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The race was alright. Don't like the new rules and was strange how the safety car came out so late then stayed way too long.  

I don't like to see such large changes made in a sport. Makes you wonder if button would have won had the rules been the same as last year.

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First two races are not going to count if the diffuser appeal goes through.

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Glad I didn't watch it. Another Vettel clusterfuck that benefited Hamilton, like Japan two years ago.  

Trulli loses podium for safety car infringement

Toyota’s Jarno Trulli has lost his third place in Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix after stewards penalized him for passing under the safety car in the closing laps.

Trulli ran off road near the end of the race, thus losing a place to McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, but then repassed the world champion once he had rejoined the circuit.

The Italian was given a 10-second stop-go penalty as a result, but since the offence occurred within the final five laps that was translated into a 25-second penalty added to his race time. He thus drops to 12th.

"I can't say how disappointed I am to finish third but have the result questioned," he said. "When the safety car came out towards the end of the race Lewis passed me but soon after he suddenly slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. I thought he had a problem so I overtook him as there was nothing else I could do."

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It won't,  by the time they get to Europe everybody will have the better diffusers.

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Also, Vettel got a 10 spot penalty for the Malaysia race due to the Kubica incident + Red Bull gets a $50,000 fine for allowing him to continue driving for so long with a damaged car.

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Huh, as far as I could tell Vettel didn't get black flagged at all.  

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And yet ANOTHER cluster that benifits Hamilton!

Just got this off F1.com:

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The Petronas BMW team is in my hotel.  I see them each morning at breakfast.  They'll likely be in a poor mood tomorrow.  What a shitty deal Kubica
got.

Brawn GP put rocket boosters under the new Formula 1 season with a sensational 1-2 on its debut in Australia.

In his regular post-race verdict, itv.com/f1 columnist James Allen reacts to the team's achievement and analyses the other key points of interest from a gripping season-opener.


Jenson Button dominated the opening weekend of the season and is a strong candidate for world champion this year.

There’s a sentence I wasn’t expecting to write when Honda decided to withdraw from F1 at the end of last year.

But it’s come true and Jenson finds it just as hard to believe as everyone else.

If ever there was an illustration of why you should never give up in life, this is it.

Sheer determination on the part of Ross Brawn and his management group has kept the team alive and now they have a fantastic opportunity to press home their advantage.

That is something Brawn is expert at, as we know from his days at Ferrari.

‘Never give anything away’ was the motto of the core team at the heart of that Ferrari operation and Brawn carries that on today, judging from his uncompromising position in the diffuser debate.

So superior was the Brawn car that Button could afford to stroke it today; the only times he had his collar felt by the opposition were at his second stop and then in the closing stages when he had to take his turn on the softer of the two Bridgestone tyre compounds.

This tyre was a disaster today, the performance going off very quickly on some cars.

It’s the reason Ferrari’s challenge faded and why they put Felipe Massa on a three-stop strategy and it’s the reason why Sebastian Vettel fell into the clutches of Robert Kubica and then caused an avoidable accident, for which he has been penalised 10 grid places at the next race.

The team told Jenson not to push too hard on the soft tyres, to preserve them.

They had had a couple of slow pit stops, the second of which meant that the gap to second-placed Vettel and third-placed Kubica was not as comfortable as it should have been.

He could have gone faster and I wondered at one point whether he had built enough of a gap, because he’d not left himself much of a margin for mistakes.

He had only five seconds over Vettel on lap 45 when the German pitted.

Overshooting the box at his own stop two laps later cost him four seconds, but luckily he had done two quick laps leading up to the stop, so he had a second and a half in hand when he emerged from the pits. He almost threw it away.

Vettel put the softs on at his second stop and to start with was lapping in the 1m29s. But by lap 54, his times had slipped into the 1m 30s and then the 1m31s. Then the collision.

The Brawn managed to hold on to the soft tyres far better, with consistent times in the 1m29s, but the problem then was that Kubica was bearing down on him, albeit with Vettel in between them.

Luckily for Button, Kubica was held up by the Red Bull driver, because he might have challenged him for the win otherwise.

Ferrari fared even worse. Felipe Massa says that he could feel the tyre performance dropping off after only five or six laps.

He suspects that KERS may have had something to do with it, the surge of 80bhp taking the life out of the tyres.

This is a bit of a problem for a team, which has until recently excelled in tyre management.

Kimi Raikkonen’s attempt to reinvent himself didn’t work out too well.

He had a shot at finishing on the podium today because he was in front of Lewis Hamilton before the second stops. Then he hit the wall.

By their own admission, Ferrari also messed up the strategy today, opting to start on the soft tyres and then switching Massa onto a three-stopper.

It was a cursed day and hard to find any positives. Team boss Stefano Domenicali put it strongly: “This was not a start worthy of Ferrari.”

The race was highly eventful, with a lot of good racing and some spectacular action.

There were some signs today of how much the KERS will affect the racing this season, with the KERS cars particularly strong at the start and the restart.

The Albert Park track doesn’t really favour KERS cars too much, but we saw enough today to believe that at tracks like Shanghai and Bahrain with the long straights, that 80bhp burst of power will make a huge difference to the overtaking.

Hamilton had a good day at the office, guiding a poor car through from 18th on the grid to fourth place, which became third when Jarno Trulli was penalised.

A lot of people have wondered how Lewis will fare in a slow car and so far he’s reacted well, keeping his head down and working hard.

To get six points on a day when all his main championship rivals scored nothing is a real bonus – as in football, you give yourself a shot at the title if you can win even when you are not playing well. Today will have felt like a win to McLaren and Hamilton.

Rubens Barrichello had a very eventful day, with a slow getaway, a collision in the first corner and another later on with Raikkonen, two new nose cones – and yet he still managed to come home in second place.

Such is the performance of this astonishing car.