an interesting valencia?

Well Valencia turned out to be an interesting watch, for a change.

There was plenty that happened, including a good deal of overtaking.  I think they got the DRS right - it put people in a position to try to overtake, but didn't make it too easy as it does at some races.

The tyres also seemed to play a reasonable part this time, rather than being the total dominating factor as they have in some of the prior races.

The only real shame to it from my point of view was that Lewis had a coming together with Maldonado which saw Lewis into a barrier and Maldonado only losing his nose.  It was a real shame, as Lewis had had a really good race.

Now obviously I'm biased as I am a Lewis fan, but Maldonado was clearly the main cause of the accident.  This has also been backed by the stewards, who punished him.  They have a bit of a history, Lewis and Maldonado and I have to say I think Maldonado is a bit of a prat.

He's clearly not averse to going for other drivers, having deliberately crashed into Lewis at Spa last year and stopped his car in the middle of the track at Monaco this year, in order to try to crash into someone else.  That's clearly not sporting behaviour, but it's also outright dangerous.

Crashing into someone in the heat of the moment while trying to pass them is one thing - pre-meditated crashes are another.  It's also pretty expensive for the team, to say the least.

In this case there is a bit of a case for Lewis having been quite aggressive with him.  He didn't give an inch and, in essence, pushed Maldonado off the circuit, but then that is part of racing.  In particular we saw Nico shoving Lewis and Alonso off the track at Bahrain and not getting in trouble.  In all of the cases there were clear run-off areas, so it's again been rubber-stamped by the stewards.

To be totally fair to Maldonado I think he was genuinely trying to avoid some speed bumps that there are in that area.  It's one of those run-off areas where you could gain quite a bit of advantage by going wide so they've put in some speed humps that mean you need to slow right down to drive around them or face the risk of damaging the car.

In other words, I'm not sure he deliberately slammed into Lewis so much as tried to avoid the bumps, which then slewed him into Lewis.

However, really, as I say, he should have slowed down and gone around them - Lewis was always going to be on that bit of the track, so by doing what he did a collision was inevitable.

Lewis was clearly not happy, but he'd also clearly been strongly briefed not to say anything.  I'm not sure about that - one of the things I like about Lewis is he speaks his mind and, especially here where the other guy is in the wrong, in some ways it's a shame he was suppressed.  Still, the Monaco thing where he said some silly stuff was probably going a bit far.