The title fight that turned on tyre failures

Should anyone really be surprised those 2013-spec Pirellis began to go pop? Not only were they structurally inadequate for the high, long-duration loads of Silverstone during the British Grand Prix, but also placed upon those tyres were the heavy hopes of the sport in preventing Red Bull's real underlying superiority from becoming fully apparent.

The tyres were not up to such demands and so the second half of the final season of the 2.4-litre V8 formula played out on tougher rubber and total Red Bull annihilation of the field, with Sebastian Vettel recording a nine-race consecutive victory streak that finally equalled the all-time record of Alberto Ascari set back in 1952-53.

Race director Charlie Whiting had looked on in ever-mounting dismay as the tyres began delaminating at Silverstone.

Sergio Perez's McLaren had suffered a left-rear failure through Copse the day before, a failure that had been put down to debris damage. But that was already a familiar explanation. It's what had been used to explain away failures on Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes in Bahrain, Felipe Massa's Ferrari there (twice) and Paul di Resta's Force India in Spain.

Nerves were jangling about the integrity of the new-for-2013 Pirelli constructions in the cockpits, in the race director's office and within Pirelli itself even before the Silverstone event when a total of eight failures had Whiting on the point of red-flagging the race very early into its scheduled distance.

That would have been the easy part. What to do next, with over 100,000 paying spectators looking on, would have been the tricky bit, potentially putting the race on a par with the disastrous 2005 US GP at Indianapolis.

The Silverstone marshals had to do a lot of this © LAT

Most of the failures were very spectacular and public, the carcass unfolding and throwing itself high in the air, landing back on track like a squashed, lifeless animal.

Whichever car it came off would limp back to the pits on its sidewall and its Pirelli lettering, though the casing would often as not keep the tyre inflated even without the carcass. But no way could this be considered safe.

Pirelli had wanted to revert to the tougher 2012 constructions a few races earlier but was told by the FIA that the only way this could happen without the unanimous consent of the teams - which it was never going to get, because some teams believed they held a competitive advantage over others in how they used the 2013 tyres and their flexible sidewalls - was under the guise of safety.

Not unnaturally, Pirelli did not wish to publicly say that its existing tyre was not safe - that sends all the wrong sorts of messages out and turns F1 participation from a marketing asset into a huge liability - and was rather hoping the governing body would support the change.

So it continued with the 2013 tyre and hoped.

Silverstone showed the folly of that decision. And suddenly by the very next race it was perfectly OK with the governing body for Pirelli to revert to the 2012 tyres, exactly what the firm had been asking for all along. Why it waited for drivers' lives to be risked and for Pirelli to be so publicly humiliated remains a mystery.

But that race at Silverstone was the fulcrum upon which the season pivoted. Before then the Red Bull RB9 was competitive and a title contender but not overwhelmingly better than the Mercedes, Ferrari or Lotus.

Afterwards, on the tougher tyres, it was almost unbeatable. Were it not for the tiniest of errors from Vettel in qualifying in Budapest it's highly likely he'd have won every single race after Silverstone and we'd have been looking at an 11-race winning streak.

Vettel and Red Bull's outright pace was masked by tyre demands at first © LAT

The technical reason for the contrast in form of Adrian Newey's latest evolution of 2009's RB5 before and after the tyre-spec change was highly politically charged.

Essentially the car's downforce enabled it to go through fast corners at a speed that overwhelmed the 2013 tyre. If they wanted to get competitive stint lengths its drivers had to use only a fraction of its performance through the fast turns. To an extent this was true of most cars - but much more so with the RB9.

Pirelli, which was seeing the loads generated by every car, estimated in Malaysia for the second GP that on proper, all-out performance tyres capable of transferring the aero loads, the Red Bull could be winning races by a lap...

Ostensibly, the reason for the new tyre was to steer the races more towards the two/three stops that Pirelli deemed best for an interesting contest and away from the one-stop races seen at the end of 2012 as the teams had mastered the tyres' demands.

But implicit was also an aim to at least rein-in some of the advantage enjoyed by Red Bull in recent seasons. There wasn't much argument from the other teams or the promoter in pursuing that aim.

Some might say that prioritised show over sport, perception over reality, rewarded mediocrity rather than sporting excellence. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Pirelli era has allowed Red Bull's rivals to avoid confronting head-on their own technical weaknesses and deficit to Red Bull, relying on the tyre to smother that difference.

But those rivals would counter that they do not believe Red Bull's advantage is derived wholly from the mind of Adrian Newey and that some of it is purely a function of spend.

The sport remains badly out of kilter financially and that is skewing the whole picture. Red Bull never did fully buy into F1's attempts at cost control. Its annual spend in excess of £220 million is almost 50 per cent higher than the original target conceived by the resource-restriction agreement - and that buys lap time.

