BRAZILIAN GRAND PRIXVIEW 11 October 2007THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS
'You couldn't have made it up' is the phrase that sums up an amazing season, which ensured Formula One was a regular visitor to newspaper front pages and TV news bulletins.
Scuderia Toro Rosso started the year with its existing driver line up of Tonio Liuzzi and Scott Speed, but it was a case of "g'day mate" and "no worries" as Aussie Mark Webber joined Scotsman David Coulthard at Red Bull Racing, thus ensuring we had two identical chisel-jawed drivers, neither of whom seemed to have English as a first language. Renault provided the motive power for the Bulls, with the Ferrari engine switching to Toro Rosso, thus reinforcing its Italian roots.
Both teams launched at Barcelona and in a spookily clairvoyant move, given the year's main story, Red Bull Racing had a girl dressed as a spy giving out the press kits, while Toro Rosso went for the more obvious girl with long legs, a short skirt and big breasts. We know what journalists want!
Naturally enough, the Australian GP saw the year's annual dose of Webber-mania, with fans wondering around wearing Webber masks and Aussie songstress, Kylie Minogue, posing next to Mark on the grid, while we boosted sales of hangover medication with our usual start-the-season party. Malaysia saw a big boost to Toro Rosso's technical team with the arrival of Giorgio Ascanelli as Technical Director. It was a big boost because in Giorgio's own words, he has put on a kilo for each of the 25 years he has worked in the sport. Not to be outdone, Red Bull Racing employed the smaller, but still perfectly formed, Geoff Willis in the same role.
Spain was the first European race and marked the debut of our Pods to replace the trucks in the paddock, although no one has been brave enough to rename our truckies as Poddies, while the Energy Station was back, with a whole new collection of catering girls on which you male members of the press could try all your old chat- up lines. More importantly, David finally put a score on the door with a fifth place finish. All right we admit it, for much of the middle part of the year both teams had reliability 'issues/difficulties/setbacks/hitches/glitches/snags', but never, never any problems and the arrival of any of our Press Officers in the media centre was usually greeted with a massed shout of "hydraulics?" from the journalists, while the more cruel French referred to our transmission as the "boite au chocolat."
No film tie-up this year in Monaco; instead we launched our 'Faces for Charity' initiative with Red Bull Racing, while Scott drove his best race of the year to finish ninth for Toro Rosso on the street circuit. Off to North America next and Tonio nearly secured a fourth place finish, but parked it in the champion's wall on the outside of the final turn. David evidently decided to stop racing at Indy a year earlier than anyone else in F1, as he only got as far as Turn One, but Mark opened his points account coming seventh. A chaotic wet start to the race in Germany highlighted what experience can do, as Mark finally stood on an F1 podium in third place, with David two places further back. A couple of garages down the pit lane, Toro Rosso's team boss earned the nickname of Franz "Cassius Clay" Tost for an altercation with Scott. Not quite a Quentin Tarantino-style bloodbath, even if the American film director was our guest at the Nurburgring. Two weeks later Speed had been replaced by Sebastian "Baby Driver" Vettel as we turned up in Hungary, where Gerhard Berger got back behind the wheel of an F1 car - a McLaren- but only to drive across Budapest's chain bridge. Doing our bit to ensure that, as ever, Monza boasts the most crowded paddock of the year, we brought along not ten, but twenty Formula Una girls, ten of them representing the Red Bull home country of Austria, as Derndl met Dolce & Gabbana.
