Vettel recalls Canada ’sex club’ memory

Sebastian Vettel has revealed a few of his biggest memories of Canada after returning to Montreal for this weekend’s grand prix.

In 2007, then a teenager, he was in the pits when Robert Kubica crashed heavily in the BMW-Sauber, leading to his grand prix debut in the US a week later.

Four years on, German Vettel has won 15 of his 68 grands prix, sat on pole 20 times and is the youngest champion in F1 history, and in 2011 is back in Canada as the runaway title leader.

But the next chapter was a catering strike during his first-class flight from Switzerland this week, meaning he had to eat his own home-made sandwiches.

"I’m not a fan of airplane food," laughed Vettel.

To Blick newspaper, he recalls the eve of his last-minute debut in Kubica’s BMW in 2007.

"Yeah, the Sauber mechanics one night dragged me into one of these famous sex clubs (in Montreal)," revealed Vettel.

"When two girls got busy with each other right before my eyes, it was too much and I left!"

And he said that last year in Canada, someone stole his credit card.

"By the time I noticed and cancelled the card, the stranger had already had a $600 dinner with wine at my expense," laughed Vettel.

Source: Nextgen

Massa's Blog: Tackling the championship one race at a time

I just landed in Montreal a short while ago, having spent almost a week back at home in Sao Paolo and with just the one hour time difference between the two cities, there is no problem linked to jet lag, which is a good thing. It had been quite a while since I had been in Brazil, so I did not do much except stay at home, catching up with friends and family. As in the rest of the world, the Senna film has, not surprisingly, had a big impact here in Brazil and I went to the cinema to see it. I enjoyed it, because the director found images we had never seen before and the subject was well researched, covering not just all the highlights of Ayrton’s career, but also the political situations that developed around him. Even people with no interest in F1 have felt it was compelling viewing. Of course I also worked on my training and kept in touch with the guys back in the factory to see what developments are coming on the car. In the past, by the time you got to Canada, the shape of the championship was pretty much defined already, but now, as the calendar is so long, we cannot say anything is decided for sure yet. So, everyone in Maranello is working flat out in their respective areas to continue improving the car so that myself and Fernando can race competitively, as we showed we could in the last couple of races, even if in terms of points, I have gone through a bad patch. I hope that will come to an end in Canada.

Montreal is a place I enjoy coming to. To tell the truth, the circuit is not one of my favourites, but the city itself is great and the people are very welcoming and keen on Formula 1, with plenty of support for Ferrari among the fans. My results have not been that good here, the best being a fourth place in 2005. I also had a very good race in 2008, when I was fighting for a place on the podium until a refuelling problem at my pit stop. I then had to pass a lot of people coming through from the back of the pack to finish fifth at the flag. At the very least, I would hope to aim for my best ever Canadian GP result this weekend and to finish on the podium would be great. The track presents all sorts of interesting challenges and it is not very easy to set up the car, because the track surface evolves all through the weekend, starting off with virtually no grip at all on Friday morning. You need a car that works well over the kerbs, has good traction out of the slow turns, but this is actually a fast track, so you need good top speed too. That makes finding the best set-up and the right level of aerodynamic downforce a complex task for the drivers and the engineers. We will run quite low downforce to suit this circuit and to generate more speed and with the help of some updates on the aero front I expect we can be quite competitive. Further complicating the work is the fact that we can expect tyre degradation to be very high, so even though we have the same tyre compounds as in Monaco, don’t expect to see people attempting a one stop race this weekend.

As far as the championships are concerned, at Ferrari, we will never give up fighting. However, it is very clear that Sebastian (Vettel) is doing a great job, winning every race except one and even that time he finished second! He and his team are looking very strong, but we are tackling the championship one race at a time and everyone is still working very hard to make the car competitive so that we can continue fighting all the way to the end of the season. This coming weekend will be a very busy one for Ferrari on a global scale, because apart from the Grand Prix in Montreal, various factory supported private teams will be tackling the Le Mans 24 Hours in France in Ferrari 458 Italia and 430 GT cars. It shows just how much racing is at the very heart of everything that goes on in Maranello. Endurance racing is completely different to the sprint that is a Formula 1 race, with drivers having to race in the dark and cope with very different challenges. It’s something that I might consider one day when my Formula 1 career comes to an end and I hope all the Ferraris racing there have a successful weekend.

Source: Ferrari.com

Alonso's Blog: We want to make another step forward

After a brief cycle of races in Europe, here we are again on another long intercontinental voyage, this time heading West. The Montreal race is one of the most popular with the drivers and the teams: the city is very welcoming and the people are very interested in Formula 1, to the extent that the grandstands are already busy on Friday.

