Friday, 13 May 2011

Road Safety, Fighting and Upgrades

Another week with no race (boo!) so a quick round-up of the most interesting stuff that didn't happen on the track this week.

Decade of Action
Action for Road Safety

Jenson can't-see-my-own-pit Button and Lewis burnouts-in-the-street Hamilton met up with Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday to launch the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety campaign. So far the campaign seems to involve lots of people saying the roads should be safer and not a great deal else. This is obviously a worthy cause but actual action so far seems to be a bit lacking. So here's my bit of action: Wear your seatbelts and drive sensibly everyone!

Adrian Sutil the Fighter?

According to some rumours Adrian Sutil was involved in an 'incident' in a Shanghai nightclub after the Chinese Grand Prix which ended with someone getting a bloodied neck. No-one seemed to know any more details than that until Sutil made a statement to the German Bild newspaper. According to Adrian there was an 'unfortunate action' in which he 'hurt another person completely unintentionally'. Well that clears that up then! Now that everything is revealed we are asked to ignore the whole event as it was not really anything to do with F1 anyway.

New British Driver Coming to Formula 1?

Adrian Quaife-Hobbs is testing for Virgin at the weekend. This will mark the young driver's first time in a Formula 1 car and will hopefully be the first of many more opportunities. Adrian has had lots of success in his career so far and is currently running in the GP3 series. During testing he was top of the time sheets but with only one race so far, bad luck has got in the way of good results. Here's hoping for better luck at Barcelona.

Upgrades for Everyone

With the Spanish Grand Prix approaching fast, the teams are all busy working hard on the cars to try and catch up to Red Bull. Who are presumably working hard to keep them as far behind as possible. Mercedes have a new aerodynamics package and some suspension updates to try and cheer up Michael. You never know he might even be able to keep up with Rosberg. As long as they don't give the same updates to him. McLaren are hoping to actually get the upgrades they took to Turkey working this time around. Sauber have a pretty significant amount of new bodywork which they hope will translate into positions and Renault are testing some parts this weekend to be ready for Spain.

Barcelona is a track which doesn't typically give very much overtaking. However this year is far from typical! Nobody is sure how DRS will affect the racing at this track as it wasn't used during winter testing. The Activation and sensing zones have not yet been announced but it seem that the pit straight is the best place to put it. That should provide some pretty impressive, and brave, overtaking as turn 1 is quite a fast corner. The Pirelli tyres should also play their part at this venue, with some long, high speed corners to make sure they wear out nice and quickly. With a bit of luck we might see a race where pole position doesn't win, unlike the last 10 years in a row. Then again, with Vettel around, maybe not.

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