Season's status early on and other items....

Wednesday 4th April 2012
MInd The Gap...? - PlanetF1.com

Feeling a bit short of F1 action? It's not surprising if you are - after two sensational grands prix in the space of eight days, a three-week gap to the Chinese GP in Shanghai seems like an eternity.

What makes the wait even worse is that we've yet to have a proper grand prix where we can see the true pace of the cars on a dry circuit and establish F1's pecking order. Lotus are busy telling anyone who'll care to listen that they're No.3 ahead of Ferrari and Mercedes.

Mercedes are probably No.2 in qualifying and then No.4-8 in the race. There's no question that McLaren are No.1 and Red Bull No.2 and that a Ferrari in the hands of Fernando Alonso is No.3 ish and in the hands of Felipe Massa looking nervously in the mirrors for an approaching Caterham

Providing it's dry at the Shang (and that hasn't always been the case) we'll get a more accurate reflection of the absolute pace of the 2012 cars and see if Lotus can actually live up to their own publicity. After that it's on to Bahrain a week later. Or not on to Bahrain depending on the political temperature in the kingdom over the coming weeks.

It's been suggested in the motorsport press that Bahrain is a take it or leave it race. The teams have got to come back to Europe after Shanghai and they can make a decision in China whether to come back via the Middle East or go the shorter way home. But with unrest flaring up last weekend and the pressure only likely to increase as the race date approaches - with protesters taking the opportunity to get maximum exposure while they can - there is a strong possibility that it could be cancelled again.

That would give us a grand prix calendar that looked like it was devised by a chicken taking numbered balls out of a sack. We already had this scheme of things: Australian GP + 7 days to the Malaysian GP + 21 days to the Chinese GP + 7days to the Bahrain GP + 21 days to the Spanish GP. If we have Bahrain taken out of the calendar that's a whole lunar month between the Chinese and Spanish grands prix.

Surely someone with anything more than a peanut-sized cerebellum would have looked at that calendar and thought 'maybe let's not leave too big a gap after Bahrain in case it doesn't happen'. Even if it does, there's a mad frenetic rush of two grands prix on back-to-back weekends followed by three weeks of wondering how Felipe is sleeping. (Though he has got a pretty good record around Sakhir) And as my colleague Andrew Davies commented last week, it would be better for Romain Grosjean to skip the Bahrain Grand Prix entirely - all that expanse of sand is going to leave him extremely conflicted as to where he leaves the car on Lap 3.

Twenty-eight days is an enormous time for Sky's dedicated F1 channel to fill with the season only three races old and no testing. It's also not great for casual viewership of the sport which started off with two fantastic advertisements in Melbourne and Sepang. Television people will always tell you that if you mess around with a programme's timeslot it's like a slow death. F1 not only suffers from inconsistent time slots that are an inherent part of the sport it seems adept at shooting itself in the foot by spacing itself out at random.

Only one person seems to be more stupid than the halfwit who devised the 2012 calendar and that would appear to be Dr Helmut Marko. If reports are correct (see separate news feature) that he sent someone from Red Bull management to speak to the Marussia and HRT teams about holding up the faster cars then he should be asked to walk round the paddock from now on wearing a large hat that says "I Am An Arse". When they launched the Red Bull team Christian Horner promised that Red Bull were "going to put the fun back into F1". Throwing your weight around the paddock isn't that much fun, but then again we can't quite believe that Horner would sanction that kind of thing.

The reason that Marussia and HRT are six seconds behind the front runners is that they signed up for an F1 that was going to be limited by a Resource Restriction Agreement and where large teams, like Red Bull, wouldn't be able to spend their way clear. Red Bull have dispensed with the RRA and presumably are spending what they like. So it's a total disgrace that people like Marko should be telling the little teams to get out of their way when they are the ones who haven't stuck to the deal and should be feeling the shame.

Dave Jorgensen

 

Clever in some parts. Makes a good in-direct argument for testing. Its something the teams want and something the fans can follow. Also provides visibility for the sponsors.