• Overall I’m pleased!
• That Leggard fella is terrible! Who is he anyway? And why is does he insist on cutting Martin Brundle off at any given opportunity?
• The tall lad presenting with Coulthard and Jordan is quite good. Excellent ad-lib abilities.
• Everytime the tall lad says “OK” I stand up and head to the kitchen to boil the kettle because I think an ad break is on the way.
• BBC’s computer game style intro is pants.
• The Chain by Fleetwood Mac brings back absolutely wonderful memories of sitting watching a race with my father many, many years ago. (Monaco ’86 immediately springs to mind and the Parmalat sponsored Brabhams.)
• David Coulthard is wonderfully informative.
• Eddie Jordan is not.
• Stefano Domenicali of Ferrari has a mighty sense of humour. (Claiming they deliberately set fire to Raikkonnen’s KERS system to wake him up!)
• Who the hell is this Leggard fella? He’s still talking and not making much sense?
• There’s some fella called something Leggard who keeps talking over Martin Brundle and he hasn’t a clue what he is on about.
• Lee McKenzie is totally underused, her accent is gorgeous!

And finally, and I never thought I would say this:

• Where is James Allen? Come back! All is forgiven!

I guess it was to be expected but no doubt no one expected the wholesale slaughter that ensued. I’m sticking with my theory that the entire Waterford team were fed an dodgy curry for breakfast. To be honest that is how they looked on the pitch. It was as if they were concentrating on tightening their bowels rather than their defence and always with one eye on the quickest route to the nearest toilet instead of the player marking them.

The Belgian Grand Prix was a whole other story though.

Epic stuff it was. Rain for the last three laps that threw everything asunder. Race leader Raikkonen flung his car into the wall but not until after Hamilton had overtaken him in a rather controversial manoeuvre.

It was titanic. Cars slithering around on a track that suddenly took on the consistency of ice. Both Hamilton and Raikkonen made mistakes and in that fateful move Hamilton cut a corner to gain advantage only to sportingly obey the rules to ensure that Raikkonen was ahead of him once more before they crossed the finishing line.

Then Hamilton overtook Raikkonen, the Finn subsequently crashed into a wall and Hamilton had won.

Or so we thought.

I don’t particularly like Lewis Hamilton. I make no secret of it and before anyone plays a race card, I dislike him because he appears to me like a spoiled brat who has had things all too easy over the years. But I readily admit that he is a talented driver (and I might be just a bit jealous). He wouldn’t be driving a McLaren F1 car otherwise. The point I’m trying to make is that he entered Formula 1 expecting to win the championship from the word go. And he knew this was a possibility because he knew that the first Formula 1 car he would be driving would be a McLaren.

But enough of my dislike of him. I do however think that he was dealt a bad hand today.

That 25 second penalty was utterly ridiculous. It was chaos out there for every single driver for the last three laps and Hamilton kept his head. As soon as he realised that he had gained an advantage he let Raikkonen pass him before ultimately passing Raikkonen on merit alone.

Sporting stuff but not according to the race stewards.

Hamilton did break a rule, and recognised it as soon as it happened and acted upon it. However rules are rules but the conditions were exceptional to say the least and Hamilton wasn’t the only one to fall foul of the conditions. By this evening after the stewards investigations had concluded he was one of only two drivers handed a post-race penalty. The other was Timo Glock driving for Toyota who was deemed to have overtaken another car for position under a waved yellow flag.

So Hamilton was dealt the full blow of a stewards gloved hand on his shoulder and was handed a 25 second penalty which ultimately resulted him placed third in the race and not with the victory that even I couldn’t  deny him.

I can’t help thinking that a 10 place grid penalty for the next race would be a more suitable penalty than the one that was handed down to him today. He did break the rules after all and like I mentioned already rules are rules. But his now aborted win would have been well deserved.

By the end of the race, conditions were utterly alien but it does indeed appear that the great anti-McLaren conspiracy theory has legs and so too is the theory that only red coloured cars can do what they want without having to worry about repercussions.

In any event Massa, the new race winner (in a red coloured car no less) is only two points behind Hamilton with just five races to go. It will keep the excitement up for us spectators. At least so it is assumed. But it will be no more exciting for me to see a Ferrari driver win the drivers championship than it was for me to see Kilkenny win another All Ireland Championship.

