morganabowen

Hamilton is the odds on favorite for tomorrow But I think that Fernando has that prancing horse ready to go and will take the lead somewhere in the middle of the race and not let go. I see Perez on the podium with Fernando and Hamilton

Nizer

okay, now i'm actually starting to feel bad for Schumacher...

Flying Finn

I just hope he finally faces the facts...
The radio message from his team was pretty awesome!

Pretty exiting race (Massa's "collarbone zig zag" was nuts), what a shame for Hammy, and in the otherhand, Alonso again benefits from others bad luck. Race is a but tighter though and remains interesting.

Congrats to Vettel, top notch driving and extra nod for classy move at the ceremony when he dedicated his win to Prof

My993C2

Congrats to Vettel for the win. He is now tied with Nelson Piquet SR for Grand Prix wins at 23. Oh and Fernado Alonso apparently has passed Ayrton Senna for career podium finishes with his 3rd place finish today. Both milestones courtesy of the BBC's feed mentioned at the end of today's race.

multi21

Typical piling on Finn, it's what is expected from you. It did look bad on initial viewing, but did you see how all four brakes locked up very badly? That is not typical and MS was not really close behind to lose aero DF.

MS said after the race that the car would not decelerate as it had before and he actually used an earlier braking point.

I would presume he lost engine braking based on all the above.
The car wouldn’t decelerate, says Schumacher

23 September 2012

Michael Schumacher believes a mechanical problem may have been the root cause of his crash with Jean-Éric Vergne in the Singapore Grand Prix. After the first Safety Car, the Mercedes slammed into the back of the Toro Rosso in a similar incident to last year.


In 2011, Schumacher flew over the back of Sauber’s Sergio Pérez at Turn 8. On this occasion, Vergne was removed from a points-paying position at Turn 14.

“I mean, first of all, after the Safety Car I braked a little earlier than I normally do at that corner,” Schumacher explained to reporters.

“But the car wouldn’t decelerated so I got on the brakes very hard and locked up everything, but the accident wasn’t avoidable anymore. Obviously I feel sorry that Jean-Éric had to retire for that reason but we need to investigate what happened.”

Flying Finn

Pete, I'm only stating the obvious.

MS should've never done this comeback since he couldn't come back to a superior team with No. 1 treatment.
He's been struggling from the day one and his "performance" is only getting worse.

If this was first "odd event" (read: screwup), it would be cool but it was one of many and when his on track performance is lacking and only getting worse, what would you do if you were MB team boss?
Re-sign him for millions when there are younger, faster & cheaper guys available?

stuttgart46

Was that not the most boring race of the season? Except for the 1/4 of a second drama with Massa, that race was a snooze fest.

Ritter v4.0

Totally agree. Despite KERS and DRS its a FF race. I literally fast forward thru it. When they talked about how fantastic it is and announced another five years- I FF'd thru that as well.
If its all about racing at night they should go to LeMans.

multi21

Finn I know you know about racing and motorsports, please tell me you can't look at what happened yesterday and say it was a very unusual incident? MS came from way back and hit Verne - it wasn't a case of misjudging the distance to Verne or anything like that. It's not like his Mercedes has not had any mechanical issues this year

Further, why would he lie about something like this -- it's not like he is trying to avoid a 10 spot grid penalty that he received because he's in title contention? He's a 7 time WDC, he doesn't exactly forget which pedal is which.

What I will agree with you on is that he shouldn't have come back to F1 because he is not in it for the titles anymore. MS doesn't have that shark mentality like he used to and is not in it to win titles anymore. He came back into F1 because he missed it and now seems to be only having "fun" with it (hard to imagine having fun in the Mercedes chassis). When you're in F1 for a hobby, it's not the right reason.

I'm sure it'll come out before Suzuka what happened on his car.

ilko

Meh race. Most boring of the season so far. Singapore is fun and the atmosphere is great but the the action on track was lacking. Too bad for LH. McLaren still have the fastest car (when it doesn't break which seems to be every race), so it will be interesting to see how things develop in Suzuka... Red Bull are gaining. Ferrari are lacking still. Alonso is really driving the wheels off that donkey cart!

Regarding Schumacher's incident, he's been inconsistent in his second F1 career and already whacked Senna earlier this year in the same fashion. So I can't blame journalists and fans questioning his skills after yesterday's crash. Even if a mechanical issue was to blame as he'd have us believe. Ross Brawn was furious at him on the radio, never heard that before!

RSAErick

Agreed.... boooooorrrrrr-innnggg. Zzzzzzz.

Monaco and Singapore have the fanfare, but the racing is terrible.

multi21

I almost fell asleep during the race, but it seemed after the Hamilton retirement, all hell broke loose. The cars don't seem to be as reliable as they were early in the year. The McLaren reminds me of the McLaren of 2005-2006, blindingly quick, but fragile.

Re; MS, I don't think that was Ross Brawn on the radio, but rather the race engineer.


"Team principal Ross Brawn wouldn't be drawn on what might have caused the collision.

"It was an unusual set of circumstances so we will have a careful look at the data and work out what could have happened," he said. "Michael's race was going well until the incident which caused his retirement."

Mercedes' director of motorsport Norbert Haug confirmed that "the team is investigating to see whether there was a problem with his car," and added that it had been an "exceptionally challenging race this evening" but the team could take pride in a job well done especially when it came to Schumacher's team mate Nico Rosberg.
"

Flying Finn

1st thing I thought was as simple as cold tires and that his line was a little different than usual. Why?
With cold tires you obviously have less grip but also lower ride height which in F1 can be crucial and being slightly off line, looked like his car's bottom might've toughed the ground.
I only saw it once in the replays so maybe I just saw things but in the end, I'd check the tire temps and if yes, that simply is a driver mistake.

Assuming it's the cold tires/bottoming, he's not lying. He was just puzzled abut it and obviously that's at the moment.
His crew was completely surprised which it seems they wouldn't be if they saw something wrong with the car.
But on the other hand, if his tire temps were really low, they would've seen that also and warned about.
I'm definitely curious to find out but in all seriousness, don't rule out just an error (of not keeping temps up etc.).

You know, we all get old and when we do, unfortunately things don't improve...
There's a reason why there are no old years old hockey players (or any real athletes for that matter).

He should've joined the LeMans crowd again, that would've been a perfect place for him to race. And probably still is although he's getting too old for that also...

No doubt, as I said, very curious to hear what happened.

multi21

MS mentioned specifically he applied the brakes earlier because of the safety car period and I take that to mean his tires, brakes were not up to normal operating temps and he took that into account.

Like you said, the team would have mentioned that the temps were too low because they can see that, but based on the race engineers radio communications, they appeared to be puzzled. The hit was very hard, it wasn't like he missed the braking point by a couple meters, he was not close to slowing down for that corner even if Verne wasn't there in front of him.

Telemetry will only tell you so much and never tell you about mechanical breakage. See Kartekan yesterday, Initially I thought he simply made a big error and understeered into the wall and said to myself, "how the hell do you do that" bringing out the safety car. But ,upon review, it was clear that his front tires were not pointed in the same direction and he had a broken suspension piece. Same thing with Verne at Monza going into T1. Looked like he locked it up badly or hit some oil, but his rear suspension failed causing the spin and crash.

Serge944

Yeah...it wasn't exciting at all. The only cool thing was watching the cityscape from the helicopter footage.