Alonso has gone out and won his first race for Ferrari, putting him right up there with some of the Prancing Horse greats (and Raikkonen) and helping to erase last years horrible anus for the team.
A Ferrari 1-2 was a shot in the arm for them, but mostly came at the expense of Vettel who had to drive around in car so tightly packaged it has to breathe in just to get the engine cover on and a broken spark plug acted like a butt plug for Seb*
But the main story of day really was that nothing really happened.
After a couple of great seasons with wonderful racing (sometimes) and going down to the wire, the changes to refueling and tyres seem to have not only spread the field right back out but also taught all the drivers to back off.
In what has been lauded (rightfully) as the most exciting season ever, with four champions on the grid, the cars close etc, etc. it’s hard to see quite how they’ve made it so dull.
Granted, Bahrain is not the best track in the world for overtaking anyway, but this race was hardly a fitting season opener for a season like this.
The refueling ban should have added a whole extra element of strategy to the randomness of the outcome and calls for people to pit, would the cleverer teams make good calls and cut that horrible overtaking in the pitlane nonsense?
No, the only significant overtaking (Vettel aside) was in the pits.
So now, running around like a chicken with its head cut off and to change the rules now is going to be knee jerk.But the problem perhaps is that the tyres are too good, Bridgestone need to add in some bits of glass to the mix or something to spark up the racing. As it stands the cars can all sail around for ages yet not want to go too fast in case they ruin the tyres.
It’s yet again the shortsightedness of the rulemakers, on paper tyres that fuck up are good for the show as people will have to pit more, in practice the teams will do their utmost to make sure they don’t fuck up the tyres. This was the kind of race where I was willing for a NASCAR style pace car to come up just to try and bunch up the pack.
The new teams did their bit, with only Pretend Lotus finishing. Showing that they may well be a proper midfield team by year end.
Can’t help but feel that they’ve gone and ruined F1, and only use hopeless addicts will stay tuned?
*this assuming that Seb doesn’t like butt plugs, if he does then this analogy doesn’t work so well.
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