With news of Mark Webber’s unfortunate accident last weekend at his own charity cycling event come two concerns. First and foremost is the hope that Webber will fully recover and have no permanent effects from his injuries, which are reported to be a broken leg and other minor injuries.

The second concern is that Webber’s career will be threatened. While the obvious question is whether or not Webber will race again, and all signs right now point to a Yes answer, the most meaningful question is how will Webber’s forced time off play into new teammate Sebastian Vettel’s rise to the top of F1.

To backtrack a bit, many fans of Webber’s understand how bad luck has played a significant role in his F1 career to date. Although he chose to switch teams when he did, Webber’s timing has been dubious as he joined the Williams-BMW team in the exact season that his former Jaguar, soon-to-be-Red Bull, squad was crossing paths with Williams, soon-to-be-without BMW, in the F1 pecking order. The result was two lost years at a team on a downhill slide.

Then there were various races where potentially high finishes were spoiled by mechanical failures or unusual incidents. One of the most notorious was in Japan ‘07 when future teammate Vettel smashed into the back of Webber during a safety car period while both were running in podium positions.

But this latest setback in Webber’s career will have the biggest impact. With Webber on the sidelines, the primary testing focus will now be on Vettel in an offseason where the Adrian Newey-designed chassis is fresh off of capturing its first victory (albeit with a Ferrari engine and presented by junior team, Toro Rosso) and where the engine supplier Renault will certainly be given the opportunity to “equalize” its powerplants with the more powerful lumps from Ferrari, Mercedes, and BMW. Make no mistake, the senior Red Bull operation will not run second fiddle to junior Toro Rosso in ‘09 (now wholly owned by Red Bull, by the way). And for further measure, Toro Rosso management will cement its junior status with its imminent driver pairing announcement.

Newey’s Red Bull creation seems tailor-made for Vettel. It is sensitive towards oversteer but very quick in the right hands. And there is no doubt that Newey and the Red Bull folks want to win big. True, KERS is a huge wildcard along with the new aero regulations. However, for the upcoming season, everything else being equal, I would expect the ‘09 Red Bull to be a fantastic car. And with Vettel behind the wheel, we could see the type of jump in performance from ‘08 to ‘09 for Red Bull as we saw in ‘93 to ‘94 for Benetton with its rising German driver of the day.

Vettel is amazingly mature for his age and relative inexperience. I use the term “relative” because he has actually been directly involved in F1 since mid-2006. And watching the young German come alive on Saturdays and Sundays of race weekends erases any doubts that he has enough skills in setting up the car to consistently run competitively.

So as Webber works hard to recover in time for a short bit a testing prior to the season-opening Australian GP, his new teammate will be pounding around at the next test in Jerez and when the new car debuts in Feruary mapping his brain to the nuances of the senior team car and how he can extract maximum pace out of it.

The opening event of 2009 should be an exciting one for Red Bull. The team will have its best-ever driver pairing and most competitive car yet. During his career, Webber has always had an edge over his teammate (although his brief pairing with Nick Heidfeld was a close call). But now, facing his stiffest competition yet, he literally begins the quest on one leg. In what should be the strongest season of his F1 career, I predict Webber will for the first time nevertheless be playing second fiddle to his teammate.

With momentum gaining for Scuderia Toro Rosso to hire two newcomers to the organization, Sebastien Buemi and Takuma Sato, the staff of Grand Prix DB would like to make a case for the team to instead retain Sebastien Bourdais.

Buemi will likely get the “first” seat at STR. And the reason why Bourdais should be in the “second” seat at STR for 2009 is that successful teams recognize the importance of stability. Yes, maybe Sato could out-point Bourdais over the course of a full season. Maybe. But he will first have to learn the nuances of the chassis, integrate with the team, and develop a rapport with his engineer. Typically this takes time.

With Buemi and Sato how is the team better off with a rookie and a team newcomer? In his F1 past, Sato has not shown himself to be a character who can instantly integrate into the team and move it forward, like Michael Schumacher or Fernando Alonso. Sure Sato has skills, but so does Bourdais. Perhaps they can be seen as equal on talent. But with Bourdais, the team already has baseline data and a working relationship, and they should be able to move forward from the get-go.

There are exceptions to the wholesale driver change rule. McLaren did pretty well in ‘07 with two new drivers. However, one was a two-time World Champion and the other was a long-term driver in the team’s development program (Alonso and Lewis Hamilton). Williams had success in ‘03. However one driver was a three-time World Champion and the other was an established test driver in the organization (Alain Prost and Damon Hill). None of these qualifications apply to Sato.

It seems STR management is taking their success in ‘08 for granted. They don’t appear to realize that most if not all of their success was due to the brilliant driving of Sebastian Vettel—not because of genius acts on management’s part. Vettel is a rare talent who is nearly impossible to replace. Bourdais did a solid job as a rookie and has obvious potential after spending a year with the team. STR is short of resources but continuing on its current path will help them more than a ride buyer would. Instead, team management is acting with impunity when it comes to driver selection.

When team managers think too highly of themselves, they usually end up ignoring the contributions of the incumbent driver and decide to make wholesale driver changes. More often than not, the result is that the team finds itself in a clear downward trend by midseason because they have had to spend precious resources on getting to know its drivers rather than developing the car.

The Minardi roots run deep at STR, and the back of the grid will be a familiar place for the team. With an all-new driver line up in ‘09, we can say goodbye to STR as a front runner. As a contender, we hardly knew you, Toro Rosso.

Incredible! Now, that is the way to finish the World Championship.

Great race to Felipe Massa. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton.

Grand Prix DB provides each driver’s statistical rating prior to the start of the race. A rating of 1.00 is the highest possible score. Here are the Grand Prix DB Power Ratings for the Brazilian GP:

1. Lewis Hamilton, 0.84
2. Felipe Massa, 0.83
3. Fernando Alonso, 0.79
4. Sebastian Vettel, 0.79
5. Robert Kubica, 0.76
6. Nick Heidfeld, 0.75
7. Heikki Kovalainen, 0.62
8. Timo Glock, 0.61
9. Kimi Raikkonen, 0.60
10. Sebastien Bourdais, 0.56
11. Jarno Trulli, 0.55
12. Nico Rosberg, 0.53
13. Mark Webber, 0.52
14. Nelson Piquet Jr, 0.50
15. Kazuki Nakajima, 0.45
16. David Coulthard, 0.43
17. Jenson Button, 0.40
18. Rubens Barrichello, 0.33
19. Giancarlo Fisichella, 0.29
20. Adrian Sutil, 0.23

While Lewis Hamilton has full control of his destiny, all Felipe Massa has to be concerned about is winning the race and let the rest sort itself out. Massa is in a great position to win the race, although if it does rain on race day, it could throw the race into a lottery. Ultimately, form should hold, and expect Hamilton to leave the race as the new World Champion.

As far as the weather, it would be nice if the rain came and played into the hands of the cars heavier on fuel. Qualifying was fairly closely matched, and another surprise result would be a nice way to end the season.