Bahrain Qualifying... Wasn't expecting THAT German...

Ahh..... the warm glow that is having F1 back again. Mmmmmmm. Nice.

And in about 19 hours we move up a gear to the race itself. But that's tomorrow. In the meantime, we had qualifying earlier and it was pretty interesting...

First of all, I just became a Chandhok fan. Poor guy - He'd never even driven the car before, the seat didn't fit and I'm surprised he didn't have the handbook out, reading the little notice about not going over 50mph for the first 1000 miles, and trying to work out where the volume control was for the stereo. In the end, he was about 10 seconds off the pace. Sounds a lot, but when you consider his last drive in an F1 car was a test last year, that's darn good. Nice one Karun.

A slight whinge - The graphics have changed this year and they seem to have opted for a slanty style of showing positions. I think it slopes the wrong way, boys. A bit counter-intuitive (did I just type that? Sorry). Sort it out.

As for the rest of quali, well, it was a bit concerning to see the Saubers a long way off the pace (they looked better than that in testing) but great to see Sutil in the Force India in the top 10, and he's gone for the harder tyres, which might well help him tomorrow.

The great Schunami everyone seemed to be anticipating didn't wipe out even his team mate, and whilst 4th and 8th for Hamilton & Button (oooo... why do those names seem so familiar?) wasn't exactly bad, they must be disappointed. Rosberg did well for 5th (and I bet he feels smug!) and Massa must be a happy bunny to have out-qualified Alonso.

Vettel got pole though in Lucious Liz and very convincing it was too. Let's face it, I wasn't expecting that. Were you?

Still, I told Jean in the bakers this morning that Alonso would win the race, so we'll just have to wait and see if I'm right.

F1 is back. Yay!

Oh, and if you're waiting for the FF1 Team selections, they'll be out later tonight. Mrs Hamilbutton has abandoned me for the night, so I'll be at the laptop...

(NP: New through my letterbox yesterday, Mika's "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" album. I'm liking it...)

Comments

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog