Round 8, Canada – F1 back in North America, just don’t tell them

As the red lights went out for the start of the Canadian GP, the BBC commentary team enthused that “F1 was back in North America!” Weellll … technically speaking, yes all the boy racers in the shiny cars were flogging around the F1-styled theme park that is Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal, Canada but I suspect anyone in the target market that Martin Brundle and co was referring to would have been hard pressed to know. 

I once wiled a weekend away between a Friday meeting in Ottawa and one on Monday in Connecticut with a leisurely country drive. To observe the formalities of crossing an international border, I dutifully parked outside the customs & immigration office near Oldenburg to have my passport inspected by a bemused official who was clearly wondering what a young Aussie lad (at the time I was such) could be doing in these parts on Saturday morning? Today the assumption would be, “Clearly, up to no good!” and one might expect deeper interrogation than “Where you headed?” In those long lost days, I offered the appropriate reply, got my entry stamp and was left to browse the postcards, read the posters for the nearby Fredrick Remington Museum and mingle with the other border crossers. While considering a detour for my cultural edification, I was amused to hear to two ladies heading north on a shopping trip who were clearly confused by the notion of crossing a border and why they might need to change some money. “Why”, one replied, “don’t they use money?” Canada sits atop USA like a hat to keep the snow out; Americans might have heard that 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, but most would be hard pressed to know what they do there – except it probably has something to do with fish. 

So yes, F1 was back in North America, but it wasn’t in cars perpetually turning left with ‘Dr Pepper’ or ‘Air National Guard’ emblazoned across the hood – you know, recognisable race cars. Jim Clark delivered a good deal of novelty by taking out the 1965 Indy 500 in a cunning, left-hand-engined Lotus that he appeared to drive backwards to gasps of “Look, Andy, he ain’t got no engine”, but I suspect the 70 laps around Montreal’s best blacktop was of more interest to the French than it was to the North Americans that Martin or Jonathon was referring to. Just ask Peter Windsor about the depth of enthusiasm for F1 he found in ‘North America’. As far as Aussies and Asians were concerned, racing in Canada just made it inconvenient to watch live.

 But what did we get from this diversion to France à l’ouest? Let’s start with style points, and there were many contenders this week. Lewis and Fernando’s playful attempt to run each other into the concrete barriers on the pit exit road was a first-rate try – would have taken it out had either succeeded. Schumi’s struggle with ‘tyre strategy’ was a consideration purely based on the amusing redefinition of driving into, or over anyone in his way as ‘tyre strategy’. Robert Kubica also entered contention with his tribute to the waltz music of his countryman, Frederick Chopin; his dive into the pits across the nose of Sutil’s car makes perfect sense if you put a 1-2-3, 1-2-3 tempo behind it, just a shame Sutil didn’t know they were dancing. But the judges just liked what they saw from the-other-No.1 Ferrari driver – and he kept it up from the first turn to the end. It was like a movie: ‘Felipe Massa’s Very Grumpy Sunday”. The aerial view of Turn 1, Lap 1 looked like Felipe was doing a laminar flow experiment: hands off the wheel, just seeing where he ended up. Thereafter, he sniped and bumped at anyone that came close – which seemed to be the Force India cars for much of the afternoon. I wonder what Liuzzi might have said that got up Felipe’s nose? Still, credit where credit’s due, it takes determination to be that grumpy all afternoon, particularly at speed.

 If it was dodgem cars in the peleton, it was musical chairs in the leading pack. Look, Quebec gets pretty nasty winters and maybe laying highly abrasive road surfaces is an art form designed to work hand in glove with metal studded tyres, but as a gimmick on their F1 circuit, maybe they need to take a look at the replay from Shanghai. Until the Canadian GP is run as an ice race – which raises some interesting possibilities now I think of it – a tyre eating track may not deliver the same level of excitement to punters in TV-land as does randomly hosing down the braking sections at the end of the fast straights. The lead might have changed umpteen times, but confining the passing manoeuvres to pit lane didn’t deliver the examples of F1 superiority needed to defend the cars against superior remarks from a particular MotoGP’er. Several weeks ago, my mate Mike asked the telling question that if all the passing is done in the pits, why do the teams spend so much effort on their aero packages when they’d get better return from a faster wheel gun?

 Of course, the dyed-in-the-wool F1 aficionados know that even on a 3 stopper with a long pit lane, the cars are only off the track for a minute or 2, tops! Without the infinite details of new aero features to discuss, the commentator’s job would be so much more difficult; their stress levels would rise unacceptably – hey, this is an OH&S issue. It’s still a little early in the season to move to widespread speculation on contract negotiations, so in the absence of overtaking, it’s only fair to provide the commentators with juicy details of F Duct designs and undercar exhaust. I know I lap it up!

