New Season of F1!
By Osaladin 11 Comments
So the new season of F1 kicked off with a pretty exciting race late last night. The race got off to a very bumpy start with Rubens Barrichello from the new Brawn Mercedes team, mucking up his start and causing absolute chaos for everyone behind him on the first corner. A pretty rough clash then ensued in the first corner between before mentioned Barrichello, BMW Sauber’s Nick Heidfeld, Red Bull’s Mark Webber, Force India's Adrian Sutil and McLaren’s Heikki Kovalainen.
Barrichello's teammate Jenson Button enjoyed a very healthy 47.7s lead over the rest of the pack as he raced past the likes of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen, of the Ferrari team. However his lead was short lived as Kazuki Nakajima crashed into a wall, and the safety car took forever to get on, and off the track.
The safety car however made it's second appearance when Sebastian Vettel attempted to overtake Robert Kubica and ended up clipping him, the two looked as if they would regain control, but it wasn't so as Vettel had lost his front wing, and crashed. Kubica also had some bad luck as he crashed as well.
Somehow in all of this commotion, Barrichello, who caused the mess in the beginning of the race, rocketed up to 2nd place to trail just behind his Brawn Mercedes teammate, Jenson Button. As a result, it was an extremely exciting race, and a historical one for that matter. The last time a new F1 team has finished as 1st-2nd, was in 1954 with the Mercedes Benz team.
With the new rules enforced this year, and the extremely exciting KERS system, this season promises to be one to remember. I found it very interesting that the teams where forced to reduce the size of both their front and rear spoilers, specially since it seemed to me throughout the race that there was a lot of back tire slipping due to the smaller rear wing this year.
The Results for the Australia opener was as follows:
| Pos | No | Driver | Team | Laps | Time/Retired | Grid | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 22 | Jenson Button | Brawn-Mercedes | 58 | 1:34:15.784 | 1 | 10 |
| 2 | 23 | Rubens Barrichello | Brawn-Mercedes | 58 | +0.8 secs | 2 | 8 |
| 3 | 1 | Lewis Hamilton | McLaren-Mercedes | 58 | +2.9 secs | 18 | 6 |
| 4 | 10 | Timo Glock | Toyota | 58 | +4.4 secs | 19 | 5 |
| 5 | 7 | Fernando Alonso | Renault | 58 | +4.8 secs | 10 | 4 |
| 6 | 16 | Nico Rosberg | Williams-Toyota | 58 | +5.7 secs | 5 | 3 |
| 7 | 12 | Sebastien Buemi | STR-Ferrari | 58 | +6.0 secs | 13 | 2 |
| 8 | 11 | Sebastien Bourdais | STR-Ferrari | 58 | +6.2 secs | 17 | 1 |
| 9 | 20 | Adrian Sutil | Force India-Mercedes | 58 | +6.3 secs | 16 | |
| 10 | 6 | Nick Heidfeld | BMW Sauber | 58 | +7.0 secs | 9 | |
| 11 | 21 | Giancarlo Fisichella | Force India-Mercedes | 58 | +7.3 secs | 15 | |
| 12 | 9 | Jarno Trulli | Toyota | 58 | +26.6 secs | 20 | |
| 13 | 14 | Mark Webber | RBR-Renault | 57 | +1 Lap | 8 | |
| 14 | 15 | Sebastian Vettel | RBR-Renault | 56 | Accident | 3 | |
| 15 | 5 | Robert Kubica | BMW Sauber | 55 | Accident | 4 | |
| 16 | 4 | Kimi Räikkönen | Ferrari | 55 | Differential | 7 | |
| Ret | 3 | Felipe Massa | Ferrari | 45 | Suspension | 6 | |
| Ret | 8 | Nelsinho Piquet | Renault | 24 | Spin | 14 | |
| Ret | 17 | Kazuki Nakajima | Williams-Toyota | 17 | Accident | 11 | |
| Ret | 2 | Heikki Kovalainen | McLaren-Mercedes | 0 | Accident damage | 12 |