Whew! Or more aptly, strewth! They spent some money on that one. Helicopter, rights-restricted music, car shots. Love the production value. And the self-deflating humor. I must say, I don't like over-long opens. I prefer to get right to the action. One benefit of DVRing the F1 coverage is that I can skip through the opens, intros and general jabber and get straight to car going in circles.
I think it is an access slot that was covered up before... I'll have to dig through some of the other shots.
Now that you mention it, I do remember some sort of cover there. My good buddy Bob Varsha is doing the honors for Malaysia! In a reverse of the Speed situation, Diffey's called away (to do IndyCar this weekend) and Varsha pinch hits. It does my heart good to see he's still involved.
She isn't. She was only ever a "border-line boiler" in her salad days but she managed to attract a fairly large following of slobbering superannuated motorcyclists when she used to head the BBC MotoGP coverage. I think that she was chosen for the job to try and give the BBC's flagging viewing figures a boost by attracting nostalgic MotoGP followers when most of their team jumped ship to Sky.
Interesting that they have dual coanda inducing "bumps" on top of the sidepod. Interesting take on the effect. That shot is just pure aerodynamic nerd pr0n. For any of the tech nerds, this is a great explanation of the coanda exhaust design.
Dunno if any of you watched practice. The tires were being flayed, much worse than I've seen before. If it's a dry race, the softer compound will only last a handful of laps. It'll be interesting to see how far Kimi can stretch a set.
looks like hot times at Sauber.. <iframe src="http://telly.com/embed.php?guid=9S7AHX&autoplay=0" title="Telly video player " class="twitvid-player" type="text/html" width="480" height="360" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Even more interesting in light of this: http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/rivals-suspect-lotus-has-unfair-tyre-advantage-report/
Apparently the on-board fire extinguisher went off. At first the commentators thought it might be dry ice packed into the vents, but it then the real problem was announced.
Hmm. Not quite. Bridgestone was one of two suppliers at the time and developed their rubber with Ferrari and for Ferrari to the disadvantage of the other teams contracted to the same supplier. In this case the suggestion is that the Lotus advantage is serendipitous.