 Still, we can’t ignore the facts, most of the leading teams put on a great show. Lewis and Jensen deserved their champagne and it’s been a little while between drinks for Alonso, so I’m guessing even the smallest of the 3 glasses was welcome. He’s driven the wheels off his little red wagon for several races without any serious results but he remains impossible to overlook for the series.

 For the Aussies watching, Mark is starting to make the unthinkable imaginable and it was tragic that he could not hold his lead after lap 49; probably for the best though. Right now, he stands as “Our Mark Webber” – I’m reliably informed the sobriquet “Our” is an Aussie knighthood – but if there is any serious risk he could pull off a World Driver’s Championship win, then the tall poppy syndrome will cut in and we’ll start to bag him mercilessly just coz we want him to succeed. A convict heritage brings special baggage to the national psyche. Better he just hang in there, say 3^rd or 4^th, but within touch on points until, say, Korea then pounce. In this case, we’d stand mesmerized for the 2 final races and collectively pronounce: “Yeah, knew he could do it all along. I’ve always been a huge Webber supporter”.

 Ah well, off to the 2^nd Spanish GP – as if Alonso needed any more encouragement.

 Vroom, vroom….

Round 7, Turkey – Something Almost Happened

If ‘Catch-22’ left readers breathless for more Joseph Heller, then his follow up novel, ‘Something Happened’, left them wondering why they hadn’t just kept on breathing normally and toying mentally with an alternate title of ‘Nothing Happened’. In a similar vein, if Monaco left us hungering for more of the same, then 58 laps of Istanbul Park left us wondering why? It was clear that Something Had Happened, but what was that Something? It’s tough to defend this race to my MotoGP mate for 2 reasons; firstly, the boys on 2 wheels at Mugello dished up pretty much the same Grand Procession of P1, P2, P3 finishing as 1^st, 2^nd & 4^th that he moans about in F1 – so the grounds of his attack fail for this round – and secondly, the Turkish F1 GP was filled to bursting with things that Almost Happened. There was almost a dramatic 3 Webber victories in a row; almost some rain; almost a battle to win; almost a competitive Michael Schumacher; and almost a parade of finishers grouped by constructor from Red Bull at 1-2 to Ferrari 7-8 (well, that’s ignoring Robert Kubica’s interruption of my imagined symmetry). But after 1 hour and 28 minutes of patient wondering, none of it Quite Happened. 

The synchronicity aspects can’t go unremarked; this takes planning and heavy script development by the team in the back room at Place de la Concord. Squabbling between the Red Bull boys notwithstanding, we did end up with McLaren-McLaren, Mercedes-Mercedes, Ferrari-Ferrari, Sauber-Sauber and even Virgin joined in to fill the last 2 places, line-astern. HRT and Lotus chipped in with synchronised mechanical failures – Lotus pulling off synchronised hydraulic failures on succeeding laps. Well done that team! Sadly, after Vettel’s unscripted improv piece, those of us in punter-land were too bemused to notice the beauty of the synchronicity; bad show us! As viewers, we need to lift our game and better appreciate the exquisite art form delivered to us by the scriptwriting team. Getting hung up on trivia like winners or losers is really missing the point. 

The primary takeout message seems to be that it is possible to enjoy a sunny race weekend only to find out that no one took out the style points. Don’t get me wrong, Seb was a lay-down-misere, odds-on-favourite, sure-thing for a line of judges cards all reading 6.0. Nothing has been more certain since Torvill and Dean did for Ravel what Pammy Anderson did for surf lifesaving – but then Vettel opened his mouth. Spiralling off the back straight in a shower of dust and shredded rubber after safely disposing of the top 2 podium spots for your own team takes a lot of beating in the style points stakes; this could have been the stuff of legend until Sebastian started talking. The series of quick cuddles along the pit wall could have been overlooked by the judges as long as he kept the finger-pointing and moaning bottled up till they were safely tucked up in the RBR corporate dormobile. But no, instead of waiting until the lads were in their matching jim-jams and eyeing each other up across their bowls of alphabet soup on Sunday evening, he had to have the ‘tanty’ in public and we all got to hear that it was his turn to win and Mark was driving on his part of the track and how come Mark gets to sleep in the top bunk all the time anyway. Well that did it for the style points judges and now we’ll have to wait to Montreal. 

