The 2007 GP2 Season Review

Timo Glock's route to the GP2 title was far from conventional, and that's not just regarding the horrible run of misfortune the German suffered mid-season when he seemed to be well on his way to the prestigious crown.

A brief look at the driver CVs of previous champions Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, champions in 2005 and 2006 respectively, paint the perfect picture of the ladder to Formula One.

Both starred in karting, then Rosberg started his career in cars in Formula BMW, while Hamilton opted for Formula Renault. Both then spent two years in Formula Three, before winning the GP2 title in their first season. Simple ...

Glock's career was initially just as straightforward. He won the German Formula BMW title (the year before Rosberg), and he spent two years in Formula Three. But then he strayed from convention.

There were a handful of races for Jordan in Formula One (which in included a point-scoring debut in Canada), but it didn't materialise into the full-time ride he had hoped for. He then impressed during a season of Champ Car in 2005, but he was quickly slipping off the radar.

So Glock decided to rejoin the ladder that he had left in 2004. He gambled on going back to a series that was below F1, and he did it with a team that was hardly a proven force in the shape of BCN.

He scored points just twice in the first nine races, but when Tristan Gommendy left iSport, Glock had the opportunity that he needed to make his big risk pay off. In the remaining races he was only outscored by championship contenders Hamilton and Nelson Piquet Jr, and he finished the season a respectable fourth.

He would stay with iSport for 2007, and after a season that was briefly plagued by reliability dramas and the occasional silly incident, he came out of it with the title. Not quite so simple ...

Lucas di Grassi © LAT

The tortoise and the hare

There was yet another element to Glock's 2007 title that strayed from the norm - a title rival that was determined to play the percentages.

For the third season running, the GP2 champion won the title with five race wins during the season. However, while Rosberg and Hamilton had gone to battle with rivals that had enjoyed similar levels of success - Heikki Kovalainen also took five wins in 2005, while Piquet won four races last year - Glock wasn't able to engage in the same sort of direct fight with Lucas di Grassi.

The Brazilian - a former winner of the Macau Formula 3 Grand Prix - had endured a tough first year in GP2, but for 2007 he had landed a plum drive with reigning champions ART.

The French squad had been the dominant force over the first two years of GP2, so a lot was expected of di Grassi, who had scored just eight points with Durango on his way to 17th in the 2006 standings.

But as Glock blasted out of the blocks with five consecutive podium finishes, di Grassi was less convincing, and the Brazilian was 19 points adrift of Glock already.

However, the feeling communicated by di Grassi was that ART had gone a little off the boil, and he called on the once-dominant team to up their game so that he could compete at the front.

As it turned out, di Grassi never quite found that extra little bit of speed that was required to mark him out as a star. But while Glock went through a mid-season spell where he seemed to either win or retire, di Grassi decided to play to his strengths.

After that excellent start to the season, Glock had retired from the next four races, and di Grassi had closed the gap down to just two points, thanks to one second place finish, and three consecutive fourth place finishes. It was hardly the mark of a champion, but few could argue that the cautious approach was working, providing that Glock kept retiring.

While Glock quite publicly lamented the reliability issues that were hampering his season, di Grassi chipped away during the second half of the year, and took his only victory of the season in Turkey. Meanwhile, Glock was still either racking up wins and podiums, or leaving circuits empty handed after yet more troubles.

The iSport driver could have been forgiven for being pushed over the edge on Sunday morning at Spa, when he tangled with Ricardo Risatti before the race had even started. As he went home without any points for the fourth weekend of the year, di Grassi took another podium, and heading to the finale at Valencia Glock's lead was just two points.

iSport teammates Timo Glock and Andreas Zuber collide in Magny-Cours © LAT

Di Grassi vowed to drop the cautious approach for the title showdown, and for the first time all year, he failed to score any points during a race weekend. He spun out of the first race while Glock came through the changeable conditions in seventh place, and the scene was set on Sunday for the German to complete his roller coaster season in style.

This was when it mattered the most, and Glock cruised to his title. There were no reliability problems, and more importantly, no silly incidents before Glock had even got to the first corner ...

A minute of madness

Glock's faultless start to the season all went a bit wrong during quite possibly the most bizarre 60 seconds of the whole season at Magny-Cours.

iSport's supremacy had been demonstrated in qualifying as Glock and Andreas Zuber lined up together on the front row, but the team's hopes of a similar result in the race were dashed after just four seconds.

The team-mates had both aimed their cars at the same piece of road in the middle of the track, and as they both made good starts, their paths crossed with dramatic consequences. Zuber's car shot up into the air briefly, before both mangled machines came to rest at the side of the track.

While the drivers had differing views on the incident, iSport boss Paul Jackson did his best to diffuse the situation, and it was only after the season had finished at Valencia that he took the time to reflect on the incident, during a press conference with Glock.

"Both of them contributed so they've got themselves to blame and they did their reputations quite a bit of harm at that time," said Jackson.

"Really, there wasn't any point in me taking any action. The most positive action was to move forward as a team, and after I'd seen it I said that as far as I was concerned it was history. We drew a line under it and moved forward.

"We carried on and had to be strong as a team. To be fair, both the guys have done that. There was really no bad feeling in any way. It was the best way to handle it in that respect."

The team's life might have been made a little bit easier by the fact that less than a minute after their cars had taken each other out, the focus was shifted to another incident, which was far more frightening.

Along the shenanigans at the start between the iSport drivers, several cars had failed to get away from the grid, so the safety car was deployed. As the field slowed halfway round the first lap, Ernesto Viso tagged the back of Michael Ammermuller, which sent his Racing Engineering car flying through the air.

Viso landed upside down on the concrete wall before his car came to rest on the other side of the wall, but miraculously the Venezuelan escaped without any serious injuries.

Adam Carroll on the Silverstone podium © LAT

A familiar face returns

The events on that Saturday in France overshadowed what turned out to be a low-key return to GP2 for former race winner Adam Carroll, who came back to the series after a brief and disappointing spell in the DTM.

The Ulsterman returned to the GP2 fold with FMS, who parted ways with Antonio Pizzonia after a terrible start to a season that had promised so much. Carroll's first weekend (14th in qualifying and no points from either race) did little to turn that downward spiral around, but he put things right at the perfect time.

In the summer of 2006, Hamilton had created a frenzy at Silverstone by dominating the weekend. His double victory somewhat put Carroll in the shade, and it was easy to forget that the Ulsterman had out-qualified Hamilton, and put an inferior car on the podium that weekend.

But the spotlight was on Carroll one year later, as he warmed up the Grand Prix crowd (who were preparing to watch Hamilton start his McLaren from pole position) by giving them a home victory on Sunday morning.

It was a fitting reward for the 24-year-old, who had gambled on returning to the series after racing in it full-time for in 2005 and 2006. There was another victory to follow in Hungary, although consistency robbed him and the team of the chance to finish any higher than seventh in the championship.

He might have been a little disappointed to finish behind his former teammate Javier Villa in the standings, who went from scoring no points in 2006 to taking three race wins for Racing Engineering on his way to sixth in the championship this year.

The young Spaniard was honest enough to admit that he still has plenty to work on though, as his victories owed much to the reverse grid rule, which often rewarded him with front row starting positions despite lacking the outright pace to consistently compete at the front.

With a new car coming in for 2008, there is a lot to look forward to in GP2 next year. The quality of this year's field came in for some criticism, in particular from Ron Dennis, but it is easy to forget that Hamilton's successor as champion was one of the few men to offer him a real fight during his stunning drive through the field at Istanbul in 2006. So he can't be that bad ...