Fernando Alonso
With the 1st race of the season over and victory clinched by Ferrari due to the demise of Sebastian Vettel. We had some action further down the grid; however, the racing was very processional and not what we were promised as the best season for decades.
The cars still seem as though they can’t over take, a good example of this was the battle for 4th with Lewis Hamilton trailing the Mercedes of Nico Rosberg throughout the 1st stint and only managing to vault him on the 1st tyre stop. The F vent in the McLaren seems to do the job of giving a speed advantage on the straights but once in the turbulent air of the car in front there is pretty much nothing they can do to overtake short of the car in front making a mistake.
This problem was also apparent with the Ferrari’s as the engineers on the pit wall were concerned once in the turbulent dirty air of Vettel.
Vettel had his own problems 16 laps from the end of the race, with a faulty spark plug effectively ruining his chance of a race win & podium. The young German looks in good shape to fight for the title in 2010, however, RBR need to take a strong look at their reliability, a major factor that took Vettel out of contention for 2009 title.
Schumacher had a lacklustre return to F1 finishing behind team-mate Nico Rosberg and unable to make much progress up the field.
One team that impressed, albeit the slowest on the grid was Lotus Racing. With virgin looking as though they had the jump on them in terms of race pace, Lotus actually managed to achieve their goal of reaching the chequered flag & watching fellow new boys Virgin & Hispania fall off one by one. Mike Gascoyne can feel proud of the teams achievements in their debut, giving them clear reliability advantage bearing in mind they only had 6 months to design and build a new car from a blank canvas. This positions them well to learn from the 2010 season and come into the 2011 season much stronger.
