Formula One Review, Preview

For the first time in nearly eight months I'm sitting down to write about Formula One. This season is shaping up to be a paradox. After seven races, Sebastien Vettel has a 60 point lead over Jenson Button. In other words, the earliest that Button could mathematically take the points lead is 24 July at the Nurburgring. Even then, that requires Vettel to score less than 15 points over the next three races and Button must win every race.

So it seems like this should be boring, right? I mean, Vettel is seemingly walking away with the title. But the races this year have been exhaustingly exciting. At the Canadian Grand Prix Vettel had a 5 second lead with about five laps to go, but Button had the best car, the oddly designed MP4-26 (seen at right). Vettel actually crumbled under the pressure of pushing his car so hard, spinning out on the last lap and allowing Button to pass for the victory.

Prior to that, Lewis Hamilton gave Vettel an insane challenge at Circuit de Catalunya. In fact, there has been an oddly low number of runaway victories this season. Yes, the Red Bull RB7 is a dominant car, but McLaren is coming after them. All of the major teams have been in the points, and of the backmarkers, Lotus is pushing hard.

The Bahrain Grand Prix was finally officially canceled. This should have happened from the start, but Bernie Ecclestone, who is after every single dollar he can get, risked a PR black eye to give the island nation a chance to settle their political unrest. They did, in a way, and just as soon as Bernie said the race would be held in October the teams started saying no.

And there have been some pretty exhilarating accidents, as well. The scariest, obviously, was Sergio Perez's hard shunt coming out of the tunnel at Monaco, slamming hard into the barriers on the other side of the chicane. At Sepang, Renault driver Vitaly Petrov had what looked like a rather funny accident (note photoshopped picture to the left), but in hindsight it was quite scary, because when the car hit the ground again, the drive shaft broke, which has actually caused fatalities in F1 before.

So the next race is this weekend at Valencia, a boring, processional course with lots of 90-degree turns. Probably not going to be too interesting, but with the way this season is going, who knows...