King down after Bahrain

By Karl King
April 22 2007

I saw one of my friends who I have not seen for a while, today. That's very nice you may be thinking, but no. It wasn't. The first thing he said to me was "old 'Bacon Butty' did well at the weekend, didn't he?"

"That Hamilton ain't going to take long to win is he?" he added. "His races won't get into triple figures before he wins like old 'Bacon Butty' will they?"

Now if I tell you that 'Bacon Butty' is this chap's less-than-affectionate name for Jenson Button, you can imagine that if he wasn't half-a-foot taller and 10 kilos heavier than me, he'd have walked home with two black eyes and blood being ejected from his right-nostril.

But I guess the big chap did have a point. He also alerted my attention to the fact that comparing Jenson's race results to Rubens Barrichello's would result in a ratio of 3:0. In Barrichello's favour.

When asked why, I pointed out that in Bahrain, Jenson seemed to be an innocent casualty and it wasn't exactly his fault that he was discharged from the race at the third corner.

But what about the first two races? Naturally I rattled off all the bumph the internet has provided me with regarding Rubens being better able to drive a bad car, and Jenson having trouble with a car which doesn't allow him to show off his smooth driving style.

Then I reminded him of something I read from Nick Fry saying that Honda would win a race before the end of the season. I had to wait for a good half a minute whilst he tried to recover some sort of breathing technique after all the laughing at this claim.

I do forgive him, though. Honda's thus far abysmal performance was continued in Bahrain by its sole RA107 being the last of the finishers who were lapped once. Behind it were the two Spykers who were both lapped at least twice.

So how can the team really regain any sort of race-winning performance and bridge the gap to Ferrari and McLaren? At the moment it would seem it would have trouble keeping B-team Super Aguri behind.

The team is blessed with a months gap before the European-leg of the season kicks off, with a few days testing. Perhaps a few hundredths can be extracted from the car – but really the team needs to be finding tenths to start really applying the pressure to the teams in front.

In this case, the car in front, for Honda, really is a Toyota. Usually Ralf Schumacher, though.