F1 2012: Yas Marina

Surprise!

Vettel thrown out of qualifying

EurosportAsia

11/4/12, 16:18

Stewards stripped the 25-year-old of third place on the grid after post-qualifying checks on Saturday showed there was an insufficient quantity of fuel in the car for sampling purposes.

…

Red Bull’s decision to start from the pitlane – rather than the back of the grid – means it will be able to make some changes to Vettel’s car’s set-up ahead of the race, and the driver himself remained positive.

So, what will this change?  Umm… virtually nothing.

It will be irony or divine justice to see Vettel race from the back, but he’s done that before and as Schumacher (who’s underqualified all season) has shown us what’s likely to happen is he’ll cut through the field until he gets to the Force India cars at least and probably all the way until he starts mixing it up with Lotus (who may have a new primary sponsor next season) and Mercedes.

Then it will will be a matter of how much car he’s used up, pits, and accidents/breakdowns as to whether he  finishes 6th or higher which is all he and Red Bull will need to continue their march of dominance.

Part of that is the track.  What idiot thinks that Monaco with its low speeds and complete lack of passing opportunities is a good model?  The answer to that question is Hermann Tilke who’s designed or re-designed 15 of the 20 current tracks and made them uniformly boring and slow.

Even notorious safety Nazi Jackie Stewart hates him.

But Bernie and Hermann don’t really care about racing per se, it’s all about the bottom line which is not filling infield with ordinary Red Barrel-swilling football hooligan red necks.

I’m fed up with being treated like sheep. What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea – “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” – and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamaris and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they ‘overdid it on the first day.’ and being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentals with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners and then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman Ruins to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney’s Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing ‘Torremolinos, torremolinos’ and complaining about the food – “It’s so greasy here, isn’t it?” – and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres and sending tinted postcards of places they don’t realise they haven’t even visited to “All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an ‘X’. Food very greasy but we’ve found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney’s Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’.”

No sirree.  It’s all about fat greasy .001 percenters taking their clients to an air-conditioned suite where they can watch any kind of satellite TV they want as long as it’s not that god-awful screaming race outside and mix with coked up semi-celebrities and D-Listers who now ply their fading fame as high priced whores while discretely vomiting bulemic Chardonnay and indifferently prepared crudites soaked in curdled sour cream that may once have been placed next to a jar labeled caviar but which was really salmon roe on the peons and serfs below while they scam their next Pozi scheme on a bunch of brown rag heads who’ve accidentally been born with money and try to ignore the stone faced ‘personal security experts’ with automatic weapons who escort them back and forth to the hotel through the rabble so they don’t suffer a puncture on their armored SUV from inconvenient bone fragments or IEDs.

Singing ‘Torremolinos, torremolinos.’

Not Just a Race for the Rich: Welcome to the F1 FanZone

By BRAD SPURGEON, The New York Times

November 3, 2012, 7:00 pm

The two elements of the FanZone that really fired my excitement were the activities themselves and the business model. The business model is, in a word, brilliant.

“A lot of the people in this part of the world cannot afford to buy tickets for the race, especially for a family,” said Boutagy in an interview. (Tickets for good seats can run 400 euros, or more than $500, though some venues, like the Canadian Grand Prix, are cheaper.) “It all started with the fact that people here weren’t really educated in Formula One. Now people know what it is.

“It is really a family oriented event, and it’s all free,” he said of the FanZone. “Any other sport has this: FIFA Fan Fest, NFL, NHL.”

Indeed. For a sport that is often criticized as elite, costly, not for the average family’s enjoyment – and not fan-friendly – the F1 FanZone operates entirely on sponsorship. The gates are open to anyone, and all the attractions are free. Boutagy’s company consists only of four people, and when he runs an event, he hires local staff – more than 30 of them – to run the rides and deal with the public. He makes his money and runs the event entirely with money from Formula One sponsors, such as Pirelli Tires or Vodafone, and with local sponsors.

People are not really educated in Formula One.  There’s so much to learn and it’s all so complicated.

Welcome to the United States.  We’re exceptional.

Interactive Tracks

• Formula One Official Site Yas Marina
• Guardian Interactive Track

Yas Marina

• New York Times History
• Yas Marina
• Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
• Yas Marina Qualifying

Official Sites

• Formula One Official Website
• Speed Racecast

Pretty tables soon.