2011 Australian recap

The F1 gods smiled on us by keeping us away from a typical follow the leader race we get every year in Bahrain. Instead we got Melbourne starting the season with a better track and actual overtaking abilities. I'm all for bringing F1 to new places and new people but going to countries that have little to no motorsport heritage and with these circuits charging so much the cameras are told to not show the stands as they are nearly empty. Does that sound like the way you would open a championship? Yet Bernie seems to not really care about losing Australia which sells out year after year and can say the fans are backing Webber and have the Bathurst 1000 to be proud of.

OK rant over onto the recap.

Qualifying
The surprise of Q1 was the loss of Heidfeld but the fact that the Lotus team was still 2 seconds off the pace of the next car was more surprising. You would think that a Mike Gascoigne design would do better then what we saw. In Q2 Schumacher struggled and ultimately fell at the hurdle. In Q1 Petrov showed what the Renault can do with getting ahead of both Rosberg and Massa to take sixth behind Alonso and both Red Bulls and McLaren. Speaking of McLaren they must be breathing a sigh of relief as they can challenge the Red Bulls which is right where they want to be.

The Race
The real highlights came from Button and Massa going nose to gearbox until a questionable move left Jenson on the wrong side of a drive through penalty. Would have been nice to have actually seen the move from either car to let the viewers find out if Button was really ahead as he claimed but we have to submit to the stewards and hope they made the right call. Despite this he still caught back up with Massa and even passed him legitimately to finish behind Webber who matched his best finish way back in 2002 with Minardi. While Mercedes can take the fact that they only lost both cars due to racing incidents they will hope to have both drivers fighting in the top ten in Malaysia. The big stories ultimately are the fact that Petrov stepped up and took his first podium and showed what both he and the car can do. We never saw the incident that made Heidfeld ultimately limp home only beating the one surviving Lotus and both Virgins but he can see that both drivers can very much challenge for wins this year. The other story came from after the race with both Saubers thrown out. If Peter Sauber has one outstanding element to his reputation its that he doesn't cheat. Why did the stewards wait until the very end of the weekend to decide to do this? Did no one measure the wings at any other point after the team took up their position in the pit lane? It stinks of amateur hour and I can only hope that future races actually look at the cars at some point before the race.

Vettel will be on top of the world with a very dominant win as the circus packs up and heads for Malaysia. With Bernie insisting that the only fans that matter are in Europe (a load of codswollop if you ask me) we seem to be certain to get a wet race. This always makes for an interesting race and I can't wait.