More cars, a return of the sport's Michael Jordan and a conflict over how one team will affect their car's handling by the movement of a drivers' knee.All in an off-season's work for the ever-changing world of Formula One.
The international open-wheel series opens its 60th World Championship Sunday with the Bahrain Grand Prix (7:30 a.m. ET, SPEED) in its usual fashion -- new rules, new controversies and a still wide-open field for who will take home the season prize.
After a brief flirtation at the end of last season with replacing an injured Felipe Mossa at Ferrari was derailed by a previous neck injury, eight-time F1 champ Michael Schumacher makes his return to the sport he last left after a narrow defeat at the hands of Fernando Alonso for the 2006 crown.
This time, though, Schumacher won't be sporting Ferrari red.
Schumacher's suiting up in 2010 to drive for the new Mercedes GP team alongside teammate Nico Rosberg. Mercedes, who now has a majority involvement with an F1 team for the first time since 1955, took over Ross Brawn's 2009 championship-winning effort -- meaning Schumacher will reunite with Brawn, his longtime technical director at Ferrari.
Schumacher's return to the sport features a major overhaul in how teams will attack each race weekend.
Effective in Bahrain, teams will no longer be allowed to refuel the cars during races -- a measure that's expected to save costs on the fueling systems that tend to be extremely expensive to tote around the world to each racing venue.
Fans will notice the biggest change from the fueling regulation as pit stops will now take less than five seconds, while drivers -- especially the front qualifiers -- will feel the change of another rule.
For 2010, F1 will take a page out of NASCAR's rulebook and mandate teams who have qualified in the top-10 to start the race on the same tires they qualified on -- forcing teams to balance between running exceptionally hard for the pole versus how they'll work their race pit strategy.
More cars will also take the grid in 2010, though some will be racing on a much more restricted budget than the series' top teams. More cars, though, might produce more on-track problems.
"We will just try to stay out of their way," said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner in an interview this week. "The danger is the time difference is going to be so big - up to five seconds a lap - and the difference in the closing speeds is massive. The potential for them to cause an incident is reasonably high,"
The slower cars, though, aren't causing as much controversy as McLaren's new car did when the teams got to Bahrain.
McLaren's MP4-25 includes an air inlet device that can be affected by the drivers' left knee. The device apparently alters the airflow to the rear wing, but was approved the F1 officials ahead of the Bahrain event.
Bob Bell, the technical director for Renault, however wasn't pleased with McLaren's plan, and threatened to submit an official protest against the device he label as a "joke" and "completely illegal."
Of course, all of this -- the controversy, the new stories -- have been all in a day's work for the F1 world at the start of nearly every recent season. And regardless of the hot new "it" story, we know one thing to be true: we still need 19 rounds of the championship to truly understand what F1's 60th campaign will really be like.
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