Australian Grand Prix : Preview

The 2014 FF1M Season finally gets underway at the Albert Park Circuit in Melbourne this weekend.

The Victoria circuit is the traditional opening race of the season. In fact, the only time that Albert Park has not hosted the opening race of FF1M was in 2006 when the opening race was staged in Bahrain.

Melbourne was the capital of Australia between 1901 and 1927, and is the only city on earth to host an FF1M World Championship Grand Prix, a Tennis Grand Slam, Olympic Games and Commenwealth Games.

The 5.3 kilometre Albert Park circuit played host to the first ever race of FF1M in 1996. Michael Schumacher started that race from Pole Position in the AquinoPlus but retired from the race leaving Maestro Motorsport’s Mika Hakkinen to capitalise and take victory.

This season we’re going to be looking back at the 1998 FF1M Season, starting with the opening race at the Albert Park circuit. A race which happens to be FF1M’s most viewed race on YouTube. As had been the case at the inaugural event in 1996, Michael Schumacher started from Pole Position alongside Mika Hakkinen with the two drivers now team mates at Dodgem Racing. The race has been re-edited and can be viewed below.

Last season’s race meanwhile saw eventual champion Kimi Raikkonen dominate the event taking pole position, winning the race and setting the fastest lap in a race dominated by unreliability which saw only 8 cars finish. It was the only time during the season that Pedersen would score any points with Kamui Kobayashi and Bruno Senna finishing 7th and 8th respectively.

This season Pedersen will be hoping that they wont need such unreliability to score points with championship runner up Romain Grosjean joining the team. Grosjean’s old team Tornado meanwhile have looked slow in testing, with team boss Tobias talking down the teams chances in the coming season.

At the front the favorites are undoubtably the Gojira of Lewis Hamilton and the Willows of Nico Rosberg and Fernando Alonso and the season ahead promises to be a fascinating battle across the coming season.