bahrain

So the race went ahead.

It would appear that there were quite a few protests, but nothing impacted on the race itself after the Force India people being caught up in it on Friday.

One of the things that was very apparent though was that there were virtually no spectators.  I mean a big part of the problem with a lot of these new events is that there are no spectators, but this weekend the place looked virtually empty.

I've noticed it at Bahrain before but there don't actually appear to be that many places to watch the race.  Usually you have two types of spectators - those seated in grandstands and those standing.  Well at Bahrain there never appear to be any standing spectators.

I don't know if this is a deliberately move and you can't get to the areas where there are no stands (this is the case in Monaco and a few of the other street circuits) but it really does make the place look empty.  What's odd about it is that it's not because there are loads of stands - there are big bits of the track where the cars just drive around a bit of the dessert and nobody except a few marshals and TV cameras can see them.

At some of the other races where there are few spectators there are stands but they're empty, but at Bahrain there only appear to be a couple of stands and they were still empty.  Whether this was a consequence of the unrest (people staying away or being kept away) or is simply a further reflection of the fact that the event attracts few people anyway I don't know.  Certainly you'd think that foreigners would be less keen to visit and the BBC showed some footage on the way to the circuit of loads of security people and APCs.

Anyway, the race itself was actually not all that bad.  I wouldn't rate it as a great race, as such, but for a Bahrain GP it wasn't bad.  There was some overtaking (even if quite a bit of it was the artificial DRS-on-the-straight kind) and certainly a few things of interest happened.

In particular McLaren seemed to have a bit of a shocker.  Having had problems with a wheel nut in Button's pit stop in China (cross-threading, apparently) the same thing happened to Lewis Hamilton... twice!

With him having started in second place he ended up down in eighth, although it wasn't really clear that it was entirely down to the problems in the stops.  Having seemed to do well in Qualifying, during the race the McLarens didn't really seem to be up to speed during the race.

Jenson's car (engine or drive train it seemed like) packed up on virtually the last lap, although some sort of puncture issue had actually taken him out of the points on the lap before.

The weirdest thing was Nico Rosberg, though, who seemed determined to drive Leis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso off the circuit.  Both incidents happened in the same place and both were quite clearly him going too far.  It clearly states (and sensibly so) that you can't go pushing other drivers off the circuit, but in both cases that's what he appeared to do.

The stewards didn't punish him at all, but instead made some statements about how the other drivers weren't alongside.  Now of course they have all the views and angles and information and stuff, but from the TV pictures it looked like they were alongside and it's difficult to see why they would be going that far over if they weren't alongside.

In particular if Rosberg did nothing wrong then why wasn't Lewis punished?  He overtook off the circuit, which isn't allowed, but surely he only did that because Rosberg left no room?

I'm sure if the circuit hadn't had such big run of areas Rosberg wouldn't have gone quite to far as he did, but surely that's not the point - you can't go shoving other drivers off the circuit, veering way across like he did.  And we're not talking any small move or instinctive reaction - the Bahrain circuit is extremely wide and he moved across the full width of it, so it was a clearly deliberate move to push them off.

I'm all for letting them battle and I often tend to think the stewards over-react, but here I think it's gone the other way.