As we all know, the race doesn’t finish just because the chequered flag has dropped and the temporary stands have been pulled down. The FIA under Max showed us that a race can finish days later – as Lewis will testify (or on second thoughts maybe Lewis shouldn’t testify). My mate, Kon, drew my attention to the role played by “Dr Helmut <epithet deleted>… the Red Bull … svengali” who seems to be rewriting the bit of history from Lap 40. Now, I’m guessing that if you asked the Australian population at large if Sebastian Vettel’s unscripted solo piece on approach to Turn 12 was – let’s say – ‘unusual’, you’d end up with a 40 million show of hands (coz some of us would raise both hands and dogs get to vote in The Lucky Country!), but we could be forgiven for supporting Mark Soon-To-Be-President-By-Common-Acclaim Webber. In fairness, posing the same question in Austria might get a different result – what a difference an ‘al’ makes, eh? However, it seems that anyone who thought they saw Seb shimmy to the right was mistaken. I hear a webinar is being prepared where Advocat Herr Doktor Helmut Marko will lead us to “Look into my eyes, don’t look at the watch, look into my eyes …..” and he will reveal the truth that Mark turned into Seb in a misguided attempt to see if Vettel had any Tic Tac’s to share.

 As far as the remaining 18 laps are concerned, it is now history – of a sort. Sure Seb’s bit of improv ceded the lead to ‘the likely lads’ from Woking, but it was still all just weird. Earlier in the race, we’d been engrossed with the confident predictions of rain; and it was delivered on cue! The 35 scant drops that seemed to fall mostly on Schumi’s on-board camera weren’t likely to be drought-breaking for the Turkish citizenry, but on Lap 41 it seemed we could divert our attention from weather watching to race watching and we were up for some more rush-of-blood-to-the­-head jousting that Vettel had kicked off the previous lap. The original script may have been clear, Mark from P1 to flag, but now with no Mark, it was up to Lewis and Jensen to ad lib. Give the lads credit, they were up for it even if their pit crew wasn’t and we were treated to some lead swapping to even challenge the MotoGP lads and some tactics that stood Webber in reasonable stead to get back on script and into the centre seat at the press conference. Sadly, it was not to be! There might not be team orders, but the desperate chatter on the McLaren radios was pretty clear: “Save Fuel”, “Save brakes”, “Save tires” …. “Just stop it!”

 Another subtle scripting innovation offered up at Istanbul Park was the addition of the chorus line, this time lead by Schumi. Now, this takes organisation and discipline, but it provides the context and backdrop for the drama played out by the tenor and soprano. Sure, the chorus for Aida, or Nabucco might be bigger and use funnier costumes, but let’s see Franco Zeffirelli try it at an average of 200+ kph. Credit where credit’s due: Bernie, take a bow.

 In the end, the show wound its weird way to the post-race PC, usually a scene for some prepared banter, pat on the back for the team and onto the next date in the calendar – not this time. Everyone just looked confused and a touch embarrassed and it was a blessed relief to hear the director yell ‘cut, print, that’s a wrap’.

 So, pack up the toys and it’s off to France à l’ouest. My aged Dad used to say of the streets of Montreal that the street signs were in French and English, but the French Canadians couldn’t read either of them. I doubt mon père ever needed to spot the braking distance signs around the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve so I don’t know if 150m out there’s a billboard reading “cent cinquante”. Ah well, at least the lads should be able to find a decent croissant.

 Vroom, vroom…. 

Round 6, Monaco – Everyone loves a parade

So, the Monaco Grand Parade was held under the sunny skies of the old piratocracy. Some pretty impressive floats in this parade, though they could take a leaf from the Carnivale’s book, add some scantily dressed Brazilian beauties and they might be onto something. The tests of audience reaction to running most of the race under Bert Mylander’s guidance seemed to pay off, so next year we might see the whole race under SC rules and get some babes thrown into the mix on some really imaginative floats. Princess Grace’s immediate offspring might no longer be in the running, but I don’t doubt the Gen Y cohort of that gene line could offer up some competition to Rio’s finest.

It was sad to see that McLaren’s first attempt at fitting the bullhorn loudspeakers into Jensen’s side pods failed. I think he’s going to have to accept digital speakers for his post-race winners theme tune and let the Apocalypse Now reference go. On the other side of the McLaren garage, Lewis proved himself to be a master of the 1-liner with his quip, “so what do you want me to do, race or save the car?” The mumbled comeback line from his race engineer suggests that, truth be told, it was probably code about the Stingers – successfully installed – in Lewis’ side pods. The actual message might have been “so what do you want me to do, race or take the shot?” We saw that he held fire; probably because his secret little friends only lock onto the transponder in Jensen’s tail light, but I’m guessing if it was the OTHER red car in front of him, Lewis might just have taken a line-of-sight shot. If McLaren’s version of Q does a bit more trolling through the film archives back to Bond’s DB5 in Goldfinger, we might one day be treated to Lewis’ radio chatter echoing the famous line from Top Gun: “…too close for missiles, going to guns”.

