Hispania have got Colin Kolles and Geoff Willis. Lotus have Mike Gascoyne. All recognisable names in the worls of F1. To write them off so soon as “dangerous” is crazy in my opinion. Admittedly HRT have had to rush things a bit, but nevertheless their times were less than a second outside the 107% mark and I have no doubt that they will make that up very quickly with the help of Dallara.

I do agree that they would have been better off if they had been allowed to turn up in Barcelona, but that’s the way the financial situation played out. Penalising them at this stage helps nobody. For now I think everyone should be patient and not write them off until they’ve had a chance to show what they can do.

One other point on the driver side is that lack of experience doesn’t seem to historically have been that linked to danger. You couldn’t regard Buemi as a danger, for example- he kept his nose pretty clean in his first year. So did Alguersuari. By comparison Sato, Karthikeyan and others (who did benefit from coming in before the testing ban) were wild and crash-prone in their early days. Pace may be a problem, but safety- I’m not so sure.

(On a side note I am a little bit reminded of the laughs of derision when Vijay took over Spyker, and look at them now!)

I think they may have tried aggregate times one year to get over that problem, but that just ended up confusing; also if somebody had had a serious problem on the first day, again it wasn’t worth them running on the second as they could never make up the difference.

Having seen all the different systems come and go over the years, I firmly believe that the current qualifying system is the best possible one we could have, and I hope they never change it (unless they think of something even better!).

I dont tend to live and breathe the politics of F1 as much, I prefer to know the more racing and tactics side of teams drivers and technical analysis of the pecking order and such thingswhich relate to the racing as a sport, so there may be occasions where I glance over some of the deeper political details, and to be honest F1 has suddenly got alot more un necessarily compicated with laundry being done out in the open rather than behind closed doors, and then released to the public. I mean its not like they actually listen to public opinion on these things, it makes no sense to a tendering process in public, but journalists have to eat, so..

Moreover, i don’t think Senna getting in Vettel’s way and Vettel signaling to him is very strong evidence that HRT shouldn’t be allowed in the sport. And why on earth should the new teams yield if they’re on a hot lap?

Throughout F1 history there have been much slower cars trying to get faster. Seriously, I’m sure the other teams can cope without somebody holding their hands past the new guys.

Anybody you know at FOM who you could point out the lack of TV captions to today?

There were no positions down the left hand side on the world feed so none of us knew what was going on during qualifying!