Skip to main content

Chinese GP - Blonde bomshell in 1st win shock!

I still have no idea how the Mercedes tricksy DRS thing does what it does. Feed air from the rear wing... through the car... so it makes the front wing work better. At 200mph...

Nope. No idea. Nor, apparently, did Lotus, who made an attempt to get it banned prior to the race, but with no effect. I suspect the stewards had no idea how it does it either, and it’s hard to say something is breaking the rules when you’ve got no idea what it’s actually doing.
 
The complicated Bahrain GP saga continued, with the FIA and Bernie proclaiming it fine and safe to go to, seemingly conveniently avoiding the whole issue of people get killed whilst protesting, which is what folks are actually upset about. Can sport be entirely free from politics? Should F1 avoid all countries with a dodgy human rights record? (That’s dodgy human rights record, as opposed to dodgy Human League record. With the first, people have to contend with scary stuff from people with strange haircuts and a dangerous look in their eyes, and the latter... oh. Hmm.)

Hamilton was off to a bad start straight away, with a gearbox change meaning that, whatever he did in quail, he’d be bumped down the grid 5 races on Sunday morning. A good effort saw him 2nd fastest, but there were shocks a-plenty, with Massa out in Q2 yet again, but more startlingly, the Sebulator found himself sitting out Q3 as well. Both Saubers made it into the top 10, as did Grosjean, and once Lewis’ penalty had been applied, Kobayashi was 3rd on the grid behind a speedy Schumacher, and a stunning Rosberg. Britney’s first Q3 lap was startlingly fast – so much so that he knew he wasn’t going to better it, and sat out the rest of the session whilst his rivals made futile attempts to get close. Silver front row lock-out... but not from McLaren.

At the start, Nico got away well, whilst Button nipped into 3rd as Kobayashi got a clanger of a start and fell to 6th.

By the 6th lap, Vettel’s bad weekend was sinking it’s teeth in, as he toured round in 14th, whilst Rosberg was already over 2.6 up on his team-mate. The following lap saw Webber pit early for tyres, to try and get out of the traffic chaos that was to dominate the race.

With 10 circuits gone, Nico has a 5 second advantage, with Jenson attempting to catch Schumacher.

After Raikkonen stopped, he and Webber had a good scrap for position, but Schumi’s stop on lap 13 was his demise, as a wheel nut failed to wind up where it was meant to be, but the car was released anyway. A few turns later, Michael knew the game was up and parked it.

As the leaders all stopped, Perez found himself leading another race, before relinquishing the position to Massa.

By lap 34 Button was closing in on Rosberg, whist Perez was doing a good job of stopping Hamilton from moving up to 3rd.

Differing tyre-stop strategies allowed Jenson to lead for while, but a disastrous stop on lap 40 saw him stationary for 10 seconds. Sounds short, but in modern F1 it was like stopping off to watch an episode of Star Trek, and finding out it’s a marathon of all the movies... including that one with the whales. To make matters worse, his return to the track in 6th saw him land in the middle of a gaggle of cars.

Massa was still clinging on in second, by his clapped out tyres meant he was holding up a formidable queue, which included Raikkonen, Vettel, Button, Grosjean, Webber, Senna, Maldonado, Hamilton and Alonso. Nico didn’t mind though – by this stage he was 22 seconds ahead of the pack.

With 10 laps left, Maldonado and Grosjean resumed the hostilities which hadn’t really helped either of them out previously, in an exciting, wheel-banging, bodywork-removing battle for 8th, whilst Nico’s pit crew were trying to point out that he needed to take it easy on his tyres. Please.

With 8 laps to go, Kimi embarked on a free-fall through the field that suggested that his tyres hadn’t just fallen off a cliff, but had in fact taken a jet to another country, and fallen off all the cliffs there too. Over the next 3 laps, he was to fall from 2nd to 12th, and lost a further 2 places by the end of the race.

Differing levels of remaining tyre grip saw Hamilton passing Webber too, whilst Vettel, who had somehow pulled himself up into 2nd, fell victim to Button, Hamilton and finally the ultimate indignity of Webber fighting past as well.

Rosberg duly bagged his first win at the 111th attempt, and with the McLaren duo sharing the podium, Mercedes had the kind of day that makes Norbert temporarily forget pies. So dominant was Nico’s performance, that Hamilton asked him, before they headed out to the podium celebrations “Did you actually do any overtaking?”

“No.” Said Rosberg. Crikey.

3 races gone, 3 different winners, and no idea of who might actually win this championship yet. 2012 F1 is shaping up nicely.

(Classic rock time, with Free's "The Free Story". N-ice!)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...