F1 Fanatic round-up: 11/3/2010

Posted by Mikel on March 11th, 2010 at 03:55pm

The clock is running out on the off-season. The 2010 F1 season starts tomorrow. Here’s our final pre-season round-up:

Links

Hanging out with two world champions (BBC)

Jake Humphrey on Michael Schumacher: “He said he wouldn’t have returned if he wasn’t fit enough, that the current crop of drivers aren’t special it’s the cars that are good, and, most ominously of all, that he is a better driver now than he was five years ago.”

The Coulthard commentary (Red Bull)

“I don’t want to pick on the new boys, but common sense says that turning up to the first race of the year without even having tested, as Hispania Racing will do in Bahrain, is a recipe for disaster.”

Jenson wins a Laureus world sports award

“Jenson won the Breakthrough of the Year Award, which recognised his achievement in taking his first world championship against considerable odds.”

Comment of the day

Pithy and to the point: John H on Ferrari bringing back their pit stop lights:

Ross Brawn wouldn’t have stood for this!
John H

Site updates

The live blogs are ready to go for tomorrow – remember you can follow every session live with us as-it-happens, just look for the live blog post on the site during each of the sessions.

As I’m running F1 Fanatic full-time this year I’ll be able to join in all the sessions and I look forward to seeing a lot more Friday practice sessions than before. See you in the live blogs…

Happy birthday!

No F1 Fanatic birthdays today. If you want a birthday shout-out tell us when yours is by emailling me, using Twitter or adding to the list here.

On this day in F1

The 1990 season began on this day 20 years ago with some surprising names at the sharp end of the United States Grand Prix grid at Phoenix.

A McLaren on pole position was no surprise, except it belonged to Gerhard Berger rather than Ayrton Senna.

Alongside him was the Minardi of Pierluigi Martini. Third place was occupied by a Dallara (I wouldn’t expect a repeat of that performance for HRT with their Dallara-built cars on Saturday) belonging to Andrea de Cesaris.

Jean Alesi’s Tyrrell completed a surprising front two rows with fourth place in his Tyrrell which, like Martini and de Cesaris, ran on Pirelli tyres which proved surprisingly well suited to the street track. He held the lead for a good portion of Sunday’s race, before losing the lead to Senna in a memorable battle.

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