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.