First A1GP win for Team GB
I know I've really neglected A1GP since the middle of the first season, so posting about it now that we are two-thirds of the way through the second season will probably seem a bit opportunistic, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity of congratulating Team GB and Oliver Jarvis on their first win in Mexico.
I've witnessed several A1GP races now where things went wrong just as GB driver Robbie Kerr was in a good position and many more where the GB car ran reliably and nothing went wrong, but France (in season 1) or Germany (in the current season) just had too much pace to be caught. By contrast, in this weekends meeting everything went smoothly for GB, the car had good pace and equally important, almost every other country had some disaster befall them.
The start of the sprint race saw Mexic get squeezed at the rolling start, touching Brazil's rear and spinning them into Germany. Brazil and Germany had to retire but Mexico only needed a new front wing and was able to claim the fastest lap later on in that race, collecting the only point they would see during the meeting. Fortunately Malaysia's Alex Yoong and GB's Oliver Jarvis got away ahead of all that and stayed one and two for the remainder of the sprint. The sprint race scores down to 6th place this season (was 10 in season 1), so there aren't so many points available in that race (although all points are welcome!), but the most important thing is, it put GB second on the grid for the much longer feature race.
The feature race uses a standing start and in that Malaysia had clutch problems. Poor Alex Yoong was down in 7th by the time he actually got going. Malaysia's loss was very much GB's gain. Jarvis got away with a handy lead, followed by USA. And barring the change in positions inevitable during the pitstops, this is how it stayed for the rest of the race. In fact the cameras spent little time covering Team GB and USA's race because there was much more challenging driving going on behind. There were plenty of the order changes that set A1 apart from certain other forms of motorsport - New Zealand, Mayalsia and Portugal ran together and swapped positions during the second half of the race. But at the front, things were more like Formula 1 with GB and USA maintaining almost the same lap times and gap lap after lap with South Africa a bit further back. In the commentary Ben Edwards tried to put "the curse of Murray Walker" on Jarvis, but it didn't work :) There were no punctures or other random problems to stop him and at last GB have their first win.
The points from the 2nd in the sprint and the win in the feature race lift GB up to third in the championship behind Germany and New Zealand (both cars being prepared by David Sears of Supernova fame). For what is a much more independent operation, GB's 3rd place in the championship is pretty credible. Of course that shouldn't be an excuse for not regularly challenging for wins, but it's just the way it is when you're competing agains a two-car team run by the guy who's cars dominated Formula 3000 (A1GP's cars being a development of the old Lola F3000 chassis).
I don't know how Robbie Kerr will have felt watching this win from the pits. He's come close a few times and put in decent drives in many more races. He so wanted to take GB's first win and while I'm sure he is glad for the team, it must be a bit gutting seeing a team mate take the win.