Style points are a vexed issue this race – so many of the lads gave it a go. Nico Hulkenberg’s attempt, while worth of a mention, was both far too early on Lap 1 and lacking a gimmick. Jarno and  Karun Chandhok were oh so close; it had nearly everything: no apparent reason, playful mounting behaviour and a good try at taking out the race leader just as the fat lady started clearing her throat for the final aria. Yes, it was close, but …. for raw, unadulterated style points, the image of Rubens Barrichello tossing expensive toys out of the pram probably captures the prize for this event. Certainly, he did good prep work with the hairy ride from Turn 1 to end up waving to the beautiful people on the terraces of the Hotel Beau Rivage above, facing the wrong way while his colleagues whistled past him on the 260kph straight wondering if Rubens knew something about a race direction change that they missed in the driver’s briefing. No, the style points must go to casually tossing out the steering wheel in a fit of pique, timed beautifully for Lewis to turn it into hi-tech roadkill. The deductions column on Ruben’s payslip this week will be a humorous read – ‘Deduction, company equipment, steering wheel, 1 only, employee re-issue: 250,000 Euro’. Hey, on the upside, it will reduce his PAYG tax this week.

Mercedes seem to have fixed things up in their garage and Nico is no longer embarrassing Schumi by popping up on the podium race after race. You’ve got to admit that’s impressive engineering: speed up Michael, slow down Nico and get both cars back down the points ladder. It recalls the old Bufferin ads (that a buffered aspirin brand for the not so long-in-the-tooth) “Why suffer a headache or an upset stomach when Bufferin relieves pain and protects against upset stomach?” The new version from the Not-So-Silver-Arrows garage might be “Why suffer embarrassing podium finishes when your superstar is constantly off the pace? Use Engineerin and remove the embarrassment. Beware of cheap substitutes.” And what a photo-op finish they were headed for: line astern, 7^th and 8^th and in the right order for once. Well, that was until Schumi’s sudden flashback to what it takes to win 7 WCs – actually joining in the racing! Fortunately the race committee found that to be very unsportsmanlike behaviour and relegated him by 20secs.

I suspect that a poll of Hekki and couple of the other guys might have come to different conclusion about anyone who bounced Alsono yesterday following his “get out of my <expletive deleted> way” charge from a pit lane start to an 8 point finish. But that’s what the fans come to see, determined, pedal to the metal racing from the best drivers in the hottest cars on the planet and Fernando at least ensured that some got a bit of that. Personally, I know I’d have been a tad intimidated to see the red car and the red misted eyes in my mirrors halfway through the Tunnel. Obviously, he wouldn’t be allowed to slap down 5 or 10 Red Bulls before the warm up lap, but whichever drink sponsor is filling Fernando’s drink bottle, it seems to be working. Shame they can’t drop some into the Ferrari fuel tank.

At risk to my self esteem, I must lay claim to one correct prediction from my recap from Round 1 at Abu Dhabi – I postulated about a “.. combined stage of the Monaco GP and first stage of the Tour de France! The smart money would be on Contador or Armstrong to lead home most of the Cosworth powered cars.” Well, as it turns out the bets on the pedal powered pacers WOULD have been buying the drinks in the Casino last night: not a Cosworth to be seen when the man with the chequered flag did his bit. Ah, but in a world of blistering irony what might have been in fact was Mark Soon-to-be-President-of-Australia-by-common-acclaim Webber leading home the cars while Cadel That-other-Aussie-in-Europe Evans lead the bikes home, Cadel all neatly dressed in his rainbow jersey.

Never mind, another Sunday night well spent watching the shiny cars and the fancy camera work from pre-race talk fest down to the post-race interview. Many are probably missing that cheeky Rosberg grin from the 3^rd place seat, but the other missing grin last night was the one from Sebastian’s face, in the 1st loser’s seat. Sebastian looked like he just couldn’t wait to get home and have a whinge. Poor old Christian Horner was in for another night of squabbling in the back of the RBR corporate dormobile. “Look Seb, it IS fair. You got to sit there in Malaysia and now it’s Mark’s turn. Of course, you’ll get another go. Now stop sulking and eat up your alphabet soup, you know it’s your favourite.”

Well, with packing done and the now, ever-present ash cloud randomly closing European airports like some ecological practical joke, the lads will be firing up the dormobiles and campervans and turning their heads towards the mystic near east. Bring on the baklava and the Turkish coffee.

