On The Podium

Red bulls fighting for 10th and 11th positions. Daniel Ricciardo and Kvyat both faced brakes issues and also got lapped by the race leader! Exhaustion after 56 laps of chasing and fighting, Vettel and Hamilton are seen sitting on the podium and having a chat as Eddie Jordan interviews Nico Rosberg. Pepe Jeans displaying their special edition 'Middle-age leisure swag' line. Not much of a celebration going on in the McLaren garage.. nevertheless, JB and Kevin Magnussen seem optimistic. Drivers standing for the Malaysian anthem. Maurizio Arrivabene, Ferrari team principal, often nicknamed Ironmauri for his emotionless character is seen getting emotional seeing his driver up on the top step of the podium.  A good Sunday for Italy after Vettel's first win for Ferrari followed by Valentino Rossi's win in Qatar for Yamaha after a thrilling battle ...

Formula One fans who have grown with the sport might have reminisced back to those good old days when Michael Schumacher won with Scuderia; the days when the German and Italian anthems were played together. A fairly new Formula One fan must have flashbacked to those very stories told by those thousands of fans who had witnessed the beginning of a new era in Formula One, some say, the greatest era there has been. Well, Malaysia should have given those newbies, myself included, the real taste of what the Scuderia Ferrari team was always meant to be, only lost somewhere in the middle, but has risen from the ashes this season with a driver with who always looked like the one who could come closest to the man those thousands often used to talk about: Sebastian Vettel. Here's the official classification of drivers: 1. First off, always the winners- Sebastian Vettel hinted the entire paddock of Ferrari's strength back in Melbourne and has kept up to the impression he ma...

Here's how the grid will line up for tomorrow's Malaysian GP! After a rain hit qualifying session, Sebastian Vettel will be the first Ferrari driver to start on the front row since Malaysia 2013, and an added bonus is he splits the Mercedes drivers. Life can be cruel in Formula One, at least for Vettel! He fell short of pole by 0.076s! The other big surprise comes from the Red Bull garage; both their drivers occupying row 2 and 3 of the grid. It does make me question, did Red Bull overreact on their retirement from Melbourne? But, ties are definitely breaking between Renault and Red Bull after Cyril Abiteboul and Adrian Newey blame each other of incompetence in public!  On the other hand, there is one other team which is relatively happier with their qualification in P17 and P18 - McLaren Honda. Both their drivers said the car performed much better this Saturday despite their back row start for the 2nd time this season, which makes it a 2/2. And to end this eventful qualif...

Kevin Magnussen's lucky shot unfortunately turned unlucky when his car failed to make it to the grid. Funnily, his drivers' parade car could have covered the race distance and made it to the grid! Quite a chatty press conference apparently! "Let me come and have a look in your garage!" says Vettel. The only Aussie on the grid! Of course, he was hoping for better, but it is a long season. Also, he used up his 2nd engine out of the 4 total allocated for this season. Just a valid meme I saw by geniuses at Looswheelnut. As much as I think Maldonado isn't the best driver out there, I feel it is incorrect to pick on him for every crash. Even for the ones he hasn't caused. He is in Formula one because of the money he has got and also for the fact that he is fast (remember, he is a race winner) Don't hate drivers. Kvyat, Ricciardo and Button! Maybe the t...

It is a new season, a great start for Formula One actually! And hopefully it's a good start for my frequent blogging too. As I promised earlier, I will try to be regular and review the grand prix in a slightly different manner called 'In 5 or more points' No, this isn't invention of the decade or something of that sort, this just helps me save time. So here we go! 1. Yes, you guessed it. The podium finishers are 1. Hamilton 2. Rosberg 3. Vettel  A very pleasing result for any Tifosi, naturally! What a brilliant drive that was from Vettel and Ferrari on his debut! The energy that he brought to the team and his good realtionaship with his teammate were some of the many reasons Ferrari have a reason to be optimistic. They were the best of the rest, however, behind the team those guys in the white overalls race for - Mercedes AMG Petronas. They clearly had the field in their fist, lapping almost half the field that participated. Lewis Hamilton's first stint w...

In India, starsports network has 7 channels and here's the best part: not one of them broadcasted either of the sessions live. As ever, my patience had been tested and so I very hastily bought the most expensive app of my life - the F1 App. £20 was the price, making me wonder if it really was absolutely necessary to buy this stuff. There is always live stream and what not! However, let me just say, it is indeed a brilliant app and fully worth the £20/$26.99 that you would pay to buy it. The whole functionality is commendable. The second the application is live, a live commentary starts and with that, all the data in terms of sectors, speed traps, live positions and tyres. In connection with BBC5, Allan McNish and Tom Clarkson do a brilliant job to get the action missed on TV to your hand-held device.  The privileges after buying the full version don't stop there, now you get to compare your drivers head to head, intercept unbroadcasted radio messages, compare race perfo...

Ernst Hemingway once said, “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”  Bar the commotion about the noise, the evident loss of horsepower, and the aggravating economics of the sport; when the action is needed, Formula One does what it is best at. A fter a season of change, politics, drama, battling and unadulterated racing, F1 returns this March in Melbourne with all tables reset to 0 . The catch of this all being, how much exactly is ‘zero’?  Testing: A blurred view  To say teams have covered up lost ground, we would need results on hand. Yes, that’s why testing took place. And we do have some good stats that prove Williams and Ferrari are a lot closer compared to 2014 (fun fact: Ferrari are 1.5s faster than where they were last season!) Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen’s frequent session topping pretty much proves Ferrari’s quantum leap. But how much were Mercedes sandbagging? Total testi...