SofaF1

Alex has already pointed out the black dots on a white jacket metaphor that Michael has used, but there are also others circulating that concern the incident: Flavio, for instance, said that Ferrari had taken all the other teams for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Willi Weber has later said that having a Spanish steward judge Schumacher’s incident was like asking the wolf how Red Riding Hood was (surely the other way around?). At the end of the day, when we get down to brass tacks, bite the bullet, and kick the bucket, metaphors (and especially the strange ones of fairytales) are the only way we can get close to understanding what happened: because what happened makes no sense at all.

Michael did not have to do it. That, surely, is his greatest defense. But, as I mentioned to Alex over some Salsiccia della griglia on Tuesday night, intent means nothing. We should have the same rule as professional golf, claims Richard Barnes, where regardless of if you have done something on purpose, you get punished. It happens sometimes in F1, but not all the time: if you speed in the pitlane you are punished; if you cross the white line you are punished; if you stall on the grid you are punished. Never does anyone question the intent of these actions. Is this how it should be throughout the sport?

Monaco was a great race in so many ways. I really did want somebody other than Alonso to win it. This was not because I dislike Alonso – far from it – but because I think Alonso’s win here and the DNFs from Kimi and low points from Michael really do let him away at the front. And I want a championship fight come the end of the season.

There was so much going on at Monaco that I felt the result didn’t reflect the race that we had seen, but of course it did. The best races in formula one seem to always express the entire season in a single race. And we had it this weekend. Kimi being fast but unreliable. Micahel’s Ferrari fast but brought down by outside influences. And Alonso just sailing serenely past.

Kimi and Mark deserved more, but again didn’t get it. And Fisi’s overtake manauver was a sight to see. Surely he wasn’t really in control of the car at that time.

When I saw this it made me think of the way that Fisi is normally a driver who seems to be unlucky. I wondered if maybe all drivers have the same amount of luck over the course of a season but some drivers use their luck like a bank and take it when it’s really important (Micahel, Alonso) and other drivers Fisi, Rubens and to an extent Kimi take it as a lottery and allow it to happen to them. This was an amazing bit of good luck for Fisi but is almost completely pointless for him in terms of the championship.

Actually it wasn’t completely pointless was it? Fisi now equals Kimi on championship points.

(Update: fixed picture)

Usually during the course of a Grand Prix there are several comments that cause an emotional outburst from the Sofa. The Monaco Grand Prix was no exception. I have selected the four that caused the most dramatic reactions to share with you.

Two comments had me shouting something like “what are you talking about” at the TV, another almost caused a full scale rant but subsided to a wry smile halfway through and another made me laugh out loud. Try and guess which ones were which! Its not beyond the realms of possibility that I misunderstood the comments, but they certainly caused a reaction!

Commentator A

“This is where Schumacher went straight on yesterday into the barriers on the outside that stopped anyone doing another lap”

What? From the pre race comments I understood that if Schumacher had gone into the barriers it would have looked a bit more real.

…and then a few seconds later…

Commentator A

“It’s a tremendous scrap we’ve got here between the two young pretenders to Schumacher’s crown, Alonso and Raikkonen”

What? I thought Alonso was already defending the crown or did I miss something?

Commentator A

“Lets just listen to this … oh lets not”

and finally

Commentator B

“Jacques Villeneuve under investigation … and not for a baggy race suit either, I don’t think”

Following on from Alex’s article on the vertical MON, MOY, MOT graphic. Whilst watching the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend (from the Sofa of course!!) I was finding myself deeply annoyed by this same graphic. I can appreciate the similarities it has with the old racetrack position board, which would have the car numbers on against the positions, itself not the easiest thing to understand, but on the TV though it is completely pointless!

This might just be me but as I sat there trying to refocus on the vertical bar on the top left of the screen, I felt like I was shifting my attention away from what was happening on the screen, like I was missing out on the race, spending disproportionate time trying to understand what the graphic was saying. Maybe I’m just a grumpy old codger I thought, trying to give the graphic the benefit of the doubt, but then………

Halfway thought the MON MOY MOT graphic, I guess being triggered by the cars crossing the start line, the horizontal graphic pops up at the bottom of the screen, showing the positions, the drivers full surname name in proper text and the timing gaps from the lead car and a lap count for the first position car. Far superior in ease of reading, I felt like I was still looking at the screen, watching what was happening in the race pictures and yet absorbing the on screen data, with the timing gaps, providing you with a good overall view of what is actually happening in the race. One of the advantages in watching F1 from the Sofa in fact!!!!

If there is a good reason for the MON MOY MOT graphic that’s fine, I don’t have to look at it if it interrupts my viewing, but why have both on screen at the same time!!!!

