Mr Mist’s Blog

The story of last week (apart from all the election kerfuffle) was the disappearnace of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean. After some wide-scale searching, items and bodies have now been found, electronic error transmissions have been noted, yet it is possible that we may never know the full story of what happened to this plane.  It is a mystery and a sad loss wrapped up in one. 

Elsewhere in the happenings, we see the 6th win out of 7 races for Jenson Button, taking the Turkish Grand Prix ahead of Webber and Vettel.  This now puts him on 61 points coming into the British GP in two weeks’ time.  Today’s race was essentially lost by Vettel after a slip-up on the opening lap, otherwise it could have been a quite different result.  As it was, Button commanded most of the race, with his team-mate suffering from crashes and eventually retiring.

Piano-playing cat.

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Another Sunday, another win for Jenson Button and the Brawn GP team. This time though Button collects only 5 points for his victory, after the raced was red-flagged after just 1 hour and 7 minutes of racing, having completed only 31 laps. (This being short of the 2/3rds distance required to count as a full race.)

Up until the red-flag there was a pretty exciting race. Whatever it is this season, be it rule changes, team shake-ups or some other element, the result has been some great racing. We actually have overtaking back in F1, with some real battles going on at points. As well as that, the unpredictable rain saw most cars taking at least 3 pit stops for tyres in just those 31 laps, before the real downpour took over.

For the last couple of laps, most of the drivers couldn’t see a thing – this being partly due to rain and partly the late starting time. In any event, the safety car deployment was pretty quickly followed by the red flag, which then saw 40 minutes of waiting time before Button was declared winner. (Even then there remained confusion, as the system initially put Glock in 2nd place, which was revised to 3rd even as he was on his way to the podium.)

In other news, North Korea spectacularly failed to launch a satelitte into space. Oops!

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The newly-founded Brawn GP F1 team – raised from the ashes of Honda – was taken by Button and Barrichello to first and second places in the Melbourne circuit. Button led the race from the off, and drove the new car well and without incident to the finish. He wasn’t severly challenged at any point – given a combination of tactics, car and expert driving – until the last few laps of the race, when Kubica and Vettel were closing fast thanks to good tyre choice on their part. So then – luckily or unluckily depending on your perspective – those two crashed and took each other out, leaving the Brawn pair to drive out the race under the safety car.

So a fairly eventful start to the season really. Hamilton, who started last on the grid, eventually came in 3rd after Trulli was hit with a time penalty for overtaking under the safety car.

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