Lewis Hamilton and Tony Stewart 'Car Swap' Mobil1 Event

Few days after another sub-par performance at the Canadian Grand Prix, Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton took part in a 'car swap' event on June 14th with NASCAR Racer, Tony Stewart. (This event was initially scheduled for July). 

Both drivers expressed admiration of each other's skills and seemed to enjoy their time in their 'borrowed' cars. Here are videos of the event (via TheNARLtv YouTube channel)

Chinese GP: Qualifying

Qualifying for the Chinese GP was an interesting affair with lots of 'surprises' - not least the McLaren race suits*. Q1 casualties were the likely bunch of Hispanias, Virgins, Team-Lotus and .....a Red Bull? Mark Webber's car had been plagued with technical problems with KERS and just didn't have the pace on the day to get out of Q3. This meant both Williams' and Saubers (and 3 F1 rookies) made it past Q1.

Q2 also threw up some anomalies with Heidfeld, Sutil and Schumacher being outshined by their 'less experienced' team-mates. Renault's Petrov developed problems with his gear-box in Q2 and the session was red-flagged (stopped) with 2mins 2sec remaining.
This could have inadvertently ruined his team-mate's (Heidfeld's) Qualifying session as he hadn't set a time by then. The session resumed with Perez first out of the pits and several other drivers raring to get a good lap in before the end of Q2. However Heidfeld needn't have bothered because his best time was only enough to move him from 17th to 16th. Drivers who failed to progress into Q3 were SUT(11), PER(12), KOB(13), SCH(14), BARR(15), HEI(16) and MAL(17).

With Petrov's car out of action, it was left to 9 drivers in Q3 to populate the top 9 positions on the starting grid for tomorrow's race.

Welcome back, Formula 1

133 days have passed since we packed up in Abu Dhabi on 14th November 2010. In case you have been stuck in a cave somewhere, here are 133 things that have happened in F1 during the 'unusually and unbearably long' off-season period, which thankfully ends on 27th March 2011 in Australia. Enjoy!

Cars

1. McLaren launches MP4-26 in Berlin on 4th February 2011

2. Ferrari’s F150* makes it debut in Italy

3. Renault F1 (Fernando Alonso and Flavio Briatore’s old team) is now called Lotus-Renault and the new car is R31

4. Team Lotus retains its name (for now, pending the High Court hearing to decide whether or not both Lotus entries – Fernandes’ Team Lotus and Lotus Renault GP, formerly Renault F1 – should be permitted to use these names), and their car is T128

5. Virgin racing has new co-sponsor and is now called MarussiaVirgin Racing, 2011 car is the MVR-02

6. Force India’s team-name remains the same, but the new F1 car is called VJM04


7. Williams' new offering is the FW33


8. RB7 is the Red Bull 2011 car


9. Hispania Racing have returned in 2011 with the F111


10. Sauber finally get rid of 'BMW' and their car is called the C30


11. Mercedes GP's "MGP W02" easily wins the trophy for the longest F1 car name


12. Toro-Rosso return in 2011 with the STR6


Rule Changes


13. Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) makes a re-appearance this season


14. Adjustable rear-wings are now allowed