Bye Bye Mark

Mark Webber is done with F1.

Having walked away from Red Bull, he clearly doesn't care who he aggravates on his way out.  This little joy ride cost him ten places at the next Grand Prix:

Webber's so cool, he hails a F1 Ferrari as a taxi.

...not the ride itself, but the manner in which he hailed it.  And that, mostly because of two other reprimands he has already accumulated this year.

Plus there's that whole Malasian podium thing.

Somehow I get the feeling that this year Webber is finally tired of playing the games he's been playing for his F1 career, and he's either consciously or subconsciously getting back at the whole circus by being disrespectful.

I don't think the rest of the circus feels too badly for Mark Webber -- he's been paid very well to drive a car far better than most of the rest of the grid (if not all of the rest of the grid some years) and been granted the privilege to win with that car on occasion.  It is, frankly, a set of problems that most of the rest of the drivers would love to have.

Charmed Life

Red Bull drivers led a charmed life on Sunday.

While no one can dispute that Vettel got his act together when it mattered and managed to be in the right place at the right time, much of his spectacular result can be placed at the feet of profiting from the Safety Car periods that happened when he did. Further, while all the chatter about him passing a car while outside the white lines on lap fourteen, I counted no fewer than four changes of direction while he vigorously defended his position.  Vettel comes away very fortunate that he was permitted to continue without a sterner penalty than just giving back the position.

Webber, on the other hand.  His first collision I can excuse as a racing incident.  The collision with Massa similarly I would be willing to write off as a racing incident.  But my view is he caused Massa to spin -- the long-lens footage is inconclusive, but the in-car camera from Massa's car clearly shows Webber charging back on-track in front of the Ferrari, causing Massa to take abrupt avoiding action.

Massa was right to be incensed that no action was taken.  I wonder how the stewards would have ruled had Massa failed to take avoiding action and clobbered the Red Bull instead?

The comentators gleefully claiming that Webber had "frightened Massa into a spin" didn't help, either.

Frankly when Webber happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often and got clobbered by Grosjean's avoiding action, I thought it was merely karma.

It isn't in Webber's history to drive like this.  I hope this is merely a one-off performance, and not an indication of things to come.

Rubber Side Down, Mark

So as much as Mark Webber's brief flirtation as a test pilot was hugely scary, there are actually some things we can take away from it.



Firstly and most importantly, Webber hopped out of the car right away. Even though the car came down on the roll bar assembly, Webber appeared to be shaken but otherwise unhurt by the accident. This alone is a huge endorsement for the work that the FIA and the teams have been doing to make the cars as safe as possible. Formula One racing will always be a dangerous sport, but the people in charge are trying to avoid it being unnecessarily dangerous. We can only hope that this won't shake his confidence the next time he steps into a car.

But secondly. While the safety car was droning around, Martin Brundle treated us to a lot of blather about how the problem was the huge closing speeds and the increased closing speeds are what makes incidents like that so dangers. He carried on by saying something to the effect that next year's movable wing idea is only going to aggravate the situation and that the people in charge will have to think very hard about this.

The problem with this logic is that it is totally divorced from what Formula One has become today. Today you can have a car that is demonstrably one or two entire seconds per lap faster than the car it is stuck behind. If you combine this with the current fasion of gerbil-maze courses that don't give the cars behind any reasonable chance to close up with the car in front, you are going to be in a situation where the only way a pass is going to get made is if the car behind is much faster than the car in front.

Fiddling with tenths here and there, which is what the movable-wing proposal is doing, isn't going to get it done.

We have seen on occasion brilliant racing this year. The most spectacular so far has to be Montreal, where the tires were so bad that the drivers were skating around on them. Now I'm sure that Bridgestone isn't keen on being the source of so much griping, but it does show that Frank Dernie was on to something last winter.

But the bottom line is that F1 has to look in the mirror and decide what it really wants. Tricky, aero-addicted high-traction cars on meandering road circuits isn't making for a formula that encourages passing. And if F1 really wants passing, something fundamental is going to have to change.

Farewell to Turkey?

It seems disappointing that a circuit which promotes actual racing is now possibly to be dropped by the series.

Where else have we seen this much actual racing -- in the dry no less?

• Hamilton and Vettel off the start, and then back again;
• Button passing Schumacher towards the end of the first lap;
• Vettel having a go at Webber, even if it ended in tears;
• Button and Hamilton having a go at each other;
• Alonso passing Petrov for position.

And that's just the for-points passes.

Button's McLaren may have been up to a second a lap faster than Schumacher's Mercedes, but the point is that he was able to pass instead of being held up.

This circuit shows how a race course should be set up, both to let the cars run and to give them opportunities to pass.

It is too bad that is is out in the middle of nowhere and cannot attract sufficient spectators to make it a viable enterprise. This seems to be putting an end to the event, even though the track itself seems custom-made for actual racing.

Ferrari Prowess

James Allen points out something from the Monaco weekend that I'd missed.

Alonso's feat of dragging his Ferrari around for virtually the entire race on a single set of tires is an amazing accomplishment by itself, especially considering how competitive he was in the early stages.

(Aside: While we watched Alonso make his moves past back marker cars at the tunnel exit, Martin Brundle was complaining that we were being forced to watch actual passes for position instead of watching Mark Webber sail serenely and unchallenged off into the sunset.)

But when you consider that the car Alonso raced didn't exist on Saturday morning, that it had been assembled up from a bare tub and spare parts -- wires and hoses and connectors and everything -- and got a set-up based on Alonso's previous work -- and got its shake down in the pre-race out-lap -- and everything worked for the entire race distance...

Well that's just amazing.