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.