Opinion: We Have a Title Fight on our Hands

The finger is back. (Photo: CNN)

I finally have some time to myself, so I'll go ahead and put in another post.

I live on the east coast of the United States, so the Australian Grand Prix went lights out at 1 AM my time. But come on, this was the first Formula One race in nearly four months. There was no way I was going to sleep through this one.

I went to bed around 8:00 and set an alarm for midnight, giving me a chance to watch F1 Countdown on NBCSN. Leigh Diffey, David Hobbs and Steve Matchett are better than ever. No wonder Sports Illustrated listed them among the honorable mentions for best broadcast team in 2015.

The race itself started off interesting enough, with Daniel Ricciardo's car getting stuck in sixth gear before the start. He would eventually recover to start the race two laps down, only to retire with similar issues after 25 laps.

But the story of the day was Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari, who used pit strategy to their advantage to take the victory in the opening grand prix of the season. The Mercedes men of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas finished second and third respectively. Vettel, however, proved that this season may not be a walk in the park for Mercedes like they've been used to the past three years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was voted Driver of the Day in a landslide.

(And yes, I went back to bed after F1 Extra and slept in until 8:00am. I actually got a full eight hours of sleep.)

I still want to be cautious with the belief that we could see a legitimate battle for the championship this season. (Keep in mind, Ferrari and Vettel have won early season races before.) But Vettel's pace matched Hamilton's when it mattered most, and a brilliant strategy by Ferrari won them one of the most thrilling races we've seen in a long time. Personally, I cannot wait for China!

Also, in other news, McLaren's Fernando Alonso has just announced his immediate retire...alright, you get the joke. Happy April 1st.

Australian Grand Prix Preview: Wehrlein out, Giovinazzi in

Photo: Formula1.com

Sauber F1 Team have made a driver change before tomorrow's (tonight's? depends where you are in the world...) Australian Grand Prix.

Pascal Wehrlein, still recovering from his accident at the Miami Race of Champions, will be replaced by Ferrari reserve driver Antonio Giovinazzi for the race. Wehrlein received medical clearance to drive this weekend but insists his fitness is still not where it needs to be (again, further proof drivers are athletes). As of today, he plans to be back in the car for China in two weeks.

Giovinazzi will one of two drivers making his Formula One début in Australia (Williams' Lance Stroll is the other). He finished second in the GP2 Championship last season to Frenchman and Red Bull development driver Pierre Gasly, whose hopes of earning an F1 ride this year ended when Toro Rosso re-signed both Daniil Kyvat and Carlos Sainz Jr.

Lewis Hamilton will start on pole alongside Sebastian Vettel. Hamilton's new teammate, Valtteri Bottas, starts third.

Also, as an American, I must give a shoutout to Haas F1 Team. Romain Grosjean starts sixth tomorrow, which is where he finished for Haas at Australia last season.

I've Got a New Blog! Again!

Ten years ago last summer, the Pixar movie Cars was released. While it was not Pixar's most critically acclaimed production of all time, it certainly had a major effect on my life. If you know me well, you probably know where I'm going with this...

I started out as a huge NASCAR fan. That's probably unsurprising, since that's the racing series on which a major portion of Cars is based. The movie came out in June 2006, but it wasn't until October 8 of that year that I watched my first NASCAR race, the 2006 UAW-Ford 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. I even wrote the linked Wikipedia article on the race, promoted it to Featured Article status, and got it onto the Main Page this fall as "Today's Featured Article" on the ten-year anniversary of the race. (Yes, I have way too much spare time on my hands.)

Photo I took at Dover in 2012 of Kurt Busch

driving to the garage after an engine failure

Next Memorial Day, May 27, 2007, my dad flipped the television to ABC to show me the 91st Indianapolis 500. It didn't take long for me to get hooked to IndyCar either.

It wasn't until a couple of years ago, however, that I really started to get into the true pinnacle of motorsport worldwide, Formula One. I had always had a slight idea of what was going on but I wasn't truly following the sport nearly as much as I do now. For example, I knew Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber were rivals at Red Bull Racing, but I would have had no clue what you were talking about if you had told me "Multi-21." When I visited my relatives in London over Easter Break in 2015, I found out Formula One was (and is) just as big of a thing over there as NASCAR is in the States, if not bigger. Once I started learning the basics of the series, all the teams (or constructors), and all the drivers, I was hooked again.

Nowadays, I'll watch anything with four (or two) wheels that goes fast, but these are the three series I follow most. So I decided to start (yet another) blog where I can give my opinions and two cents on what's going on in the world of racing. (I don't want to fill up my personal blog, Schneider Speaks, with nothing but motorsports posts.) Welcome to a new room in my Internet house. Pardon the dust while I work on some formatting...