Has pretty much made himself world champion elect in Formula One. The Spaniard drove a sensible race, not taking any risks, doing just enough to keep his Renault in 2nd position, and eventually two spots ahead of chief rival Kimi Raikkonen. The Finn had multiple obstacles in his way during the race, for the early part of the race, that obstacle was Jacques Villeneuve who jumped the McLaren off the line. Later Raikkonen suffered a rear tyre delamination, which lost the Finn even more time and later had a harmless spin in the closing stages of the race, and with all this happening, the McLaren driver still finished in 4th position just 22.7 seconds behind leader and team mate Juan Pablo Montoya. The Renaults were the big gainers of the day, grabbing a total of 14 points, with Alonso following Montoya home, and Giancarlo Fisichella finishing 15.5 seconds behind the Renault team leader. The disappointment of the day for me was the BAR team, who promised so much in free practice and qualifying, with Jenson Button starting the race in 3rd and Takuma Sato in 4th position, despite early form in the race, the BAR’s fell away as the race went on, with Jenson Button finishing the race in 8th position; over a minute off the pace and Takuma Sato finishing in 14th more than a lap behind. The only other Brit in Formula One finished in 16th position after a collision in the first corner damaged his car, which compromised his race. In other Formula One news, Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo has slated the new tyre and qualifying rules in 2005. Oh what a fucking surprise, I bet if the rules benefited the Ferrari team, he would be praising the rules. It’s the same for every team, if Ferrari can’t work these rules to their advantage, tough, they need to work harder, simple as that, all the other teams have managed to adapt to the new rules. I don’t necessarily agree with the rules and even agree with some of Montezemolo’s points, I think we need to take a step back into the past, when racing was racing, 12 laps, 1 hour qualifying, slick tyres, and allow for tyre changes in the race, I don’t find F1 very exciting to watch anymore, too much emphasis on safety has stifled the sport, much to the detriment of Formula One!
In non sports related stuff, I have joined the last.fm network, formerly Audioscrobbler, which records which tracks I play on my computer and displays them on their site. Although I am having some problems with the Winamp plugin they provide, it tags and records WMA and OGG Vorbis tracks but shows an error with mp3 and mp3PRO tracks, which is very annoying especially as the Windows Media Player plugin works a treat, although WMP doesn’t support OGG Vorbis or mp3PRO formats, so it isn’t my first choice of media player, anyway, you can track my listening habits here; I will be adding a link to it on the sidebar in the near future, probably after my plugin problems are sorted!
