Welcome back to another year of the SofaF1 championship, but before we start a special thanks to Alex for sorting out the superb new hi tech prediction submitter which if you haven’t all seen it already shows your individual scores once the race results have been added in. A great addition for the new season which will provide much more timely information than I have been managing over the last few years!

So how did we all find the first race of the new season? I must say I did enjoy watching qualifying and race after such a seemingly long break.

Plenty of new stuff going on, new drivers, old drivers, new teams, old teams with new colours, in fact the only teams that really look similar to recent years have been Ferrari, McLaren and Williams.

I have heard various moanings already about how boring the race was, I must say though that I didn’t feel like it was too boring when watching, but I can understand what they mean. Essentially all the top ten starters used the soft tyre when qualifying then ran for a bit in the race, switched to the harder compound tyres and then looked after them all the way to the end, giving a much more endurance feel to the race. Even Martin Brundle made several reference to Le Mans similarities during the commentary.

Talking of Martin Brundle, I do like the way he is starting to come up with his own Murrayisms, I should have written it down but (i’m sure I heard this right) he said at one point something like “Three Germans in a line but all in different positions!”

Well, real shame for Vettel, they weren’t dominating, but did seem to have the race sorted. Alonso though showing good pace and claiming to have some more in the bag, seeming to suggest he could have taken Vettel anyway, but judging by the way the car was heating up behind Vettel could he really have passed him? I don’t know but I reckon we are in for a great year finding out.

Bit of a rocky debut for The Hulk, all over the place not long after the start with some wild oversteer but good fun to watch pulling back the places later on. I guess the Mercedes guys will be disappointed with their performance, despite finishing in relatively good positions, they don’t seem to have much for Ferrari really to worry about just yet.

Awesome comeback for Massa too. Really good solid result for him, pretty much held onto Alonso all the way round, it will be interesting to see how close those two are as the season unfolds.

So now we can forget all the winter hype and see how good the cars really are. It looks like Red Bull will be battling the Ferraris, with McLaren and Mercedes hoping to spoil the party, as many people predicted. The race is on…

Round 1 & Championship

Alison 12
guille2306 12
startledbunny 12
Igor 10
Lukeh 10
Nick Ollivere 10
Andy (The Speedgeek) 9
fourstar 9
mr. c. 8
RG 8
dp 7
James 7
Lou 7
Alex 6
Brawn2bwild 6
Steven Roy 6
the blue pariah 6
Bearded Stew 5
Christine 5
GrifF1 5
Pat W 4
Pete 4
Amy 3
Rod 3