Senna, again

Phil: They let me watch 'Senna', at last. Frankly I'd have to endorse my co-blogger's glowing review. This is one of the best films I've seen in a long time. A cynic would say, being obsessed with F1 like we both are, that I would say that, wouldn't I, but I do think that the narrative is so strong and the archive footage so absolutely superb that even someone with little or no interest in F1 would enjoy it.

Although I knew the central story, of course, Senna's arrival in F1, his rivalry with Prost and finally his death at Imola in 1994, there were plenty of new things to keep me interested. I'd never heard him speak his own language, and I'd never seen Ratzenberger's crash the day before Senna's. While as my co-blogger pointed out, Rubens Barrichello's crash that fateful weekend was spectacularly bad (incidentally, not unlike Allan McNish's crash at Le Mans a few weeks ago), I was particularly shocked by Martin Donnelly's crash at the Spanish grand prix in 1990, which equally I'd never seen before. Donnelly's Lotus seemed to have just disintegrated, leaving him unconscious - dead, for all the film audience knows - and lying in the middle of the track. With the benefit of hindsight we know that Donnelly survived, but 17 years on, as I watched a helicopter take the greatest driver of his generation to the hospital, I felt close to tears.

When I was growing up with F1 in 1980s, I was aware that F1 had a history, and that it had a dark side, with not very many retired F1 drivers. I'd seen footage of the likes of Fangio driving in shirt sleeves with no seatbelt or crash helmet. But there was this conceit, or maybe it was just me, that F1 was so much safer than it had been. Imola shattered all that. Looking back now, and comparing F1 cars and tracks in 1994 to the safety measures that basically saved Sergio Perez's life at Monaco this year, there is no comparison. Cars then seemed to fall apart when they crashed (and often when they didn't crash: 24 finishers out of 24 starters at Valencia last weekend is a record, and a measure of how reliable F1 cars have become).

Anyway, that's quite enough doom and gloom. Let's have some racing. Oh, sorry, it's Valencia, there isn't any. It's Valencia, the weather is fine and Vettel is on pole. Nuff said, I think. An hour and a half of racing at Valencia somehow seemed to take longer than four hours of mainly waiting in the pit lane for it to stop raining at Montreal.

To be fair, this has been a cracking season, and we're always going to get a duff one (at least we were spared Bahrain this year). I say a cracking season, but realistically even Vettel's main rivals admit who is going to be champion this year, as my co-blogger was explaining. With six wins and two second places out of eight races so far this season, Vettel has scored 93% of the possible maximum points. A driver has only ever taken more than 80% of the possible points in a season three times: Schumacher twice in the early 2000s, and Jim Clark in 1963, who, as my dad pointed out, won 7 out of 10 races. In each case, the driver concerned won the title by a country mile. Vettel's lead at slightly under half way through the season is now 77 points over Jenson Button, and as Martin Brundle observed, Vettel could join him in the BBC commentary box for the next three races, and still arrive at Spa at the end of next month leading the championship.

A few weeks ago one of the bookies had him 4-1 on to take the title. That's £1.25 back on a £1 bet. But don't think of it as a bet. Think of it as an investment.