The team's spectacular fall from grace has been the biggest mystery of 2009.
And now it has rocked F1 by announcing it will quit at the end of the year.
Last season BMW made up the Big Three with McLaren and Ferrari and driver Robert Kubica was a world championship contender.
But this year Kubica and team-mate Nick Heidfeld have been way off the pace of the front-runners.
They have scored just EIGHT points between them in ten races.
And while McLaren and Ferrari have recovered from slow starts to the season to finish 1-2 in last weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, BMW were still floundering.
Heidfeld came home 11th with Kubica 13th. And you could almost FEEL Kubica's shoulders sagging when he said afterwards: "I had massive understeer and a lot of front tyre wear throughout the entire race.
"About ten laps into each stint my front tyres degraded a lot — and I was very slow."
So why the dramatic collapse?
The answers come from Edd Straw, F1 editor of motor sport's "bible" Autosport magazine.
He told how BMW were first to try out their new car following the raft of rule changes over the close season.
UP IN SMOKE ... BMW's season
And they were "pretty happy" when they discovered the downforce they were achieving with their new aerodynamic bodywork exceeded predictions thrown up by their pre-season computer simulations.
The trouble was that those predictions were way too low.
At a following test they took to the track with Ferrari — and again were content when their lap times matched those of the Italian giants.
But they did not realise that Ferrari had initially come up with a duff car, too.
Straw said: "It was only at later tests with other cars that they realised they were lagging behind. And when Brawn finally hit the track in March, they saw the goalposts had been moved."
But why are they still struggling when Ferrari and McLaren have made such big gains?
Straw said: "You can only put that down to the fact it has taken them longer to react."
No comments:
Post a Comment