After the mesmerizing events in Bahrain the F1 world as gone a little mad in the past two weeks people have been fired, people have resigned and appeals were rejected - so it is safe to assume that there will more scared faces wandering around the Shanghai paddock for fear of being the next to go. The biggest announcement of all was the news that Stefano Dominicali from Ferrari has resigned... to which I suggest he was forcefully booted out of the door by the Ferrari overlord Luca Di Montizemelo. I assume he wanted answers to why his cars were being passed so easily in Bahrain and generally failing to capitalise on having two supreme world champion drivers. Instead of working on updates and making the car more competitive, Luca disposed of Dominicali in some grandiose gesture - very mafia-esque. It's veering dangerously close to F1 becoming much like football - the team is under performing, so fire the manager instead of curing the underlying problem... Personally I don't agree with the decision, because I don't think the cars and the team will miraculously improve - Stefano is being made an unnecessary example of.
In lighter and far more positive news - new teams are on the horizon for the coming years - two bids have been made to join the grid and have been tentatively accepted by Bernie and his minions. The most interesting one is Haas F1 - an american team currently active in Nascar as Stewart-Haas (if this the right Haas, there are two and I get confused). Gene Haas (or Carl... I can't remember) has said that he want's to base the team in the US in a building where the Nascar team has moved out of and wants a driver pairing consisting of an experienced driver and a young American. The second entry is from a team called "Forza Rossa" which appears to be another incarnation of the Stefan GP team that tried to enter with HRT the last time the grid was bulked up. That time round the deal didn't quite make it to fruition, little is know this time (or maybe it is and I haven't looked) but rumors of this being the Ferrari equivalent of Toro Rosso have been suggested. Colin Kolles is apparently on board, who was involved with HRT and ran a pair of R10's at Le Mans - so definitely has racing knowledge, we shall just wait and see.
The Venue
The next in the chain of Tilke dominated tracks is Shanghai - a track based on a Chinese character... clearly the best thing to engineer a layout from. Sadly I can't really see this configuration genertating quite the same amount of intrigue as Bahrain managed, as it shares a lot in common with the Sepang Circuit in Malaysia... and we all know how the world responded to that race. It almost seems as if Mr Tilke started with the template of the Malaysian GP and just stretched some of the corners out a bit and stapled an excessive straight to the back of it. But like Sepang, it does have sections that work well - albeit fewer of them than the host design.
At the start of the lap we are introduced to a series of corners where the designers couldn't quite decide when enough was enough - it starts off so well with a high speed entry which gradually constricts through the radius of the corner. At this point it should have been called a day but no... someone decided it would be a brilliant idea to fold this corner into a hairpin pointing the track back at the main straight. Like the later levels of historic arcade game 'snake' the lap has to make another horrifically awkward hairpin to avoid colliding with itself... Why Tilke...Why?
Anyway eventually you'll escape this tirade of opposing spirals and accelerate out towards the turn six hairpin (the corner numbering is also a little odd) one of the prime overtaking locations - and one of the few places where Maldonado can unleash his special brand of overtaking. I'd recommend a spare batch of rollhoops be dispatched forthwith. After the hairpin we are presented with a pair of sweeping corners, where the second is fractionally slower feeding into a double apexed turn... straight out of the Malaysian playbook that one, yet it remains one of the more enjoyable elements of this racetrack.
When we come to the end of the shorter back straight, it all starts to unravel again - another example of how a track built without a consideration of it's drivability can have some truly horrific corners. Turn 11 is a prime example - it almost resembles Oschersleben's turn one, regarded as one of the worst corners in all of the universe. Because it isolation it would be an average low speed corner, but the exit is constricted by the next turn making it much tighter, unnecessarily so, such that you can't drive the corner without compromising the next one. It slightly redeems itself further on as it opens into a high speed banked sweeping turn. Winding up onto a more than excessive back straight.
This straight, sculpted for DRS ends in the slowest corner on the track - perfectly designed for having accidents and if you feel like it, overtaking. As illustrated last season as Gutierrez crashed into the back of Sutil's Force India - with these lower noses that could be a far more dangerous situation, like the Kobayashi/Massa accident in Australia. The end of lap is marked by a deceptive and interesting corner, it taunts you to throw the car in faster than it can be done, but on the whole the track is a hive of inconsistency as have been the races held here.
The Form Guide
Well, to be honest if something other than a Mercedes takes pole and walks away with the victory and by some margin on both counts, this is race four and thus far no other team has achieved such a feat. But I think the advantage won't be quite so significant in China because it isn't a track defined by top speeds as much as Bahrain, therefore Red Bull and Ferrari won't be so swamped. Illustrating that firing Dominicali was a rash reaction to a much wider problem. Inversely those other Mercedes cars will have far more competition - Williams, McLaren and Force India won't have all the freedom to pass at will as they did in Bahrain it will be harder and hopefully it will bunch the pack up towards the bottom end of the top ten.
Lurking just on the other side of that top ten will be Toro Rosso - and points may be back on the cards for Vergne and his frightening team-mate, morning briefings must be terrifying in that garage. Moving on to Sauber and I still see points being dependant on attrition and luck for Sutil and Gutierrez - the car isn't capable of keeping up with the bulk of the grid, which ever way up it happens to be this time. Sauber however are no longer alone - Lotus have caught up with the Swiss team and have manufactured some reliability along the way. Of course this does mean Maldonado is in range of other cars now... and we saw how that worked out last time....
At the back of the grid is doesn't appear that either team has a consistent advantage over the other - mere luck and attrition elsewhere decides how well their afternoon plays out. Neither Marussia or Caterham can compete with the other teams - even Lotus now have fixed their car and taken off ahead of them - I'd imagine they'd have to wait for Haas racing to arrive to give them someone to race against.
One the whole the Chinese GP isn't a key point on the calendar that jumps out as being particularly interesting or entertaining - much in the same way as the Malaysian GP doesn't. That race is the closest comparator as how we expect this weekend to play out, and just like that race in Sepang there will be many reams of complaints and scorn over how uneventful the action is... people are fickle like that even after the show Bahrain put on...
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