Bahrain Race... Alonso leads redwash

Well... what did you think?

The first race of 2010 wasn't stunningly exciting, was it? Pretty unexciting in fact. Interesting yes, but not a thriller.

The new kids on the block (Lotus, Hispania & Virgin) weren't as far off the pace as expected, but were pretty much about as reliable as we expected (ie, not very) with the exception of Lotus, who got 1 car to the end and the other at least classified as a finisher. Hispania just got the better of Virgin when Senna dragged his car into it's 19th lap before it finally packed up. Chandhok managed less that 5 laps in the entire weekend in his Hispania - a bump he didn't even know was there got him on his 2nd race lap.

After my irritation with BBC commentator Jonathan Legard last year ("Hamilton pushes on"), Pit lane poppet Lee Mackenzie got my goat this weekend with her brilliant questioning style. I think she instructed every driver that dropped out of the race to "Just tell us what happened". Oooh. Good idea Lee. They probably hadn't thought of that.

Anyway, the race itself saw Webber deploying a brilliant smokescreen tactic to try and stop anyone from overtaking him, and Alonso laid down the first marker to his team mate by nipping past Massa at the start. Vettel looked to have it in the bag until a dodgy spark plug caused him problems (it wasn't the exhaust, no. The big hole in his bodywork was though). The inevitable happened, and he was passed by Alonso, Massa and Hamilton. Schumacher didn't shine, getting beaten by Rosberg (bet he's happy!) and Button wound up 7th. Welcome to McLaren Jens - I suspect you'd better get used to this. The Saubers seem to have been fast in testing only, and neither of them made it to the end either.

So Alonso won on his first outing for Ferrari. Shame he hadn't practiced what to do during the Italian national anthem. Schumi used to conduct the team, Massa always does a spot of chest thumping. Kimi looked, er, well, bored. Nando looked decidedly awkward and uncomfortable. Still, he'll get used to it.

As for the rule changes, the pit stops were great, cars nipping in and out rapidly, but there wasn't much in the way of overtaking on track and nearly everyone changed tyres once only. Even then, no-one seemed to be clinging on to the track by the tips of their tyres. What's the betting we get a mandatory 2 stops introduced if that keeps up?

F1 2010 - 7 out of 10. Must try harder.

(The Monkees would very much like you to board the Last Train To Clarksville.)

Comments

"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 ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog