Lotus is passive/aggressive with Kimi

Lotus still butthurt by Kimi Rakkonen's departure.

We all remember the whiny twitter posts from Lotus after Raikkonen announced he had enough of driving for free and would  be off to the land of tortellini and Lambrusco.

After statements proclaiming Gosjean as team leader, we figured things were tense at Lotus but not quite this bad.



The transcript in case you haven't figured it out:

Alan Permane: "Kimi, Get out of the fucking way!"
Kimi Räikkönen: ''Don't shout there fucker! I get out of the way when I have a chance, but not during fast corner''

The message was sent towards the end of the race as Grosjean was catching Raikkonen who was dealing with played out rubber.

Lotus apologized, possibly to to avoid a fine,  and put a cute polar bear picture on their Facebook page...

“With hindsight, this radio message could have been sent in a less emotional way. There was a lot of tension, a lot of potential technical problems, and some of the words that flew around were simply not appropriate.  Said Lotus team boss Eric Boullier  “I know that quite a few people were surprised and I can only apologize for that on behalf of the team. It won’t happen again.”

Passive aggressive again.
(via YouTube and WTF1)

Indian GP Executive Summary

I hope you'll excuse the abbreviated version, it's a beautiful day here in New York City but the city was seriously wounded by this storm. We had to evacuate our building (you may have seen that dangling crane 75 stories up...) and as of now don't know when they will be able to resolve that situation.

Which brings me to F1 which along with doing two races myself this past week end was the last distraction from this mess.

QUICK GRADES:

Awesome first lap then essentially a procession of DRS passing in the same place. Buddh may be a cool technical track but racing turns out to be people racing the one second DRS interval rather than each other. Boring.

Vettel: you can have the best car but you need to still need to execute. That he did and as usual he managed to build a DRS proof gap in the first few laps. I would dearly love to see Vettel start from somewhere in the back and see him really fight for a victory in one of the final races.

Alonso: Star of the race, he too executed his plan and with help from Webber's failing KERS system (funny how things mostly fail on Webber's car...) was able to score as many points as possible behind Newey Vettel.

Mclarens mostrly fizzled, Senna made a cool pass and one bonehead move, Perez did not shine, Massa started and finished, that's about it. F1 needs to do something about tire cutting end plates. It's not possible that such minimal contuse completely shred tires.


Next week Abu Dabhi and hopefully something more exciting.... like being able to watch at home!

Get a room already!

How Felipe Massa though he could leave the door open that much and have Hamilton NOT hit him we'll never know. It's not like it's the first time Hamilton has tried that exact move. Just in Monaco he did it twice, to Massa at the hairpin and to Maldonado at St.Devote, both resulting in epic fails for the Brit.

The issue here is that Hamilton has decided he is Senna and he saw the movie, and he read the quote about going for the gap every time, blah blah blah. It's obvious Lewis believes people should just move out of the way when he makes any move, thus his surprised whine after the incident.
But he is not Senna, this is a different century and a different Formula 1. That Hamilton believes anyone in the top tier (and some in the second tier) will move aside goes a long way towards explaining why he painted Bob Marley on his helmet. Pass it over Lewis!

Massa's penalty is proof the incessant whining about being "singled out", is working for Hamilton. That and having Johnny Herbert as the "expert" steward in India. That was at best a racing incident, but judge for yourself after the jump.

Other than this incident, nothing really happened at the Indian GP, just a boring procession with the usual results. Big losers have to be Webber and Hamilton and possibly Force India for a rather poor showing in front of the home crowd.