scarface_au

We'll see.

Oh boy, if Webber wins you can expect this to be quoted followed by witticisms and dancing bananas. He's got as good a chance as anyone. Have you forgotten one of his wins last year was in the wet?

Watching the race again now, was at the track now I'm watching the broadcast. Just saw my favourite moment of the race - Lucas di Grassi in a Virgin carving up Der Weltmeister, in front of a banner proclaiming his imminent 8th title ...

Button was lucky, I was surprised he went so well on the slicks. I've seen so many bugger up that call, and with more rain in the area it could have seriously bitten him on the arse. Nonetheless I would have thought as soon as someone sets a purple sector on slicks, you should call in both drivers, even queue them if necessary. Tyre stops are so quick now Webber might have been better off following Vettel into the lane. Better still would have been pitting a lap before ...

Yeah all good now, mum had severe bruising and dad had a cracked vertebra, but both are fully healed now. It's interesting though, losing that car put me on the road that lead me to the GT-R ... if I hadn't had that accident I might still be driving the Suzuki Swift ...

Probably a bit of both ... it just pisses me off that I've already had one car wrecked by a bloke who ran out of talent, and I'm worried one day I'll lose more than a car. You might not think a bike would hurt a car all that much but both my parents were injured in the crash. And the cops always seem to be picking on imports from what I've heard ... I suppose it's harder to defect a bike, since they're so fast in stock form. Plus the bastards are harder to catch when they run.

Where were you? I saw more overtaking than that at my corner alone, including Webber passing Hamilton around the outside.

Know what I've noticed? No one's bitching about it being a boring race. Perhaps because it wasn't ... guess all the doomsayers are keeping their heads down.

Was that the Kangaroo Ground-Warrandyte road? I nearly killed someone on that road once. He dropped it right in front of me coming the other way and I hit him head-on. Don't think he was speeding but it just goes to show how dangerous they are even when you ride legally. Some motorcyclists are simply suicidal. I'm not worried about them, if they want to kill themselves that's their problem, but I worry about the accidents they can cause for other people.

I agree. He has a better chance than everyone except Vettel. If Webber doesn't make any mistakes and Vettel does Webber can come home with the win. If he does I will run all the way from Turn 3 to the podium, possibly waving my Webber shirt.

Haven't seen anything that mentioned how fast he was going or anything like that, do you know something we don't?

Don't know how that ended up on there three times, sorry guys.

SKY32 at my servo in Donvale tonight. Nice to see a girl driving a proper car.

SKY32 at my servo in Donvale tonight. Nice to see a girl driving a proper car.

SKY32 at my servo in Donvale tonight. Nice to see a girl driving a proper car.

SKY32 at my servo in Donvale tonight. Nice to see a girl driving a proper car.

GTST-32 on plymouth road around 1:30

Just about anything is better than the short-cut idea. Honestly you wonder what the guy puts in his brownies sometimes. Like the idea of having medals instead of points ... My point is by simplifying the engineering you can make the racing better and cheaper. The trick is to do it in such a way as to keep F1 at the pinnacle of motorsport ... you can't have F1 cars being outpaced by Indycars or something.

You better not ever get busted speeding then because even a small fine would be that much. If you can't afford that much for a track day I'm wondering if you're driving the right car ... performance cars cost money, pure and simple. A lot of people would spend $125 a week in fuel alone, just in normal driving. If you can't afford to put $30-$40 a week aside to use the car the way it's meant to be used, maybe you need to sell up and buy something more within your budget. Otherwise what's the point? You don't need 220 kW to do 110 km/h, and in city traffic all it's going to do is waste fuel. I appreciate that you love cars but you need to appreciate your life circumstances. I've held off buying my dream car until now because I couldn't afford it. I really don't understand the point of a powerful car unless you're going to drive fast, and the only place to do that is the track.

They have plenty of traction to cope with the power, and anyway, even if they didn't, having to battle wheel-spin and oversteer is going to lead to more passing.

