+ F1 At Its Best

Last weekend’s Bahrain F1 race was, well, certainly different. Unlike the Australian and Malaysian Grand Prix, where Narain Karthikeyan got quite a bit of screen time on the live relay, this time round, he went out pretty early with a car failure. And that was some prime interest taken out of watching (not that he had a chance to win, but monitoring his race and the position will certainly hold interest through the first season at least). And then, the second point interest of dropped off – Michael Schumacher going out along with the ‘new’ Ferrari for the season. That meant, no more praying Mikey shouldn’t get up on the podium.

The automatic point of interest left in the race should have been how Raikkonen would fare. It did always look like he would get in the points, and it was great to see him on the podium after a horrendous 2004 season when nothing seemed to go right with the McLaren; Kimi didn’t even manage to finish half the races!

However, after a point, Kimi settled down in third position and it was plain that he wasn’t going to move up... or, equally importantly, down. By then, I am sure not many people were interested in anything other than the other McLaren and Pedro de la Rosa’s frenetic on-track activity. This guy was racing after more than two years, but it certainly didn’t look it. And it certainly didn’t look like an accident that he qualified ahead of Kimi. His relentlessness was amazing but more than that was the way in which he managed to make it work. First, he was on the back of Jensen Button, and maintaining his half-second lag through almost 10 laps. Button was having to go easy on his brakes, and it wasn’t long before de la Rosa, who had been trying it for a couple of laps, managed the necessary burst across the long straight and squeezed ahead on the turn.

By now, it wasn’t race leader Alonso anymore who was setting the fastest lap; it was de la Rosa, clipping up to a second off the fastest lap. The next intended victim was Barrichello, and it took the best driving from him to keep the rampaging McLaren off. However, it couldn’t be for long. This was de la Rosa’s day, and his overtaking of Barrichello was quite spectacular, squeezing ahead on the inside on the turn.

If it seemed like this was an act of desperation and couldn’t last, the next lap settled everything. De la Rosa wasn’t going to overtake anyone else, but he wasn’t going to be overtaken either – Barrichello was more than a couple of seconds behind. And in the next – and last – three laps to the finish, de la Rosa managed to surge more than 10 seconds ahead of the driver behind him, with Barrichello having dropped far back with a car that needed to be herded to the finish line. Another few laps, and would he have challenged Ralf Schumacher?
And to think de la Rosa was the stand-in for Montoya!

I really haven’t seen anything more exciting on F1 in the last three years than the last third of the 2005 Bahrain Grand Prix.