For all its pre-season hype, the excitement of having 4 champions on track, the eagerness to get a competitive Ferrari back on tract, the season opener couldn’t be a more boring car procession.The front runners, the ones having the fastest cars, just followed each other around the track completing the mandatory 49 laps without trying any overtaking maneuver. And the new regulation of fueling ban ensured that the nothing exciting could even happen during the pit stops.
The qualifying was the first to signal that something is not right. Until the last year, Q2 used to see the cars go zoom-broom at top speeds. Then the Masters of Strategy would work out a fuel strategy to give their drivers the best shot at glory. This did mean that slower cars could end up in front of faster ones, but at least it did mix the grid up a bit, and then the pit stops would become interesting. The new format of having no fuel strategy for Q2 and Q3 somehow reduced the charm of Q3. And when Vettel set the fastest Q2 lap, it was only a matter of wait and watch to see Vettel do it again in Q3. After all, there is no change in the car from Q2 to Q3. So the result of Q2 and Q3 should be the same, unless of course one of our drivers gets nervous and commits a mistake, something we saw Webber do. Or else if you were foolish enough like Adrian Sutil to be the only driver running on Hard than the Super Softs which the remaining 9 had chosen.
After qualifying we knew who the fastest guy was – Vettel. We also knew that Alonso and Massa were strong. But when everybody starts the race with the same amount of fuel, and when you expect everybody to come into the pits at almost the same time, and when you already know that to overtake the car in front you need to be 2-3 seconds faster which you are not, then where the hell did FIA see an opportunity for the drivers to overtake one another?
Another impact of removing refueling was that drivers chose to dive into pits only once, and play it safe on the track to conserve their tires.
For all the talk about reducing cost associated with getting a team ready for a race, and lessening the impact of machinery on race result, FIA has made the race day boring. Perhaps it were the slow corners of Bahrain which wasn’t the ideal place to judge the new regulations, or perhaps I was expecting just too much, but I wasn’t impressed with the show. If the same repeats for a few more races, F1 might face an even greater scare than all the scams, match-fixing and recession of the past couple of years. With a dwindling fan base, they need to do a quick rethinking.
Congrats to Alonso and Schumacher. Is this the beginning of the end of Schumacher – Ferrari legacy? Will Alonso become the next Schumacher of Ferrari? I certainly hope so. And I think the next season will once again be Schumacher vs. Alonso – one last time, and I will put my bet on Schumacher to walk away with the title. That would most certainly be a fairy tale end to a great illustrious career.
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