F1 2014 Australia

[Harrison]

Simple answer to that is Bernie Ecclestone. His greed is what drives the decisions on where F1 races. No one wants to race in the middle east, but that is where all the oil is coming from and where a handful of oil barons with a passion for fast cars live. Bernie gets a lot of money and they get their own personal race track and event.

Regarding this years cars, I actually think it was exactly the right thing to do, and the right direction to take. V12, V10 and V8 engines are dinosaurs of the old world. They sound great, but they consume a lot of fuel to produce their power. We need modern engine and car technology to move in exactly the direction F1 is taking. To achieve the same performance, but with much smaller engines, producing a lot less CO2 emissions and consuming a lot less fuel. It is amazing to think that this year's 1.6 litre F1 engines are producing the same BHP as last year's 2.4 litre V8s were. But due to the turbo's, with a lot more torque.

We have been seeing similar ideas for engine development in new cars recently too, but F1 will be developing the future road cars energy saving and recovery systems far faster than manufacturers could hope to achieve themselves. It won't be long before we will start seeing the Kers style energy recover on more standard road cars, I'm sure. And I think the way the new F1 engines completely eliminate turbo lag is brilliant (they utilise the turbo energy recover battery to spin up the turbo's turbine when a gear change occurs so it is already up to speed before the revs and exhaust pressure can do it naturally).

Regarding watching F1. The same is true in the UK. If you are a Sky TV Satellite subscriber with the HD package you get a dedicated F1 channel, as I do. But if you don't have Sky then you can't watch it. Instead the BBC channels broadcast a highlights program later in the day showing you the best bits of the race. I would hate to only have access to that. The BBC used to broadcast every race live, but to save money they sold their F1 rights to Sky a couple of years ago. Mad. Although I will admit Sky's F1 coverage is brilliant, and far better than the BBC ever managed.