Vroom, vroom, vroomm…

Round 4, China – Rain: the secret sauce

So, the away leg of the season is done and dusted and we look forward to all the shiny cars returning to the spiritual home of F1: Monte Carlo, Spa, Hockenheimring, Monza …. Hungaroring, Istanbul Park – well, you can see the spiritual home from there. But wipe those misty eyes and recognise the break through served up last weekend with a “Made In China” label printed loud and proud on the front of the product. Yes, we all know China is a centrally controlled economy, but who’d have guessed they also did centrally controlled weather? If Sepang failed to dish up the long promised downpour, Shanghai showed how it is done. Not just a monsoonal downpour, or a miserable drizzle; no, Shanghai dished up the 11 secret herbs and spices, the full monty – dry qualifying, then wet, wet, dry, dry, wet on race day like a some frenetic slow, slow, quick, quick, slow dance routine.

 Ciaran ‘bloody genius’ Pilbeam might have sent Mark out on inters again reassuring our home-grown hero that ‘everyone’s already got one’ – except as they lined up on the grid, everyone did already have one; everyone but Button and ‘the other German guy’. But wait, let’s not jump ahead. Turns out that style points can be awarded before race day. WWF exponent, Kamui-san, got amongst it again on Lap 1 in a tangle that saw one third of the Ferrari engines on track preserved for Fernando’s possible use later in the season, but while these were heroic efforts indeed, when the judges held up their style-points scorecards, it was Buemi’s solo turn on Friday that took the bouquet. I still doubt we’ll see a visual spectacle to challenge Mansell’s tricycle run down the main straight in Adelaide, but Sebastian’s ‘look ma, no front wheels’ gig sure gave it a nudge.

 A dry Saturday for qualifying gave us another Red Bull P1, P2. Or was it P2, P1? Or P1, P1? I could already hear my MotoGP mate yawning, then banging on about 4 lead changes and 11 passes before Turn 1 at Qatar. Well, Mike didn’t take the Chinese secret sauce into account: just add rain. It is true that we mostly couldn’t see much beyond the first wall of spray, but, hey, neither could the drivers. There’s lots of evidence it was a feast of passing; mathematically, with 4 cars up to 4 laps off the race pace there had to be, therefore it must have been exciting stuff …. Right? I’m guessing it was as much of a surprise to the guys in the cars as it was to the punters in beer and popcorn land. Makes me wonder how many ‘strewth, where’d you come from?’s and ‘whoops, where are you off to?’s got muttered in the privacy of the fireproof balaclavas.

 Schumi was about the only one who didn’t join in the game. With his new found taste for the bright lights of the post race press conference, Nico broke with team orders and left Michael to remember his own way round the 5.4kms of Shanghai’s best blacktop – admittedly Michael still holds the track record, but he wasn’t threatening to reset it on Sunday. However, Germans are a close bunch and Adrian Sutil stepped up to the task of providing Schumi with a pair of Mercedes exhaust pipes to follow home. The BBC commentary team made cogent, polite and professional observations as Hamilton, Alonso, Webber and so on made their ‘excuse me’s and edged past Adrian and god’s 2^nd son to set off in chase of Jensen. The commentary team at my place claims none of the professional heritage of Martin Brundle, or David Coulthard and while it might have been unkind, the Mrs announced that “Michael couldn’t pass Sutil if he’d stopped for coffee”. I’m not convinced, but since Michael 7-times-WC Schumacher’s ex-Brawn Mercedes did wind up a mighty 10^th to Adrian Sutil’s ex-Spyker Force India Mercedes’ 11^th, did Adrian make a quick stop at a trackside espresso van for a reviving ristretto, or macchiato?

 But while Adrian might have made a sneaky, off-camera stop for a caffeine fix, Fernando made no effort to hide his comfort stops. One for tires, one for a drive-through, one for a toasted ham sando, one to call his mum and another to allow the pit lane paparazzi to get a better photo for the scrapbook – even then he ended up only one position off the podium. Sure he jumped the start by half the first straight, but does he know a secret short cut round the Shanghai track?

 And so to the end, a different pair in matching overalls this week – and Nico, again! Nico hasn’t quite lost the rabbit in the headlights look, but you can tell he’s having a ball and since the general female view is that Nico is as cute as, maybe it’s just all good for him right now. The top step and the big plate was for Jensen this time, with a grin to risk dislocating his jaw. It is rumoured that JB’s McLaren is getting some skunk-works mods to install the bullhorn speakers off one of the ‘Apocalypse Now’ Hueys into the side pods, so he can cue his digitally modified version of Queen’s “I am the champion, my friends”. The same source also hints that Lewis is toying with the side pods on his car to mount Sparrow missiles, pre-locked onto Jensen’s butt.

