Fun F1

Well, there were no real big surprises with qualifying in Melbourne today with the exception of Felipe Massa’s troubles. Maybe he hasn’t been wearing his old old lucky underwear?

Ferrari and McLaren look by far the quickest, with BMW next. After that, everyone else look as slow as each other.

The big improvers were Super Aguri. But even that wasn’t much of a surprise given talk that their chassis is largely based on that used by the Honda F1 team last year. The latest speculation is that Williams and Spyker are going to protest against the legality of the chassis of Super Aguri, Red Bull Racing and Squadro Toro Rosso.

I wonder if Super Aguri delayed the launch of their car until this week so that other teams wouldn’t have time to analyse their chassis to see exactly how similar it is to last years Honda? If so, very sneaky.. But it could just be that they were late in their manufacturing.. right?

I’m no lawyer, but if you ask me the Super Aguri may actually be the most legal car when compared with Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso. This is because their chassis design is only used on their car (this year at least), whereas it could be that the RBR and Toro Rosso chassis this year are close to identical. An FIA article states:

“A constructor is a person (including any incorporated or unincorporated body) who owns the intellectual property rights to the rolling chassis it currently races, and does not incorporate in such chassis any part designed or manufactured by any other constructor of F1 racing cars except for standard items of safety equipment, providing that nothing in the Schedule 3 shall prevent the use of an engine or gearbox manufactured by a person other than the constructor of the chassis.”

It will be a very interesting couple of weeks to see how the protest turns out. Please note that all comments in this post are purely speculation and just a fans point of view..