Hello F1 fans! The season was kicked off with a great race in Australia. The whole weekend was eventful with the bad weather in Practice, the qualifying system and of course, the race itself. There were three rookie drivers and even a new team!

3 weeks before the start of the season, a new qualifying system was going to be tried out for this race’s qualifying. Read my other post for more about this. The new system did not go very well. Most of the fans thought it was too complicated, and for the last 4 minutes, there was no track action! Only 18 hours after qualifying a decision was made to go back to the old qualifying system for the next race in Bahrain .

Lewis Hamilton took his 50th pole with at time of 1:23.837. It was his first pole since the Italian Grand Prix from last year!

Nico Rosberg’s time was almost 4 tenths slower than Hamilton in qualifying. The two Ferraris locked out the second row. Behind them was Max Verstappen  with one of his best qualifying performances.

At the start of the race, the two Ferraris had a great start passing both of the Mercedes cars. Hamilton dropped to 6th and Rosberg dropped to 5th. It was probably the new start procedures that caught them out. Vettel pulled out a big lead until lap 18 when there was a huge crash. This was the turning point in the race.

Alonso was lucky to walk away from that violent crash.

The crash caused the race to be red flagged. Ferrari had an aggressive strategy and put on the fastest and most grippy, super soft tyres. Mercedes chose to put on the more durable medium tyres. That way, the two Mercedes cars could go to the end of the race. Ferrari would have to stop for another set of tyres to go to the end.

At the restart of the race, Vettel couldn’t pull away a big enough lead from Nico Rosberg’s car for his strategy to work. Meanwhile, his team-mate, Kimi Raikkonen retired with a fire in the engine. Vettel eventually did a pit stop on lap 35 to put on the soft tyre compound. He emerged in 5th place behind Lewis Hamilton. Vettel and Hamilton passed Daniel Ricciardo for 2nd and 3rd place. Now, Vettel Had to drive like crazy to catch Hamilton.

With 5 laps to go, Vettel was within 1 second of Lewis Hamilton. However passing him is the harder part. Vettel pushed really hard hoping to mount a serious attack, until he spun with two laps two go. I wonder what would have happened if he didn’t spin.

In the end, Rosberg won the race untouched at the end despite tyre and brake problems. Hamilton managed to fend of Vettel for 2nd. Daniel Ricciardo finished 4th in his home race. Romain Grosjean finished an impressive 6th in his debut for the brand new Haas team.

Haas became the first team to score points in their debut since Toyota in 2002

Brawn GP won in their debut, but was actually a team that bought Honda.

I hope you enjoyed my post. The next race will be Bahrain in 2 weeks time. My next post will be a special YouTube video…

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