grumpyf1

Formula 1 roars back into the lives of armchair motorsport fans this weekend, with the first race of 2019 taking place in Australia on Sunday. If you’ve paid up to watch the races on Sky, congratulations – you get all of the races live, and an extra Button too, with the former F1 champion, Jenson, joining their presenting line up. If, like me, you’ll be watching it on Channel 4... well, there’s less to be excited about. Only the British GP will be live, as a deal signed by former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone kicks in, giving Sky the rights to show all other races exclusively live in the UK. Instead, Channel 4 will have highlights only. Cue the tricky task of trying to avoid picking up your phone, turning on the laptop, or watching TV/listening to the radio for half a day after the race has finished, to try and avoid an unwelcome “and the winner was...” situation. Plus, some awkward late-night timeslots. Formula when..?! Sky’s big promo film also conspicuously used Fleetwood M...

"Excuse me whilst I say something mind-bogglingly stupid..." It’s a tough time for Brits in Formula 1. Both British teams, McLaren and Williams, are a million miles away from their championship-dominating glory years. McLaren are in a perilous 6th place, and Williams 10th. In case you’re unfamiliar with F1, and think that sounds OK-ish – there are only 10 teams. Whilst brilliant British drivers have won many titles (Hunt, a couple of Hills, Button, Mansell etc.), 2018’s championship boasts just one driver from our fair isles – Lewis Hamilton. To be fair, he is pretty handy, having bagged four titles himself. With the British Grand Prix taking place at Silverstone this weekend, if you want to support your home team or driver, you’re probably going to need to back just Lewis. If either of the two teams manage to have the first car past the chequered flag, I’ll be talking next week about the most dramatic race in history, whilst bookies sob uncontrollably. It’s been ...

F1 2018: Catch it while you can... It’s set to be a thrilling season for Formula One fans. Both Britain’s Lewis Hamilton and Germany’s Sebastian Vettel have now achieved four world titles each, with Hamilton equalling his arch-rival’s tally last year. Who was battling it out for that title last time? Yup – those two. It wasn’t always the most gentlemanly of battles either, with Seb famously banging wheels with Lewis after he believed the Brit had brake-tested him. So far, so tremendously entertaining. True, Vettel’s team, Ferrari, along with their driver himself, lost the plot somewhat when it really counted. Happily, it looks like we may be on for another ding-dong (and potentially bodywork-bashing) re-match. The cars look a little different this year too. Imagine someone sticking the bit that goes on top of your foot from a flip-flop onto the cockpit of the cars, and you’ve pretty much got the ‘halo’. This controversial new safety feature should help protect drivers from in...

Being a Formula 1 fan has been tough the last few years. Same team winning all the time. Tyre management. Vettel swearing at everything. Yes, saying you’re a fan of Formula 1 often feels like you’re admitting to stealing underwear off washing lines (that wasn’t me though, honestly). People look at with a mixture of amazement, horror and sympathy. Why would you do that? Surely not for fun? You need some kind of help. The Mercedes team have dominated for the last few years, and whilst 2016 gave us a decent battle between their two drivers, no-one else was really in with a shout. Everyone complained endlessly about having to drive cautiously to stop their tyres wearing out too soon. Former champions were reduced to pedalling cars that were either slow and fragile (Alonso and Button’s McLarens) or dogged by poor strategy calls and a propensity to get into any accident going (Vettel & Raikkonen’s Ferraris). 2017’s season kicks off this weekend in Australia, and there are reaso...

Andy Murray may have ended the year as men’s world number 1, but there’s another Brit still fighting for the World Champion title in 2016. In any other year in Formula 1 history, Germany’s Nico Rosberg would already be a couple of weeks into celebrating his first title at the pinnacle of motorsport. He must be rueing F1’s decision to expand the 2016 championship from the previous season’s 20 races to 21, leaving him with one final battle against his team mate, and rival, Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton is 12 points behind, with 25 available for a win. There are various permutations that could see Lewis take his 4th title (and 3rd in a row) in the heat of Abu Dhabi. The headline-grabbing one is nice and simple though, and shows the level of challenge he faces – even if he wins, Rosberg needs only to come 3rd to take his first title. True, Hamilton has won the last couple of races, is at the top of his game, and may well be the most naturally gifted driver behind the wheel of a multi-...