I’d like to suggest the bottom graphic appearing at the start of every lap, or every other lap gives you all you want, in a place where you can read and absorb it without interrupting the race viewing, enhancing the overall experience.

Rant over for the moment!!

I would be disappointed to see Raikonnen leave McLaren but the way things have been going with his car I don’t think I’d blame him for heading for a more solid Renault or Ferrari at this stage, mind you there is a long way to go in this season still and McLaren will be working very hard to get his car to hold together long enough to finish a race.

This season is still shaping up to be a good one though, despite the fact that it looks like Alonso is heading in to the sunset with a massive points haul. His form has been looking good. Not finishing below 2nd place is a cracking way to be going to secure a second championship.

I’m hoping this season will end up a bit like the 3-way fight of 2003, with 3 teams fighting down to the wire. Certainly Renault are well in there with both drivers winning races already this season, Schumacher is always in there, but I think the Ferrari is actually a good car, as we have not only seen Schumacher win a couple of races and score 5th from the a pit lane start at Monaco, but early on in the season we had both Ferrari’s on the front row of the grid. McLaren are still hanging on, Montoya scoring well at Monaco albeit not really hounding Alonso. It’s just frustrating to see Raikkonen sidelined with a melting car when he was and should still have been pushing Alonso hard for the win.

Webber was impressive at Monaco, and again frustrating to see him conked out on the track, unfortunately my number 2 prediction Rosberg also retired with mechanical maladies. (The collision with the wall didn’t help either)

Maybe I should go back to studying the form guide, as my predictions are quite often left dangling in the realms of fantasy.

I love Michael’s quote about what happened in Monaco:

“But I think everybody has black dots on their white jacket. I have been in F1 for 15 or 16 years and I think I can say there are not too many black dots on my jacket. In a way, I can live with it that people argue about these black dots.”

It sounds really nuts. I wonder if it’s idiomatic in German.

The last thing that I’ll say on the matter (for now at least) is this. Most of the people suggesting that it was really weird that Michael turned back to straight in the middle of the of the corner. But surely that move was what people were calling Michael’s genius a few weeks before. That’s what Michael always seems to do – and which none of the other drivers have seemed to have sorted out – he does it to stop his tires from flat spotting.

Out of everyone’s description I thought that Jackie Stewart came closest to the truth. It was an accident that got him there but it was Michael’s mind that left him there because even in that split second he knew he had an advantage.

My favourite reviews of race weekends normally come from the ‘Facts & Stats’ column at Autosport.com (I think Ted is your favourite, Alex?), and this week it ended with two fascinating and funny figures. Firstly:

“There’s no solid evidence suggesting Midland’s Tiago Monteiro is made of Teflon, but he’s developed a remarkable ability to emerge unscathed from on-track incidents, and Sunday was his 24th finish in 26 races, despite having two collisions.”

And secondly:

“With safety car driver Bernd Maylander celebrating his 35th birthday on Monday, he has the not-inconsiderable bragging rights of having led the F1 field for more laps this year in his AMG Mercedes (19 laps) than the McLaren-Mercedes team (15 laps).”

Great stuff.

Should Alonso be on pole? He set his fastest lap on the lap that Michael was stalled on the track. Isn’t that illegal? If there are waved double-yellows you should not be going faster than you have before. We’ve seen this before with Alonso – Brazil a few years ago and the crash that stopped the race allowing Fisi in the Jordan to win. Alonso ignored the waved yellow flags there too.

Also, I think we should not be saying ‘why did he cheat?’, but ‘why don’t more of them cheat?’. If all of the drivers were doing crazy things like this, racing would be much more fun, and it would show how much they cared about winning. It used to be an accepted part of the sport, but has since been purified out.

But did he cheat? Why would a world champion make a mistake on a simple (or at least simplified a few years ago) corner? We’re not even half-way through the season, he’s not that far behind Alonso, and he would have been second or third anyway. Not that serious, really. Neither answer makes any sense. Like Webber said, only Michael knows.

At the end of qualifying yesterday Michael, whether accidentally or on purpose, ended up stopping the other people aiming for pole from being able to complete their hot laps because his car was in the way.

The reaction of many teams and drivers was that Michael had cheated and had deliberately done this to stop anyone else from bettering his time. And last night race control announced that they were stripping him of all of his qualifying times for cheating.

My immediate thought when I saw what had happened was that he’d been very lucky to stall there as it meant nobody would beat him. Which immediately led me to ask the question – “he couldn’t have done this on purpose could he?”

Then the rational part of my brain took over and said the following things in quick succession:

1) Nobody – not even Michael – has completely perfect car control. There would have been a huge risk that he either crashed the car or flat spotted the tire thus compromising his race.

