'Quick Nick' is the right man for Renault

 

THERE WAS MUCH speculation surrounding the Lotus Renault GP team's driver lineup after Robert Kubica's terrible rallying accident, they've made a choice now and I think it's the right one.

Let me start by saying that I like Robert Kubica a great deal. Not only is he one of the sport's most naturally talented drivers but he's a breath of fresh air in the overly corporate world of Formula One. He's a decent, nice and down to earth bloke. He's also a proper 'old school' driver, hence the fact that he was out driving a rally car just weeks before the season starts. Back in the good ol' days F1 drivers would be out there every weekend racing whatever they could get their hands on; be it a rally car, an F3000 car, a touring car or an endurance racer, simply because they loved racing.

Nowadays they're not even allowed to be seen another car incase it annoys a sponsor let alone partake in something even remotely dangerous outside of a Grand Prix weekend. The naysayers will say "you see; he was doing other activities, it went wrong and now he's out for the season" but I applaud Robert Kubica, I wish all drivers were more like him.

Replacing Robert
With Kubica out, but luckily recovering well, Lotus Renault were faced with a problem of who to put in the vacant seat. Their official reserve drivers were Bruno Senna who suffered a farcical rookie year with Hispania in 2010 and Romain Grosjean who displayed a distinct lack of star quality the last time Renault put him in a race seat. 

Bruno was the early favourite because he has the most recent race experience and, well, because who could resist giving someone with the Senna name a drive in a black and gold Renault powered Lotus F1 car.

No doubt Bruno would have done a fine job in the short term but he still has only one years F1 experience under his belt and this was likely to be a year long gig so understandably Renault wanted someone with a little more experience and there aren't many with more experience that Nick Heidfeld.

Experience

The extremely likeable German has 172 race starts and 225 points to his name and is often described, along with Martin Brundle, as the best driver never to win a race. That elusive race win is long over due and maybe now, for probably only the second time in his career, he has a car that might just be able to provide it for him.

Of course experience isn't everything as was proved last year when Heidfeld replaced the equally experienced Pedro De La Rosa, most famous for falling in a river at the US GP, at Sauber and scored as many points in five races as the spaniard had managed in fourteen.

Nick Heidfeld is a genuinely fast racing driver and he deserves to be on the grid legitimately rather than as a stand-in but unfortunately there is such a thing as sponsorship and it has an awful lot of power in F1. So much so that drivers with lots of it find themselves in race seats whether they're fast enough or not, while talented drivers like Nick Heidfeld, Anthony Davidson, Karun Chandhok and Nico Hulkenberg end up on the sidelines.

It's because of this I'm glad to see a talented driver back in F1 instead of one with lots of money, albeit under very sad circumstances.

Get well soon Robert. Szybkiego powrotu do zdrowia Robert.