F1 Bahrain GP

I missed the race this past weekend but managed to find a copy of it online, so I'm watching it now. The biggest difference this year is the new V8 engines. I can't say I'm thrilled with the reduced power. At least they're revving as high as the old engines so they don't sound any different.

Neat factlet of the race: 13 years ago Gilles Villeneuve and Keke Rossberg started a race on the same row as each other, and in this race their sons, Jacques and Niko did the same thing.

Filipe Massa pretty much fell on his face starting for Ferrari, failing to stay ahead of Alonso at the start which would have messed up Michael Schumacher's 3 stop strategy, and then losing it going around a turn and nearly smacking Alonso.I've always said he was a bit too unpredictable a driver to be in a top team. He'll have to prove me wrong through the year.

Toyota are spending the most money and getting worse and worse each year, it's pretty astounding, but nice to know money isn't everything.

The new engines have knocked a couple of hundred horsepower off of the cars, but the aerodynamic regulations are basically the same. I'm going to guess taht this will make it harder to pass among the front-runners, because more turns will be at full-speed, taking away the variable of who brakes last and who does a better job of taking the corner. If they just have to sit on the throttle to go through more turns it will make for a more predictable race.

There's a new racer for the Honda junior team who is a 31 year old rookie who got penalized at the start, ignored the penalty until almost getting disqualified and then topping it off by running into his mechanics when going in for his pit stop. I wonder which Honda executive's kid he is.

Ironically Cosworth's V8 engine that the Williams team turned to as a last resort when they were dropped by BMW, is actually a really good engine. I guess their decades of making V8 engines for CART actually paid off. The engine revs at over 20,000 RPMs, which is ridiculous.

It's not even halfway through the race now and Raikonnen went up from dead last to 3rd without making a pit stop. It looked like he was light on fuel at the beginning because he was going so quickly.

Jacques Villeneuve's BMW just blew up really nicely.Reminds me of the days of his wuper high-revving Honda couldn't go a full race. Nice.

I sort of hate Speed TV's commentary. It's just 3 guys in a TV studio watching the same video feed that we're watching, instead of the ITV feed TSN uses where they're actually at the race. The timing and scoring has been down for most of the race so they have no more information than the person watching does.

OK, 19 laps to go and Alonso just got by Schumacher coming out of his last pit stop. Michael is going to have to fight Alonso all the way to the end of the race, and already he's run wide on a couple of turns. This goes to my assertion that he is by far the best driver in the series but if he has to actually race someone head-to-head he becomes human mighty quickly. Of course the race isn't over yet, but at least it's got my attention.

Well, that's the race, Alonso won, Schumacher 2nd and Raikonnen amazingly makes it up to 3rd place. Another guy to watch for this season is going to be Nico Rossberg, he made some very fluid passes and the Cosworth engine is scary fast in a straight line.

I think it's going to be a great season this year, I can't wait for the next race in Malaysia this weekend.