Were you at the Yarra River Delta track or did you watch it on Kayo?
Bet you’re still wondering what happened. So are most of the drivers and their teams.
It’s simple really. F1 is a reality TV show much like top-rating programs around the world. Shows like the Australian Open, Married At First Sight, NFL in the USA, the UK’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (the Lou Hamilton story) and the Spring Festival Gala in China.
Look, before we get into that, what did we learn from the Yarra River Delta, where former reader Tim Nolan tells me sun goes down later than in Sin City? Mad Max won (again), despite three red flags (first time in F1 history), proving the Red Bulls are unbeatable.
The Hamster and the Pensioner came second and third and everyone else was seconds back. Eight cars decided to stop where they were or go back to the pits for a Peter Stuyvesant and a Coopers sparkling. In the first time in about a zillion years Mercedes led some laps, with both Georgie’s and the Hamster’s performance mainly due to a race suiting their tyres. While the Mercsters aren’t complaining, most of the rest are saying Pirelli’s tyres are, well to put it politely, crap.
Good to see Stefano Domenicali, the current CEO of F1, out talking to Australian journalists.
Not much about weirdo stewards decisions, human rights in Qatar (see our Ellie Dudley’s exclusive on Thursday about the five Australian women are who are suing Qatar Airways over forced internal exams and other invasive medical procedures at gunpoint at the Doha airport two years ago) and Saudi Arabia, but about Drive to Survive, social media, Covid-19 and “how we can use our platform to talk about not only sporting events but also about values that are bigger than Formula One”.
You know when CEOs talk about values publicly “the values that too often stand for nothing but a desire to be au courant or, worse still, politically correct” (thanks to HBR). Of course, that’s a joke cue: How can you tell if a CEO is extroverted? He looks at your shoes when talking to you instead of his own.
What else did we learn? The stewards apply the rules differently to every race. Ferrari and its drivers are still in the hopeless corner. And the Australian Grand Prix Corporation is in the naughty corner after stewards found in serious breach of FIA admitted to “failures that had led to an unacceptable situation that could have had disastrous consequences”.
“A large group of spectators managed to break the security lines and accessed the track while the race was still ongoing. Furthermore, spectators were also able to reach the Haas of Nico Hulkenberg, which was parked at exit of turn two and which still had its light flashing red (ie. the car was in an unsafe condition with possible electrical discharge)” and Pete Gasly should be racing in the Rockynats where he may keep his licence.
Talking of the Rockynats and three days of high-octane automotive awesomeness, you need to be in the city of Rockhampton today for well-stewarded burnouts and drifting with some of the wildest modified cars in the country.
Complete Automotive Caloundra boss Shane Page, the Todd Herring of Pro Class, will become the only person in world history to win the class three times this weekend. Put your money on Stevo Robson and his 1957 Chev, SPOTTO57, to take out the Pro Burnouts Class.
Stevo hasn’t had the best of luck in this comp. “In the first year we broke a steering box and so we had no steering coming off the pad, and in the second year, we had a huge fire which caused damage to all of the rear quarter panels of the car,” Robo told me via psychic press release.
For $3.5m you could do both Robo and Pagey. Yup Gordon Murray has just launched an open-top T. 33 Spider. Only 100 will be built, with mid-mounted, naturally aspirated 4-litre V-12 engines built by Cosworth in the UK. The engine, not Gordon, puts out 455KW horsepower.
I wouldn’t take the McLaren Artura ($460k drive away) to Rocky. The hybrid supercar has had its problems. It was recalled because high-pressure fuel lines could loosen, leak, and ultimately cause a fire.
New McLaren CEO Michael Leiters told Motor 1 in an interview that: “What I heard from my team here is that in the past we accepted a non-mature product and would launch it and deliver it to the customers.
“The Artura was the first project where we didn’t do that. We saw that the car wasn’t mature, so we stopped deliveries.”
McLaren brought our four cars to customers and media drives last month. I’m told three didn’t work. Maybe buy a petrol VW Golf for $36k while you have the chance. The choice of boy/girl racers for nearly 50 years will be replaced with a dreaded electric thing.
And before you rush out and buy a coal-powered EV, buy a copy of the UK’s Which? magazine. Its independent testing of more than 70 electric vehicles shows that their actual range is nearly 20 per cent less on average than the manufacturers claim.
That means an electric car claiming that it can go 386km is likely to get less than 320km before running out of power. Which? also found that the average electric car battery needs 15 per cent more power than advertised to become fully charged, so it will cost you more.
In equally good news Paris has banned rental e-scooters. Over 90 per cent of voters wanted a ban. Probably because the riders act like Pete Gasly, and in 2022 three people died and 459 were injured.
And in even better news, Grant Denyer, who has done some TV and a bit of racing but is best know for competing against the old bloke and me in Targa Tassie, will compete in the #55 Supercheap Auto Ginetta G55 for the three 40-minute non-championship sprint races as part of the Bathurst 6 Hour.
Grant told me he is worried that we might enter the WART 1990 BMW 3 series to show him up.
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