the crucible of speed

Monza is the fastest circuit in the current F1 calendar.

That also makes it the shortest race and usually doesn't last much more than an hour.  I also have it logged in my memory as not normally being a particularly good race - with so few corners and most of the corners there are being chicanes, overtaking opportunities should be relatively low in number.

It's not like there's a big technical section where a driver can make a mistake and allow his rival to catch.  And knowing where to defend is hardly a stretch of the imagination - the handful of corners.  And yet in recent years it's produced some really good opportunities.  And it's generally true that overtaking tends to happen when you have a fast straight and then a tight bend and Monza has a few of those.

This last weekend it was a good race.  There was plenty of overtaking, a few incidents and even a few strategic elements that came into play.  The last of these was particularly surprising as, being such a simple circuit, you would think strategy was minimal.

However, it was strategy that basically let Perez get to second place.  The problem was that the degradation of performance of the tyres meant that towards the end the front runners - who were by then all on very old harder tyres - were easy meat for Perez who'd used the harder tyres on his first stint and stayed out for a long time on them.  That meant he had fresher softer tyres, which are quicker, and he didn't have to worry too much about making them last.

But the front runners were faced with a dilemma - if they came in for new tyres they'd have ended up behind they're closes rivals on circuit who didn't with no guarantees of being able to overtake them.  The gamble worked out for Hamilton who was just far enough in front to stay that way for the end of the race, but Alonso and Massa both ended up being overtaken.

I have to say this race was probably the first really big victim of the BBCs new program pattern.  They only showed highlights and, as mentioned, the race itself is only just over an hour long, so what they showed was only about 45 minutes (I think _ I didn't time it).

They did broadcast both race and practice on Radio 5 live, so I listened to those, but they didn't broadcast any of the practice sessions at all.  None of them were on TV, obviously, but they also didn't put them on 5live or Sports Extra.  I'm pretty sure they weren't on the internet either in anything but "text update" format.

Now if it had been a total duffer that would have been okay, but clearly it was actually quite entertaining.  And that's one of the big problems with this only showing highlights for some races - there's no real way of predicting which are going to be the good races.

Take Valencia - it's always been as dull as dishwater and the BBC said they'd show the full thing.  But then they lucked out and this year it was really good for once!