Re: F1, boring?

The F1 season finally ground to a halt on Sunday in Brazil.
I took a look at this event really to see if anything had changed since I last saw this televisual feast of mediocrity.

It had not and was broadly the same yawn. One kinda gets a flavour of the thing when Martin Brundle tried so hard to whip up some excitement and anticipation about ...........rain.

In trying to understand F1 lets look at a few facts about this 'race' in particular. We have Mark Webber gaining his first victory of the 2011 season in the very last race of the year.
How was this possible? We are led to believe that Vettel had a gearbox oil leak from the fifth lap and had to back off considerably in order to try and finish the event. This would be fair enough if that is what actually happened.

The more one looks at this the more it becomes quite evident that Vettel gifted Webber the win and that Red Bull used the gearbox issue as a smokescreen.

If Vettel really did have the problem how is it that he was able to to set fastest sector and lap times after the problem was supposedly seen on the cars telemetry.

This is after all F1, the cars are only tenths of seconds apart from each other. Even on this circuit which only requires second gear at two corners, time and speed must still be lost in short shifting to preserve the integrity of the transmission. One would have thought that he would have been all the more cautious not to risk fourth or fifth gear as that would hve been the end of his race.
One can also look at the rate Button caught and overtook Alonso but could not make inroads into the pace of Vettel.

One can argue technicalities but for me the dead clincher was Webber's body language when he got out of the car after the finish. If he had felt that he won it fair and square he would have been much more buoyant. He is a true sportman and would have enjoyed the victory, he knew what had transpired and struggled to hide it.

Re: F1, boring?

I do agree with you about the Webber/Vettel situation Hammer. When it was mentioned over the radio that Vettell had gearbox problems, I quite expected him to retire over the next few laps!

It was a shame the driver with genuine gearbox trouble...... Hamilton, had to retire.

Re: F1, boring?

I'm a big car race fan and F1 is on my list. I set my alarm and get up at 8 a.m. on Sundays (North American time) to watch the European races and I stay up into the wee hours of the morning the night before to watch the Asian races. But I have noticed that in recent years, I have to watch the races in my hard-backed chair at my desk. If I watch from my easy-chair, I'm asleep by the end of the second lap. Plus at my desk, I can cue up the 'race stats' on my computer. Often, the biggest racing thrill on race day is seeing that the 17th place car gained two-tenths on the 16th place car, the last lap.

There's lots of reasons for the demise of F1 in recent years. Technology has taken over from raw driver skill. Team orders often overrule in-team competitiveness (where one should naturally expect the closest match-ups), the stewards and 'make it up as you go along' rules and policing have made the drivers hesitant to attempt daring passes, banning in-season testing puts drivers on the track with no experience in their cars, etc., etc., etc. I could go on for another hundred lines.

But I'm a car race fan. I watch it all: F1, Lemans, North American open-wheel, even the NASCAR roundy-roundy. But my biggest car race thrill in the summer is taking my favourite lady down the road to the local dirt track and watching the 800 h.p. winged open-wheelers cover us both with a layer of dust and engine smoke. Our first date was at the local stock car track.

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