Well, personally, while I've always liked Hulkenberg but I'll be cheering both Force Indias on tomorrow, even though we may not see either of them.
On a more serious note, this is Salah Abbas Habib protesting before he was killed last night: http://twitpic.com/9cb6sd R.I.P.
Ross Brawn and Martin Whitmarsh agree with many in being stupefied at Yvette Cooper and Ed Milliband calling for the event to be cancelled after it had already started. Were they not paying attention a week or a month ago or are all their policies based on Twitter trends? Andrew Benson's BBC version includes the clip from Question Time when Yvette Cooper got tongue-tied calling for Button, Hamilton and di Resta to stay at home. Another BBC report says the Force India team was "close to unravelling" following the firestorm incident, and hence cancelling FP2 was the right decision:
Typical Labour, always quick to leap on a bandwagon. If they truly wanted the event to be cancelled, then they should have spoken out last wednesday/thursday, the only real opportunity to cancel the race.
Perhaps, like me, they thought someone would have the sense to stop this shameful show and reacted when they realised that things were just going to carry on regardless. But there's no point in appealing to people who have no shame and no conscience and that, for me, is why they were foolish to try.
This is sick... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Fj7A930wBJ4 How would Bernie feel if the police were groping and fondling Tamara and Petra?
Yeah - the Bahrainis were none too keen on letting non-F1 journos in. Dr Ala'a Shehabi has allegedly also been arrested tonight.
Jonathan Miller ‏ @millerC4 I've been released with my crew. Breakneck drive to Bahrain airport in police van. Being deported now.
They took a risk: "Miller said his team had come in 'under the radar' and had been filming discreetly without accreditation." (The Guardian) The race seems to have been such a success that Ecclestone thinks it will remain on the calendar "forever", after all - "there is no such thing as bad publicity,” he said.
It's clear the demonstrators are not protesting F1 as such, but their government. If they increase the scale of their activities whilst the TV cameras are in town, then that's their decision but it's surely a deliberate one to take advantage of potential publicity. It's probably the case is it not that some of the demonstrators WELCOME F1's arrival precisely because it brings world wide recognition of their cause? I do agree F1 is about money but then, that's always the case, wherever it goes. You could argue that F1 & other sports shouldn't do business with morally suspect regimes in the first place, but the point is that once you you have a contract and a scheduled event, is it the right thing to do to cancel or not and that's a tricky one. Did the boycott of the Moscow Olympics achieve anything? I doubt it. Let's not forget that behind the call for democracy is a sectarian divide within the country's religion. If we're talking moral significance, I'm not sure much support would be given to protests by members of the Church of England against the presence of Roman Catholics in the Government if they happened in this country. I accept that we have a freely elected government and the Bahrainis don't of course, but that's true across many of the Gulf states. The issue of safety for those at the circuit is a judgement call for F1. I'd argue that the safety of the Bahraini citizens generally is primarily the responsibility of those organising the demonstrations and of the Bahrani government, not F1. It's most important you don't take comfort from the fact that China is peaceful if that peace is based upon a massive system of suppression. It just means their oppression is more effective!
Eric Boullier can FRO. The race organisers politicised the event by running the 'UniF1ed' campaign and Ecclestone backed them up by offering opposition leaders an F1 press conference.
Sorry to be annoying and harp on about Bahrain but the footage of disturbances during the F1 GP weekend that the team that was arrested smuggled out has been released by C4. Also, nothing to do with F1 or Bahrain, just an interesting parallel: Tear gas used by police against protestors.
