HoldingWater

With pole position a good second ahead of the pack, you would have been pretty safe in assuming that, with the performance of Red Bull, and in particular Sebastian Vettel, the result would be pretty much a foregone conclusion and the race would be fairly processional.

How wrong were we?

I’m not going to even hazard a guess at the number of overtaking manoeuvres that happened into days race. The varying pitstop strategies thrown up by the performance of the Pirelli tyres, combined with DRS and Kerrs seemed to come together perfectly for this track. The continually mixing up of the pack delivered non stop action from start to finish.

Hamilton raced hard today and deserved the win however Webber was my driver of the day – delivereing one of the drives of his life – taking 15 places to finish on the podium was a sterling effort.

So on to the engine manufacturers table – with 4 cars in the top 10 Mercedes have clawed back 16 points on Renault this weekend. Assuming no FIA changes to the results post race the results are as follows:

Renault – 137
Mercedes – 102
Ferrari – 64
Cosworth – 0

Per car the results are Renault – 34.25, Mercedes – 17, Ferrari – 10.17 and Cosworth yet to get of the mark…

Only 2nd race in and already posting this a day late!

Fortunately it seems, as both Alonzo and Hamiltionrecieved  20 second “drive through” penalties after the chequered flag – Hamiltion for making more than one change in direction  whilst defending against Alonzo and Alonzo for causing a collision with Hamilton.

Pretty tough on both of them though Alonzo managed to stay in the same position whilst Hamiltion slipped a couple of places down the results table.

So how did the results in Malaysia affect the leaderboard?

Renault – 102
Mercedes – 51
Ferrari – 49
Cosworth – 0

And on a per car basis as before (with Virgin, Lotus and HRT excluded):

Renault – 25.5
Mercedes – 8.5
Ferrari – 8.2
Cosworth – 0

Renault already leaping ahead on both counts –  roll on China

With the exit of Honda, Toyota and BMW from Formula 1 over the last few years there has been an ever decreasing pool of engine suppliers for the other teams to choose from.

Thankfully Cosworth decided to come back to Formula 1 to offer teams with another alternative. I thought it would be an interesting to monitor how these engine providers perform over the season with the launch of a championship for engine providers.

Fortunately as engine manufacturers are split across the teams this is fairly easy to calculate – but would this be a fair representation?

After Melbourne Grand Prix points standings are as follows:
Renault – 50
Mercedes – 26
Ferrari – 25
Cosworth – 0

Unfortunately for Cosworth only Williams will likely earn them points so suspect we’ll see the other three manufacturers scamper away pretty quickly..

If we exclude the 3 new teams ( Virgin, Lotus and HRT ) and score on a per car basis this would look something like:
Renault – 12.5
Mercedes – 4.3
Ferrari – 4.16
Cosworth – 0

Whilst this works better for Cosworth this puts the championship well and truly into Renaults hands with two of the strongest teams in Redbull and Renault scoring points and no 3rd team to lower the average.

Ferrari and Mercedes still have to split the points across 6 cars – IMO Mercedes the slightly stronger of the two teams (albeit with 2 DNFs for the works team)

Any other suggestions on how this could be tracked a little more fairly without some ultra complicated algorithm?..