crash, bang wallop

It was the Belgium grand prix this weekend, from the famous Spa Francorchamps circuit.

And it was an incident packed race.  I think a route of this was Friday, when it basically rained really hard all day.  However, the forecasts also said it was going to be dry for Saturday and Sunday.  This meant that the teams had no real motive for doing any running.

Using the Friday practice sessions for testing was basically pointless since they would tend not to get representative results, there was no point setting the car up for a wet race, the drivers weren't going to need any practice for wet driving and being wet meant there was a good chance they'd have an accident which would cause them real headaches.

All of this meant that they really only had the one hour practice session on Saturday morning to set their cars up.  This in turn meant that the qualifying session was a bit on the random side - most of the cars you'd expect to be up the front weren't.  For example, Vettel and Webber both finished ended up outside the top ten but Kamui Kobayashi in the Sauber was second on the grid.

Not to take anything away from anyone - this year with the stable rules that only really removed the blown diffuser has meant that everyone has been a lot closer - add in the difficult tyres and you have this championship.

The race itself was therefore set up for a lot of battles, since many cars were 'out of position' and Spa is somewhere you can overtake (and not just in the DRS zone).  However, unfortunately Romain Grosgean also caused a big accident on the trace down to the first corner.

He's actually a bit of a one for getting into accidents at the start.  I think he's actually said that he gets a bit too excited and tends to act a bit rashly.  Certainly he was clearly in error on Sunday, as he moved over so far that an accident was almost inevitable.

It was a particular pity on Sunday since he took several of the championship contenders out.  It was quite a scary accident actually, as Grosjean's car was lifted into the air (often a consequence of wheels clashing, as here) but because it was a rear wheel he was also spun in the air and of course the cars are a lot longer than they are wide.

You could actually see wheel marks on Alonso's car that were close to where his head is.  It's one of the difficulties of open cockpit racing, but then there are always issues over them getting trapped in the cockpit if it's covered - being a close-fitting cockpit, rather than an open space inside a car can cause problems.  Especially where fire is always a risk - that's how a lot of drivers used to die in the bad old days.

Anyway, race itself was good and I guess the up-side with Alonso being knocked out is that it closes the championship up a bit.

And we go again this next weekend - there are actually a lot of double-headers until the end of the year, which is going to play havoc with my schedule, but there you go.