Squidoo F1 Videos

I don't know if you've seen Squidoo but it's a great site for creating pages on just about anything and sharing them with a like-minded community. It'll be a great place for F1 fans (in fact, there are already lots of pages about various drivers, events and things).

I've been hoping to bring the best F1 videos from YouTube into one place and Squidoo is a great place to do it so I've made a start here:

http://www.squidoo.com/F1Vids

No doubt Bernie will get upset and close the whole thing down but it'll be a fun project while it lasts.

Why not take a trip over and see if there are any videos you'd like to see on there.

A challenge

Right, let's see just how clever you all are!

I've set a small quiz, consisting of 8 questions going back over the last 30 years of GP racing. Go and see how well you can do. If you're sufficiently proud of your efforts then leave a comment so that we can all marvel!

If you'd like to see more of these quizzes then please let me know.

http://www.massmediadesign.co.uk/quiz.aspx

At the end of the quiz you can post the HTML into your blog or facebook or whatever to share your glory (or shame) with your friends.

Good luck!!

The benefit of hindsight

I'm going to go back in time today and look at an item in history that I don't think has ever really been resolved.

Come with me back to 1990 and imagine a young Jean Alesi - driver of the moment, the man who had impetuously passed Ayrton Senna's McLaren in his little Tyrrell, the man surely destined to be a multiple grand prix and championship winner. The man who had somehow managed to sign himself to both Williams and Ferrari contracts at the same time and who now had to choose which one to go with. A contract hoo-haa erupted, but Ferrari were the eventual winners and young Alesi would be partnering his hero, Alain Prost - the world was at Alesi's feet.

Fast Forward to the end of the 90s and there's Jean once again, 1 grand prix victory under his belt, no championships and a bemused paddock wondering quite what had happened to the man destined to be one of the greats. During the same period, Williams had made world champions out of Mansell, Prost, Hill and Villenueve as well as winning 5 constructors championships.

"Obviously", everyone said, with grave voices, knowing nods and the benefit of hindsight, "Jean made the wrong decision to go with Ferrari and the fiery Sicilian has let his head rule his heart. He should have taken the logical choice and have gone with Williams."

However, I'd like to take a different view. My view is that Jean made the correct decision for the time and I suspect most in his situation would have make the same choice; Jean was just unfortunate that it turned out over time to be the wrong decision.

To understand why I'm putting my head on the block like this, you need to look at the bigger picture.

In 1988, Ferrari had one race win to Williams zero wins and finished second in the championship against Williams 7th.
1989 Ferrari had 3 wins to Williams 2, although Williams took 2nd in the championship and Ferrari were 3rd.
In 1990, Ferrari had 6 (!) wins to Williams 2 and were runners up in the championship whilst Williams were 4th.

If the trend continued, as it looked like it might, then Ferrari were by far the stronger team and had the strength and experience to possibly take Alesi to the title. Williams looked like they were still in their rocky period after a dominating time with Honda. Their relationship with Renault hadn't yet shown its potential.

I think, looking at the stats above, Alesi would have been crazy to go to Williams at that time. Sadly for him, craziness was what we needed at that time but any sane person would have gone to Ferrari, a team that was fighting for the championship, and get the experience to partner and learn from Prost - one of the greatest drivers ever in the sport.

Jean was just unlucky.

Thoughts on Bahrain

Well, I don't like to boast but I should point out that I did predict Massa dominating the Bahrain GP and I was right. So, stick with this blog and you can impress your friends with your foresight. Anyway, well done me and Massa.

I only want to mention one thing about Bahrain GP and for me that was the hint that Honda might actually be making a small step towards becoming vaguely competitive rather than a laughing stock.

It'd be difficult for them to be much worse than they were last year but pre-season testing seemed to suggest that they might actually be. However, come Melbourne it wasn't as bad as was predicted with them lining up 10th and 12th. Malaysia they lined up 11th and 14th with Button setting the 4th fastest lap.

In Bahrain Button and Barrichello managed to qualify 9th and 12th although the race didn't pan out as well as could have been expected. However, are we starting to see the influence of Ross Brawn?

Many times a tech director will change team and talk about their 3 year or 5 year plan and then never actually end up delivering anything, but Brawn is different. He has a devastating track record and despite some of the questionable things that Ferrari have done, you still have to have respect for what he's done over the years. Just having him in your team and knowing that he's got a plan to win the world championship with you would be enough to get you to work just that little bit harder - because you have confidence in what he's doing. That's something that Honda has been lacking since they got rid of Geoff Willis.

So is it just a brief upsurge in their performance or are we starting to see a comeback for Honda? I wouldn't like to say and it's far too early in the season to be confident about such a thing, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter - and if so, I'd be extremely impressed at how quickly Brawn had managed to assert himself.

Time will tell

F1 back on the BBC!

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/65897

I'm not sure if this is good news or not. On the face of it it looks like fantastic news - no more adverts, no more James Allen, more impartial coverage and the return of The Chain theme tune.

If that's the reality then great, but I'm a little concerned that it might not work out that way. They could end up getting an even worse commentator and you might end up having no live qualifying and no build up or review (remember the days when we used to consider ourselves lucky if we got the press conference after the race?).

So, what would I like to see the BBC doing? Well, it's quite simple:

• Ben Edwards and Martin Brundle as the commentators
• Less biased coverage - there are more drivers than Lewis Hamilton
• None of the silly features that we seem to be subjected to
• Yeah, it'd be nice to have The Chain - dummmm dum dum dummm dum dum dum dum dummm dummmmmmmmmmmmm.

I personally don't think that we need an hour of build up to the race. 30 minutes would be enough to run through the latest F1 news, qualifying, outline some of the things that might happen, perhaps with an interview or two and perhaps do a grid walk. But really, I only want to hear from people if they have something interesting to say - I get tired of hearing drivers telling me that they'll drive to the first corner and see what happens. That doesn't tell me anything!

Then after the race - it'd be nice to watch the warm down lap, podium ceremony, press conference and then a brief review of the main events of the race with some interesting insight.

Simple. BBC - make it so!