When has Adrian Newey ever designed an engine? He never did in his years working in CART nor F1, that’s for sure. He may well be the greatest aerodynamicist in F1 history, but he isn’t a miracle worker.

Counterpoint: Nope. Not even a little bit.

I watched it live on ESPN2 starting at around 11 am ET. Maybe they cut it up for the rebroadcast.

I live in New York. Here it was the Sky feed non-stop ( I only switched over during the formation lap, so I don’t know what preceded it ) with a Mother’s logo in the top right corner of the screen saying that they sponsored the commercial free race coverage.

ESPN’s coverage of the first race was a total disaster and they issued an apology and promised to do better. If they intend to keep going with uninterrupted coverage with a sponsor logo in the top right corner of the screen, which is what they did here, then I’m all for it.

Yeah, I think it looks good also. A much better face than the current one.

Judge at least gets walks to help offset his strikeouts, but Stanton doesn’t so his numbers are just that much worse. interestingly these two are taking the heat off of Sanchez, who’s been worse than both ( although he’s been good behind the plate so far ).

Gary Sanchez has been off to an abysmal start as well. Aaron Boone could have pinch-hit Sanchez for Austin Romine ( this would be a no-brainer most of the time ) last night and chose not to. Not because they were resting Sanchez, but because he’s been terrible at the plate.

Honda hired him last year or maybe the year before. They still haven’t quite got the reliability worked out, given the retirement in Melbourne, but they seem to be competitive on power now at least.

The wheel nut was loosened. They just couldn’t get it off.

It’s been clear for a while that Mercedes customer teams don’t exactly get equal goods. I would suspect that Force India and Williams don’t have a ‘party mode’ for when they need extra giddyup either.

The car has to be retired if released with a loose wheel. That’s why both Haas cars immediately parked and retired in Australia.

It’s not like there were so many people around that he could’t have seen the one on the ground being tended to. Not rushing over to help ( like he’d even know what to do ) doesn’t really say anything about his character one way or the other - maybe he just didn’t want to get in the way, but I think he definitely saw…

If the green light doesn’t go on before the stop is done, there’s no issue. The automatic release system isn’t accurate enough.

Indycar still has air jacks in the cars. They never removed them. The jacks themselves rarely fail, but the air hoses do from time to time.

I think the Ferrari PU is far better than the Renault ( It might even be better than the Merc this year, though time will tell ). I also think Ferrari’s dampers and other mechanical bits are better and Haas get’s to use all of those things too. McLaren and even Renault don’t have the budget to make up for that with…

They need to ditch the unreliable green lights ( which I believe have no standard and are different from team to team ) and go back to a dude holding a sign in front of the driver’s face. It may be slower, but unsafe releases seem to occur more often with the new system.

They should have an award opposite the DOTD ( a Bad DOTD, if you will ) for performances like Verstappen needlessly squeezing Hamilton ( to his own detriment ) or Grosjean needlessly backing up his teammate and probably denying him 4th place.

I don’t think McLaren will finish best-of-the-rest ( I think Haas or Renault will ) But I do think that beyond Williams, who look totally lost, the rest of the midfield should be pretty close. Of the drivers outside of the big 3: I do think Alonso could possibly be the highest scoring this season, but KMag likely will…

I would assume midfield isn’t quite where they’re aiming. They may be able to get a win or two in the next few years if they get really lucky, but standing on the podium may be an ambitious enough target for now.