So a statistician would be intrigued by the results of this weeks poll, I think. Before the race weekend there was a clear bias in favour of Kimi being a car breaker, and although that remains over the race weekend there votes for “Both” started moving the poll in a new direction. All that seemed to have happened over the weekend was a clear case (perhaps the clearest of the season) of Kimi breaking the car. And yet both was the new vote. Odd.

Personally I think that despite this weekend Kimi is generally not at fault for breaking the car. I think that he has a clear disadvantage though. One of the things that James keeps going on about is that Alonso is the more rounded driver and I think this might well be true, James also re-tells (and re-tells and re-tells) the story that when Alonso arrived at McLaren he said that he “didn’t want a rocketship he wanted a car that could be thrashed around”. This is actually the most telling example of Alonso’s “roundedness” if true. And it’s something that Lewis “I slapped the barriers four or five time” Hamilton is also reaping the rewards of. Kimi it wouldn’t seem, would ever ask this of his team, he’d presume that Ferrari would make the car as fast and as reliable as it could be and he would do the rest. Alonso’s genius is perhaps that he knew to ask for this. Kimi’s car is less ready to take the kind of beating that the new generation of drivers are used to giving their cars. When Kimi went to McLaren it was too early for him to dictate terms to them. And after having Michael Ferrari weren’t ready to hear it either. Alonso was able to tell McLaren what he needed because McLaren didn’t know what to do. They knew that Alonso knew how to win more than they did.

So despite me making the poll I think it’s that the car can’t take it and it should be able to is the answer. Who’s fault that is is perhaps the more important question.

We saw when Kimi got his car back into the pits that his pit crew were working great guns on trying to get the car back up and running, and then Luca stopped them but Kimi didn’t get out of the car. Apparently all of the crew knew that there wasn’t time but Kimi had come on to the radio and had shouted “we need to get that thing fixed, NOW”! He apparently never shouts at his crew, and is always calm and collected with them. They were so fearful that they kept working on it. When Luca told the crew to stop work he apparently stayed in the car for another 5 minutes with his helmet on so that he could calm down. I don’t know the facts but my guess is that he knew it was his fault and he was more angry because of this. I can totally buy this argument. I can see Kimi as harsher on himself than his team.

Anyway on to the new poll. This is the change you would make to improve Formula 1.

Options:

Two races, one in qualifying order one in reverse order

No qualifying, race in reverse championship order

No Blue Flags

Longer Races

Classic separation of quali and race, eg. No race fuel.

No overtaking in pit stops

No pit stops

No fuel stops (just tires)

No tire stops (just fuel)

No change