Conference krakar::f1

	Methinks that this could be Jordans big day.

	-John

	PS. Happened to see a bit of that old film "Grand Prix" (1966)
	recently. Noticed that one of the fictional team managers was 
	called Jordan. 

    Quite right. The fictional Jordan team was in reality the BRM team. The
    driver was Stoddard, or Stewart if you prefer.
    
    Edward.

    
    Heres some latest info from the Free practice times,
    
    Alesi has somehow managed to get the fastest time with his teamate
    coming in 5th quickest, 
    Villeneuve came in 2nd quickest .2 of a sec slower,
    3rd and 4th were down to jordan with ralf beating 
    fisi. by a tiny margin.
    Micky came in 7th just behind Coulthard, should be
    a interesting race considering the trackside temp. 
    was reportedly over 37 deg. C
    
    cheers
    
    mark
    

    Well I managed to stay awake through most of the Barcelona Grand Prix
    and was delighted with Panis managing to finish second behind Jacques
    Villeneuve and a head of Alesi. The 10 second penalties for Jumped
    start & obstruction were good in their way, but on such a wide track,
    overtaking space looks plentiful, from my armchair, However there seems
    to be a lack of power to overtake cleanly, in some of the closely matched 
    cars...
    
    	For once I was looking forward to look at a Indy 500 "live" but
    it got delayed & rained off. sniff...
    
    If someone knows when it is to be run again, do let me know.   :o)

    A comfortable Sunday afternoon drive for Villeneuve, made all the
    easier by Schumacher's good start, which resulted in him holding up the
    Mclarens and Alesi.
    
    I think that Villeneuve would have won even if he had been chased by
    Coulthard right from the start, but maybe he would not have won so
    easily.
    
    Both Schumacher and Irvine distinguished themselves by operating as
    moving roadbloacks for much of the race. In fact, both Schumachers had
    a go at it!
    
    It was nice to see Alesi back in with a shout, and even nicer to see
    Panis scoring the best result ever for PGP.
    
    What happened to Frentzen? He never figured at all.
    
    Edward.

    A lovely sunny (mostly) three day yrip to Barcelona ended with sharing
    the flight home with loads of "tired" Irishmen and Ukyo Katayama, wife
    & 2 kids, travelling ecomony with the rest of us! So much for the flash
    F1 brigade.
    
    We had seats at the end of the start finish straight so saw all of the
    overtaking & action. The view was excellent being able to see from the
    grid through the first three corners and then picking up at turn 5 as
    they swept down hill on the other side of the circuit. There was an
    excellent crowd (64000 according to the Times) way ahead of the
    previous Spanish GP we went to (Jerez 1990 )
    
    Villeneuve was streets ahead of everyone most of the time -smooth &
    very fast. Frentzen looked good in qualifying but was clearly fazed
    when JV pulled off his last ditch pole lap and looked very average in
    the race. Coulthard was good for sections of the race and then faded
    badly. Berger never got going at all, Hakk just tooled around most of
    the time & Irvine was appalling and fully deserved his penalty getting
    a huge cheer from the crowd when it came up on the screen.
    
    The Ferrari's are a really naff red in the flesh by the way.
    
    Major question - why does Verstappen have so many fans? There were
    thousands of them!
    
    Drive of the race - Panis
    Drive of the first 10 laps - Hill, really pushing and driving well,
    shame he's saddled with such a crap car.
    
    Paul 

	Not a lot of interest in this race here!, well it was pretty
	dull. 

	Panis, whose main advantage was the longevity of his Bridgestone
	tyres, could surely have won if he hadn't started so far down
	the grid. There were just too many cars to overtake.

	Irvine deserves far more than a 10 second penalty for his 
	tactics. After holding Panis/Alesi up for a great many laps
	he moved across to the other side of the track to let
	Schumacher past. Blatant gamesmanshup.

	Dreadful day for Jordan, whom I thought could have done so 
	well on this circuit. Ironically Fisichella set the fastest
	lap of the race.

	Did you see how very, very unhappy Patrick Head was that 
	Williams "didn't have two cars at the front of the field".

	-John

Regarding the Indy 500, it's running as I type this (on lap 132, according to 
their on-line scoring).  But it's not a pretty sight--with all the crashes you'd 
think some of these guys had never been in a race car before.

--PSW

    Looking back at the Spanish GP, it is clear that the grand battle over
    tyres is now open. The winner was the guy who had set up his car in the
    best way possible to conserve his tyres.
    
    Bridgestone just brought the right rubber quality. Goodyear tried
    desperately to survive by supplying soft rubber to their clients. The
    problem with those was simple: too soft, the temperature was 15C above
    that of the last tyre testing session.
    
    Apart from Panis who was obviously running on another planet (did
    everyone see the shot of Panis' used tyres after his pit stop? they
    were like new, which tells a great deal on Bridgestone's technical 
    expertise) the Goodyear boys experienced the following:
    
    - Ferrari F310B's : terrible chassis, destroying tyres in a few laps
    - Williams : Villeneuve played his well known Indy trick, he used 3
      sets of tyres on the Friday, just doing a few laps, then stored those
      saving them for the qualifications and the race. Apparently this
      process works well (there appears to be a chemical reaction within
      the rubber that takes 24hrs+ to complete). Obviously Frentzen did not
      know the trick (but he was using the same rubber quality)
    - Benetton : similar problem as Williams, Alesi had the right setup and
      drove a very gentle race always keeping an eye on tyres, while Berger
      was very confused
    - Sauber : Herbert almost managed to finish ahead of Schumacher, but
      that is forbidden by contract and would have caused a lot of emotion
      in the Ferrari/Fiat ranks
    - McLaren : same as Williams/Benetton, rubber was just too soft and
      could only survive a few laps
    
    I guess Goodyear will bring soft and hard compound for next race.

    There was apparently some consternation amongst the Goodyear users when
    Salo's tyre burst. After the race, Bernard Dudot stated that, for
    Goodyear users at least, the two-stop strategy pushed the tyres to
    their very limit. Villeneuve and Alesi were only able to go the
    distance on two sets of tyres by adopting conservative driving styles.
    
    Edward.

    Go here to see Herbert's move on Coulthard, which TV coverage missed.
    And this is not all it missed either.
    
    http://members.aol.com/ForzaF1/johnny/esppass.htm
    
    Edward