Inside Line F1 Podcast - Will The FIA Ban The Shoey?

Nico Rosberg is lucky that Mercedes built him a tank that went through the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix undamaged. Rosberg was lucky on multiple other counts too, including that he had a clean getaway (the Mercedes cars can't take that for granted anymore) and the two VSC periods that helped him climb back up the order.

Daniel Ricciardo had a great result to win the race. Will drivers not want to be on the podium with Ricciardo though, given his love for the 'shoey' (gross!)? Mark Webber was smart, he threw away Ricciardo's shoe - the other podium victims need to learn from him. Given how much the FIA loves clamping down on everything that's fun in F1, maybe they will ban the shoey on the podium too? A BIG thank you to Red Bull Racing for allowing Ricciardo and Verstappen to race fair and square. Ricciardo managed to do what not a lot of drivers have done this season - he kept Verstappen behind on-track (he claims to have learnt this from Verstappen himself!)

Lewis Hamilton made the race interesting - not sure if it was thanks to his engine failure, post-race comments (or both!). Hamilton believes that 'something or someone doesn't want him to win this year' - and he's right. We tell you who this person in the Mercedes garage is, who has been mercilessly trying to keep Hamilton from winning.

Nico Rosberg's penalty was strange. It seems that the FIA does not want drivers to overtake on track at all! Rosberg has notched up so many penalties this season that he's halfway to a race ban. Clearly, 'someone or something' is conspiring against him to get him so many penalties!

Hamilton's bad luck was Mercedes' bad luck - they lost their second attempt at equalling the record for the most consecutive wins in Formula 1. Speaking of records, Jenson Button notched up 300 Grand Prix starts - and McLaren celebrated this by turning their paddock into an English pub (luckily no shoeys on offer there).

Ferrari's race was like how their whole season has been - all talk. Surprisingly, Raikkonen is outperforming Vettel. Perhaps Vettel go the Alonso way if Ferrari are unable to deliver a winning package in 2017! Is McLaren now part of the midfield teams with Williams and Force India? If so, they're still at the bottom of that midfield.

BMW recently announced their motorsport program and it doesn't feature F1, but does include Formula E and the WEC. We guess they've been listening to Fernando Alonso's criticism of the sport and decided to stay out!

Here's the big question: Can Hamilton still win the World Drivers' Championship? Of course! Five races, 125 points to go. Let's hope a clutch, an engine or swapping of teams doesn't decide this year's champion.

Suzuka is up this weekend, and it promises to be a real cracker. Will it be a Mercedes 1-2 again, or can Red Bull Racing challenge them?

Tune in!

(Season 2016, Episode 32)

Looking back: the Austrian Grand Prix of 1986

Now 30 years on we presumably can expect a few retro features. There is a consensus that the 1986 F1 season is an all-time classic, and it brings many familiar things to mind to even the fan who was not around at the time to witness it.

This includes not least its extraordinary finale, encapsulated by the oft-repeated footage of Nigel Mansell's exploding Goodyear - the vast shower of sparks and all - on Adelaide's Brabham Straight which helped Alain Prost to a long shot drivers' championship. A title that, still three decades on, is arguably the last claimed not in the best car. Whatever, it was an achievement about as extraordinary for The Professor as the finale that delivered it.

The McLaren team, seen here at Brands Hatch,
was one of the major players in 1986
"McLaren pit 1986 Britain" by Phil - mclaren in
brands hatch pits. Licensed under CC BY 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:McLaren_pit_1986_
Britain.jpg#/media/File:McLaren_pit_1986_Britain.jpg

It's also viewed more broadly as a golden age: rip-snorting turbos and a stellar cast of drivers to tame them. Mansell and Prost we've mentioned, but you can add to it Nelson Piquet and a young Ayrton Senna. It also was a season with a strict in-race fuel limit and many resultant economy runs - some comical last gasps of races too as various cars ran dry - but best not spoil the moment.

One could argue also that competitiveness or variation at the front beyond these names weren't the season's strongest boasts either. That year many spoke of a 'Gang of Five' with Prost's McLaren team mate Keke Rosberg variously added to the quartet mentioned, though perhaps 'Gang of Four' would have been more fitting as Rosberg was the least regular presence among them at the sharp end by a way. Almost never would anyone else beyond this five get a look-in. Yet in among the 1986 rounds was an extraordinary outlying weekend on this front. That in Austria.

Even compared with the later round in Mexico where alone that year one of the usual suspects didn't win, even compared with that finale in Adelaide, this was the weekend of the season that really turned the order onto its head. Though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the result, which in its victor at least looked slightly ordinary. Perhaps that's therefore led to it being forgotten. And a winner whom you'd have got long odds on at the weekend's outset was denied, cruelly, as well as by an unlikely (perhaps absurd) source. Someone would have to remember to purchase a new car battery