[Tournament] Formula One 2009 World Championship

I believe McLaren have already tested with them and are already up to speed with the Brawn cars although a lot of that could be to do with Lewis Hamilton being a much better driver than that idiot Button.

Edit: Yep, Button and Hamilton fastest in practice in China. Formula 1 has to be one of the only sports in the world that Britain really dominates at (Yachting being one of the others) and yet sadly none of the British drivers are particularly likeable. Hamilton would be ok if he smiled once in a while I guess and none of the exceptional engineers get much publicity so they could all be really nice guys.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I watched a bit of it but the safety car was out for most of what I watched and it was pretty dull so I turned it off. It's a bad sign where the FA cup semi-final pre-match coverage is more interesting than an F1 race.

Does anyone else think the cars look stupid with the new, thinner rear spoilers on them? I think it's a shame they keep trying to restrict the speed of the things all the time. They shoudl just allow the teams to put whatever the fuck they want on the cars and see just how fast they can make a car go round a circuit. It could be kept competitive by putting a budget cap on the teams so that everyone had the same amount of money each season, so if you spent a load of cash on the best drivers, you'd have less for the engine and so on. It would make the sport far more competitive and exciting in my opinion and the added risk would perhaps justify the millions of pounds the drivers earn every year in wages and endorcements.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Musharraf

Can anyone tell me what's up with Ferrari. What the heck are they doing. Three points in four races. Second to last place, this is going to be a disaster season, I know it already.

I think it's pretty obvious what happened isn't it? Ross Brawn left.

That Ferrari are doing shit without him and that his own team are winning everything would suggest to me that the man knows what the fuck he's doing. I don't know how many of the old Ferrari staff he took with him either but I know they've gone through a lot of changes and combined with starting the season on the back foot without the diffuser, they're struggling to catch up as a result to some extent of all the staff changes.

I think the one thing this season has proved so far is that the skill of the driver really is second in importance to the engineering. Hamilton is clearly a better driver than Button but can't keep up currently. I'm sure he'll be beating him by the end of the season when the McLaren team sort the car out but it might be too late to win the Championship by then.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Barrichello achieved all that in the same Ferrari as Schumacher was driving though. I'm not claiming that Schumacher wasn't a great driver, clearly he was but he never proved how good he really was by driving a worse car. If he had spent a season driving for one of the lesser teams and still been up the front all the time then it would have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's an amazing driver.

Barrichello has gone from driving a car that's leagues ahead of everyone else's to a car that's a bit better than everyone else's. Also, the new regs have made it harder to drive the things in general and I'm pretty sure the current Brawn cars have less in the way of driving aids than his old rides. Button's a bit more used to driving cars like that perhaps?

Basically, I just don't like Button and refuse to believe he's any good. It's a natural English character trait, disliking smug, rich bastards and hoping they fail spectacularly. People like Hamilton because he's a likeable guy, comes from a pretty normal background and hasn't immediately started swanning around Monte Carlo all year with a supermodel on his arm (Tax haven house in Switzerland notwithstanding). People liked Coulthard because he was a bit shit (And Scottish so when he lost he was Scottish, when he won he was British), liked Eddie Jordan because he's a massive junky, liked Mark Blundel because he was a bit shit and so on. I think if Jensen Button face planted into the pit lane wall at 200mph, most people in the country would cheer.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Monaco's eventful but not because any overtaking ever happens. It's basically all over by the end of qualifying, assuming nobody does anything retarded with the pitstops and there isn't a safety car, which is at least a high possibility given the lack of run-off areas.

That said, I do always enjoy Monaco, mainly because of the possibility of a massive crash (Let's be honest, what else does anyone really watch F1 racing for if not the huge crashes which is precisely why all the additional safety measures make the sport more and more boring each year).

How ya doing, buddy?

The whole has been a joke for a couple of seasons though. Pretty much ever since Ecclestone didn't sack Mosely after he was caught in a Nazi porn dungeon.

I imagine Schumacher will be up to speed pretty quickly, he still works closely with Ferrari now so must still drive the car around. It'll be interesting to see if he can finally prove that it was him, rather than Ross Braun who was responsible for all those victories though. Current season evidence would suggest that the engineers are far more important than the drivers but Schumacher has a chance to prove he really is the amazing driver most people make him out to be.

I'd suggest that F1's existence in it's current form was doomed as soon as Branson got involved. He's not the type to listen to other multi-millionaires and do what they want, I'd be very surprised if he wasn't one of the main instigators of all the rifts.

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