With the first race of the season having courted a fair amount of controversy both from the new cars and their (lack of) noise and off track decisions changing the podium, will we see a better race in Malaysia and more importantly more cars see it through to the end of the race? With a total of 9 DNF’s in race 1, unexpected problems saw former World Champions including pole sitter Lewis Hamilton and current Champion Sebastian Vettel retire early with technical issues with the new V6 turbo engines.
The GP on Sunday at Sepang is a favourite of Red Bull Racing who had pole and the 1st and 2nd steps of the podium last year but will reliability issues again cloud their day in Malaysia? Can we rely on Nico Rosberg to pull another win out of the hat for Mercedes and will McLaren again please their fans with more trophies for the team? Lotus had a very poor start to the 2014 season with 2 DNFs due to failure of the ERS (Energy Recovery System) on both car and we’d expect they’d been working all hours to solve these reliability issues.
4 of Sunday’s line-up have won the Malaysian GP in their careers to date; Raikkonen, Alonso, Vettel and Button. Will the heat of Malaysia be their downfall or will we see them back on form? Lights are out at 4pm local time on Sunday and with the pole man having won this race 8 of the 16 GPs’ in this Kuala Lumpur circuit’s history we’ll see if the new rules can keep this form ongoing or it throws another spanner in the works.
