You know, I feel I did a decent job reading the on track performance of cars this year. With RBR potentially falling off, that looks to have extended Mercs advantage slightly. They're going to walk this season again. Very impressive development effort from the Germans.
McLaren indeed were putting on a brave face all this time. They built a dog with the best engine last year. It's not really surprising that the car is currently a dog this year. They're going to be fighting Sauber and Manor for last place, folks. As a Lewis fan all I can say is I told you so. While Button fans we're claiming us to be bitter, many of us were pointing out accurately that Martin Whitmarsh was single-handedly destroying McLaren's decades of racing heritage in order to appease his favored son, Benson. Well, congratulations. You got to keep both Benson and a shitty car. Thank god Lewis fled that sinking ship. McLaren is probably going to go through the Williams-Mechachrome phase of shitty irrelevance. Macca fans better hope there's a Williams-Martini transition on the horizon, because otherwise they just married themselves to a new version of the Cosworth. Dennis should never have stepped down as principal. None of this would've happened then.
Red Bull are not the best of the rest. I feel like this is not the first Melbourne weekend where the STR looks to be on equal footing with the parent team. That's odd, but this race is also a bit of an outlier in car performance.
Ferrari are once again fast on Friday. I assume they'll be quick on Saturday too, but will they suddenly slow down when the race comes and fuel flow is controlled again? I remember them being pretty good in practices last year, only to be well off the pace in the race due to fuel management. I'm not sure if they demonstrated any change in that regard during testing.
Williams isn't showing all their cards just yet. I'll wait until FP3 before determining if Ferrari really overtook them.
The off track stuff is wild. Bernie is really going to run this sport into the ground. It's not embracing new technologies. It's not very fan friendly at neither the track nor on tv. For a sport that generates so much numerical data, there is no stats database. I mean, the NBA, NFL and mlb all have embraced the stats revolution and offer comprehensive databases online. There is no such thing for F1. You already have to dig around the site just to find paper driving records. I fear this sport I love won't see the end of this decade. PEACE.
