Monthly Archives: September 2008

Singapore 2008

Posted on by
Reply

After watching the very enjoyable qualifying session on Saturday morning, I was really looking forward to Formula One’s first night race in Singapore. Frustratingly though our PVR/cable box died on Saturday afternoon and is still dead now despite two visits from Videotron technicians.

I had to resort to “watching” the race via a live blog over at F1Fanatic. Not quite as enjoyable as seeing the racing with my own eyes but it was still exciting stuff; it’s surprising how easy it is to follow along just from a text feed.

It turned out to be an exciting race, but for all the wrong reasons. It sounds like it could quite easily have turned into another procession like we saw in Valencia but then Nelson Piquet drove his car into a wall and suddenly everything went crazy. It was just as most drivers were ready to make their first pit stop, and of course the safety car came out so the pit lane was closed. By a stroke of luck Alonso had pitted just before the crash, which meant he was in the perfect position, and went on to win the race.

Meanwhile Ferrari were having all sorts of dramas with Massa driving away with the fuel hose attached (not his fault) and Kimi hitting a wall leaving them with zero points. Hamilton drove an anonymous race to finish third and cement his championship lead.

It’s sad that a race only becomes exciting because of a rule that everyone thinks is stupid anyway. Commentors on the live blog were saying what a great race it was, but was it really? Yes it was exciting but was there actually any racing? There were maybe 3 or 4 decent overtaking moves but everything else revolved around what happened in the pits and with the safety car. F1 needs all the excitement it can get, but it needs to find a better way of generating it.

Travesty at Spa

Posted on by
Reply

I was thrilled by the race at Spa last weekend. The last few laps were amazing and I wanted to blog about it straight away. We were going out though, so I had to wait.

Then I returned home to discover that one of the best races of the season had been ruined by more ridiculous decision making by the stewards. The idea of writing anything about the race evaporated at that moment and took a few days to return.

Neither driver did anything in those few corners that could constitute a rule infringement severe enough to warrant changing the race result. Even if (and it’s a very big if) Hamilton broke the rules, choosing to strip him of the win as punishment was insanely harsh. Hamilton was overttaken by Kimi again after that incident, and re-took the lead before Kimi crashed out so the incident had absolutely no bearing on the final result.

Handing down a punishment like that after the token fine Massa got for unsafely exiting his pit garage just exposes the FIA stewards as incompetant at best, corrupt at worse.