MotoGP Rant part 2

Back on topic, yesterday I was talking about how the stewards are taking some crazy decisions. Well to continue in this vein at the Spanish GP at Barcelona there was an incident in the 125 race, Terol was leading into the final corner and had young French man Zarco just behind, Terol decided to take the slower defensive line into the corner and Zarco cut up the inside, they both ran wide onto the rumble strip on the outside of the corner and Zarco ran him out off the kerb.

By the time Zarco had returned to the pits after getting his maiden win the stewards had decided to give him a 20 second time penalty, thus robbing of the win. While the move from Zarco was hard there was essentially nothing wrong with it. But again it involved a Spaniard who lost out. I would also like to point out that Terol, once the penalty was announced jumped around like he had won in a disgusting show of poor sportsmanship.

Sabaru WRX @ Isle of Man TT

Just found this on Youtube, Title explains it pretty well. Should give all you guys who drive cars and not ride bikes some idea about the TT course, just FYI this section is flat out on a superbike!

MotoGP

So far i've not mentioned the stewards for MotoGP, but these guys have been making some pretty crazy decisions this season.

 

Here we have where the crazy began. As you can see from the clip Dani ran into the back of Marco and crashed breaking his collar bone (again), a few laps later Marco was pulled in far a ride thru penalty under the banner of  "illegal move" I fail to see what was illegal about it. Now comes the conspiracy part! Dorna who owns the commercial rights to the MotoGP world championship is Spanish, so is Dani and it seems like they are trying to protect their own. There are 4 rounds to the championship held in Spain and a lot of the money comes from Spain (Repsol, Telefonica amongst others) this is the last season of the 800 machines and they would like a world champion thank you very much!

Now all this wouldn't look so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this penalty was give on the spur of the moment, and it wasn't the only one...........more about this tomorrow.

Cookstown 100

Judging be the popularity of my TT post thought I would give you a bit of a HD treat today. This is a video taken by one of the competitors at a race in Ireland called the Cookstown 100. The race is again held on the public roads so the track surface if far from perfect.  If you go to youtube to watch it, you can see it in 1080p.

2011 TT

What a great week of races at the TT last week, everyone who races there are proper racers. John McGuiness got his total number of wins up to 17 on the island and Bruce Anstey got his 8th win.

For those of you who haven't seen the TT before check this out! Its a short vid of one of the practice sessions.

 

The prize for funniest press conference of all time goes to John McGuiness in the supersport race 2.

F1 Race Start Canada

While i'm on the subject of the Canadian F1 GP, what was the deal with the start of the race? Starting under the safety car?? was it really that wet? lets look to Silverstone MotoGP, the weather there was just as bad as Canada and the bikes have 2 less wheels yet they managed to start the race without all the fuss.

Everyone seemed to agree that there was no reason for the race to start that way, and for the safety car to stay out so long that people were able to change straight onto the intermediate tyres? They need to take a serious look at the procedures for these conditions, these are supposed to be the best drivers in the world!!

F1 Race Canada

Now for those of you who stayed up the extra couple of hours to watch the Canadian race were in for a treat, lots of overtaking and lots of crashes. Due to the torrential rain the race was stopped and restarted.

I'm not going to provide you with a blow by blow account of the race if you want that there are plenty of sites like crash and autosport, however I will cover a few key moments in the race.

On the 1st corner of the 1st lap we had an incident where Hamilton ran into the side of Webber, in this case Hamilton came charging up the inside of Webber, he gave Hamilton plenty of room on the inside of the corner, much more than a cars width but Hamilton still hit Webber's left rear, this spun Webbers car round through 180 degrees and lost him about 10 positions on the track.

Then there was Di Resta on Heildfeld, Di Resta got a bit ambitious on the brakes into the final chicane and showed his front wing to Heildfeld, who promptly took the line away and broke the front wing of Di Resta's car, There was no obvious damage to Heildfeld's car and the contact didn't cause a spin.

And 3rd on my list is Button running into the side of Alonso at the 1st chicane. Button got a better run out of the hairpin at turn 2 and pulled along side Alonso, due to the nature of the corner Alonso went for the outside of the 1st part of the corner to give him the better line through the 2nd part, there was plenty of room for Button's car but he took the kerb on the inside and slid wide and into Alonso's car, spinning him onto the kerb and beaching the car, out of the race.

Now from those 3 incidents the only one that was punished was Di Resta! How can this be you might say as Di Resta was the only driver not to benefit from the incident. The stewards need to take a close look at what they are doing! if you are going to hand out penalties for " Causing an Avoidable Accident" then you need to punish all that cause avoidable accidents, not just the drivers further down the grid.

Again it seems F1 is all to willing to punish teams at the mid-pack but if you are a front runner then you can pretty much do as you please. Hamilton and Button both deserved to be punished for their driving this weekend but as we all know the stewards and FIA always favor Ferrari and its not Mclaren that get away with everything.