What do you call two silver things that cost millions of pounds and keep crashing into each other? The Mercedes Formula 1 team. You’re right – that isn’t funny. Which is exactly how team boss Toto Wolff saw it when Nico Rosberg ‘forgot’ to turn into the corner on the last lap of the Austrian Grand Prix last week, causing his team-mate to crash into him on the very last lap. A sure-fire 1-2 finish turned into an acrimonious 4-1, as Hamilton took the win from Rosberg, and the chastened culprit limped home with a damaged car. Sure, it’s not exactly the world’s biggest problem, as the drivers remain 1st and 2nd in the championship title hunt, and the team themselves are comfortably leading the constructors’ table. But it does highlight a problem for them that refuses to go away; If these two highly-paid racers can’t play nicely, and the other teams catch up a little, they could well start taking each other out of two races – the one on the track, and the one for the title. And w...

F1 – or “The Lewis Hamilton Show” as it should probably be called now - zooms back into action this weekend. Will it be exciting this year? Despite being a huge F1 fan, even I can see that it’s been, well... kind of dull the last couple of years. In 2014 it looked like a good battle was on the cards, and fellow Mecedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg did just that for most of the season, at times acrimoniously, before Brit Hamilton took his second title. Everyone else was left looking like they’d turned up for a heavy drinking session with a thimble-full of shandy. Last year it was a bit closer, with Ferrari’s Sebastien Vettel taking a few wins, but it was again the Hamilton & Rosberg show most of the time, with the blinged-up Lewis tying up title number three much earlier, and the entertaining personal conflict better suppressed by the team. So will the 2016 season, featuring a whopping 21 races, be another one dominated by Hamilton? The all-too-brief winter te...

So Lewis Hamilton is F1 World Champion 2014. Congratulations to him, but even more so to his rival, Nico Rosberg. That’s F1 all done and dusted until next year, then. You can’t fail to have noticed Britain’s Lewis Hamilton all over the papers, TV and internet following his 2nd World Championship title success in Abu Dhabi last Sunday. He’s certainly had to wait for title number two – his first came in 2008,when he was a fresh-faced McLaren youngster, and looked a lot less like the cool-dude, diamond-ear stud wearing favourite of the press, with the Pussycat Doll girlfriend and chronic mood swings, that he has become since he joined the dominant Mercedes team. He deserved it, too. His team-mate, Nico Rosberg, had an identical mind-blowingly expensive motor, but managed less than half the number of race victories of the man across the expanse of immaculately polished garage floor. As early as round 3 the friends from karting days were working hard on destroying their relatio...

If ultra-fit blokes driving round in circles in stupidly expensive cars is your thing, then Hurrah! Formula 1 returns this weekend. It may only seem like a couple of months since Formula 1 packed up for the winter break with that German chap with the pointy finger looking smug again, but in fact... oh. Yes, it was only November. The F1 circus opens up it’s big top of baffling wonderment in Australia this weekend, and for the first time in years it really is anyone’s guess as to who might win the title. Had things remained the same, it seemed entirely plausible that Sebastian Vettel would have picked up where he left off – which was winning nine races in a row and crushing all opposition in his Red Bull dream machine. Happily, the biggest set of rule changes this century has given the pack and jolly good shuffle, and the signs from winter testing sessions are that things really have changed a lot. In a sport where a 0.1 second improvement is considered a huge gain, the timesh...

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 dang...

Nice one, Britney! The blonde one with the sticky-out ears (not Samantha Brick, no) finally broke a somewhat lengthy duck and won his first race. Not only that, he did it in commanding style. Meanwhile, everyone else seemingly needed to visit Kwik-Fit a bit, er, kwicker, as clapped-out tyres saw drivers dropping down the order faster than Norbert can see off a tray of pies. And so we come to the not inconsiderable matter of the Fantasy F1 scores. Well, it's like dis. And, in all probability, dat, too:   RACE RESULT Position Name   Points 1 Andy 86 2 Paul 85 3 Tony 78 4 Kristin 74 5 Chris 70 6 Martin S 67 7 Heather 66 8 Olie B 64 8 James 64 =10 Ian S ...