After a winter of heightened expectations the Formula 1 season opened on Sunday with the Bahrain Grand Prix with the promise of exciting racing and a close battle between the top four teams.
However on the basis of the race these expectations may need to modified for the future as the race failed to live up to expectations and disappointed many fans with poor racing and a lack of overtaking. With refuelling banned the hope was that there would a variance in race strategy but as the race unfolded it became clear that the Bridgestone tyres were more than comfortable running long distances in the desert heat and all drivers only had to make a single scheduled pitstop. The action on track was poor with cars unable to make overtaking moves on one another even if they had a faster car as shown with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Hamilton got bottled behind the Mercedes driver and had to wait for his pitstop before being able to clear the German and when in clear air the 2008 world champion was able to comfortably pull away.
Michael Schumacher made his views perfectly to the BBC clear after the Grand Prix saying, “Overtaking is basically impossible, other than if someone makes a mistake.” The seven times world champion is one of the few drivers whose career is long enough to have spanned to the previous non-refuelling era of Formula 1 and he was clearly unimpressed with the results of the changes as he returns to the sport.
The main crux of the issue is that the tyres are durable enough to last long distances during the race so there was no issue with excessive wear during the race, prior to the start it was speculated that Red Bull would be one of the teams that would have issues with tyre wear but Sebastian Vettel was able to lap comfortably at the head of the pack and keep the Ferrari’s at bay until he lost engine power in a failure attributed to a spark plug issue. Last season’s title runner-up was highly impressive after clinching pole position and leading for the majority of the race until having his mechanical trouble.
This let Fernando Alonso through to romp home to victory ahead of his teammate Felipe Massa in Ferrari’s best start to a season since 2004. The Spaniard, making his Ferrari debut, was unable to match Vettel’s pace on the soft compound in the first stint but once the pitstops were made both Ferrari’s showed tremendous pace to close in on the Red Bull. A great battle was looking set to be raged but then Vettel’s engine problems came to the fore making him easy pickings for the Ferrari’s and later Lewis Hamilton down the pit straights due to his reduced top speed.
Alonso made clear his joy after the race. “Jumping onto the top step of the podium was a special feeling and I hope I have matched the expectations of the whole team.” He clearly has a great car this year that will give him the chance to challenge for the world title for the first time since 2007 but he will face stiff competition from the Red Bulls which justified their tag as the fastest car on the grid even if it became clear that it still suffers from durability concerns in light of Vettel’s failure.
Away from the front of the field the new teams offered an interesting subplot with Lotus the only team to get a car to the finish with Heikki Kovalainen’s solid drive. The team can be pleased with a good debut Grand Prix that they will rightly look at as a solid building block for the future. Hispania on the other hand struggled throughout their debut weekend with Karun Chandhok unable to drive the car until qualifying and retiring after an accident on lap 2. His teammate Bruno Senna fared better running until middle distance before retiring and showing a better turn of speed during the race than expected. The team will look to build on their performance for the next Grand Prix but they face a long road to success.
Virgin Racing had a mixed day with Timo Glock racing the Lotus’ well until retiring with the same hydraulic issues that have curtailed running during testing but the experiment of designing their car without the use of traditional wind tunnels and utilising CFD instead seems to have paid off with Glock the fastest of the new team’s drivers in qualifying. Lucas di Grassi struggled on his debut weekend with mechanical issues blighting his running and only managing a few laps in the race.
The weekend can be one that was generally characterised as one that disappointed. The racing was vastly below expectations and Mercedes and McLaren showed that they have a lot of ground to make up if we are to have the top four teams challenging each other. Current world champion Jenson Button also has cause for disappointment as he was unable to match his teammate Hamilton’s pace in qualifying and the race and he will need to perform significantly better in Melbourne or else a shift of momentum within his team will see Hamilton as the clear leader. Even though Hamilton finished on the podium it seems quite clear that he transcended the car throughout and he will feel development of the car needs to be very aggressive or else the pacesetters will get too far ahead for McLaren to launch a serious title challenge.
Vettel can feel aggrieved after comfortably leading the race before finishing in fourth. The young German’s title challenge was wrecked last year by mechanical issues and accidents. He will do what he can to curtail his mistakes but he will expect the same from his team or else it will be impossible to win the title. Mark Webber made a mistake in qualifying that left him from the sharp end of the grid and he paid the penalty throughout the race unable to overtake Button and he finished in eighth.
The next Grand Prix is in two weeks time on the streets of Melbourne’s Albert Park and a circuit which is one of the most punishing of the season, for Formula 1’s sake it will need to also give thrilling racing and make Bahrain just a blip as the sport looks to capitalise on the return of Schumacher and the positive press of the preseason. But with the durability of the tyres and the lack of performance of McLaren and Mercedes it may well become a race between Ferrari and Red Bull for the foreseeable future until Formula 1 returns to Europe and the development race can truly begin.
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