The role of skill in F1

This year, Fernando Alonso can seemingly make no mistake. He's been winning almost as often as Schumacher did last year without even having the best car around. For the past 3 races, McLaren has clearly had the best car with Raikonnen blazing away from the rest of the field during practice and qualifying. Sadly for Kimi though, his car's reliability has not matched up to its performance. I think he has had atleast 3 engine failures (If I remember right, one of them was during qualifying and due to one of F1's stupid rules this season, he had to drop down 10 places in the grid for having changed his engine!), because of which he has not been able to capitalize on McLaren's superior performance at the moment. But, atleast for me, what has been amazing is that Alonso has always been around to take advantage of other's misfortunes. In every race this season (other than the infamous US GP though :D) he has managed to grab a pretty good place at the finish, usually making it to the podium as well, even when it has been clear based on the performance of the cars on Friday and Saturday that Renault isn't the best car around.

Alonso's performance this season has made me believe once again that skill does matter after all in F1. After watching Schumacher's domination the last couple of years, when all that he needed to win was his Ferrari, I had lost complete faith that driving ability mattered at all in Formula One. This season has brought forth a fresh breath of air. In fact, this weekend was the best example of this. Not only did Alonso manage to capitalize on Raikonnen's misfortune, but Montoya managed to make good use of McLaren's advantage over the rest of the field to finish second after starting from the back of grid (this time because of his own error doing qualifying). Schumacher's 'skills' were for all to see as he was first passed by Montoya and then by Button :) It's time to retire Michael! BTW, F1 is considering some radical proposals for the qualifying format for next season. Check them out here.

To end, hats off to Lance! How many ever times I read about his story, it has always been an inspiration for me. I was still hoping Ullrich or Basso would manage to defeat him this year :P



Cheers,
Harsha