The twists and turns of Monaco

Guest writier Tom Mcloughlin gives his view on some of the optimism around the paddock ahead of this weekend's Monaco Grand Prix.

In the lead up to Monaco this weekend, a number of teams seem to be suggesting that this could be a turning point in their season. These include McLaren and Ferrari, with Kimi and Lewis both suggesting in interviews this week that they feel they can get some success on Sunday and use it as a platform to launch their season. Now, it's not inconceivable that one of the red or grey cars could take the victory, but what I'm struggling to understand is the suggestion that this will have some sort of effect on the rest of their season. Monaco is notorious for surprise results, with a number of the top runners regularly ending up in the barriers, and for this reason it's a definite possibility that we could see an unexpected victor. However, when the train moves on to Turkey I don't see either McLaren or Ferrari as potential winners whether they get a result at Monaco or not. Sorry guys, I think it'll be a little longer until you're challenging for race wins without any bizarre circumstances.

Speaking of which, the McLaren and Ferrari crews will be holding on to memories of Olivier Panis' extraordinary win in 1996. Having just relived the highlights of that race I can only hope we have a contest half as exciting come Sunday. The amount of action and twists in the plot that day made it an edge of your seat experience even 13 years on and it illustrates the amount that can go wrong around the tight Monte Carlo streets. One thing that caught my attention in the commentary involved the pace of the back markers. Jonathan Palmer kindly informed us that the gap between the front and back of the grid thas year (1996) had decreased massively due to the introduction of the 107% rule. The change from 1995 to 1996? 9 seconds to 6 seconds!

This immediately drew me to the current debate on the budget cap and potential new team entries to F1 next year. The gap between the front and back of the grid has closed significantly since the 90s and the gap has sat around 2 seconds this season (thought it's harder to tell with the Q1, Q2, Q3 qualifying format). Will the influx of several new privateer teams increase this again? And will this be for the good of the sport? Ferrari have made their feelings very clear that they believe teams such as Lola, Wirth Research and USF1 are more suitable for 'GP3' instead of Formula 1 and they aren't keen on sharing a racetrack with them. I'm sure Max and Bernie will have something in place to prevent the new boys from replicating the form of regular whipping boys Forti and Simtek back in the 90s and lapping 9 seconds off the pace, but it is obviously an important consideration for the F1 world if a raft of new teams comes into the sport.