a swift Brazilian

This weekend saw the last Grand Prix for the year in Brazil.

Usually Brazil is a good race and while I wouldn't classify this last weekend's as a great race, it was certainly among the better ones this year.

There were a few interesting battles and overtaking manoeuvres and there were some strong strategic elements to the race.  Also it's an interesting circuit, and is very fast, so it's always an enjoyable race to watch.

There was a lot of talk of rain - something that crops up fairly often in Brazil due to the time of year it's normally held - but it never actually happened.

However, there were a lot of people having problems with their gearboxes, which was a bit weird. My guess is it was because everyone was at the edge of the lifetime for their gearboxes, but still, it was a bit weird.

Overall it's been an interesting season, with the Pirelli tyres really throwing the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons at the beginning.  The team's seemed to have gotten a better handle on things later into the season, but it's still helped lead to interesting racing.

The added element of DRS was an interesting experiment, but it didn't really seem to work as advertised, either not helping overtaking at all or making it far too easy.  KERS is difficult to know if that really helped or not - my guess is it did, but was still too underpowered to really have a huge effect.

The unfortunate thing this year was the Seb seemed to be the total master of the tyres from the get-go where everyone else struggled, and he was also in the best car, so he just romped away with it.  Hopefully with few rule changes next year things will be a bit more interesting in terms of the championship, but I wouldn't want to guarantee it.

Red Bull still have bar far and away the best designer in F1 and in Seb they have a guy who can pull spectacular laps out of the bag on demand, therefore tending to put the best car on the front of the grid - always a difficult thing to get the better of.  The Red Bull has also been staggeringly reliable, with I think Seb only having any sort of technical issue in the last two races of the season.

It really is a winning combination and it doesn't seem likely their suddenly going to loose form over the winter season.  Certainly it's going to be up to the other guys to take the fight to them.

But the odd thing about the year was that, despite the championship being a bit dull, the actual races were generally rather good.  I guess the trouble was that they were good much further down the field than the man in front.