 I hear the airlines are back in the air and script development has been shelved for a one-off ‘F1 Wacky Racers does the Silk Road Rally’ to get the cars back to Catalunya. Scuttlebutt from the cricketing world reports Kevin Pietersen is mightily miffed – seems Vijay Mallya had promised him a go in one of the Force India cars on the northern Afghanistan leg. Great cross promotion idea; wonder if Liuzzi, or Sutil can bat?

 Vroom, vroom.

Malaysia – recalled from the verandah bar of the Peregian Beach Surf Club

If Malaysia taught us anything, it was that a week is not enough time between F1 races. It seemed pretty clear that the F1 script writing team hadn’t got the story line together for the matinee performance at Sepang; wet, or dry; who’s upstage, who’s down; entrance stage right, exit stage left – it was all a bit muddled. Got to think that around Thursday night in one of the back rooms at Place de La Concorde, the scriptwriting gang realised the jumbled mix of plot points, untested gags and OMG close-up moments jumbled across the big whiteboard weren’t going to get any better organised before Practice 1. Time for the old stand-by: emblazon “Ensemble, improv piece” across the top of the board in someone’s best Britannica Bold font, shoot the whole whiteboard with the corporate iPhone and email it all to Bernie’s PA, then off to the local boozer for a few quick vins ordinaire and home for the first bit of kip in 3 or 4 days.

A quick look at the post-qualifying interview made it pretty clear that Nico for one hadn’t been given his lines for the scene. Mark’s a pro and could ad lib alongside Brando and Vettel’s a born comic of Woody Allen stature – they could carry their roles in the dark dressed as vegetables, if necessary – but Nico was a rabbit in the headlights, if a journo with a sense of humour (and no need to keep her press pass) had asked “Nico, tell us why you’re here”, instead of banging on about the balance of the car and thanking the team, he’d probably had said “ooops, sorry the girl with the FIA cap told me to sit here.”. Don’t get me wrong, Nico deserved his spot in the lights, but his lack of podium (or theatre sports) experience shone through – he’ll improve; maybe he can paraphrase one of Liberace’s old lines – something like “I wish my brother Michael was here”.

Ciaran Pilbeam, a secret Monthy Python aficionado, was one of the cast that made the most of the freedom for improvisation – pit lane observers got a big chuckle from Ciaran, in his best John Cleese accent, telling the rest of the RBR team that he’d put Mark on inters “I told him everyone has already got one, hee, hee, hee..”. Ah but in true vaudevillian tradition, instead of doing 200kph aquaplane pirouettes down the length of the back straight, Mark pulled back into parc ferme with P1 against his name to announce Ciaran is a “bloody genius”. Well, as the Bard tells us “All’s well that ends well”.

So there we were, settling into our seats pre-race, firm in the knowledge that the script was written for some sort of cross between open wheeler and jetboat racing only to be gobsmacked with NO RAIN. Strewth, Red Bull had even installed the undercar combination exhaust/waterjet drive system. The promos had built us up for monsoonal downpours; the punters expected it, no, we deserved it – and what did we get? A dry race with P1, P2 & P3 coming back as 2^nd, 3^rd and 1^st. But, it was just twist, turn and surprise from lights to flag. Ain’t that why we watch it?

Without a decent script, Hekki and Jarno got in a bunch of laps stopping for photo ops and running slow enough so that the pocket Canon’s of the Malaysian crowd could get clear snaps of the British Racing Green cars in their home race (yeah, go figure?). Virgin proved all the naysayers wrong by running the full distance – albeit, some claim to have seen Lucas Di Grassi decanting the contents of his drink bottle into the fuel tank to run the final couple of laps, but getting there is getting there.

Both Hamilton and Alsonso got enough of the printouts from the scriptwriter’s email to know there was a race on somewhere, but the storyline petered out long before the curtain dropped at Sepang. The commentary team announced that Lewis was swerving all over the main straight like some crazed slalom skier to break the bungie cord Petrov had looped onto the towball of the McLaren, but a review of the team radio log might find Lewis was head down in the cockpit thumbing through his script, yelling … ”yeah, so what happens AFTER page 15. My script just ends there. Am I missing some pages?” And so it ran – my MotoGP mate got in an early shot asking if anything happened in the last 20 laps after he’d fallen asleep. I haven’t answered him yet.

However, for the devoted fan who will watch the drivers sitting in their cars on the grid with the same enthusiasm as wheel-to-wheel jousting at 300kph, the juice was in the post race press conference. Nico was there and only a touch less startled, but the drama was all with the brothers in the Red Bull overalls. Kid brother had pulled a stunt on big brother at Turn 1 Lap 1 and sat in the PC with a cheese-eating grin the size of a Montana sky. Big bro was not amused! We all know that once back in the comfy surrounds of the RBR corporate dormobile, Vettel wouldn’t be getting any dibs on the top bunk that night and once Christian Horner had settled into the deluxe double berth/dinette combo, a No.10 elastic-sided RM Williams boot might have found its way firmly into kid brother’s butt. Bet he didn’t yelp, or stop grinning. Real theatre doesn’t need to end coz the lights are off and the audience has gone home!

