Chinese GP - Pushed Beyond the Limit
Straight into the points today, with a rant to follow (sorry!):
Lewis Hamilton - Bernie, how on earth do you write these scripts? Talk about bad luck! Imagine if Lewis did manage to lose the championship in the final round.. Imagine it was lost to Kimi Raikkonen in a Ferrari…? Anyway, Lewis seems to be a driver that’s particularly hard on his tyres. He’s lucky he didn’t race last year where the tyre war produced even less durable tyres. Kimi and Fernando did a good job to keep the pressure on him till he went beyond the limit.
McLaren - Terrible job. Whoever was responsible for Lewis’ strategy got so focused on holding out to be sure they swapped to the right tyres that they forgot to keep an eye on the state of his current tyres! If they kept their eye on the big picture Lewis would be World Champion right now.
Sebastian Vettel - BRILLIANT! What a fantastic comeback after such a low point just a week earlier.
Kimi Raikkonen - Did a great job in pressuring Hamilton. Looked in complete control maintaining the gap between himself and Alonso at the end of the race.
Fernando Alonso - Full marks for effort. Looked like he might have even been able to catch Kimi at one point but I think it was more to do with the Ferrari driver taking it easy then bringing the pace back up.Â
Vitantonio Liuzzi - I always have trouble remembering this guy’s first name when I write a post about him.. Shows how newsworthy he’s been in the past, but this race he did a super job like teammate Vettel!
Jenson Button - Great race from the former golden boy. Although you’d have to say, 5th place is at least where Honda should be every race.
BMW - Hmm.. I wonder if their poor showing is a sign they’re already putting all their energy into next year?
Felipe Massa - I think Kimi has kindly donated the “bad luck curse” to Felipe perhaps? 
Expect him to be on hot form for his home GP though.
Now, onto the rant…Â
For those of us in Australia, the Asian/Oceanic rounds of the Formula One World Championship mean we get to see the race on a Sunday afternoon instead of the usual starting time of anywhere between 10:30pm Sunday to 4am Monday morning.
Despite this, the Australian broadcaster Channel Ten decided to show the Chinese Grand Prix at 1am on Monday morning! Now I can understand there are some conflicts, but really, who wants to watch reruns of the Simpsons or Futurama (or Senfield in past years) when we can be watching a live race for the championship at a normal hour!?
To Channel Ten’s credit they’ve done a great job in bringing us coverage of the qualifying (albeit delayed). So a big thank you on that front. Let’s hope the race coverage times get sorted out next year.
/end rant :)Â Now us Aussies can look to a 3 or 4am viewing of the final round in Brazil…
Date: Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Category: Formula 1 Races
Keep track of new comments here through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
i was there, at the track, it was exciting, but sooo difficult to follow
I did not realize Kubica was leading the race until I read it somewhere today 
I saw Button lost somewhere deep down in the pack, then I look up at the screen right in front of my nose, and he is 5th behind Vettel, who was 17th the last time I remembered 
what mess and what a fun 
That really bites. At least when the US broadcasters run the few European races not covered by Speed they have the decency to delay them until noon on raceday so we can all sleep in. Canada and Indy get real time coverage, well, Indy did anyway. Feel your pain, man.
F1 Wolf - You’re lucky you had a screen right in front of you otherwise it would have been impossible to know what was going on!
verasaki - Thanks for the sympathy
I guess I can’t complain too much though. We have it pretty good here in Aus given that the F1 coverage is free-to-air. What I would love though is if there was an official video feed on the net that you could pay to watch per race. But given how slow the official F1 site is with just text and images I don’t see them streaming video any time soon.. 
No matter who’s gonna be the champion next weekend, this season has been full of surprises. Who would have known that 1) McLaren would be stronger than Ferrari 2) Lewis would be so good 3) McLaren would spy 4) there would be 3 drives fighting for the championship in the last GP.
Can anyone shed some light on this!!
Quote from ITV James Allen Verdict:
“As for Lewis’s slide into the gravel trap, I think that what happened there was that he was tucked up behind another car’s rear wing on the approach to the pit lane entry”
I must have missed something….
I think this was not the reason for Lewis’s slide into the gravel trap. Probably Hamilton get a little nervous when his car started losing grip and, maybe, he lost his concentration at all when Kimi and Trulli overtake him seconds before he went on a trip to the countryside. Here in Spain we’ve got a theory about why Hamilton went off the road, POR GAÑAN!!!!
I don’t know why, if FIA said that nobody can help a F1 driver when he goes off the road, Hamilton and Denis were asking people to help them to push the car. In addition, Lewis was more than a minute inside the car and, as FIA rules, he should get out from the car.
Even if everything points to Hamilton will become the next world champion I’m still waiting for the miracle.
i have nothing good to say about Ch10