F1 Season Just One Week Away
The highly anticipated 2010 Formula One drivers championship is just a week away.
The 2010 F1 season will fire up in Bahrain with the first practice on Friday 12 March. The race takes place on Sunday March 14 at 3.00pm local time.
This season sees the return of seven-time F1 drivers champion Michael Schumacher who will be driving for the Mercedes GP team. Schumacher won 92 Grand Prix races before retiring after the 2006 season.
With Schumacher on the grid there will be four f1 driver championship winners in the field. The 2009 winner Jenson Button teams up with the 2008 champion Lewis Hamilton at McLaren while Fernando Alonso, the 2005-06 champion is now driving for Ferrari.
The Red Bull drivers, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel will be hoping to add themselves to the list. Team owner Dietrich Mateschitz expects nothing less.
The 2010 season does not see as many rule changes as in more recent season however there is one big change that radically changes how races will be run. Refueling has been banned in F1. Teams will still need to make pit stops to change tyres but refueling is gone.
After some of the problems last year it is a good thing. It removes the danger factor of something going wrong when a F1 car refuels.
The points system in 2010 also has changed from past seasons. The winner receives a bigger rewards and scoring goes all the way down to position 10. The new F1 points system is as follows.
1st 25, 2nd 18, 3rd 15, 4th 12, 5th 10, 6th 8, 7th 6, 8th 4, 9th2, 10th 1.
For each F1 race weekend each driver will get 11 sets of tyres. Six sets are primes and five are options. Three sets are to be used on Friday and returned used or not. If a driver reaches the Q3 session the tyres they used have to be carried over to start the race.
With engine changes the penalty is 10 grid positions at the race it is changed and at the next race.
An interesting change for 2010 is that the third driver can be used on Friday as long as they use the engine and tyres allocated to the nominated race driver in that team.
The 2010 season sees a few new drivers enter the fold. Williams have a rookie with German Nico Hulkenberg joining the team. Another rookies are Vitaly Petrov from Russia who joins the Renault team, Karun Chandhok with HRT, his teammate is Bruno Senna the nephew of the late great Ayrton Senna. Lucas di Grassi driving for Virgin is another making his F1 debut.
What are you most looking forward to in the Formula One drivers championship for 2010? Do you think Schumacher can make a winning return to F1 and will the champion come from the group of four previous winners or will a new face appear?
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