My long standing dislike for Ron Denis’ favouritism towards certain drivers, e.g. Kimi Raikonnen and Mika Hakkinen over team-mates David Couthard and now Juan Pablo Montoya has surfaced again. He elected to bring in Kimi before Juan Pablo despite the fact that Juan Pablo was in the lead at the time. This was obviously done to help Raikonnen leap-frog Montoya, as Montoya had to do an extra lap behind the safety car, which indirectly lead to Montoya’s disqualification for leaving the pit lane while the red light was on. All this transpired because of the FIA cracking down and banning of team orders, so things have to be done in a more sneaky way, but to me this was almost as blatant as the Schumacher/Barrichello situation two years ago, which was universally condemned. I also think that team orders would have come into play with Renault drivers Alonso and Fisichella if it wasn’t for a problem with Fisichella’s car, which sidelined him. It didn’t matter as Alonso threw it into the wall on lap 38, damaging his rear suspension. Jenson Button was on for a podium finish if it wasn’t for hitting the ‘wall of champions’ on the exit of the final chicane. Jenson didn’t make any excuses, it was his own fault and admitted that. Eventually Kimi Raikonnen won the race, followed home by both the Ferrari’s of Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello respectively. Sauber’s Felipe Massa put his more experienced team mate Jacques Villeneuve to shame, finishing in a strong fourth place, followed by Williams driver Mark Webber, and the Toyota of Ralf Schumacher. The Red Bull Racing cars of David Couthard and Christian Klein finished in 7th and 8th position respectively, another solid race for the Red Bull team, although they were fortunate to benefit from a bit of luck with lots of cars retiring ahead of them.
Onto something non-sport related; last night I was at the sound desk for a gig that I thought was going to be stupidly loud, which turned out to be reasonable levels. But the bizarre thing about the night was that the second band to play has mislaid their drummer, so they had the sampled drum pattern on CD, so I was effectively the fifth member of the band, cueing the drum track from the CD player. But despite this, everything went pretty well, only one slight timing error from the band. The headline band, who I expected to be stupidly loud, were reasonably quiet on stage, a little louder than ideal, but it didn’t effect the sound too much, I just reinforced the sound through the PA rather than amplifying it further as the levels coming off stage were about right for the venue, and the reinforcement was for the people at the back of the venue. The sound levels couldn’t have been that bad as I didn’t need to wear my earplugs as the crashing cymbals were minimal for the night, which makes a nice change as it’s what makes sound engineering in the Phoenix so hard!