LoudHowards Race Review

By LoudHoward
March 18 2007

The first round of the 2007 F1 season has been completed with Kimi Raikkonen bringing his new Ferrari home for a comfortable victory ahead of the McLarens of Alonso and Hamilton. Red Bull Racing had an opening round to forget with the a host of problems cropping up for both cars.

Mark Webber got the RB3 off the line well (Better than Fisichella), easily holding onto his 7th for the first stint. Mark lost time to the front runners but was nicely extending his lead over the chasing pack until he pitted at just over 1/3rd distance. Moving into the pitlane for the first time Webbers fuel flap refused to lift up, and the refueler ended up having to manually open it which cost him upwards of 10 seconds. Unfortunately for Mark that wasn't the end of the issues as when he left the pitlane the fuel flap (on the right side of the car) lifted and stayed open for the rest of the race.

The Red Bull fuel flap opens with the hinge being perpendicular to the (intended) direction of the vehicle, unlike say McLarens which opens upwards and side on to the airflow. The end result was basically Mark lugging a barn door around with him, ruining the airflow to his rear wing and losing him precious downforce which the RB3 can't (at this point) afford to lose.

At about this stage Webbers throttle sensors went down and lead to the computer leaving some throttle on under braking and through the corners. These two problems combined left Webber tumbling down the order in a car that was requiring plenty of modifications on the fly. This culminated in a spin for Webber as he entered the pitlane in a mistake not too dissimilar to Barrichellos blue on Friday, luckily though Webber gathered it up neatly using a manouver dubbed the Kovalainen and lost only 2-3 seconds.

In the other RB3 Coulthard was slowly working his way forward in a car that appeared to have decent pace, until he tried a move on Alex Wurz which wasn't on, the result was a 3-wheeled Coulthard literally flying over the cockpit of the Williams and into the gravel. Coulthard was out on the spot while Wurz retired moments later with antenna damage.

Webber eventually stumbled home 13th but seemed pleased with how much pace the car had in the first stint, though there is a lot of work to do the team feel if things go right for them they can have Williams, STR, Spyker, Honda, Toyota and Super Aguri covered, especially once the European upgrades come online. Ferrari, BMW and McLaren are definately out of reach for the time being but Red Bull must be eyeing world champions Renault in their goal set this season.

The next round is being held at Sepang, Malaysia, in three weeks time.

Article reproduced courtesy of: http://www.markwebberblog.com/