Carlton Supporters Club

It will be a long long season for Aussie F1 fans, Ricciardo was stitched up by McLaren which naturally favours it's home boy Norris, but Ricciardo was able to make some progress simply because of his record.

Piastri has nothing to offer McLaren in the short term, no traction, no gravitas, and pretty much everything to lose if the team fail to support him. I have some business associates who attended Bahrain and the word is McLaren were using terms like disappointing in regards to Piastri's testing and performance, it shows how cut-throat F1 really is, most of those whispers will be coming from the management of other drivers.

Yet it looks very much to me like it's the car and not the drivers that are the problem. They may have pandered to Norris a bit too much and have as a result formulated a spud of a car, a car that is tuned to Norris's unique skills and flaws but is in effect a dead-end as far as being competitive is concerned.

Norris is going to have to lift McLaren out of the mire, if he can't then white anting Ricciardo might have been the worst decision of his career!

In the meantime, over at RBR they are reaping the benefits from having Ricciardo back in the Testing / R&D train.

Oh Mr Hart, what a mess!

Said to the family at the second last re-start (2 laps to go) that there will be chaos and three or four cars will go out and another red flag will happen. 

Other than that, thought it was a pretty good race, with a bit more passing than usual and a little more unpredictable with the grid how it was.  Perez, Alonso, dare I say Stroll, Gasly, Norris, Sainz all did well.  Piastri drove well too - lucky to be in the points, but there are plenty of times you don't get luck in F1, so take them.

It seems the full story is not as cut and dry as the media make out, why am I not surprised!

The hard left fascist media feminists want to paint the bloke as a misogynist multi-millionaire who steps on people for a living.

The reality is he sits at the top of a brutal sport, you can't just be good to survive, you have to be the best of the best.

It seems behind the scenes, and well before the complaints were made, issues had been raised about the performance of the complainant. In effect for being warned to pull up their socks and keep to their boundaries instead of lifting their game they responded with assertions of bullying. This is a modern phenomena, something quite foreign to people over 40, but at epidemic levels in the 20 to 30 age group.

The other is unsolicited 'pics' sent from Horners phone.

Interesting to hear the legal claims from Massa regarding 2008, not much F1 could have done at the time, but certainly in hindsight he's got a very good case following the revelations the Piquet Singapore crash was deliberate.

In my opinion, the fact that the FIA later banned a number of Renault managers and technicians, leaves the FIA with little ground to stand on.

Massa deserves compensation as a minimum, and quite possibly the 2008 world title.

I suspect the FIA defence will assert Ecclestone has dementia or is otherwise losing his 93 year old marbles.

So no.
It won't be changed.

Regardless, I think he is a significant chance for some sort of payout, even if it's just to drop the lawsuit, because reality is when Renault directed Piquet to crash to bring Alonso back into contention it was deliberate. None of that can be debated because they have all since confessed, and it looks like in old age Eccelstone has disclosed they knew that at the time not just retrospectively.

Whether it was in or out of the rules of the time might be debated, deliberately crashing into barriers wasn't explicitly written in at that time as far as I know, but the FIA banned the Renault people so it must have thought it was crook.