Turkish Grand Prix - Shall we just give Seb the title now...?

The GP weekend didn't start too well for Vettel.

Apart from the fact that somebody had stolen a lot of his hair to make a fetching haystack, he binned his motor pretty comprehensively in the wet 1st practice session on Friday. Missing all of P2 whilst the team sent out for extra rolls of gaffer tape and a dozen catering-size bottles of superglue, he made P3, then promptly made everyone else look like complete idiots in quali. Again.

Fastest by 0.4 seconds from his team-mate, Rosberg was ahead of Hamilton, Alonso and Button, and the weekend was already slipping rapidly away from his rivals. So confident were Red Bull that Seb and Webb(er) only did 1 lap each in Q3 and then put their feet up and had a cuppa whilst the others tried pathetically to beat their time. Dominant, no? Unfortunately for the smiley ninja Kobayashi, his car packed up in Q1 before he's even set a time, so back of the grid beckoned him for race day. Kamui and 23 cars to try and get past? That explains my happy little dance that the neighbours saw me doing. Not the lack of clothes though...

Rosberg got the better of Webber at the start of the race and the fact that you seem to be able to overtake anytime, any place, anywhere (Hey hey we're....) once again meant no-one tried too hard to get past their competitors at the start. Hamilton's impetuous side got the better of him again, and after running wide he found himself behind his team mate. Cue a lovely ding-dong between the McBoys as they overtook each other a couple of times during the early laps (surprisingly showing that team mates can race without crashing into each other - Who'd have thought it, eh?).

The race once again got deeply confusing, with multiple stops for tyres, more overtaking than in your average queue for a nightclub and Kobayashi passing 4327 cars during the race. Massa was released straight into the side of Hamilton in the pits, but remarkably got no penalty and all the while Seb ploughed on comfortably out front.

So frantic was the coverage, that Kamui's drop from 9th to 17th mid-race went unnoticed by the cameras, as did a fair bit of other racing, so frequent is the need this season for the focus to fall on another bit of DRS-KERS-Shagged-tyres-related overtaking at the sharp end.

One such rather splendid move saw Button nip round the outside of Massa, with Felipe then getting a lucky break as he stopped at the same time as Hamilton, who promptly had a problem with his nuts and lost the place whilst his mechanics had a good fiddle around trying to sort it out for him.

As the race drew to its conclusion, Webber and Alonso had a corking battle for P3, with the Aussie chap coming out on top.

So Seb won with relative ease (Woohoo, sank you boys, yes! etc), followed home by Webber and Alonso. Hamilton salvaged 4th whilst Rosberg's tidy 5th once again put another mark on the form that says "Tick here if you think Schumi is looking a bit hopeless, keeps crashing into everyone and should retire". Button's tyre-whispering skills failed him and he trailed home 6th, followed by Heidfeld and Petrov (who had fun waving at each other during the race: "Nice car, matey!" "yes, you too!") and Kobayashi, whose overtaking skills got rather overlooked.

And therein lies the problem, as far as I'm concerned (scraping sound of soap box being pulled into room). Now, I like a nice bit of overtaking, but there's now so much of it, that it's just not as exciting or meaningful as it used to be. As sure as Schumi's chin is quite long and Fenando's eyebrows comically large, I don't want to go back to the dull, processional races of the early part of this century, but there's now so much going on you can't take it all in. Whilst the cameras used to follow an epic battle for 12th place, they've now barely got time to get a shot of Button/Hamilton at each other's throats before they have to cut to Webber and Alonso, Massa and Button, Rosberg and Webber etc etc.

Dear F1, I love you to bits, but you're just a bit too full-on for me at the moment. Calm down dear, and lets have a little less frantic overtaking and strategy, so that we can properly value and enjoy the action.

I shall now retire to safe distance, hide under a table and wait for the onslaught....

(Random rantings typed to yet more Ultravox 12" singles, and right now it's the belting "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes"...)

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 ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

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