Yes, I am horribly late with this review. In my defense there is a whole lot of extracurricular activities that has to be tended to when you get married. And our wedding went exceptionally well, thanks for asking 😉

But this is an F1 site/blog and so we delve into the travesty that was the Canadian GP. Well – a travesty may be a bit harsh. But since it left me pissed and the feeling just started to subside now, I will stick with that description. And thus – it will be a short one as it is best forgotten. If you ask me that is.

QUALIFYING

Blah…

THE RACE

Okay, maybe qualifying recap was a bit short so let me try to mend that.

QUALIFYING (revisited)

Kimi had a hydraulics problem that meant another non-glitchfree qualifying session. Result: Blah..

THE RACE

So now that we have covered that in depth, we can move on to race day.
The weather is hot, the hydraulics problem have been fixed. Thats good. But Kimi lines up 12th behind Kobayashi. Not the best outlook, but he did get a brilliant podium from 11th in Bahrain.

The lights go out and Kimi muscles past Kobayashi and takes 11th place. A few laps later ballerina Massa decides to do an unprovoked pirouette and lets a few cars by him in the process, Kimi included. Kimi is now up to 10th and hassling Button for position.

It takes a few laps but Kimi gets by the Brit on lap 14: http://youtu.be/XrbhRlSfqQA
The next car ahead of him is his teammate Grosjean that started in 7th on the supersofts while Kimi started on the harder soft tire. Which means Kimi should go longer on his first stint. So far so good.

And longer he did. He ran in 4th place for quite a while before finally stopping on lap 40 for a 1-stopper. Unfortunately he was losing time to the top 3 of Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel. Not much, but enough to be holding up Perez who had started in 15th also on the softs. So when Kimi pits, Perez does a quick lap and jumps him out of the pits.
To top it off, Rosberg also passes Kimi with the help of DRS. Argh..

At this point Kimi is in 9th, which obviously is not what we or he had hoped for at this stage of the race. To make matters worse, he is not able to stay within the 1 second DRS range of Perez and drops back a little. From then on its basically a cruise to the finish line for our protagonist. He inherits 8th place when Massa pits on lap 58. And that would be his final position.

It could be worse than 12th to 8th. But when you see that his teammate Romain Grosjean drove from 7th to 2nd, it leaves you wanting a lot more. Qualifying hampered his chances, yes. But unfortunately that is no excuse when Perez, who started 3 places behind Kimi, finishes on the podium!

All in all it was a weekend to forget. I dont have the inclination to delve into why Kimi was off the pace compared to his teammate. But it does happen to everyone once in a while.

An encouragement is that Kimi is even more pissed about the bad result than we are. Reports from a Lotus teammember say that Kimi was furious when he got back to the hotel and was screaming “voi paska!” which means something like “fucking shit!”.

SORENS RACE RATING

Congratulations to Hamilton. He kept his cool even when losing the lead while his main competitors 1-stopped. But he went on to pass them to take the win. Driver of the day for me. As for the race, I give it a 4 out of 10. Mostly due to the disappointment I felt after the race. Nothing could top last years race here anyway, could it?

THANK YOU

I have received a few donations for what I asked for the last time: To support this blog and possibly to allow me to go to Spa and do a proper from-the-track review. So many thanks for that. It is still a ways to go though. So if you want to donate a few quid or more, then the paypal link is found here:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=6RASBNUPLDU3W

Now we find ourselves only a week from the action in Valencia. Or should I say “action”, as I am sure most of you, like myself, are no fans of the track. Still, Kimi is apparently pretty fired up. So hopefully we will see some proper Kimi fireworks there. He dragged a dog of an F1 car to a podium there in 2009, so if all goes well, it should be possible with a repeat. Fingers crossed. Fly Kimi, fly! 😉

Love
Soren

Images © Lotus F1 Team, Glenn Dunbar, Lorenzo Ballanca, Pirelli/LAT Photographic

Do not hesitate to contact me if you need any of these photos taken down for any reason.