Race Report 5: Viva Barcelona

As Freddy Mercury would say if he were alive, interested in F1 and prone to using his lyrics to comment upon GPs. So in many respects it’s Viva Barcelona as Freddy Mercury wouldn’t have said at all.
Anyway I enjoyed the race. After the ‘Boredom of Bahrain’ anything would have been an improvement in the entertainment stakes but to me Barcelona was a pretty good race.

The crucial moment of the weekend appeared to occur on Saturday when my old issue with Martin Whitmarsh resurfaced once more. Some how Mclaren have turned up this season with the best car but being Mclaren led by Whitmarsh they have failed to take advantage of this situation at all. Admittedly Button has won a race but Hamilton has yet to stand on the top step of the podium post race despite qualifying on pole 3 times out of five races and qualifying second on the other two occasions. Somehow incidents, bad luck and bad management have combined to prevent Hamilton take advantage of any of these situations. The Spanish GP failure though has to be most embarrassing and costly of the year so far and to me seems indicative of the cautious management style that has in my opinion ruined Hamiltons’ chances of victory over the last two years. Once again at the last race Hamilton suffered a penalty which effectively ended his hopes of winning the race due to two factors.  1 an error made by his team which at the end of the day Whitmarsh has to take responsibility for and 2 the decision to stop the car out on track as this would leave enough fuel to give a sample, but with the knowledge that stopping the car out on track would lead to a penalty for Lewis. This strikes me as another cautious decision by Whitmarsh that just made the situation worse. In my opinion they should have just got Lewis back to the garage as slowly as possible. Then they could have tried to find a sample for the scrutineers and if they succeeded great and if not then they get a penalty but by stopping out on track the penalty was inevitable.
The continued failure of Mclaren to win a race (Button’s win accepted) when there is not one other great car out on the grid when one looks coldly at the teams is a catastrophe. Williams, Sauber and Ferrari continue to be hugely impressive but they shouldn’t be winning races with their budgets, drivers or in the case of Ferrari, with what is clearly not a championship winning car.

If Mclaren fails to win the title I think it will be time for Whitmarsh to step down as boss.

So the race.

It was quite good wasn’t it? I was a little disappointed that Alonso didn’t manage to keep up the pace and chase down Maldonado. Obviously none of us predicted Pastor would take the victory and top step of the podium who would have? I must admit being a little disappointed he won rather than Bruno Senna which would have been a huge story. The Renaults looked briefly pacey and then faded but perhaps this year unlike last year they will continue to develop he car rather than pointlessly give up to work on next years car which in turn they will give up on a few races in to the season to develop next years car, and on and on… Anyway perhaps as I say they will continue to work on this car as it seems to have pace and they have two great drivers who could definitely win races this year.
Hamilton performed admirably to get from 24^th to 8^th. Sadly despite it benefiting my points Vettel did manage a surge past him late in the race. Webber was once again nowhere and Button the champion professional winger (a title he has won form Webber) spent the entire weekend bleating about understeer, oversteer any bloody steer that means he escapes blame for another weak performance. Congratulations are due to Maldonado. He drove well, qualified amazingly and didn’t crack under the pressure (this time). However a pole to flag win has never really impressed me so I must admit struggling to muster much enthusiasm for Pastors win. He also sounded a little keen talking about the championship in the post race interviews. On the other hand seeing Williams back where I think most of us have wanted to see them again after 8 years was a wonderful thing. Shame of course that someone lit the BBQ inside the garage but hopefully all is well, everyone is fit and healthy and it won’t effect their performance at the next race.

Of course one can’t produce a race report without mentioning the bizarre and hilarious Michael Schumacher vs Bruno Senna incident. Schumacher bizarrely claimed after he left the garage that if we watch the video like he just had we would see Senna move once, and then weave back leaving him no room and making a crash inevitable. Well I don’t know what computer enhanced footage he was shown but in the tape I saw multiple times from multiple angles showed that if Senna had moved to his right is was no more than half a foot, he then moved smoothly and un-dramatically back slightly to take the line through the corner as drivers are permitted to do. Schumacher claimed Senna had moved in the braking zone. Well firstly as I described above a driver is allowed one move to defend and then can take their line through a corner. Secondly if they were in the braking zone, why wasn’t Schumacher braking? He hammered into the back of Senna’s car almost at full pace, where was this breaking you were speaking of Michael? The fact that everyone has come out uniformly damning Schumcher for his part in the incident reassures me I can understand what I’m seeing occurring in a race (something I rarely doubt as I seem to spot things minutes before the commentators on a regular basis) and it pleases me that he wont get away with blaming other drivers for his terrible mistakes. The main thought I’m left with is, what was he doing? I can’t understand what Schumacher expected to happen coming into the corner that fast and closing on Senna as quickly as he did?

Tyres thought: Can’t they make a tyre you can drive flat out on for say 10 laps and then drops off a cliff, not a tyre that drops over that cliff edge after 3 flat out laps? It’s so dull not getting to see the top speed of the cars and listening to the pundits go on and on and on about the bloody tyres again.

Anyway enough of that, our league table

So there have been questions regarding penalties for predictors who pick a driver for pole who then receives a penalty and drops down the grid before the race. Well as clarified at the last race if this occurs you too will suffer the penalty to add that extra jeopardy to predictions and really mix up our point scoring. This week this rule really came home to roost as a few of us predicted Hamilton for pole and after Mclaren’s standard balls up we have felt the pain of Charlie Whiting’s surprisingly harsh punishment and with Jack, Alex and myself predicting him for pole perhaps we would have been better off not submitting any predictions after all as we each received an eye watering -14 for that element of prediction. So another low scoring weekend generally with Simon pulling a second place out of the bag with Alonso yet again finishing well in what is supposedly a dog of a car. Whilst Jack picked up a third with Raikkonen which alleviates the Hamilton punishment a little.
So top scorer this week Simon with 22 and bottom Alex with -8

After 5 races here is the league table. Simon has once again risen to the top in ominous form whilst the two low scoring and largely unpredictable weekends have bunched the table up a bit. So we go into race 6 wondering whether it will be 6 races, 6 winners?

The League Table after 5 races

Week 5
	Predictor	Points
1	Simon	89
2	Becx	88
3	Alan D	87
4	Jack	83
5	Alan WA	75
6	George	68
7	James	64
8	Alex	49
9	Martin	44

Predictions for Monaco by 12:10 26/05/12 please. Best of luck.