Fun F1

Straight into the points today, with a rant to follow (sorry!):

Lewis Hamilton – Bernie, how on earth do you write these scripts? Talk about bad luck! Imagine if Lewis did manage to lose the championship in the final round.. Imagine it was lost to Kimi Raikkonen in a Ferrari…? Anyway, Lewis seems to be a driver that’s particularly hard on his tyres. He’s lucky he didn’t race last year where the tyre war produced even less durable tyres. Kimi and Fernando did a good job to keep the pressure on him till he went beyond the limit.

McLaren – Terrible job. Whoever was responsible for Lewis’ strategy got so focused on holding out to be sure they swapped to the right tyres that they forgot to keep an eye on the state of his current tyres! If they kept their eye on the big picture Lewis would be World Champion right now.

Sebastian Vettel – BRILLIANT! What a fantastic comeback after such a low point just a week earlier.

Kimi Raikkonen – Did a great job in pressuring Hamilton. Looked in complete control maintaining the gap between himself and Alonso at the end of the race.

Fernando Alonso – Full marks for effort. Looked like he might have even been able to catch Kimi at one point but I think it was more to do with the Ferrari driver taking it easy then bringing the pace back up. 

Vitantonio Liuzzi – I always have trouble remembering this guy’s first name when I write a post about him.. Shows how newsworthy he’s been in the past, but this race he did a super job like teammate Vettel!

Jenson Button – Great race from the former golden boy. Although you’d have to say, 5th place is at least where Honda should be every race.

BMW – Hmm.. I wonder if their poor showing is a sign they’re already putting all their energy into next year?

Felipe Massa – I think Kimi has kindly donated the “bad luck curse” to Felipe perhaps? Expect him to be on hot form for his home GP though.

Now, onto the rant… 

For those of us in Australia, the Asian/Oceanic rounds of the Formula One World Championship mean we get to see the race on a Sunday afternoon instead of the usual starting time of anywhere between 10:30pm Sunday to 4am Monday morning.

Despite this, the Australian broadcaster Channel Ten decided to show the Chinese Grand Prix at 1am on Monday morning! Now I can understand there are some conflicts, but really, who wants to watch reruns of the Simpsons or Futurama (or Senfield in past years) when we can be watching a live race for the championship at a normal hour!?

To Channel Ten’s credit they’ve done a great job in bringing us coverage of the qualifying (albeit delayed). So a big thank you on that front. Let’s hope the race coverage times get sorted out next year.

/end rant   Now us Aussies can look to a 3 or 4am viewing of the final round in Brazil…