I am not a big fan of F1 racing. I don't understand the technicalities involved, and don't share the passion as do so many of my friends and associates. But once in a while, while surfing through the 'n' channels that we get nowadays thanks to Cable-TV, if I come across Start Sports or ESPN or TEN Sports showing some F1 race, I do occasionally stick around and egg Michael Schumacher on. Such was the case this Sunday.

The season opening doesn't hold any particular significance for me. But when people around me very enthusiastically discuss F1, I can't help but feel a tinge of interest towards the races. So, I had noticed the F1 itenary in the newspapers a couple of days back. When I switched on the TV on Sunday morning and switched over to channel 13, I straight away realised that I was looking at the Australian Grand Prix!

There is no particular reason why I support Michael Schumacher, other than the facts that he was the first F1 driver whose name I had learnt, and that he is good! I mean he wins more races than anyone else. He has won most of the races that I have seen. Being technically challenged as I am, I needed no more reason to support no one else. And since I like Schumacher, I also like Ferrari. Naturally I was delighted when I saw that Schumacher was leading. (It was the 4th lap going on.) I still did not know that he had timed best in the qualifiers, and therefore had started at the head of the crowd. I came to know later during the race from the commentary. What I saw then was that he was half a second ahead of Barichello, another Ferrari driver.

Throughout the race the first three positions remained unchanged. What was amazing was that four laps from the end, Schumacher was about 20-25 seconds ahead of Barichello, who was in turn another 25 seconds ahead of Alonso. And Schumacher was about to lap the fifth place driver (Montoya, I think)! At that point of time, he slowed down dramatically for the last four laps, to go easy on the engine, as he explained later in the press conference.

For me, the best part of the race came somewhere around lap 35, when the two Ferraris went in for their second pit stops. Barichello was the first to go in. When he went in Schumacher was just ahead of him. While Barichello was in the pits, Schumacher did one of the fastest laps of the race (1:24:xx if I remember correctly), and when he came out of the pits in the next lap, he was way ahead of Barichello. I think that was the point where he began to pull away, and the difference between the race leaders started going up from the 1-2 seconds as had been earlier.

They say that the Ferrari guys always pull in Barichello into the pits one or two laps before Schumacher. They say that this is like a warm-up for the Ferrari team, so that they can pull the fastest and most efficient pit stop with Schumacher. I don't know how much truth there is in this point of view, but what I did notice was all of Barichello's stops took the same time (7-8 seconds) if not less as compared to Schumacher.

There were very few overtakings in the race. Australian tracks are less suitable for overtaking, as Sumeet and the commentators tell me. But there was one good piece of overtaking by Montoya (I think) when he went ahead of Button towards the end of the race.

Finally, Williams have launched a new car, which I did not find anything outstanding (from the results), and particularly ugly with the broad nose.

I may have gone wrong with details at many places, experts on the field visiting this page please correct me.


P.S. This post is dedicated to my friends who are passionate F1 fans!!