Vroom, vroom.

Melbourne – 2 races in 1!

my mate, Mike, prompted me for thoughts on Sunday’s race. Initially I thought he meant me in the 50km Ipswich bike ride, but that wasn’t a race, so I figured it was the GP.

Something quite bizarre happened on Sunday at Albert Park. If anyone thought it was to be a procession of shiny cars and cutaways to hot women and overweight American movie folk, they were wrong. Nap and you missed it.

Mike suggested that Bernie might have randomly installed sprinklers around the Melbourne track – I’m prepared to get behind that as the plan. A hard look at the Abu Dhabi circuit on Google Earth definitely seems to show a decent trench meandering in and around the Yas Marina Circuit. Either sprinklers are being readied to squirt amusingly into the braking areas for Turns 8 & 11, or I’ve misread the satellite imagery and they are installing rocket fuelling lines, or a nuclear fuel processing facility.

Ah, one can but wonder at the master strokes being cooked up at Place de la Concorde under JT’s skilful guiding hand. Max raised the bar and has gifted Jean with F1Plus, but a continuous improvement program requires continuous improvement and I’m confident Monsieur Todt is up for it. Given there might not be enough money in England to fund an F1 quality sprinkler system – and no one seems to know if the British GP will be held at Silverstone, Donington Park, or on a hastily constructed course at Lords – I hear Jean Todt has a trick up his sleeve to randomly assign tyre configurations based on a pre-race knock-out series of rock, paper, scissors. The rubber that meets the road will not to be chosen by some inscrutable Japanese tyre engineer, or an unseen weather boffin, no, the first team to poke out a meek flat palm of paper to a thrusting, 2-finger, scissor salute will get to roll onto the grid with a mix of prime, option, inter & full-wet, one at each corner. Now that would be racing – at some point in any given race, that car would have grip on at least one wheel.

But back to Sunday last and back to Melbourne. Again we witnessed Max’s master stroke that is F1Plus – running a GP2.5 race inside of the main event. Clearly the media have fallen for the line that Richard Branson’s lads can’t fuel up sufficiently for a full race. Get a grip – the car was designed on a computer … get that, a computer! And by people who could use ‘Computational Fluid Dynamics’ in a sentence. There are probably knobs on that masterpiece that go up to 11. The fact the 3rd estate missed is that the GP2.5 component of the race runs under different rules. Kobayashi-san demonstrated it when he took the style points with his newly perfected World Wrestling Federation moves on the hapless Hulkenberg – a quick on track half nelson saw Kamui’s Sauber pin the Williams for the necessary 3-seconds in the sandbox. No, with the exception of Hekki and Karun Chandhok, the other GP2.5 racers completed their race successfully. Hekki might see himself in front of the stewards for proceeding with extra laps after their race ended. Wait till they introduce the optional half-pipe section mooted for the Korean GP. Sports fusion, bring it on!

And the show wasn’t confined just to the Albert Park precincts. The question probably remains open: Was Hamilton laying down smoking, 360 degree donuts in a busy suburban street or did the B in BRIDGESTONE spin through to the E at a higher angular velocity than it should have done given its road speed? If the CCTV footage illustrates a drifting master at work, ping Lewis for the frustration he has proven to be from time to time. If the latter: Webber called it right and he got the nanny state response – get out of town quickly Mark, they’ll have the speed camera on your airport luggage trolley for sure.

Many years ago, I lived in Melbourne and rode a Honda 360S – I’ll attest to Melbourne as a sliders town. In that era, the space between the tram tracks was laid with wooden blocks; in the wet they were like little cobble stones formed from ice with an oil topping. On any of the 325 rainy days per Melbourne year, if the tram tracks didn’t git yer, the wooden blocks surely would. About the only thing more entertaining than watching someone on a motorbike was watching a dentist driving his new Porsche home from the showroom. Stand at the corner of Flinders and Queen Street where the road and tram tracks disappeared under the train track above and wait for Doctor Tooth to apply a tad too much right toe and see the hysterically overpowered pendulum at the rear swing from “look at me” to “oh no, I’m sorry for everything, Mum”. Not uncommonly, as the tow truck rolled away with the now, not-so-shiny-new toy, a bystander would hear the former uber-driver point a waiting cabbie to the nearest Toyota dealer where they might have Landcruisers prêt-a-porter. But that was then and now is now; Melbourne is a city reborn with perfect streets quite unaccustomed to ignominious treatment from a casual, free & easy, devil-may-car (sic) Swiss citizen fresh from his laissez faire country where a bit of automotive boisterousness is positively encouraged (and minarets are now banned).

