**** race.
Lewis kinda ****ed it up for everyone by bodging his start, then his team helped him out by giving him an awful stop.
DRS maked over-taking mostly a formality long as you had the right tires and engine.
Dull dull dull.
I feel bad that you chose this race to come back to f1 with, it's a terrible track. Monaco next up.... Yay.
Agreed, the top 4 finished in their starting positions, with no real excitement at any point.
Highlight of the race for me was the Bottas / Räikkönen battle for 4th in the last few laps of the race. You could see Räikkönen was driving on the edge of his tire's grip, fighting the wheel in almost every corner, whereas Bottas was just keeping cool, driving smoothly and not making any mistakes.
Poor Lotus jack man... saw he had an icepack on his groin after that incident. Ouch. I see Crash-jean is extending his ability, from team-mates, to other drivers and now to pedestrians. And of course Maldonado did his bit to keep his reputation alive, too.
When they had fuel stops it gave the teams much more scope for strategy, depending on how their cars handled when lighter / heavier, how they used their tires, how they're set up, etc. This is how Schumacher won a lot of his races, IMHO, simply strategy. Of course the car was also good, but strategy played more of a role than the differences in car performance. In fact you could compensate for the weaknesses of your car and play to the strengths with strategy, which minimised the effect of the differences between cars and in fact allowed for more variety in setup, etc, with teams putting more effort into one aspect over another where they saw they could improve their race with a new strategy. This fake tire stops thing (purposely crippled tires that can't last the whole race) is just not interesting, and certainly is not improving tire innovation.
In other words, Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA have crippled F1, making it irrelevant to the car industry, boring to all the target audience groups and stifling any useful innovation in the one area of motorsport that has the funds and brilliant engineers to do good research and development. Well done. I know, I know, I should simply enjoy watching the top drivers racing the top cars against each other, but there's really very little enjoyment left for me, sorry to say.
