England v Germany

I assume you're well aware of the events of Sunday afternoon, as Fabio handed in his resignation! I don't think I'll say anymore, leave it to my World Cup Review.
However another England Germany duel was played out on the Spanish streets at the 2010 Valencia Grand Prix. Before discussing the race, clearly the most important thing is that Mark Webber walked away completely unhurt from his accident. Ironically an almost mirror image incident occurred in the GP2 sprint race in the morning, when Josef Kral ran over Rodolfo Gonzalez at the end of the next straight along. Obviously the GP2 cars aren't quite as sturdy as their F1 counterparts and as such Josef was rushed to hospital but again I'm very pleased to report he too is absolutely fine.
Before the race, it was refreshing to see some football related banter for Jake Humphrey and Martin Brundle with Sebastian Vettel and Timo Glock respectively, where Timo presented Martin with a German football shirt on the grid.
Now to the on track action, where Sebastian, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso (how dare he intervene on the rivals big day!) were all going for it in the opening stages and a potentially good, clean race looked likely to unfold. OH how wrong was I!!!! The safety car is clearly the talking point of this race, where I have to say in my view the blame has to lie at Mark's door. Heikki was defending his position, and as the Red Bull is miles faster than the Lotus then why Mark needed to follow Heikki's move to the left for that extra bit of slipstream baffles me, as he would have had the position wrapped up by staying put on the inside!
This safety car had many knock on effects, too many for me to even mention, but the main one obviously involves Lewis and Fernando. Now where to start tackling this, Lewis clearly from the replay overtook the safety car so is penalised, so everything's fine, well no! Firstly, I don't really understand why what Lewis did was dangerous, as had he not hesitated he would have crossed the safety car line before the safety car, it comes down to having to draw the line somewhere I guess. Secondly, had he remained behind the safety car then he would have been back in 8th place, or whatever was one place ahead of Fernando, at the restart, so at risk in England of causing uproar (although just consider if the positions were reversed), Fernando has a very valid point. Ferrari always have to blow things out of position however, and to call the race 'manipulated' is absolute rubbish! Whilst the stewards did nothing wrong and followed the procedure for dealing out punishments, the fact remains, like Spa 2008, for Lewis to lose nothing from the drive through clearly means the punishment is not befitting of the crime. Perhaps the penalties that can be dished out need to be revised, and once again 2010 throws up another example of how the rules aren't right........
What made a refreshing change, was that by handing out 5 second penalties to all those speeding during their safety car inlaps was to me a fair penalty, in the fact that by looking at the laptimes against the 'delta' (target) time, on average these drivers were about 5 seconds faster.
Another congratulations must be given to Kamui Kobayashi for an excellent drive in a highly ridiculed Sauber car and he was easily able to keep Jenson Button at bay, whilst overtaking Fernando, just to make him feel better!, and Sebastien Buemi at the end for 7th place.
It seems the football was on everyone's mind though as amusingly both Sebastian and Jenson were glued to a screen out of shot at the side during the press conference!!
So it was Germany's day, and after 24 years it seems Diego Armando Maradona will be supported by England fans, whilst fittingly the F1 season moves on to Silverstone.