Three years ago Mercedes (fifth in 2012 from the fifth highest spend of 2011) was downsizing to the numbers agreed and waiting for the likes of Red Bull and Ferrari to get down to its level, as had been agreed.

Upon the realisation this wasn't going to happen, in 2012 Mercedes pulled out all the stops and reinvested hugely, giving it the second highest budget to Red Bull. Lo and behold, in 2013 it finished second (to Red Bull).

But the notion of the top teams even pretending to reduce budgets is now bankrupt - just like many of the smaller teams could be very soon, if some restraint is not imposed upon the big spenders.

Ferrari - the third-highest spender - finished third in the constructors' championship. Moving down the table from there was only strife and distress.

Raikkonen eventually lost patience © XPB

Lotus was again a race winner and in the season's second half had the only car that could keep the Red Bulls in sight, but was in such severe financial straits that its driver Kimi Raikkonen finally walked - on account of not having been paid "a single Euro of my 2013 salary".

Nico Hulkenberg had been suffering similarly with Sauber and though this was later resolved the cracks F1 had papered over for the past few years were becoming visible now to the outside world.

The costs crisis - and F1's greedy private-equity ownership structure - is colouring everything. It is because costs are out of control that the sport has become ever-less multi-dimensional over the years.

Engine freezes, technical prescription, single-supply tyres are all attempts at putting a band-aid on the cost/ownership problem, but each of them further erodes F1's core values.

This year's attempt at moving further down that road was customer cars, thankfully headed-off. If less income were removed from the sport and cost controls imposed, every one of those core values could return.

Instead CVC continues to reap the financial rewards and the smelly fall-out from that sell-out years ago continues to stain and discredit the sport with several ongoing legal battles.

It wasn't only financial; competitively, a fourth season of Red Bull dominance put pressure on just about every other relationship. In the summer break Fernando Alonso, seeing another year pass by with the height of his powers unrewarded by a title, despaired of Ferrari and instructed his agent to begin sounding out other possibilities.

This and an ill-advised throwaway line borne of his frustration got him into hot water with Luca di Montezemolo, and so Fernando and Ferrari fell out of love.

This only hastened Ferrari's re-signing of Kimi Raikkonen; Ferrari needed to do it just in case Alonso should leave. Ferrari's doing so only disenchanted Alonso further. Two days after Raikkonen finally put pen to paper, post-Monza Monday, Ferrari announced its 2014 Alonso/Raikkonen line-up but for those two days even Alonso's 2014 participation had been far from certain as both sides stood at the brink.

Life at Ferrari became fraught © XPB

Alonso then set about trying to repair things but the relationship had taken a bad knock. The years of onslaught from the combination of Red Bull financial horsepower and Adrian Newey neurological firepower had just inflicted further damage to a rival - just as those things had played their part a year before in Lewis Hamilton leaving McLaren for Mercedes.

Competitively, it was difficult to see where the Red Bull's qualities ended and Vettel's began.

The car continued to get more from exhaust blowing than any rival, allowing a level of rake no one else could achieve without either the diffuser stalling or the tea-tray leading edge of the floor running too hard into the ground.

The greater the rake that can be achieved without diffuser-stall becoming a problem, the more underbody downforce can be used. The tougher 2012-spec of tyres used in the second half of the season allowed such levels of downforce to become feasible on the Red Bull once more and hence its advantage increased.

But the way Vettel has adapted his driving to the odd demands of a car with a big increase in rear downforce from off-throttle to on has allowed the car to be further developed in this direction. That adaptation continued into 2013 and the repeatability and consistency of his brilliance was quite remarkable.

Previously his total ease with the initial rear instability of the car on corner entry had been a key; this year that was less of an issue, especially into the season's second half. Clever vortex creation and control allowed a better airflow along the bottom of the sidepods to the tunnels at the rear and over the top of the diffuser, greatly increasing the car's off-throttle rear grip.

The challenge changed to getting as early as possible off the brakes and onto the power - and into slow corners he was doing it visibly earlier than anyone else.

This was one trick too many for the old dog Mark Webber, who remained blisteringly fast through the high-speed sections but could not summon anything like Vettel's dexterity into the more important slow corners. He also tended to be rather harder on the delicate rubber than his team-mate over a race stint.

He could still turn it on for qualifying - as a couple of late-season poles demonstrated - but in a season during which his team mate won 13 times, he failed to take a single victory. Malaysia however should have been his - and with a more favourable strategy Suzuka might have worked out that way too.

But this was now Vettel's team and that played its part in both those races.

Webber said goodbye to F1 © XPB

On the Thursday before the British GP Webber announced he would retire from F1 at the end of the year in favour of a sportscar ride with Porsche.

