People are making a big deal about Ferrari being so much faster than they were, and while they are, it looked to me like this race really came down to Mercedes making the wrong call on that first pit stop under the safety car and Vettel making the option tires run fast a lot longer than most people thought he could. He was still averaging slower per lap, but not by enough for the Mercs to make up for the extra pit stop that they had to make.
Nah, he actually seemed pretty upbeat, which was surprising given the result. He and Vettel seemed to be chumming it up. Nico kinda seemed like he might pull out a knife and just stab everyone.
Yeah, I think they made the wrong call there too. He also didn't have a new set of mediums for the end of the race. That goes back to them using a set of the options during Q1, which was just perplexing, especially with rain almost a certainty at that point.
Granted Vettel is very good at this track, and it is early, it looks like we might have a battle here. Don't count Kimi out either. If he can manage to qualify well and not get in trouble on lap 1, he will be a force.
And how about them Torro Rosso boys (literally)!
See, Ferrari was fast. Kimi was the proof. He was outpacing the Germans for quite some time.
He was super lucky he got the pace car when he did. Without that I feel he wouldn't have gotten a top 10. I think this season is shaping up to be amazing.
Vettel ran a good race and it's nice to see a two horse race (with one horse) for a change.
Hamilton lost the race when he couldn't clear traffic after the safety car imo, that's when Vettel opened up the 10 second gap which he held to the end. I'm not a big fan of Vettel but he simply out drove the mercs and Ferrari executed perfectly whereas merc kinda crumbled under the pressure.
Impressions from the track. First up the storm in qualifying was awesome, it was kinda funny as while in TV land the wait for Q3 seemed to have annoyed people at the track everyone was absolutely loving the storm. Rain coming in sideways, massive wind, lightning strikes 20 feet from where we were sheltering, it was gates of hell stuff with F1 cars thrown in. Just fantastic.
The crowds are non existent. I'd say there are more people at suzuka at 8:30am on Friday morning than there was at Malaysia for the race. And of those people at the track at least 90% are non locals. It makes it very easy for getting in, out and around but it is a bit odd.
Sepang is a great track for spectating as you can see so much of it but the way they do the ticketing kinda sucks. At the other grand prix's I've been to you could walk most of the track and watch from different places but at Sepang they really restrict you to just your area and even on Friday when all stands are open its really difficult to walk the track. That's a bit shit really. Other surprising thing is food and drinks are much cheaper at Suzuka than Sepang, that kinda surprised me.
I spend a fair amount of time in Thailand atm and while everyone said that KL is very similar to Bangkok I have to say they're wrong, KL is miles better than Bangkok, absolutely no comparison imo. About the only thing Bangkok has over KL is the number of hookers but everything else KL is much better. As long as it stays at Sepang I think this is going to become another regular trip for me.