I arrived yesterday evening and this afternoon I popped down to the track to meet up with the team. I found that the boys were in good spirits, wanting to demonstrate here that Monte Carlo wasn’t a flash in the pan. There is promise that it can happen. Even though it has some very fast stretches, the Canadian track suits cars which can jump over the kerbs without losing too much balance and cars that have good traction on the exits of the slow corners. Those are both characteristics that are among the strong points of the 150° Italia.

Here aerodynamic efficiency, which is our Achilles Heel at the moment, is less important and so we think we can have more chance to fight for the top places. Brakes are another fundamental factor on this circuit: we will need to work hard during free practice to understand the correct level of cooling in order to avoid the risk of problems in the race.

In Montreal we will again have the two soft tyre compounds prepared by Pirelli: the Soft and the Supersoft. Last year this was one of the few races in which we saw more pit stops than the traditional one-stop because the degradation of the tyres is quite high. Even though the Pirellis are different to the Bridgestones, I don’t think we will see anyone manage to get to the end of the race with only one tyre change, as we saw in Monaco. As we have seen this year, it will be important to pick the right moment for the pit stop so as not to lose too much time compared to your direct rivals.

For the first time this year we will have two places where it will be possible to use the DRS on Sunday: the first is after the apex of Turn 10, the second on the pit straight. I’m interested to see what will happen: on paper whoever manages to pass in the first zone will then have a big advantage because they will be able to use the movable wing again on the main straight, even though they are ahead of the car they are battling.

Last year I managed to make the podium but we left Montreal with a definite sensation of having deserved more than our eventual third place. There were a couple of episodes that didn’t go well for us that prevented us from picking up the win that was within our reach. We also had the chance to win at Monaco ten days ago and it would have been good to have won there because wins have now eluded us for too long. It remains very difficult because I expect McLaren and Red Bull to be very strong but we must not count anything out.

The second third of the season is starting and the situation in the championship is far from favourable. It’s true that there are still many races to go but it’s clear that we must try to find a catalyst for this title chase in terms of points. We hope to start straightaway, on a track that carries the name of one of the drivers who is most loved by Ferrari’s tifosi: Gilles Villeneuve.

Source: ferrari.com

We were back to normal in Montreal

Posted by Fernando Alonso

I’ve been back in Switzerland since yesterday
morning already and I think that with the race having started at 12, lots of Formula 1 people made the most of it to get home quickly. A couple of days on from the race, the sense of disappointment that we missed out on a win that was within our grasp has been replaced with the awareness that we did actually get a great result. We have to look at it as a glass half full because, on the Thursday we would have been satisfied with the thought of a podium finish. We were competitive throughout the whole weekend, both in qualifying and the race, which is very positive. We were back to where we have been in practically all the other races, the one exception being Turkey, where for various reasons, everything about the Grand Prix went wrong, from every point of view. The normal situation is the one we have seen in Montreal, Monaco, Melbourne and Sakhir and all the other tracks where we fought for a podium finish. Maybe the results did not always match our potential, but I think the same can be said for all the top teams. In these first eight races of the season, all sorts of things happened – mistakes, reliability problems, bad luck – but we are still in the thick of the fight for both championships. The same can be said of McLaren and Red Bull, who have also missed out on points along the way.

The Montreal race was very spectacular and incident packed, not just because of the nature of the track, but also because of the different strategies chosen by the teams, as a function of the tyre performance. I think the spectators at the track and those watching on television really enjoyed it, but I can assure you that for the drivers and the teams, it was a difficult and stressful weekend, because it was never really clear how the tyres would react in the various situations that arose.

The next round is in Valencia in my home country. It will be nice to race in front of my fans and I would like to get on the podium again, given that Valencia is another circuit where I have never done so. We will have major updates on the F10 which I hope will allow us to up our performance level. Following on from that, we have further developments in the pipeline which should arrive for England and Germany: which is to say that the European Grand Prix is simply the ninth round of the championship, not a last ditch effort for Ferrari, which I heard some people saying. I don’t see how they can say that given that we have not even reached the halfway point of the season and that after Valencia there will still be ten Grands Prix to go. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now, this is a stage event and the final one of those stages will not come until November in Abu Dhabi. There is still a long way to go and things can change very quickly, going either one way or the other. People seem to have forgotten that last year, in the middle part of the season and in a car that was getting ever less competitive, Kimi was the driver who had scored the most points.

Source: Alonso's Blog - Ferrari.com

[Photos] Canadian GP - Sunday - Race

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[Photos] FP1 and FP2 in Canada

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