Motorsport on Monday: 23/03/2015

Another Goodwood great, Fernando's fine but Porsche has a weekend to forget

I was at the Goodwood 73rd Members' Meeting yesterday, watching how motorsport used to be done in the good old days. If you haven't been to the revived Members' Meeting, you should put a big circle around March 2016 for the 74th Members' Meeting right now: either get on the waiting list for the Goodwood Road Racing Club or, perhaps more successfully, befriend someone who's already a member.

The mighty Mini!

It's a superb event, which can be best described as a Goodwood Revival before it started to get really busy. Numbers are capped at around half Revival levels - on Saturday, it was around 12,000 - and the event becomes immeasurably easier to navigate as a result. You can get close to the cars, watch the track action without the need for gentlemanly elbows and enjoy it all without a full-on retro overload.

Best of all, the cars are not limited to a defined era that ends in 1966; this means cool stuff from the 70s and 80s can race too - making events such as the Gerry Marshall Trophy for tin-tops of the 70s and early 80s little short of mesmerising. Ford Capri, Chevrolet Camaro, Mini 1275GT, Triumph Dolomite Sprint, Mazda RX-7, Rover SD1 V8 - the grid was brilliant and the racing stupendous. It was the good old days of giant-killing Minis made that bit more relevant and engaging (hey, it might even make some love the Mini Clubman as a result). This one race alone defines everything that PHers love.

And at the other end of the 73MM scale

Just like in the Revival, the guys were really on it, too - even the Mercedes-AMG handicap demonstration was a full-bore effort. Since time immortal, car companies have been trying to show how amazing F1 cars are with one-lap challenges that see road cars get a massive head-start: this was no different - but it was done before our very eyes on the fantastically unsanitised challenge that is the full Goodwood course: like when Michael Schumacher drove the Nurburgring in an F1 racer, it seemed slightly naughty and dazzlingly cool as a result.

Someone did overcook it though: Jochen Mass and Tony Wood had a dramatic coming-together on Saturday evening, denting a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLS Porter Special and apparently destroying a Lister-Jaguar Knobbly. The images are not pretty - although both drivers were fine, it does remind us that the good old days of motor racing weren't quite so good on crash integrity...

To return at Malaysia - does he want to though?

Fernando's fine
The 'mystery' surrounding Fernando Alonso's McLaren-Honda testing crash should be resolved this week, as the Spaniard has apparently been cleared to race in Malaysia. The question marks are bound to continue but at least some of the doubts around it should be silenced.

The bigger question is, will he actually be that excited about getting back into the car? McLaren's pace in Australia was pitiful and, although they admitted the engine had been substantially pegged back to ease reliability concerns (completing the first race distance ever covered by the revived partnership was more critical...), it's going to be fascinating to see how things pan out this coming weekend. It's a good job for McLaren that Manor F1 didn't run in Oz, some wags have commented - the embarrassment of the big-budget effort being beaten by the no-budget salvaged Marussia team would've been too embarrassing for words...

Close but no cigar for Porsche at Sebring

Porsche disappointment in Sebring
Pain for Porsche in Sebring this weekend: a certain win in the GTLM class faded in the last hour of America's oldest long-distance motor race, when both Porsche North America works 911 RSRs faced trouble having qualified on the front row. Brit Nick Tandy, who was lining up to take the class win in the #911 RSR, instead left empty-handed. It was only the Falken Tire customer car that saved a bit of face with a podium. That famed Porsche reliability didn't quite come through...

The overall race was won by the Action Express Daytona Prototype of Joao Barbosa, Christian Fittipaldi and Sebastien Bourdais. There was a Brit triumph though: Tom Kimber-Smith, teamed up with Andrew Palmer and Mike Guasch, scored a sixth place to win the Prototype Challenge class with a PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports ORECA-Chevrolet FLM09.

[Images: LAT]

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Thunder18

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160 posts

119 months

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Monday 23rd March 2015

Yes, yes Fernando will be there... full of want...
https://twitter.com/alo_oficial/status/57704965952...

Also, an interesting statistic that I was reading earlier,
http://www.formula1.com/content/fom-website/en/lat...

It says the only higher than Button cornering forces during the race were the Mercedes duo and Massa. So when Honda gets it s