynn), the Most Desirable Outsider stakes (Jonathan Rea, Redding, Hawksworth), the Solid Journeyman stakes (Crutchlow, Button, Meeke, Conway), the Will Probably Win Le Mans One Day stakes (Stoneman, Tincknell, Mardenborough) and even the Derided Paydriver stakes (Chilton, Stevens). Want to know something weird about that list? Only one of them has a famous Racing Dad.
Something else weird? None of them is Scottish.
(Honourable mention: Colombia. As the considerable intellect of James Rodriguez's left foot was kicking Colombia into a World Cup quarter-final, Colombians were locking out the podium in Indycar's Houston Grand Prix. Carlos Munoz, Juan Montoya and Carlos Huertas (this decade's Mario Dominguez) jumped on the roulette wheel of a wet/dry, time-limited, fuel strategy race on a car park course, and won big. Will we ever hear about them again? Probably. But probably not all in the same sentence.)
Team of the Year
Team AMG Mercedes. 20 years after breaking Indycar racing with its Tyrannosaurus Rex pushrod V8, they gave the same treatment to F1. Mercedes won nearly every race, the only obstacles worth the name proving to be themselves.
(Honourable mentions: X-Raid, whose Dakar Mini team had enough in hand in at the end of the Only Proper Rally to play silly buggers with team orders; Team Penske, who in this correspondent's opinion were only a few feet at Indianapolis and one painful Chase for the Sprint Cup reform away from outdoing the achievements of their former partners in Stuttgart.)
Enchanter of the Year
Marc Marquez. Clearly the most prodigal prodigy in world motorsport, he won the first 10 (ten) races of the year, whether that was from pole or from the pitlane, on the first lap or on the last lap, against Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa. Not since 2005 have riders sounded so beaten before riding to the garage on their team-branded scooters.
(Honourable mentions: Mark Webber's Pied Piper act during the World Endurance Championship. Wherever he went, queues assembled. He probably thinks sports car racing's as popular as F1. Lewis Hamilton's hex on Nico Rosberg following, or perhaps even during, the Belgian GP. Rosberg got himself into winning positions in the next seven races, and lost all but one of them.)
Apollo 11 Award for Acceptable Levels of Unreliability
During the 1970s war in Northern Ireland, Reggie Maudling, the Tory Home Secretary, received brickbats for boasting that the IRA had been reduced to “an acceptable level of violence”. A similar calculus was at work in 2014, whose preseason had been sexed up with amusing predictions of the whole field breaking down at the opening race. The days of Nigel and Michael's bulletproof Ferrari seemed very far away, as challenging technical regulations proved too challenging for some, most notably multiple world champions Red Bull and automotive Gordon the Big Engines Porsche AG.
More acceptable were the unreliability records of F1 champions Mercedes and Le Mans champions Audi, so they get to share the prize. Mercedes only suffered one fire, one catastrophic brake failure, two failures to properly get going at all, one gearbox breakage, one case of car plague, and a hilarious double regen-failure that left one driver out of the race with cooked brakes and the other doing half the race minus a three-digit quantity of horsepower, making up new brake balance settings every lap, and still finishing second.
Audi, on the other hand, won the 24-hour classic by only having to make one 20-minute turbocharger change over the whole 379 laps.
(Honourable mention: Nissan's ZEOD electromobile came to Le Mans as an experimental Garage 56 entry, having been set objectives of doing one complete lap on electric power, and reaching a top speed of 300 km/h (one of these was subsequently achieved by the Formula E circus). It broke down on the first lap, but in a legal sleight of hand worthy of Portia, Nissan announced they had completed both its objectives during the morning warm-up. Touche!)
Moment of the Year
It's time for the obligatory Indycar gong. You might remember the Indycar Series, they did a couple of races last August. The most sensational moment of the year, perhaps of any racing series, came halfway through the Long Beach race, eventually won by Bromley's Mike Conway after the Fuel Saving Art Project Formerly Known As Scott Dixon ran out of E85.
Conway was not racing for the lead on lap 56, but Andretti teammates Ryan Hunter-Reay and James Hinchcliffe were, chased by a charging Will Power. The trickster god who goes by the name Pit Strategy chose in his infinite tricksiness to place a cold-tyred Josef Newgarden ahead of all three of them. Hunter-Reay made his move, but – as A.J.P. Taylor was fond of saying – the plan miscarried. Three were out on the spot, and that was before Takuma Sato came bombing round the corner and proved that 2012 was no fluke. The race thread says it all.
Honourable mentions: the final laps of the 2014 Hungarian Grand Prix; Jack Hawksworth looking totally comfortable leading the Golf Course Grand Prix of Indianapolis; the Resistible Rise of Ryan Newman.
And a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the whole forum.
Edited by Risil, 24 December 2014 - 21:27.