He bowed out with all the grace and dignity to be expected of him and F1 has lost an important voice that was never afraid to stand up and be counted. His vocalised thoughts over the years on a range of subjects from Max Mosley to Bahrain, Pirelli tyres and Red Bull politics shone through all the PR-speak, harking back to an earlier era when drivers could be relied upon to tell it how they saw it.

Ferrari looked like a title contender in the first part of the season - Alonso winning two of the first five races - but the car's form dived into the second half, partly because of the switch of tyre construction that allowed Red Bull to properly utilise its superior machine, but also partly through a Ferrari development programme that stalled from Canada onwards.

Alonso needed just a sliver of the daylight of opportunity and he'd drive the F138 clean through it and he performed magnificently to take a distant runner-up spot to Vettel in the championship. But again Ferrari had flattered only to deceive; four years at the team for Alonso and still no titles, just three runner-up spots.

Before the season was very old the team had recruited from Lotus James Allison (for his second Maranello stint) and his aero chief Dirk de Beer. Felipe Massa completed an eight-year stint at the team, the last four of which have been against the phenomenon of man and competitor that is Alonso.

As ever, the peaks of his ultimate speed were very little different to Alonso's; the joining up of them starkly different.

Mercedes had something of a helter-skelter year with Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton taking eight poles and three victories between them.

It was always on the cusp of eating its rear tyres in the first part of the season and not quite as quick on the 2012-spec rubber, but it was aerodynamically effective - the first of the team's cars to be conceived in the new 60 per cent windtunnel - and its hydraulically-linked, Lotus-like suspension allowed its drivers to take lots of kerb.

Wolff's arrival ultimately led to Brawn's exit © LAT

Ross Brawn in his final season was laying great foundations for the future but the arrival at the beginning of the year of Toto Wolff as Mercedes' new representative (and team investor) brought a complication. Toto brought with him Paddy Lowe from McLaren on the understanding he would take over as team principal in time.

Once Toto and fellow new managerial recruit Niki Lauda understood Brawn's value they were left in something of a pickle, with Brawn unwilling to stay on as anything other than the boss, and at the end of the season they parted.

The upgrade that Brawn has presided over was only just beginning to bear fruit in 2013 and the extent of the team's jump in competitiveness surprised and impressed new recruit Hamilton, even if he was less satisfied with his personal performance.

There was little between Lewis and Nico, over a season that demanded more than just outright speed from the driver and which did not reward that quality as much as when Hamilton first appeared in F1 in 2007.

Although Hamilton broke Vettel's perfect post-Silverstone run with a smart victory at the Hungaroring, it was more usually Lotus that provided Red Bull's stiffest competition in the season's second half. Its supple-riding E21 continued where last year's car had left off as very easy on its tyres and had a formidable combination of pace and stint duration.

Raikkonen followed up victory in the Melbourne season-opener with his usual relentless harvesting of points but, following the tyre-spec change, it was team-mate Romain Grosjean who came to form the team's cutting edge.

After his well-publicised difficulties of last year he still seemed somewhat detuned in the first part of the season but from mid-season onwards developed into the truly magnificent driver he'd always threatened to be with formidable pace, great fighting spirit and able to withstand any pressure applied.

Twice - at the Nurburgring and Suzuka - he made Vettel sweat for his victory. It was great to see Lotus's patience with him finally rewarded.

McLaren had a miserable season spent largely in the midfield © XPB

Although Lotus was a top-four team competitively, it was far from that financially.

Conversely, well-heeled McLaren struggled badly. Its decision to do an all-new car backfired, the MP4-28 just a step too different from what it had before for the simulation to keep pace with, leaving Jenson Button and Sergio Perez marginal Q3 qualifiers and McLaren its first podium-less season since 1980.

Such a season did nothing to aid the cause of team boss Martin Whitmarsh amid continuing political moves in the background from Ron Dennis.

Of the smaller teams, Force India starred in the first half-season with a car configured carefully around the 2013 tyres and was adversely affected by the later change in construction.

Sauber's season was a mirror image of Force India's, struggling in the first half, sparkling in the second once it had reconfigured its car with a Red Bull-style Coanda exhaust arrangement.

Williams suffered an appalling season with a badly conceived exhaust-blowing system. Once this was removed late in the year it became once more the half-decent machine of 2012.

In the meantime tech director Mike Coughlan had been replaced by Pat Symonds, whose task it now is to return the team to respectability.

As one technical era came to an end, the underlying financial and structural problems of F1 remained very much in place.

The cracks are getting bigger - something's got to give.

To read the digital edition of AUTOSPORT's definitive F1 2013 Season Review, click here.