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Having been at Brands Hatch for the day, I thought I'd let anyone who wasn't there in on the day's events.
The organisation so far has been excellent; Parking was arranged so that we spent no time queueing before parking, or even before leaving. Because there were so few people there, the ticket gates all operated smoothly, but we'll have to see how this holds up with the crowds tomorrow. The atmosphere was laid-back and expectant, and there were plenty of food stalls, drinks vendors etc. I thought the memorabilia was a little thin on the ground as far as selection was concerned, but for a first race, I may have to cut them some slack
. The only dissapointing thing for me was the commentary provided by Radio Brand's Hatch and the PA system; at times it seemed very disjointed, and the commentators seemed not to have that much more info that we could glean by watching cars racing around.As far as the actual A1 practicing and qualifying goes...
My brother and I were sited in grandstand B on the Brabham straight for the first half of free practice (until the session was red-flagged for a car in the gravel trap (Canada, if I recall correctly). We then moved to the viewing bank just after the paddock hill bend for the second half of the session. The view from the grandstand is very nice, and the sound of A1 engines gunning down the main straight certainly is impressive. We got to see far more in the way of excitement from the paddock hill bend though; First Mathias Lauda dropped the Austrian car into the wall on the right of Hailwood Hill (I'm not sure of the cause; he may have clipped the white line at the base of paddock hill a little too energetically). This left a strangely intact looking front wing (severed at the attachment points to the chassis) lying in the middle of the track, and some other minor debris. This resulted in a red flag, although the wing had been removed from the track by a brave (read Insane) Marshall before the flag had caused the cars to come in. Shortly thereafter, Scott Speed put Team USA's car into the gravel trap at Druid's, followed a lap or two later by the Czech Republic team. This viewing bank provided a nice spot to observe the cars coming out of a corner, and to have a look at the extent of control the drivers have over the cars(of which more later).
For qualifying, we moved to the outside of Clark Curve, just before the Brabham straight. This was also a nice spot (and we got to see the Team Lebabon car hit the gravel in front of us).
Having had time to look at the cars in racing trim, I've come to the conclusion that they're a handful. Every driver coming out of the Clark Curve on just about every lap displayed a characteristic wiggle under accelleration. A similar quick correction could be seen during accelleration out of the Paddock Hill corner. As the drivers push, mistakes that would have been caught and corrected by a traction control system are showing up, and these seem to require some manual intervention. There may also be an element of learning curve going on. There may have been as many offs as there were simply because the drivers are still learning the limits of the cars.
The qualifying format itself is exciting and tension-producing; Certainly superior to anything we've seen in F1 since they scrapped the old 12-Lap/1Hour shootout format. We had action throughout each of the 15 minute sessions, and choosing the moment to send your driver out and get the cleanest air and track for him to run in is clearly going to be an ongoing challenge. Watching drivers desperately trying to outdo the time their opponents did in the last flying lap has reminded me why I used to look forward to watching f1 Qualifying, and the scrap between Nelson Piquets jr. and Matt Halliday was well worth watching. My only suggestion would be to lose the aggregation of two laps for the time; Let's just race and see who can put in the fastest lap. This would also allow some strategy to creep in via the missing of sessions because of sufficient banked times etc.
All in all, it's very promising, and I'm expecting a great race tomorrow.
Tony
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Thanks for the report............
Didnt even get a photo of team GB! saw lots of overtaking just a few feet infront of me and the noise was great! I was surprised and really loved it, Shame kerr had an engine failure! Once piquet passed power he pulled out a 13sec lead before the end of the feature race, not bad going considering the cars were identical! The sprint race was dull but nuff said bout that!
