The wait is finally over, as we burst out of the off-season and into a new and exciting year of motor-racing, a year that has already delivered so much. The opening rounds of the V8 Supercar season in Adelaide - the former host of this race - were immense, yes that Whincup bloke won another event but he did do it rather well. Take note Vettel, that's how you balence dominence with entertaining racing, not that panel rubbing and contact is quite so tolerable in the Red Bull - wheels might be lost and apparenly race cars need wheels to function. Unless of course you're Lowndes where running without a tyre just results in spectacular drifting, followed by an unscheduled pit stop to replace the missing article.
So will the F1 people be quite so entertaining down there in Australia, well we can always hope so - although it will generally only be seen by the folk on Sky. Having said that I may have secured a location for Sunday to catch a full re-run of the event, meaning hopefully the blog won't be trapped with the highlights packages that BBC has been left with this season. Which based on the ones they posted for the Indian GP last year, were more than a little abstract, but this time they are called extended highlights so who knows how extended they are going to be. Time will only tell as qualifying on Saturday will be beamed to blog HQ through the BBC, but there will be no spying on the first practice session of the season unfortunately.
The Track
Pulling myself away from another building rant about Sky TV, lets re-focus on the patch of tarmac the drivers will be doing battle on this weekend, and also doing battle in the scenery too if anything history of this event has told us. On the belief that the unusually incident free 2011 event was more of an anomaly than anything else, normally we have cars bouncing off walls, bouncing off each other, and in the case of Ralf Schumachers 2002 start - sailing through the air. The close proximity of the walls only serves to encourage people to drive into them, and the Australians being an odd bunch have painted them all green. Camoflaging the concrete barriers, just to temps drivers even closer perhaps - certainly makes the support action entertaining.
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| Track graphic from the FIA event information |
Albert Park is a combination track - part temporary street track running through the park, and part permanent racing facility, a similar process to that applied to Adelaide it's predecessor and the Singapore GP well see later in the year. Being set in a park the track is partially shaded by trees, which discard their leaves on the track suface, and also lengthening the shadows as the race draws to a close on Sunday. Australia just building up the perils for the event to introduce a little spark into the event - a far cry from the health and safety modern Tilke tracks where you need to hail a taxi to reach the barrier.
One consequence of being mainly a street track event is the nature of the corners, limted by the infrastructure of the park, are a little simlar in nature. A problem that effects the likes of Singapore or Abu-Dhabi, however here the impact of repeated corner styles doesn't detract from the flow of the track. The advantage of not using city streets but park access roads where the topology isn't composed of endless sequences of 90 degree corners. Managing to to find a balence between slower and faster corners, some vastly enjoyable and some a little more irritating - yes turn 15 I'm talking about you.
But this is a new season and I've already unveiled the 2012 blogmobile in previous posts but now it is time to take it on it's official capacity around the melbourne circuit in the first of the track videos for this year. Still managing to produce the films in 720p HD - or so youtube claims, yet the actual content is filmed at a slightly lower resolution. My graphics processor would cry at the thought of running the simulator in HD, it can barely manage to cope with filming some of the F1 sequences in DX9. So without further ado and rambling on, this probably is the interval of the opening race post of a brand new season, here is the 2012 track video for the Ausralian GP, complete with soundtrack...
And welcome back after a that little break of visual pseudo-entertaiment - one of these days I shall get the video system working properly, but that might require a new much more powerful purpose built system. Based on the budget here at Blog HQ such things are many many years down the road if this blog even still exists then.
What to Expect
It is anyone's guess really, a fleet of new cars - all hiding their true pace in the preseason testing sessions - so no-one really knows who will come out on top this weekend. Even if we had some representitive data, the unique nature of this race, with the walls and leaves and other Australian paraphenalia means that the formbook probably can stay in the cupboard for this one.
But we can asume some constants, primarily the grid divisions as pointed out in the last post, the top three teams will more than likely be the ones battling for the pole - with the figre of Kimi Raikkonen for Lotus an outside chance of joining that party. Which roughly gives us seven cars in the top division with chances of scoring major points (real ones that is, bonus points are different) and even threatening the front row. After so much dominance from Red Bull I'm all for them having some form of competition out there.
In the middle of the pack, it is difficult to pick a winner from that group, Force India and Sauber look strong but Williams and Torro Rosso also had promising testing times. I know those times can pretty much be discarded, as they are about as reliable as HRT's development program. But no-one was hopelessly off the pace so expacting this little group to be very entertaining.
Then there is division three, where the newer teams live - a division which has been completely dominated by Heikki since it's inception. This time the Finn has a new team-mate in the form of Wingman Petrov since being removed from the team formerly known as Renault-Squadron now Lotus GP. Given Kovalainen's experience with the car, I expect the early races to fall into his favour as Vitaly catches up, but the pairing could help Caterham escape division three. As for Marussia well pretty sure they are staying down here at the back losing more ground to Catherham and the rest of the grid.
There are two omissions from this list, firstly Mercedes GP, who from the information floating arounf twitter, have been very clever indeed - incorporating a sort of F-duct inside the rear-wing endplates that activates when DRS is opened. The air is then sent under the car to the front wing effectively creating a front DRS system as well - well played Mercedes, well played indeed. Meaning their staus as being the only runner in division 1.5 could be promoted to division one too.
That leaves HRT, more twitter updates have stated that De La Rosa's car isn't ready yet, which is never a good sign - saying it is being built at the moment and are waiting on parts which haven't been delivered. Flashbacks to 2011 are cropping up where the team were woefully slow on account of not doing any testing before hand, and failed to qualify for the race. History is repeating itself as HRT have declared that they will be using the event as a glorified testing session... will they make the grid.
In terms of the race, the FIA have introduced a double DRS zone in Australia, but with a single detection point in the same place as 2011. The second zone comes into effect on the exit of turn two before turn three which is a decent overtaking point on the track. The main question that comes up here is WHY!. This methodology is a little foolish because if a driver makes a pass in the first zone he can use the system again and vanish off into the distance, culling a posible ongoing battle.
Blog predictions
After a season of given those people on the actual track the hallowed bonus points, I thought it was time for some internal points awarding in the form of a rough series of predictions mainly just for a laugh
Top 10 finishers:
- Vettel
- Button
- Alonso
- Hamilton
- Raikkonen
- Massa
- Webber
- Rosberg
- Kobayashi
- Di Resta
Qualifying Battles
- Red Bull - Vettel
- McLaren - Button
- Ferrari - Alonso
- Mercedes - Rosberg
- Lotus - Raikkonen
- Force India - Hulkenberg
- Torro Rosso - Ricciardo
- Sauber - Kobayashi
- Williams - Senna
- Caterham - Kovalainen
- Marussia - Glock
- HRT - (if they qualify) De La Rosa
This brings to a close the opening post from the season, and during the course of writing this out, it has been confirmed that Sunday I will be borrowing a Sky powered TV to see how the enemy manage to handle the coverage. A long way off what the BBC have been offering over the past years, but before then there is Saturday's qualifying to enjoy first. So until the next time this is farewell from the blog HQ.
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