You can overtake at Monaco after all

Phil: Well, Monaco was certainly a unique venue for our 'live blog' experience. Apologies to anyone out there in the blogosphere who wasn't there, you missed some great banter, and I still maintain that Button should have braked really hard to get that thing out his sidepod, cartoon-style, before it cooked his engine. My esteemed colleague took the role of Murray Walker in our panto, and I was James Hunt. That's not rhyming slang, by the way.

Anyway, congratulations once again to Mark Webber for what but for his performance last week in Barcelona would have been the drive of his career: to pull out a lead, only to see it evaporate when the safety car came out, not once but four times, was the drive of a champion. He has seemed utterly invincible for two weeks and his confidence must be sky-high going to Turkey. Vettel has some thinking to do, but Red Bull are edging ahead at the moment. And I agree with my co-blogger that one of Webber, Vettel, Alonso and Button - the four men who have won races so far this year - will be champion.

Alonso proved in more ways than one that you can overtake at Monaco after all (even if it is a bit like the Hungaroring with houses). He scythed his way through the Virgins and Lotuses early on, but it's Schumacher's last-corner overtaking move that everyone is talking about. At last, the Schumacher of old is back, courting controversy as ever. Whether it was legal or illegal, it was certainly an audacious move, and one which really only Schumacher would ever have done. Something that appeals to me about F1 is the history, and there was so many historical ironies here - Schumacher and Ferrari, Schumacher and Alonso, at the same corner as in 2006 when he parked his Ferrari in quali and buggered up Alonso's flying lap, and most of all, a little wry smile that it was Damon Hill as race steward who had the pleasure of reducing his old rival to twelfth place, with a hint of retribution for the 1994 world championship. As for the rules, I haven't a clue, although a learned friend of ours who has been known to read this blog (eh? what?) thinks Schumacher is clearly right. I think the rules are likely to be self-contradictory, and weren't tidied up properly when the new rule about safety cars was brought in at the beginning of this season. As Eddie Jordan pointed out, and it's not often that he's right, the fact that it took Damon several hours to reach a decision indicates he wasn't sure either. The latest as of lunchtime today is that Ross Brawn is still sure he's right and Mercedes intend to appeal. Having said that, how many times do Formula 1 teams announce they're appealing a steward's decision, and then quietly forget about it?

It's well past my bedtime, so I ought to wrap up and nominate my skiver of the day, which my co-blogger has already alluded to. There are several candidates this weekend. My first thought was the nameless bloke at McLaren who left the wotsit in Jenson's car which made his engine brew up after three laps. My second was double world champion Fernando Alonso, who was clearly having forty winks on the way into the Rascasse on the last lap, thinking it was all over, when an elderly German snuck past him. However, I am going to nominate Eddie Jordan, who is fast becoming favourite for skiver of the year, for failing to take a dive into the BBC micro-pool, in the Red Bull post-race fashion, in aid of Children in Need. To be fair, it was a very small pool, and he'd probably have banged his not inconsiderable ego on the bottom, which wouldn't have been a pretty sight at all.