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Start your engines – it’s F1 time again!

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It may only feel like last week that the Formula 1 season finished but, after a break so short the engines are probably still warm, it’s back this weekend.

Much has happened off-track during the ever-decreasing winter break, including World Champion Lewis Hamilton winning the BBC TV Sports Personality of the Year award and having photos of himself plastered all over his Twitter account looking moody, stylish, and fashionable in shots so posed you could get a couple of quick laps of Monaco in whilst his entourage figured out if the lighting was flattering enough.

The Caterham and Marussia teams went bust, got resurrected, went into receivership, were having their assets auctioned off (which sounds painful) , being brought out, saved, optimistic about the future and doomed, and all that before Christmas. The end result is that Caterham didn’t make it, whilst Marussia are now Manor and ready to roll with a hastily altered car from last year. Assuming the paint has dried in time, and their drivers can find the garage.

Hirsute Spaniard Fernando Alonso – the man who perceived wisdom says should have won way more than the 2 titles currently on his mantelpiece – suffered concussion is a testing accident, which left him briefly thinking he was a junior karter from 1995, and sees him missing the opening Australian Grand Prix. On the plus side, the temporary memory loss will have given him a brief respite from the crushing realisation that his move to McLaren has resulted in him having a car so unreliable, he’d probably have been lucky to get to the start line without it breaking down.

Multiple Champ Sebastian Vettel has taken Alonso’s seat at Ferrari, and will be hoping for a far better season following a severe shaming at Red Bull by his team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, the Aussie with a perma-smile so big, winning a title would probably cause his head to split in two.

Unfortunately for him that’s unlikely, as winter testing times, two great drivers and a bulging trophy cabinet from last year all point to a Mercedes team who will be hard to beat. Has Hamilton reached a level that will see his arch-rival and former friend Nico Rosberg unable to match, or will Nico piece together a consistent campaign and bag his first title this year?

Elsewhere on the grid, spotty youngster Max Verstappen will be interesting to watch – at just 17 years of age he’s too young to even drive in his home country, but is highly rated by many seasoned observers. He could be a revelation, assuming he can remember to get up before lunchtime and doesn’t have a massive sulk and lock himself in his room when things go wrong.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Kimi Raikkonen is the last driver still racing to have been born in the 70s, narrowly beating British veteran Jenson Button to the dubious title of oldest bloke on the grid.

Vroom for one more on the sofa?

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 13th of March 2015. It hasn't popped up on their website, but if you want to keep an eye out for it, this is where to hang around whilst not looking suspicious. The print edition had it retitled as "Racing action back on track".

This was very nearly a column about Jeremy Clarkson's restaurant incident, but as I need to sub my content on a Wednesday evening, the story was still very much in it's early we-don't-know-much-but-let's-speculate-anyway phase, with the media dusting off their "He's an arse and look at all the bad stuff he's said" files.

Further rumour and non-developments have kept the papers busy and frothy-mouthed over the weekend, so maybe I'll have a stab at it for next week's edition.

Having now seen the first Grand Prix of the season, I seem to have got it largely correct. It does appear 2015's racing will feature fans wondering by how much of a margin Lewis will beat Nico, quite how spectacularly bad the McLaren-Honda is, and if we might see a race with less than 10 finishers. Depressingly, my comment on Alonso turned out to be all too true, with his stand-in breaking down on the way round to the grid.

In all my years of watching Formula 1, this is the least excited I've been...

(Slow-running cassette again - No, I don't know why I'm persisting either really. Anyway, It's a remix album of Jeff Wayne's War of The Worlds, from 2000, with bonus irony; the CD player I had at the time was on the blink, so the recording features skipping noises. Gah.)
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