Donkies of the 2013 Season

[jens]

McLaren is the donkey for me. Lotus and Sauber are textbook examples, how you can design fast cars on what looks like a shoestring budget. McLaren still has a decent budget, but the whole year has been a huge let-down. Especially considering their normal standards.

Other than that I don't know.
Caterham and Marussia aren't really "new teams" any more, but they don't have any depth in the team to improve to another level. Disappointing.
Williams is disappointing though not really surprising any more. More like "usual business" unlike McLaren (yet).
The way Ferrari fell off late in the season was pretty underwhelming too. Alonso got only a single podium in the last six races.

Drivers?
Obviously the most underwhelming drivers of the year have been the bunch of paydrivers (Maldonado, Gutiérrez, Chilton), but this hardly makes them donkies as it was expected and someone has to pay the bills to keep the teams running. Massa doesn't surprise me any more either - more like business as usual. Webber is already pretty old, so him getting obliterated by Vettel was more like a predictable way of things. To be honest, expected a bit more from both Sutil and Vergne. I'd say the reputation of both drivers has been dented and makes their F1 futures questionable.

[AndyL]

Has to be McLaren for rolling out one of their worst cars ever. Maybe the worst ever, if you make allowance for rules - there were a lot more opportunities to make mistakes or miss the boat with the less restrictive rules of the 70s and 80s, and a number of their poor championship finishes in the past have been down to unreliability more than lack of speed.

However I kind of get the feeling they're in a no-win situation regarding the criticism over Perez. Last year they were criticised for hiring Perez and doing it too early. Now they're getting it for sacking Perez and doing it too late!

[Storm]

McLaren and Ferrari

[N. Jones]

McLaren. Lured me into a false sense of excitement. Watching them piddle around between 9th and 14th was not a joy to behold.

Williams is just in a sad state. I too hoped the win last year would at least keep them in the top ten during the race. That never happened and they sank back to....

Caterham and Marussia, levels of Why-are-we-here? All I know is journos from F1 always say it takes five years to build a car capable of scoring points. If this is true then we should see these two scoring a point or two next season, but I'm not sold on the idea.

[anfield5]

McLaren. Lured me into a false sense of excitement. Watching them piddle around between 9th and 14th was not a joy to behold.

Williams is just in a sad state. I too hoped the win last year would at least keep them in the top ten during the race. That never happened and they sank back to....

Caterham and Marussia, levels of Why-are-we-here? All I know is journos from F1 always say it takes five years to build a car capable of scoring points. If this is true then we should see these two scoring a point or two next season, but I'm not sold on the idea.

To this I would say "absolute rubbish'
In their first four years Sauber had 27 top 6 finishes including 2 podiums, if we expand that to top 10's the number is a huge 56.

Jordan had 20 top 6 with a podium and 41 top 10's

AGS, who were one of the worst F1 teams ever had 2 top 6 finishes in 4 years (12 top 10's)

The much maligned Osella had 1 top 6 (7 top 10's)

I can't think of any team that hasn't scored top 10's after 4 seasons continuing on in F1 and having any success what so ever, let alone even surviving.

[anfield5]

McLaren. Lured me into a false sense of excitement. Watching them piddle around between 9th and 14th was not a joy to behold.

Williams is just in a sad state. I too hoped the win last year would at least keep them in the top ten during the race. That never happened and they sank back to....

Caterham and Marussia, levels of Why-are-we-here? All I know is journos from F1 always say it takes five years to build a car capable of scoring points. If this is true then we should see these two scoring a point or two next season, but I'm not sold on the idea.

To this I would say "absolute rubbish'
In their first four years Sauber had 27 top 6 finishes including 2 podiums, if we expand that to top 10's the number is a huge 56.

Jordan had 20 top 6 with a podium and 41 top 10's

AGS, who were one of the worst F1 teams ever had 2 top 6 finishes in 4 years (12 top 10's)

The much maligned Osella had 1 top 6 (7 top 10's)

I can't think of any team that hasn't scored top 10's after 4 seasons continuing on in F1 and having any success what so ever, let alone even surviving.

[rjbetty]

That's true, but back then cars used to retire from races and if they went off the track usually never got back on.

Caterham and Marussia have averaged around 2-6 seconds off the pace through their time. Not great. But Sauber were usually 2sec off the pace in several seasons.

[Dave B]

Donkey of the entire season: Lotus for utterly mismanaging their finances and losing a great driver, while pinning all their hopes on the equivalent of a Nigerian chain mail.

[anfield5]

Donkey of the entire season: Lotus for utterly mismanaging their finances and losing a great driver, while pinning all their hopes on the equivalent of a Nigerian chain mail.

I also considered the black team for daring to call themselves Lotus, it is a diabolical marketing ploy aimed to attract fans and money to the team, who believe they are in some way connected to Lotus. They are simply sponsored by Proton who own the Lotus name. It would be like Marrusia getting sponsorship from Fred Tyrrell's fish'n'chip shop and calling themselves Tyrrell