I stayed up last weekend to watch the Australian GP live and it was my 13th year hoping that maybe ITV might improve its broadcasting. Overall ITV’s broadcast was pretty excellent. Martin Brundle is an outstanding commentator and the rest of the crew are enjoyable and knowledgable and do add to the presentation. With the exception however of James Allen. He is probably the most annoying sports commentator in the world. How or why they promoted him from a pit lane correspondant to race commentator is beyond me.

Anyway, although I was hoping this year might be different for ITV, it seemed that I was hoping for too much. It seems that for the ITV bosses, the actual racing itself was just an annoyance to them and only served as an interruption to the broadcasting of adverts. A prime case in point is that as soon as a race starts you can be 99.99% certain that ITV will cut to an ad break within the first 5 laps.  Whenever they do cut to an ad break they seem to have the uncanny knack of missing a huge event in the race. I remember a few years ago during a rainy Belgian Grand Prix, they cut to an ad break. I switched over to RTE only so see Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari smash into the back of David Coulthards McLaren. I flicked back to ITV and they were still on an ad break. As soon as they resumed commentary no mention was made of the incident and then as if by magic they made time reverse and the accident ‘Just happened’!  I flicked over to RTE and saw that there was something like 20 laps left in the race, I flicked back to ITV and there were 25! Then ITV went to another ad break and when they came back, there was parity again!

So it’s great that the BBC will be showing uninterrupted races again. I hope they also manage to negotiate with the current presenters too. Except for James Allen of course. As for ITV, they can now go back to forcing relentless ‘reality’ drivel on the mindless masses and continue rigging phone and text competitions.

Sylwia is in great form and seems to be after getting much bigger since Monday! Her mother is convinced that the baby will be a girl. I got a text message from Billy who is one of my best friends during the week to say that his partner gave birth to their second baby over in Germany on Tuesday. They had a boy weighing in at 4kg (8.8lbs) and are calling him Mark. That’s something that they have over us. At least they had a name. We still haven’t a clue what we are going to name ours.

In my last post I mentioned the Ferrari F1 car outside the hotel. When I finally got to look at the pictures this morning I realised that I don’t think it is the 2005 car but the 2006 one. Reason being that it is supposedly Michael Schumachers car and it’s number is 5. If t was the 2005 car the number would be 1 seeing as how he won the championship in 2004. So as promised here are a few pictures.

I have a full gallery available over at this page on my main site.

The irony is that I’m not a Ferrari fan and would actually go so far as to say I despise them. Still and all it was nice to see it up close. No chance of taking it for a spin though as it didn’t have an engine.

I almost forgot! The reason it is parked in the hotel car park is that there is a bit of a shindig on by tyre supplier ‘Modern Tyre Service‘. This pair were here too but I didn’t manage to get any pictures of them

Update – You can see the pictures here

It’s debatable as to when this toy throwing started but I would consider it to be when Fernando Alonso stopped sharing his car setups with him. But, credit where credit is due, he is a supremely capable driver and certainly has incredible talent but it is his attitude that really takes the proverbial. He makes Michael Schumacher look like Mother Teresa!

He threatened to leave England because the papparazi were following him, he told McLaren that he doesn’t want Alonso in the team next year or else he will leave, he complained to his boss because of being unable to use Alonso’s setups. But the one that really got my goat was when he accused Alonso of a dangerous overtaking move in Belgium. Of course if it was Hamilton overtaking Alonso then it would be seen as the overtaking maneuver of the year. As it happens it was probably the overtaking maneuver of the year but he is probably upset that it wasn’t him.

Anyway, what has all this to do with Wiki fiddling? Well, it seems that Lewis Hamilton’s Wikipedia entry was vandalised recently. Pages get vandalised all the time you might think but this time it has been traced to a Mercedes factory, Mercedes being of course the manufacturer of the engine that powers the little jumped up gnomes chariot.

You would imagine that they would be among the last people to vandalise his page but they happen to have a factory in Spain. Which of course is the country where Fernando Alonso is from. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the Mercedes Benz facility that was responsible