You don’t have to ask whether the Belgian Grand Prix will be a good race or not like you do with many other circuits on the F1 calendar, you just know it will be. It always is. Any circuit as long as that, with so many corners, straights, twists, turns, uphills, downhills and not to mention unpredictable weather will always make for a fascinating Grand Prix and once against in 2010 all those elements played into this race and made it a classic. After surviving a late trip into the gravel when it began to rain, Lewis Hamilton clung onto a lead he took on the first lap to take the checkered flag and move back into the lead of the drivers championship standings.
I was unable to see qualifying this morning for one reason or another which may or may not be because I slept in after a long week at work and a lack of a decent nights sleep for the past number of weeks, but forget about that. So when I woke up this morning, reached for my phone and checked Twitter to see one of the many F1 people I follow to see who had gotten pole I read something about Lewis Hamilton being half a second faster than Button and a full second faster than everyone else. So, I got up and got on with my day under the assumption that Hamilton would be starting tomorrow from pole. Well, it’s 11.59 p.m. as I type this and I have just flicked up the BBC F1 website to read on any latest news from post-qualifying to see the headlines forcing their way out of my screen and into my confused eyes that Hamilton didn’t take pole; Championship leader Mark Webber did. Eah?
With the Belgian Grand Prix just a few days away, I thought I’d climb into the Delorian, spark up the flux-capacitor, speed up to 88 and zip back exactly ten years to the weekend of the 25/26/27 August 2000 and take a look at the Belgian Grand Prix which also happened to be the first ever Formula One race I attended.Read More»
I came across a blog post today on the excellent James Allen on F1 website that gave the facts to show Ferrari were the most reliable team in Formula One so far this season. While I have to admit I was a touch surprised it was them, I was flabergasted when I see the numbers. Ferrari have a finishing record through 12 races of 99.8%. An astonishing show of reliability. I’m betting it wasn’t even that reliable in Schumachers hayday when the reliability of the car was a bit factor on his haul of points in every race.
Due to Formula One’s mega-tight copyright guff, the below YouTube clip might be gone before I even post this, but it’s worth a shot and what it shows is the incident on lap 66 of the Hungarian Grand Prix when Michael Schumacher almost ran Rubens Barrichello into the pit wall when the Brazilian was attempting to overtake the seven-time World Champion and former team-mate to Rubens.
Okay, so here is the story of the 2010 German Grand Prix: The positions were sorted out in the first corner of the first lap and the result fixed with 18 laps to go. That is it. Nothing more to see, nothing more really to talk about race wise. Read More»
While watching the British Grand Prix this weekend you might have noticed one driver was missing and some new driver had come onto the scene. The driver was Bruno Senna of the HRT team, replaced for this race by Sakon Yamamoto. Now this is no criticism of Yamamoto who given the chance to drive was always going to take it but rather a criticism of HRT for such a move and to the authorities of F1 for allowing this kind of thing to happen. On this occasion it was nothing to do with talent, rather money and when a team allows a driver to virtually buy a seat for a weekend then it shouldn’t be anywhere near F1, especially a smaller team that should be encouraging talent development.
