At some point in the last week, I'm sure Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda and others are in a meeting, discussing "how the hell do we keep these guys from crashing the fuck into each other?", and Lauda says "Hang on a sec, I got an idea", and pulls out his phone and presses a strange number of buttons. "Yeah, God? It's me. You owe me one. No, I don't want ( Read more... )

I was out of town and missed the race when it happened, and got it on the Tivo a couple days late. Lots of stuff to unpack here. First, the Mercedes guys really need to figure out how to stop crashing into each other. Second: Button, Grosjean, and Pascal Wehrlein(?!). Third: this is three races out of the last four where Kvyat's wheels have ( Read more... )

I kinda flaked on these for the last couple months. It just hasn't seemed important. I've been a little bummed out, and I got sucked back into Warcraft again, so I've had plenty of other things to eat my time. But these are important to me, because they give me a glimpse into my thinking at this particular point in the season. So, I'm going to pick ( Read more... )

This had all the makings of an interesting race, but by the third turn of the first lap, it was a completely different interesting race. The processional nature of F1 is due to qualifying doing a pretty good job of putting the fast guys at the front and the slow guys at the back. ...unless it rains. Rain fucks up everything. But this race had ( Read more... )

This was a great race, and it's becoming apparent that the field has compressed quite a bit, although Mercedes are still half a second faster than anybody else. There were stories all up and down the grid, and even though it was unusually high-attrition for Bahrain, there were some surprises not accounted for by that alone, like ( Read more... )

The first race of the year is always a both a reliability crapshoot and a demolition derby, and I've said before that you can't really draw any conclusions from it. I was quite surprised that the NBCSN announcing team was uniformly ready to coronate Lewis Hamilton as this year's champion, before the racing even started. I don't think it's possible ( Read more... )

...but I think that, if you fall for the "Mark Zukerberg is giving away a squillion dollars to anyone who reposts this", you probably shouldn't have a concealed weapon.

On paper, there were two surprises in this race: Valteri's unsafe release and Maldonado crashing out and it was somebody else's fault this time. Those were the only guy in the top 10 that didn't finish in the points, and the only retirement, respectively. But the otherwise neat follow-the-leader-ness of the race was spoiled by Vettel, driving from ( Read more... )

The interesting thing about this race was how relatively uninteresting it was. Usually, Brazil has rain that fucks up everything. In this race, the first six spots sorted themselves out by the third corner and pretty much stayed that way after that, even through all of the pit rotations. Although there was some diceyness further back in the field ( ( Read more... )

I spent most of this race listening to it while I was making pasta in the kitchen, but it sounded like a great time for everybody except Ferrari. And the podium ceremony was unbelievable ( Read more... )