Monday, September 15

A Dream Day

A master class performance from Sebastian Vettel resulted in his first F1 win, the youngest in history. It was also Toro Rosso’s, formerly the Minardi team, first win.

It has been a long time since I have seen such a performance, and after the Spa debacle, it was exactly what F1 needed. The past few races, the German has shown us glimpses of his potential. Today, in mixed conditions, he was in a different class to the competition.

Kovalainen was a depressing second. I’m sure questions would be asked as to why he had zero answer for Vettel in an inferior car. Robert Kubica, who was nowhere all day, benefitted from his long run to pit at the ideal time for the tire switch-over. Others were not so lucky, having to come in a second time.

The Ferraris were as what I expected. Fast in spurts, but overall unimpressive in the wet weather conditions. Massa made the best of a difficult situation and should be happy with scoring above Hamilton. Raikkonen was shockingly poor for the first part of the race, before finding pace towards the back end.
Lewis Hamilton was no-where for the first part of the race, continuing his qualifying form. Suddenly, he came alive and was the Lewis Hamilton we know. He played himself to make the most out of a bad situation until the lack of rain meant he had to some back into the pits.

His driving was far from inspiring though. While he could defend running Glock off the road due to the spray, I struggle to see a defence of him nearly running Webber off the road can be conjured. I can remember back to Canada many years ago, where a similar incident happened between Schumacher and Frentzen. Schumacher had a stop-go penalty for that. And Lewis fans think they get hard done by? That wasn’t all from in his unsportsmanlike conduct. He left zero room with cutting in front of people after overtaking people. His move on Alonso a prime example of this.

The championship is down to a single point. Given how bad Ferrari are in the wet versus how good Lewis should be, I’d be happy if I was Ferrari. It could have been a whole lot worse. It is on to new ground in two weeks with the first night race at Singapore.

PC’s Driver of the Day: Sebastian Vettel. A supreme drive that we haven’t seen in years. While James Allen was too busy trying to bring false comparisons between Hamilton and the great weather specialists, he should have been saving them for this man.

No comments: