F1-Blog

Australia Result

And it’s a result for Lewis Hamilton, and McLaren.

Lewis drove a start to finish winning race, however the news is the Ferrari cars.

None of the Ferrari powered cars managed to finish the race, with two engine failures (Kimi and Bordause).

It was also nice to see the BMW and Williams on the podium, Heidfeld took the second spot, and Rosberg took a much deserved third spot.

The race was incident packed, with 3 safety cars out, Kovalinen got caught out in his second stop with the Safety Car that Timo Glock’s big accident brought out, having to stop under the safety car, and join the end of the snake along with Alonso.

David Coulthard had a big accident with Massa into turn one ending Red Bulls day. Rubens was running well in the lone Honda (Button had an incident on the opening lap), with his car running out of fuel, he had to come in to refuel while the safety car was out and the pit lane was closed giving him a 10 second penalty, he then looked to go back out onto the track through red pit lights. So it’s unknown at the moment if he managed to score points or not.

Pole for Lewis, but that’s not the surprise

Lewis popped his McLaren onto the Pole position, but the surprise is who is in second.

We already know that Kimi is starting 16th, so it was expected that the second Ferrari would be lining up next to him. That did not occur though, and it was not Lewis’s team mate Heikki either.

Nope hat’s off to BMW Sauber and Robert Kubbica for their second spot start for the first race.

Other surprises are the Honda cars, both making it into a lot higher position than last year (11th and 13th),

Both of the Toyota’s made it through to the top 10 shoot out, as did Nico Rosberg and David Coulthard and big surpise Sebastian Vettel. Mark Webber held his bad luck at his home track, with what looked like a failure of a front brake pad or disk under braking into the fast turn 12.

We look forward to what will be a cracking race tomorrow.

Times after the clickthrough.

Kimi comes back

Kimi Raikkonen has shown that he still has it in him to win a GP by taking a strong win in at the last Magny-Cours race in France.

The win happened because Kimi had more fuel on-board and managed to make it count by overtaking his Ferrari team mate Fillipe Massa during the second round of pit stops.

Third place was taken by the young Brit Lewis Hamilton, who ran a 3 stop strategy, as was his team mate, although Fernando Alonso was switched to a 2 stop race after the first stops. Lewis for the first time, was mugged off the line, and never seemed to be able to make a move on the Ferrari’s at any point in the day. After all 8 podiums from 8 starts is not a bad record.

Race of the day Robert Kubica managed to bring his BMW Sauber in for 4th spot, after a hard race in the second stint with Lewis Hamilton. The second BMW Sauber of Nick Heidfeld made finished in the fifth spot, with a close run battle between Giancarlo Fisichella and Fernando Alonso finishing 6th and 7th.

BMW Sauber to run Sebastien Vettel

It seems that BMW are not happy putting Robert Kubica in the car for this weekends American GP.

Instead Sebastien Vettel will get his first outing in the big class.

Kubica said he was ready to drive, however doctors expressed concerns with the Pole driving because if he had another incident they believe it would be too much for the young driver.

Vettel said - “Of course I am looking forward to my first F1 race,” he admitted, “but I wish it had come under different circumstances. It’s never nice if a team-mate can’t drive because he had an accident. For me the Indianapolis Speedway is unknown territory, but I have prepared myself for this situation and I have two 90 minute practice sessions. I know the car very well as I have quite a lot of testing miles under my belt.”

Good luck to Sebastien and BMW at Indy.

Heidfeld Roll

Eurosport has posted a good set of shots of the roll the BMW Sauber driver had to endure in this weekends USA GP first lap incident.