The Lion Nation was glued to their screens, initially biting finger nails and hating Virat Kholi only to triumph on a brilliant victory in T20 world cup. It was during this time in Bahrain, the engines of F1 cars came to life in what could be considered the better race this season. The practice sessions and qualifying further cemented the dominance of the Mercedes team where both Lewis and Nico had managed to get P1 and P2 (Position1 and Position 2 / First and second places) on the grid even without setting a time on his second run in 3rd qualifying session. (Usually, the last runs are faster than the first runs and the rest of the teams were not fast enough to catch up to the Mercs even in their second runs)
From inception, where Lewis managed to overtake Nico in to the first corner, both were battling it out making the usually dull races of 2014 more exciting. Though Nico went on to a different strategy (we trust a 2 stopper as oppose to Lewis’ 3 stopper), the safety car on lap 40 meant Nico shifted back to a 3 stopper where on his soft set of tires gave Lewis a run. Lewis managed to keep his cool to ultimately win the battle with a super drive. Credit goes to Nico for a fantastic drive too.
In addition, we saw a few exciting battles down the line. Massa had made a massive jump from 7th to 3rd on the opening lap of the race and kept all at bay till the first leg of pit stops. He was much faster than his teammate this time around and had no need to move off the way.
There were some exciting drives by the Force India duo of Hulkenberg and Perez where Perez managed to battle it out with Hulk to get in front and most importantly to the 3rd step of the Podium. That was a great drive from Perez and a well-deserved podium.
The other awesome drive came from the guy who was unlucky during the first 2 races – Daniel Ricciardo. He started 13th and finished 4th beating his team mate, the world champion Vettal.
Pastor Maldonado once again reconfirmed why F1 pundits reject the idea of having paying drivers in F1 by being totally erratic. He went straight in to the Sauber of Gutierrez on lap 40 which turned the car upside down and brought the safety car to the track. Pastor was given a 10 second stop and go penalty and a 5 place grid penalty for the next race in China. However, lot of F1 fans believe that the offense was such, Pastor should have been black flagged immediately (Instant stop and disqualification from the race) and banned for the next race in China. They stated that Ricciardo was given a 10 place grid penalty only for stopping his car in the pits after his wheels were not tightened right in the previous race in Malaysia which was a negligible offense as oppose to what Pastor did.
Official Race review here – http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2014/4/15692.html
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We head to China for the next race on the 20th of April at the Shanghai Circuit. http://www.formula1.com/races/in_detail/china_917/circuit_diagram.html
This again is a great track with similar qualities to Bahrain. Hence, we can expect to see the same kind of results in China. However, there is a 2 week break where some teams will do a lot of work on improving performance. This would be the fact to look out for in China – which team improved over the others.
