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Fisi 14th whilst Sutil crashes in snooze-fest GP
By Karl King August 25 2008
After a three week break Formula 1 returned with a bang. The bang was the noise my head made on hitting the coffee table after falling asleep in front of my television through sheer boredom. Thank God the Ferrari mechanics were feeling the same way and decided to spice things up a bit with a few...err...'uncoordinated' pit stops.

One of these, of course, involved Force man Adrian Sutil - although it shouldn't have.

Ferrari should have had a good old fashioned man with a good old fashioned lollipop installed in front of Felipe Massa who, on seeing Sutil coming down the pitlane would keep Massa in his box until it became safe to release him.

Instead, their new traffic light system let him go right out into the path of Sutil. Ferrari insist that it is not a fully automated system and that a mechanic can override it to stop it from sending the car out when not appropraite. Just one question, then. Why the hell didn't they override it?!

That's not what annoyed me though. It was Felipe Massa's downright dickish comments in the post race press conference that got me. Here's what he said referring to Sutil: "I think it wasn’t very clever from his side as even if he went out in front of me he needed to let me by. It was a shame to fight with him in the pit lane as we were very close and I needed to back off and I lost a lot of time but fortunately the gap was enough.

"...because I stopped behind him in the pit stop and we leave together. When he was passing me by I was leaving the garage, so we were side-by-side. But I was the leader and he was lapping. It was quite narrow and the wall was getting narrower and narrower, so I didn’t want to take the risk."

This is just utter stupidity though and I wouldn't want it to taint what was otherwise a perfectly executed race by Massa. I'm glad he didn't have a thoroughly deserved race win taken away from him by the stewards (despite the idiotic comments in the press conference!) but I'm not quite sure the punishment he got was appropriate.

For those that don't know, Felipe received a €10,000 fine. This happens to be exactly the same sum that Fernando Alonso was forced to pay out for a delayed entrance into the pitlane which was nowhere near as dangerous.

But that's just water under the bridge and no-one was hurt, so what about the rest of FI's race?

Well, Adrian shouted a bit over the radio about how his team-mate was holding him up as he explains, "it was a shame that I couldn't pass Giancarlo quickly enough to take full advantage of the two stop strategy and lost a little time. Once I passed him it was getting better but it was still difficult to pass more cars."

However that proved to be irrelevant as he later stuffed his VJM01 into the barrier anyway. He said, "under braking I lost the rear and tried to avoid a crash, but the barrier was too close and that was it." Perhaps he was just as bored as the rest of us and fell asleep at the wheel.

Giancarlo pretty much kept his nose out of trouble and managed to finish 14th out of 17 finishers, which he seemed fairly happy about, "it was a difficult race with the very hot conditions, but overall I think it was a good performance. The strategy wasn't bad, but we did expect a safety car after seeing the other support races, but there weren't any incidents so it didn't come. Our pace was good, it wasn't far off the others, and we made a step forward with the gearbox."

Mike Gascoyne applauded the team on the progress they had made and explained the choice of strategy for the race, "Adrian was honest enough to admit he made a mistake, but until that point he was having a very good race. We had put one car on one stop and the other on two to cover all bases in case of a safety car, which we were expecting for this race, and had he finished, Adrian on his two stops would have been able to finish just behind Giancarlo."

Hopefully the 2009-spec cars will make for more exciting racing at the harbourside track next year...

Next it's off for a test in Monza, before flying to Belgium to race at the historic Spa-Francochamps (before flying back to Monza again to race there. Who said Formula 1 isn't 'green'?)

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