The Formula One season has lurched to a chaotic start after two races.
The sport’s power teams are in crisis, one of the races finished prematurely due to contentious scheduling, and there is still no decision on whether results from the races in Australia and Malaysia will stand.
The late start also meant that once the storm had largely passed after almost an hour’s wait, encroaching darkness made a restart unfeasible.
Brawn GP’s Jenson Button won both races, making Brawn the first new team to win its opening two GPs since Alfa Romeo won the sport’s first two races in 1950.
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However, Button, Brawn and other top finishers only received half the usual points for Malaysia, as stipulated under F1 rules, because the race went less than three quarters of the scheduled distance.
And that is if those points count at all.
The results from Australia and Malaysia remain provisional pending a ruling of the FIA’s International Court of Appeal in Paris on Tuesday.
Ferrari, BMW, Renault and Red Bull have lodged appeals against stewards’ decisions in Australia and Malaysia to allow Brawn, Toyota and Williams to race with what the four teams claim are rear diffuser designs that breach new aerodynamic regulations.
At the other end of the standings are the power teams: McLaren, with a single point, and Ferrari, which has gone through the opening two races of the season without earning a point for the first time since 1992.
McLaren’s struggles on the track have translated into turmoil off it. Sporting director Dave Ryan, a team employee for 35 years, was fired on Tuesday for deliberately misleading race stewards at a post-race hearing in Australia.
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Next week, Formula One powers could spoil the season by ruling the Jenson Button fairy tale is too good to be true and his back-from-the-dead Brawn GP team has cheated its way to the top of the grid.
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