Bahrain

A new season, new drivers, new reasons to cheer people on etc., and if you haven’t chosen which driver to support yet then make sure you do that now using the official driver selection flowchart. Also new this year is the car. It’s got more downforce, more powerful DRS, more flexibility to actually fit drivers of different sizes in and generally more everything fast and good. It also looks and sounds like a cute little cartoon car. Something for everyone. Anyway the drivers apparently love it so at least they’ll all be happy for a few minutes…

Bahrain

A new season,
Full of new hope. What excitement awaits!?
Lap 5: Max is 4 seconds ahead.
Hope gone.

F2 is back! (Is there any other way to start a new-season post, because I seriously haven’t seen one). There’s lots of new people and plenty of familiar faces too, including the full-time return of Juan-Manuel Correa who said he felt more like a rookie than a veteran because so much has changed in F2 since he last raced in the series. Good thing I gave him his own section in F2’s most important flowchart then…

The first race of the season was all about trying to explain the new format, which CEO Bruno Michel promised us would make sense once we actually watched it, but really it was just a distraction from the fact that all the cars are now blue, so not only would we not understand why the drivers were in the grid in the order they were, but we also wouldn’t even know who they were. (I’m just joking guys, I really like the new format and a grid of 18 blue cars)…

F2 is back and so is Sean Gelael, following his strange spine fracturing accident, which means goodbye Vips. Hughes is also out as F2 makes way for its youngest entrant ever in the form of surprise F3 runner-up Théo Pourchaire. Surely a nice warm-up for his 2021 season. Other changes since we last raced include Dan Ticktum’s hair colour and a few driver announcements, but nothing of note…

Normally I wound’t be so excited by an F2 practice, they can seem more like a 45 minute blip on a long weekend of racing. But not this time. This was the first time we got to glimpse the new F2 field out on track (aside from those six full days of testing earlier)…