F1 2019 is here!!

Justin:

So, I started my first blog of 2019 about a month ago, then paused for thought...and here I am completing it now. A lot has happened! I'll start where I finished, with my initial thoughts...

 

An evening with Ross Brawn OBE

Imagine my surprise about a month (well, 2 months now really) or so ago when my Dad sent me a link to an interesting looking event taking place at Wycombe Swan.

Ross Brawn was being interviewed by Steve Rider at Wycombe Swan for a charity event. Fantastic.

It was a quite fascinating and insightful evening, showing never-before-seen photographs of Brawn's career alongside he and Rider talking about all things motorsport and F1.

A couple of things stood out for me. When he was asked about the future of Silverstone, he was pretty evasive and political. Ok, you could argue as Managing Director of F1 that is his job now! It seemed to me that his mindset on that night was "well, we'll have a British GP but it probably won't be at Silverstone". Brutal. F1 is so complicated. Silverstone is one of the best attended races of the year, but it's comparatively bloody expensive to attend for fans. I mean, last year General Admission tickets for 3 days were around £170. I spent £240 for a bloody amazing grandstand seat at the Canadian GP! Ok, also Silverstone is not government funded like many other races worldwide.

You can see Brawn is very fond of Michael Schumacher for sure. When Steve Rider went digging about Michael being a bit of a git sometimes on the track, particularly against Damon Hill, Brawn sort of said "well, I recall Damon running into him a few times", and never really admitted or answered the original question. A true politician haha.

The Sky Sports vs Terrestrial TV point came up. More or less, what Brawn said here was that Sky was paying 5 times the amount for exclusive live footage (did I dream this number??), and he runs a commercial company. Ouchie.

Sky has been kind enough, with enough pressure from Liberty no doubt, to cut a deal that allows Channel 4 to show highlights for 2019 and the British GP live. But this is a deal that has Sky rules all over it. Never-the-less, Channel 4 do an awesome job (more later on that).

As I say, it was a fascinating evening and Steve Rider is a legend. He did the gig for free of course and jetted in the same day from a family holiday and was leaving early the next day. What a guy.

And of course many thanks to Ross Brawn. I actually didn't realise he started his career at Williams.

Whilst I admit I'm slightly unsure what to make of him, I'm glad he is on the F1 management team on the whole.

My tenth year!

Just realised, this is the 10th year of my F1 blog. It started out as a partnership with the person who I can only name here as my esteemed F1 colleague and best friend. I realise I've gone down to 3 or 4 blogs a year in the last year or so (since my colleague retired from his special event guest blogging duties). When we started it was a blog after every race and then some! A partnership not unlike Frank Williams and Patrick Head, James Hunt and Murray Walker, Damon Hill and Heinz Harald Frentzen...eh.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary, I pledge to blog at least after every race, if not more. I'm going to try and entice my colleague back under some sort of "it's ten years, you must!" emotional blackmail thing.

I just looked back to our blogs in 2010. In November that year, we were both predicting an Alonso title win! How wrong we were.

Funnily enough, our first blog entry was for the Aussie GP in 2010 (the second race that year, but our first blog).

Here's to 10 years!!

Fantasy F1 teams

I submitted my 3 fantasy F1 teams just in the knick of time. I based them on previous teams, for the most part. Though I cannot select Alonso now. That said, I have shown a worrying turn in that I finally selected one of Vettel or Hamilton. Oh well. Let's see. One of my teams has Kimi in it. The name of the team is "Bwoah!". I've also gone for a lot of Haas over the 3 teams. I think they are going to be bloody great this year, best of the rest outside the top 3 and may even pick up some podiums.

*Update - nobody out of 62 team entries picked Bottas as a driver. That's a lot of missed points.

 

Moto GP

Whilst this is nothing other than an F1 blog, I should note that I have an increasing interest in MotoGP (and indeed I love all forms of motorsport - aside from Formula E!), and I thought the first race in Qatar was amazing. I'm a bit worried about Lorenzo though. He's beat up and at the back whilst the others are scoring good points. Whilst I was watching though, I thought wouldn't it be great, if F1 had as close and as crazy racing as MotoGP. At the front. For the win.

Channel 4 coverage is back - love it!

The Channel 4 coverage was so much better than Sky from 2016 - 2018 (yes I admit I paid for one race on Sky and thought the coverage was ok, but a tad dull). It kind of sucked in a way, that C4 inherited a contract where they couldn't compete for live coverage from 2019.

They've had a few rules imposed on them by Sky

I'd imagine 99% of C4 viewers won't respond to Steve Jones saying "Watch the race with us, or alternatively you can watch SkyF1", with an instant subscription to the enemy. It's all good.

Steve, DC, Mark and Ben are joined this year by some brilliant additions to the team. Billy Monger and Stefano Domenicali (who actually doesn't look entirely unlike my blogging colleague) are insightful, knowledgeable and have huge passion for the sport.

Phil

 

 

 

 

Stefano 

 

 

 

 

 

Australian GP review

I'm going to put it out there. I'm not as convinced as others by the victory Bottas achieved here.

Ok, he was 20 seconds down the road at the end. But, Hamilton's car was damaged and he was simply stroking it home. Bottas got a flying start for sure, and was dominant thereafter. But it would have been interesting to see Lewis closer, car undamaged.

Bottas could prove me wrong of course. He needs to do it consistently and batter Lewis in the next few races. Then we have a fun season ahead.

The pace of Ferrari was a complete letdown. They were nowhere, and Vettel was overtaken by Verstappen in a Red Bull Honda. Hopefully Ferrari will come back in the next race. With that, Max and Lewis vs Valterri, we could actually see some fighting for the win. Though I won't hold my breath.

Driver of the weekend has to be Lando Norris. He qualified 8th and looked mighty in the race too. McLaren have a megastar on their hands right there. It will be interesting to see how Sainz reacts to being soundly trounced at round 1 (Ok, his car did blow up early on, but he was nowhere in qualifying).

The 1 point for fastest lap actually added a fun element later on, when Lewis, Valterri and a couple of others went for it with a few laps left. In fact, the two Mercedes boys defied team orders to take it easy.

To round 2!!