In this series of articles we will take a look at how team mates fared against each other in the teams that finished fourth through to sixth in the Championship. Both North Star and FIRST switched a driver halfway through the season, but was this the right call? Will Westwood regret letting Tumo Kinnumen go? And which driver was the only one in 2017 to not be beaten at all in qualifying? North StarJudson Sikes and Aleksy Nowosinki were retained but the pairs relationship quickly deteriorated. An early announcement that Johan Halvosen would replace the Pole alongside Sikes for 2018 did not help matters and at the mid-point in the season he departed the team after they struck a deal with Ocelot to run Beckenbauer, but did this help them?
The shift in power balance is reflected equally as greatly in the average qualifying gap. Sikes had 0.325 in hand over Nowosinki, and only once was Nowosinki ahead by a margin of great than a tenth and a half - once again his final race. Enter Beckenbauer however and Sikes was regularly a couple of tenths shy, only once beating the German. The average gap between the pair ended up at 0.518, though this was somewhat distorted by a 2.259 second gap in a wet Belgium qualifying. In short, bringing Beckenbauer on-board was absolutely the right call. In the first nine races Sikes had the upper-hand on Nowosinki, but the Pole held his own on occasions. While Sikes form never really dropped, Beckenbauer took the car to new heights in the latter half of the year, including that incredible maiden win. Johan Halvosen has big shoes to fill. FIRSTDouglas Bacon staying at FIRST for another season was one of the biggest surprises of the 2017 driver market, but being dropped and replaced by Oleksandr Zozulya after just four races really wasnt. The Ukrainian rookie put up a much tougher fight against Arden Hutchinson and got a good foothold in the team he will share with FV2 Champion Felix Pérez in 2018, but is he up to leading a team?
With Hutchinson never being bettered over one lap this graph makes for pretty damning reading. The average gap to Bacon was an incredible 1.412 seconds, while to Zozulya it was 0.585. This is slightly skewed however, as only in five of the fourteen qualifying sessions was Zozulya actually more than 0.585 behind, with large gaps in the wet sessions of France, Belgium and Brazil harming his overall deficit. The rain is something Zozulya also needs to master. It is fair to say FIRST had one of the more one-sided seasons in terms of how their team mates ran, and for Hutchinson to be dropped after such a strong campaign is unfathomable. Zozulya shows flashes of brilliance but needs to pull it all together over a single lap and in the wet before he becomes a real force, and with the highly rated Pérez alongside in 2018, he needs to do it quickly. WestwoodWestwood signed a rookie in 2017 as Finn Schnyder joined Tumo Kinnumen after the departure of Will Hoskins and the demotion of Nikolajis Christodoulou. Kinnumen is no slouch - in 2015 he took the fight to Hoskins and won - and given a strong car he is impressive, but when it is not there he can be found wanting. Against a driver many rate as one of the best to have never had a Championship car, was Schnyder able to perform enough to prove he can handle the heat when Kinnumen leaves next year and is replaced by the in-form Beckenbauer? Like many of the rookies, his qualifying pace needs work. Losing 13-5 is not something to be boasting about, but the margins were rarely massive as we will see below. He also showed some incredible racing prowess, and it also reflects overall as Schnyder reached the chequered flag first 8 times to Kinnumen's 6. He did not quite score as many points and never failed to finish a race due to a mechanical failure, but it was a sterling first year for the young Swiss racer. The average gap was 0.421, but take out a bizarre occurrence in Austria where Schnyder lapped four seconds slower than Kinnumen, and a wet Belgium qualifying the Swiss could not get to grips with, and the average gap becomes less than a tenth. Rarely was the distance greater than a few tenths, but due to the tight midfield it usually accounted for a large number of places, making his race comeback all the more impressive. Westwood was one of those team mate battles where neither driver really lost. Kinnumen showed he is as fierce as ever and his loss in race head-to-heads can be attributed to the last three races, where in both Indianapolis and Brazil he was caught up in others incidents. Meanwhile Schnyder as a rookie was hardly expected to take the fight to Finnish team mate, and yet he did. The young Swiss racer will only get better, but he will have too as in 2018 he will be paired with Beckenbauer, who looks to be in the form of his life.
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