HoldingWater

With pole position a good second ahead of the pack, you would have been pretty safe in assuming that, with the performance of Red Bull, and in particular Sebastian Vettel, the result would be pretty much a foregone conclusion and the race would be fairly processional.

How wrong were we?

I’m not going to even hazard a guess at the number of overtaking manoeuvres that happened into days race. The varying pitstop strategies thrown up by the performance of the Pirelli tyres, combined with DRS and Kerrs seemed to come together perfectly for this track. The continually mixing up of the pack delivered non stop action from start to finish.

Hamilton raced hard today and deserved the win however Webber was my driver of the day – delivereing one of the drives of his life – taking 15 places to finish on the podium was a sterling effort.

So on to the engine manufacturers table – with 4 cars in the top 10 Mercedes have clawed back 16 points on Renault this weekend. Assuming no FIA changes to the results post race the results are as follows:

Renault – 137
Mercedes – 102
Ferrari – 64
Cosworth – 0

Per car the results are Renault – 34.25, Mercedes – 17, Ferrari – 10.17 and Cosworth yet to get of the mark…

Only 2nd race in and already posting this a day late!

Fortunately it seems, as both Alonzo and Hamiltionrecieved  20 second “drive through” penalties after the chequered flag – Hamiltion for making more than one change in direction  whilst defending against Alonzo and Alonzo for causing a collision with Hamilton.

Pretty tough on both of them though Alonzo managed to stay in the same position whilst Hamiltion slipped a couple of places down the results table.

So how did the results in Malaysia affect the leaderboard?

Renault – 102
Mercedes – 51
Ferrari – 49
Cosworth – 0

And on a per car basis as before (with Virgin, Lotus and HRT excluded):

Renault – 25.5
Mercedes – 8.5
Ferrari – 8.2
Cosworth – 0

Renault already leaping ahead on both counts –  roll on China

With the exit of Honda, Toyota and BMW from Formula 1 over the last few years there has been an ever decreasing pool of engine suppliers for the other teams to choose from.

Thankfully Cosworth decided to come back to Formula 1 to offer teams with another alternative. I thought it would be an interesting to monitor how these engine providers perform over the season with the launch of a championship for engine providers.

Fortunately as engine manufacturers are split across the teams this is fairly easy to calculate – but would this be a fair representation?

After Melbourne Grand Prix points standings are as follows:
Renault – 50
Mercedes – 26
Ferrari – 25
Cosworth – 0

Unfortunately for Cosworth only Williams will likely earn them points so suspect we’ll see the other three manufacturers scamper away pretty quickly..

If we exclude the 3 new teams ( Virgin, Lotus and HRT ) and score on a per car basis this would look something like:
Renault – 12.5
Mercedes – 4.3
Ferrari – 4.16
Cosworth – 0

Whilst this works better for Cosworth this puts the championship well and truly into Renaults hands with two of the strongest teams in Redbull and Renault scoring points and no 3rd team to lower the average.

Ferrari and Mercedes still have to split the points across 6 cars – IMO Mercedes the slightly stronger of the two teams (albeit with 2 DNFs for the works team)

Any other suggestions on how this could be tracked a little more fairly without some ultra complicated algorithm?..

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.

So far, the Universe is winning

Rich Cook

….isn’t that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Steven Wright

Chatting last week with Graeme, a friend from work, the topic of conversation got round to Terry Pratchett. As always this ends up with a round of ‘if your work colleagues were a character from the Discworld who would they be?’.

The Patrician, Librarian, Foul ole Ron and CMOT Dibbler instantly spring to mind.

So, to all those Pratchett fans out there who do you think best describes you? Do you see yourself as Bloody Stupid Johnson, Twoflower, a wizzard of Unseen University or, dread the thought, Nobby Nobbs!

I’d see myself as the Bursar – feed me a few dried frog pills and you may just get some sense out of me, otherwise just give me something shinny to play with and i’ll keep myself amused.

Since I was a young boy I’ve been a fan or motor racing, in particular formula one. I have many a fond memory of sitting in front of the television after a hearty Sunday lunch listening to the ever increasing pitch of Murray Walker’s commentary as the action of the day increases in its intensity the closer we get to the checked flag. Disturbed only by the occasional snore coming from my father as he once again dozes off in his favourite rocker (always the pudding that does it never the wine!)

Sadly, we very rarely have the opportunity to benefit from Murray’s insight since his retirement, however i think his shoes have been well filled by Martin however he can come up with some very bizarre assessments of the situation.

This afternoon’s race at Spa for example – during the course of his commentary Martin, with his usual panache, delivered the line “Lewis’s driving needs to be as sharp as a Kumquat”

Even Jonathan Legard sounded a little surprised at hearing this one.

Being uneducated in the world of tropical fruit and expecting a comparison to Lewis’s precision driving and sharp attention to detail, a picture of a rather lethal lethal looking fruit sprang to mind something that you’d think twice about messing with.

Armed with a vivid picture of a fruit that would not look out of place in the hands of a dwarf in a Terry Pratchett novel a quick visit to Google soon highlighted my ignorance. For those who don’t know a Kumquat is a small orange citrus fruit, round and smooth without a thorn or razor sharp edge in sight.

Which of course makes perfect sense! – Lewis drove a really smooth race out in front from start to finish with only one hairy moment where he just managed to avoid hitting a tyre wall after slipping off track in the rain.

Whilst I still think my version of a Kumquat would have been better, if anyone did drive in that style F1 would probably looking more like a sequel to Death Race