My Past F1 Predictions

[jens]

So maybe I'll start about 2001 before rjbetty puts his prediction here.

Once again I didn't predict. But yeah I can perhaps recall some of the general feelings.

For the first time in my mind M.Schumacher entered the season and championship favourite. While before the previous years I thought Häkkinen with his superior car is going to win anyway regardless of how "close" it is. But now I thought Schumacher should do it, Ferrari is on an upward curve getting better each year. I guess I would have thought Häkkinen would still finish second in the championship, so his bad season was a surprise.

Behind them perhaps expecting Williams-BMW to end up 3rd would have made sense regardless of the tyres they were using. Back then I didn't take the tyre-war seriously, I thought doesn't matter which tyres they have, they'd perform similarly anyway. But Williams turned out to be much better than "just 3rd", they were really fighting with two top teams.

I heard Jordan switched to factory Honda engines, so perhaps expected them to be a bit better, but didn't expect miracles. BAR was likely to keep going in points-competing positions as well.

Sauber was obviously a surprise even if I thought them to be their "usual solid self" and score several points as they did each year. But they got much more than that. Prost had switched to Ferrari engines, so it was a bit of a hope, but I had lost a lot of belief in the team and felt Alesi was perennially unlucky, so I didn't even dream anything going well for him any more.

I can't remember what I could have thought of Jaguar or Arrows. Perhaps thought Jaguar should be at least better than in 2000 after their "build-up season". Despite taking over Stewart there was some talk Jaguar had trouble in re-building the team and Irvine was speaking about "3-year-plan" about the team becoming competitive as he had a 3-year-contract. Perhaps I took this talk half or 20% seriously, but when I saw in 2001 again that they were in (lower) midfield, I lost all belief in them.

Arrows seemed like a great underdog team, who sometimes could be surprisingly fast and genuinely compete for points.

And of course, Minardi the last team. This was a constant expectation each season.

Overall. The past years had made me disillusioned of any "close contest". Ferrari and McLaren were so far ahead of everybody else in 2000, that basically I felt the rest of them have a hard time doing anything about it.

Perhaps I pinned some hopes on Renault and Toyota from 2002 onwards and that those two car manufacturer giants could do something about the "status quo", which I didn't feel like some privateer minnows like Sauber, Prost, Benetton, even Jordan, yeah, whoever, could do anything about. And the well-funded BAR wasn't anything more than a "big talk" team to me on those days, I didn't take their ambitions to reach the top seriously.