2) The spot is unsighted and he wouldn’t know how close anyone was behind him. If the marshals hadn’t been as quick as they were, or a rookie hadn’t spotted them then there would have been the chance for a massive crash involving his car which would hugely compromise his race.

3) If Alonso had to momentarily lift and was therefore .3 seconds slower than Michael then he wasn’t sufficiently blowing Michael away on that lap to let Michael know for sure it was worth pulling the stunt. What I mean is that if Alonso had been half a second up on him then it would have been obvious that he would have to do something drastic but it wasn’t that “cut and dried”.

So after all of that I decided that it was an accident. An accident that just happened to look odd, and happened to favour Michael. Which effectively demanded that it would be investigated because Michael always seems to be the centre of controversy.

The incident called into my mind the infamous Senna vs. Prost incidents where two years in a row the world championship was decided by one or other of them deliberately driving the other off of the road (eg. Senna won the championship in 1990 because he was ahead in the championship going into the last race. And to guarantee his win he made sure neither he or his only rival could complete the race). Senna when asked if he thought it was sportsmanlike conduct to deliberately crash your car off the road to win said something along the lines that, “the only thing a sportsman should concentrate on is winning – and I wanted to win”.

But people don’t hold up Senna and Prost as cheats and bad sportsmen. They say they were legends of the sport. And they were teammates both times!

So at this point I was pretty sure, as I said, that it couldn’t have been a deliberate ploy. And I kept feeling that until I saw the reactions of the other drivers. Normally if it’s a regular incident that’s a bit iffy then you expect a quote from Jacques Villeneuve. If it’s a bit more iffy then expect David Couthlard and Montoya to weigh in. But this was something else. There were quotes from Kimi and quotes from Mark Webber. It was the Mark Webber comment that turned me around. I know that Mark had a reason to want Schumacher out of the way (as he’ll now be starting from the front row of the grid) and could therefore be seen as biased but he’s normally such a benefit-of-the-doubt kind of a guy that it seems pretty damming. Here’s the best quotes about the incident:

Webber

“I understand the second sector was well down, you could say he was trying very, very hard in the last sector, but it looks like there’s been two moves on the steering wheel from what I’ve heard. Obviously if it is intentional it is childish, isn’t it? It looks a bit tricky to be honest. Senna did some pretty wild things because he believed that was right. But will Michael sleep well tonight? Who knows?

“If it’s deliberate it’s absolutely rubbish, it’s massively below the belt and if that’s the case he should definitely lose all his qualifying.”

Montoya

“Was it really a mistake? I’m not so sure.”

Raikkonen

“I don’t believe that he really had any problems.”

“He should have taken one hand off of the steering wheel and covered the camera with it”.

And of course the most blunt comments from Jaques

Villeneuve

“I hope it was deliberate, because if that was a mistake he should not even have an F1 superlicence, if you can make a mistake like that, you shouldn’t drive a race car. There’s no way you could make a mistake like that. It’s the kind of thing I couldn’t dream of doing myself. I don’t know what goes through your mind when you decide to do that, when you know that the rest of the world can see. I don’t understand it, it’s stupid. He didn’t need to do that, he’s a seven-times world champion, he was on pole position. Why do that? It’s only going to make him look bad.

“This is embarrassing. Embarrassing for a world champion. It would even be embarrassing for [Yuji] Ide”.

Ouch!

So Michael and Ferrari have previous which gives them a worse chance with race control. And to my mind it’s 50:50 as to what exactly happened out there. So all we are left with is the question of what would Race Control do. I was convinced that they would decide that it was better to not brand Michael a cheat and that they would say that it was an accident and that it could stand. And that they would then add that any further attempts to lodge a complaint against Schumacher or briefing against Schumacher to the press would be seen as bringing the sport into disrepute. The sport can not have it’s world champion seen as a cheat.

But in the end they have gone the other way, and this morning I feel that they have made the right decision. Almost whether Michael did it or not. At the end of this season if Michael had won the season there would be a group of people saying that this world championship was tainted and didn’t count. And that would be bad for him (and the sport). This way removes any doubt and makes the championship run clean (although Michael and Ross Brawn might feel that they have been ganged up on and the rest of the teams are cheating I suppose). This decision leaves everyone on an even keel but…

It probably is going to be the deciding factor at the end of the season. Reliability has been really high this season and Alonso is really going to start scampering away at the front if he gets 10 points today and starting from 22 place means there’s a good chance Michael will get none.

So who’ll be on pole, who’ll make the podium? Monaco is at once impossible to call, because of so many unknowns, but at the same time easy to predict, because of the lack of overtaking. Nonetheless, I think Alonso for pole and for the podium:

1. Montoya
2. Raikkonen
3. Alonso

I don’t really know why. The McLaren’s look good, and they’ve both won round Monaco.