chinese grand prix

Last weekend it was the Chinese Grand Prix.

Usually China is quite a good one.  It's a Hermann Tilka designed circuit, but it's one of his better ones.  You normally get overtaking, particularly into the first corner.  As with many Tilka circuits there's a gigantic straight (the start/finish straight) and this has also become the DRS straight.

This has led to the slightly odd situation of people who would have had a go into the first corner instead using the DRS to do an easy overtake down the straight instead.  This wasn't so bad this year as it was last year, but it still clearly happened.

However, the race was a bit of an odd one.  As I say, usually China is good, but this year it only got good in the last third.  The first two thirds was actually weirdly boring.

I mean the opening couple of laps were good, but after that it seemed to settle into the weird sort of rhythm where everyone seemed to be doing their own thing.  However, at about two thirds of the way through these different things and a few incidences all seemed to converge such that (with the exception of Rosberg who was way out in front) everyone seemed to end up in the same stretch of track with either more or less grip on the tyres.

This led to some really exciting racing and over-taking and so I really enjoyed the end part.

In terms of the championship Lewis is on top.  This is a reflection of him having finished third in every race where everybody else has been all over the shop.  I believe he has stated that it was his intention to be consistent this year, though his expression after the first two races where he looked like he'd already lost the championship suggested he was thinking more along the lines of consistently winning.

It's too early to know if the Mercedes will now be a fly in Lewis's ointment.  For the first two races they qualified well but had a lot of trouble working the tyres in the race so tended to fall back.  In China you wouldn't have known they had any troubles as they performed very well throughout the race (Schumacher suffering with a wheel change problem that put him out).

Whether this means they've really cracked it or it just happened to work for the Chinese Grand Prix and the conditions (it was quite cold) it's difficult to know.  Certainly it looks like Red Bull have lost their edge.  The lack of changes to the rules this year mean that others have caught up and the one thing that did change (blown diffusers) seems to have been key to the Red Bull design.