Stats

The 2013 Chinese GP was Fernando Alonso’s 200th race start and it went a lot better than his 200th race a few weeks ago in Malaysia. Alonso won the race from 3rd on the grid, his 31st race win and 10th for Ferrari.

MADE IN CHINA. The Shanghai International Circuit is one of five circuits on the calendar with “International Circuit” in the name. A slightly pointless stat but something that irritates me about modern circuits.

Pay drivers! Everyone loves to moan about them and then there’s always someone that mentions Schumacher paid for his seat at Jordan.

Buckets of rain! Many safety cars! Cars sliding off everywhere! None of that happened this year, a fairly dry Malaysian GP with just a damp start. Sebastian Vettel won from pole position for the 20th time, behind just Ayrton Senna (29 wins from pole) and Michael Schumacher (39 wins from pole). Webber won’t be pleased however, he could have won his 10th race at his 200th Grand Prix had Vettel followed orders.

The 2013 Malaysian GP should be a pretty interesting race, not sure on the weather, probably wet, but it will be hot and humid as always. It will be the 15th race around the 5.543km long, 15 corner Sepang International Circuit. The race will be 56 laps and 310.408km and Mark Webber & Fernando Alonso’s 200th Grand Prix and potentially Webber’s 10th race win.

The F1 season is back and off to a pretty good start, three of the last six races in Australia have now been won from pole position, and four from the front row. Räikkönen however won from 7th on the grid, the last time anyone won from further back in Australia was Coulthard in 2003, Kimi’s teammate at the time.

It’s been a while since I’ve done the pre-race stats, hope I haven’t forgotten how! The Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit is a 5.303km circuit with 16 corners. The race will be a distance of 307.574km long after 58 laps. In the last five Australian GPs, three have been won from pole position, and three wins from Jenson Button.

Pre-season testing is finally over, I’m completely ignoring all actual times as they’re pretty much irrelevant. Laps and total distance is what I’ve been looking at, gives some idea of car reliability at least. The cars covered a total of 49947.273km during the 12 days of winter testing, that’s larger than the circumference of the Earth and almost 40% of the race distance of all cars in 2012.

Following the success of Danica Patrick last week at the Daytona 500 I thought I'd write about all the women drivers of F1, past, present and possibly future. There have only been five women enter an F1 race, with just two actually starting a race and only one finishing in a points scoring position.

Last season I made quite a few F1 predictions on Twitter, including the obvious Vettel/Red Bull championship, I also predicted podiums for both Grosjean and Pérez and a first win for Rosberg, with a few stats to back up the claims. Now it's time for some predictions on the 2013 season.