donal's blog

F1 is back with a bang... and the changes for the 2008 season have had a dramatic affect on today's Australian GP... Just 7 cars finished the race which saw plenty of driver mistakes. Both Ferrari drivers had bad days with both Massa and Raikkonen making mistakes which saw them in the gravel pit. Indeed, Massa's demise was probably related to the collision which put Coulthard out on lap 26. Raikkonen missed breaking zones, spun his Ferrari while trying to take Timo Glock. The pundit's conclusion on the Massa / Coulthard collision is that Coulthard should have left Massa more room... I disagree! Coulthard was quite right to keep his position and Massa probably overcooked it just a tiny bit. He definitely didn't deserve to be taken out as he was having a good race. Timo Glock's spectacular spin on lap 44 robbed Kovalainen of 2nd place but resulted in Raikkonen, Kovalainen and Alonso being line astern after the 3rd safety car. This resulted in some good overtaking... K

I happened to be flying through New York's JFK airport last sunday and got delayed over an hour on landing and again on departure. The pilot of our flight mentioned that there was some sort of security incident but there was no mention on the JFK website or in any of the main news sites... We could see a LOT plane in a secluded area of the airport surrounded by a bunch of police / security vehicles and it looked pretty serious... It turns out, the flight had the Polish Prime Minister (Donald Tusk) on it and someone had phoned in a bomb alert for the flight (it turned out to be a hoax). the only websites to report this news (which delayed 100+ flights) appear to be polish websites (and 2 of the new york papers)... very little mention of it in the mainstream news... http://www.poland.pl/news/article,Polish_PM_opens_visit_to_the_United_States,id,318420.htm http://www.polskieradio.pl/thenews/human-interest/?id=77632 http://www.nypost.com/seven/03102008/news/regionalnews/polish_pm_in_jf