And to add a touch of conspiracy theory, my Pommie mate Malcolm asked if it was true that some guys wearing red T-Shirts were observed tipping off Melbourne’s finest of Lewis’ probable route back from the pub after a night of beer and Friday night AFL? Is it within the realms of imagination that in – a scene worthy of “Underbelly” – some of Melbourne’s boys in blue might have been encouraged to nobble Lewis’ attempt to recover from his ignominious end to Race 2, 2009? But in a scene worthy of “Wise Guys”, they probably thought they’d impounded his race car. Well, it’s silver, isn’t it!

Nuff for now. A good race by & large, shame to see Vettel go down again to mechanical failure, but Button drove well and Alonso was astonishing.

My MotoGP mate has asked for confirmation that Melbourne 2010 might be an isolated outbreak of interest. Sorry, but I don’t think we can promise that F1Plus will continue to live down to his expectations. No, it looks like it is all up from here. Still doubt we’ll ever see the likes of Mansell barrelling down Dequetteville Terrace at 300+ kph on 3 wheels with his left rear deploying sparks and rubber confetti over half of Adelaide’s leafy suburbs like some C130, spewing flares and chaff, coming in hot over woodlands bristling with surface-to-air defences.

Vroom, vroom, vrooooommmm … Nick

Abu Dhabi – There was a race?

Well, the big lads in the fast cars are back! No, not the V8 Supercar series; F1, the pinnacle of motorsport.

After months of breathless anticipation – mostly around whether Team Robin Reliant and Team Hot Wheels could sell enough copies of ‘Big Issue’ to buy the petrol for 49 laps in the desert, but also whether we would actually experience the Second Coming as god’s No.2 son descended to take his rightful place in the cockpit of the Oddly-Grey Arrow. Schumi, of course, would not countenance being anyone’s No.2, so henceforth and despite the 2,000 years head start, Jesus will be referred to as equal No.1 (and how many GPs did He win anyway?) – well, ‘henceforth’ in the sense: henceforth once the Mighty One can slow Rosberg down by 4 tenths a lap.

With any luck, and some money from an Albanian group Bernie is negotiating with, we might see Team Trabant on the grid for the first of the home races along with some rule tweaks that will see all the newbies able to start from pit lane on any lap they feel might be propitious for them to the fray.

But delicious politics aside, only a dead person’s pulse would have failed to peak during the 1:35:20.359 of dicing, cut & thrust, tip & run racing at the Scalextric designed Sakhir circuit. Fans struggled to keep up with the position changes coming fast and furious from some ‘ass-hanging-out’ driving. The top step of the podium was properly filled by Alonso following his knife edge passing manoeuvre on Massa at Turn 2, Lap 1 and his balls-to-the-wall dive around Sebastian (Mr 7 Cylinders) Vettel a scant 33 laps later. But even away from the lead runners, it was adrenaline charged action all the way with Nico Rosberg assisting team mate, Michael Schumacher, by showing him around the recently modified Bahrain race track. Who could fail to thrill to Mark Webber’s early use of the 007 inspired smoke screen button and his charge to almost get close enough to World Champion, Jensen Button’s McLaren to read his number plate?

But of course it is about racing and racing means passing and we saw that a-plenty throughout yesterday’s race. The top 14 all managed to squeak past the hugely competitive Hulkenberg & lovable Hekki, and 3 times each past Buemi & Trulli – that’s 112 nail biting, anything-could-happen-in-the-next-half-hour passes. Anyone that says F1 is a procession from pole to flag just needs to watch that replay – awake this time!

But of course let’s not forget the brilliance of F1 management to orchestrate the shimmering afternoon in the Bahraini desert: Were those front tyres just 25.4mm narrower? Wow, I’d have sworn they were 25.7, or even 25.2! Running two races within one – and going in different directions? Mastery! What next? A combined stage of the Monaco GP and first stage of the Tour de France! The smart money would be on Contador or Armstrong to lead home most of the Cosworth powered cars.

Sadly, while the spectacle of F1 cars duke-ing it out against the world’s top cycling teams is unlikely this season, the paddock is buzzing with an electric rumour of a mooted 2011 rule change that should bring the fans flocking to F1 – the top 10 qualifiers will get to choose between a Jayco, or Coromal 2-berth, pop-top to click onto the back of their cars on the starting grid. This would go a long way to reuniting the long-estranged racing and caravanning fraternities.