Skip to main content

British GP qualifying - Bad for Button


Oh dear.

Whilst everyone seems pretty thrilled to be at a revitalised Silverstone for this weekend's British Grand Prix, Jenson Button is probably wondering what the hell went wrong at his home race during qualifying.

McLaren tried to rush through the blown rear diffuser pioneered by Red Bull, but couldn't get it working properly and wound up having to revert to their old system. Whilst Hamilton was able to recover to a reasonable 4th place, Jenson wound up in 14th.

Vettel sang the praises of the new circuit from his car immediately after getting pole, whilst Webber finished just behind him in second. There was then a vast (in F1 terms anyway) 0.6 second gap to Alonso in his Ferrsri, fresh from yet another waving-at-someone-like-it-will-make-a-difference episode.

Whilst it may be pouring at home in Cumbria, it's 25C and Sunny at Silverstone, and tomorrow afternoon we find out if the Red Bull team can actually get both cars to the end without them breaking down or crashing into each other. If they can, it looks like it could be a dominant victory. Mind you... how many times have we thought that this year?

In other F1 news, Senna got dropped by Hispania in favour of Sakon Yamamoto who hasn't raced since 96. You could tell too - he was hardly able to keep his head up in quali. Good luck in the race then... Maybe if the team sellotape his helmet to the airbox....? Kubica has signed to Renault for a further two years, a sensible decision when you realise that all the other top seats have gone for next year at least.

Enjoyed BBC's coverage today (breakdowns and sound issues notwithstanding), especially the Huw Edwards intro (but why was he talking so sloooowwwwllllyyyyy?), seeing Murray Walker outwitting the new boys, and everyone taking the piss out of Eddie Jordan's (lack of) dress sense.

Roll on 1pm tomorrow...

(Toons today from OK GO's album "Oh No")

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

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 ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...