Dear God, no. What is this, Mario Kart? Collect enough coins and you get a turbo boost? Why not design the cars so that they can pass each other the old-fashioned way, you know, by out-ballsing each other? Two problems. One, the brakes are so good they're only on them for a couple of seconds, even for the biggest stops, which doesn't allow for out-braking. The difference between braking too early and overshooting the corner is only a couple of tenths. So we need to downgrade the brakes. Don't whinge about it being a safety issue, the cars and tracks are safe enough that reducing braking performance by 25% or so won't significantly increase the danger. The other problem is the aero. As a previous poster stated, they can't draft anymore and most of this is because of the complex aero. The FIA is trying to modify the cars to overcome this but it hasn't worked. I can think of a few things that might help: Ban diffusers. They seem to cause a lot of the turbulence. Reduce the HEIGHT (i.e. thickness) of the wings. To see what I mean look at the rear wings in Monza-spec. You can't read the sponsor's logos from front on because the wing elements are much flatter relative to the ground. Look at re-introducing ground-effect as a way of maintaining corner speed, although this may not help Bring back the POWER! Reduced straight-line speed means reduced drag, which means less drafting. Get the cars back to 900 bhp or so. Anyway, that's my two (billion) cents. For me the golden era of F1 was the 80s, safety issues aside there was some great racing. Get the cars back to near that spec, while maintaining safety, and the racing will improve.

Getting a driver's licence in Australia is so pathetically easy ... there's nothing in the driver's test that examines your ability to control a car. You might get the brake pedal and the accelerator confused on a regular basis, but so long as you indicate in the right places you're fine. What we should do is get rid of the minimum hours requirement for learners (about 120 in Victoria I think) and replace it with a couple of sessions of driver training. A few hours on a skid pan, learning how to control a slide, how to stop quickly without losing it, stuff like that. It would teach learners a lot more than dozens of hours driving in traffic. At the very least, the government should introduce subsidies for people who want to learn to control their cars better. It would save a lot of lives.

Silver GTS-T on Blackburn rd and Maroondah hwy at 10:20 pm tonight. Looked really nice.

Partly laws against stuff like burnouts is to stop tools who don't know what they're doing from hurting themselves and others. Go to failblog.org and check out "Burnout Fail" to see what I mean. If you can't be bothered, basically an idiot in a beemer does a burnout with the door open ... and gets thrown out and nearly runs himself over. Burnouts aren't dangerous if you know what you're doing ... but there's no way for the police to know who knows what they're doing, so they have to make it illegal for everyone. The other thing is that stuff like burnouts is best done in an environment where those present appreciate such things. If I'm going to a drag race or something I expect clouds of smoke and bellowing engines. If I'm having dinner down the street ... not so much. As the previous poster put it, burnouts and dinner don't go well together. It's stuff like this that gives us a bad rep, and it's a lot to do with why police harass import drivers. If it wasn't for idiots like this we could enjoy our cars (and our meals) in peace. Come on guys, keep it safe on the street, and save fanging around for the track. It's what they're there for.

Let's not forget that this is only the first race, and Bahrain is not typical of the tracks they will be racing on most of the year. We'll see what happens after a few more races, then we'll be able to draw some better conclusions. I agree with what most people have said, not the most thrilling race ever. Turning F1 into an economy run ... I'm not sure. But it may be better on the Euro tracks. At least the top few teams are relatively even. Yes it was a Ferrari 1-2, but Vettel probably would have won it but for his mechanical, and McLaren aren't that far off. Mercedes are up there too, although "old-man-Schumacher" performed as I expected him to, average but not great. Come Australia I think you will see a much stronger performance from Webber, he had a dud run in qualifying and that buggered up his race. Not saying it wasn't his fault but I don't think his result was representative of his potential. The new teams ... all I can say is that they didn't seem to get in the way too much. I didn't think it was possible for an F1 car to be as slow as the HRT cars are. I think it's likely that the new teams will get testing dispensation (extra days) later in the year. I have to say though, it's really nice to see the Lotus-Cosworth combination together again. The car looks good too. Don't despair guys! It's only one race, let's hope things pick up in Australia.