From Behind the Glasses
Abu Dhabi served up the worst Grand Prix for quite some time, defined by Vettel driving away at the front with ridiculous pace and very little else happening. This is the fifth time Abu Dhabi has been on the calendar and it's simply terrible. Every single race at the circuit has been boring and today it was borderline unwatchable, with the only overtakes coming in the huge DRS zones as opposed to anywhere else, and the stewards seemingly incapable of identifying when an advantage had been gained by going off the track and cutting a corner. I like Adrian Sutil, but the fact is he wasn't on the track when he gained two places and deserved a penalty for it. Abu Dhabi is just a showpiece and gimmick, a place clearly where lots of rich people rub elbows and pay no attention to the track itself. The facility is an incredible sight without a doubt, but it's all shirt and no trousers, with no excitement generated by the awful Tilke-designed circuit itself that added the crown jewel to his list of failures on the Formula 1 calendar. The transition from day to night is about as relevant to Formula 1 as off-roading, since it is simply somewhere Formula 1 cars do not and should not go. If you want to watch all-weather racing, through day and night, go and watch endurance racing in sports cars like the Le Mans 24 Hour (which sure as hell provided better racing in the first 10 minutes of this year's race than anything produced by Formula 1 this weekend). It just angers me so much that terrible tracks like this are on the calendar, and this was far from Hermann Tilke's first failure in designing for Formula 1. He was allowed to carry on inflicting this woe upon us and it has degraded the sport and spectacle. I could list eight tracks I would immediately delete from the calendar, contracts be damned, and Abu Dhabi would be number one on that list, followed by seven other Tilke monstrosities. If Formula 1 management don't take a view on improving racing in Formula 1 shortly, it will go into the decline we saw during the Schumacher years. How can it be the pinnacle of motorsport when it races on tracks that don't challenge car or driver, lining its pockets at the cost of the thrilling racing that should define it? Just think; San Marino, that incredible track draped in so much F1 history from the glory of wheel-to-wheel action between Schumacher and Alonso in 2005-2006 to the horrendous tragedy of the Black Weekend in 1994, is not on the calendar yet a track like Abu Dhabi is taking up a spot.