From The Desert to Desert With Potentially the Pass of the Year In-Between

This weekend featured NASCAR at Phoenix, the start of the V8 Supercars season with a set of passes that are early nominees for pass of the year and more head scratching as Formula One testing comes to a close and the first grand prix is a fortnight away.

Starting with NASCAR, it was another good Phoenix race. Not great, but not every race can be great. Kevin Harvick was the top car all day and earned that victory but it wasn't without challenges from Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Jimmie Johnson and Ryan Newman. Harvick joins Earnhardt, Jr. as having locked up a spot in the Chase.

Is this what every week is going to be like? A different driver won't win every week but I am still skeptical this is better than the previous formats of the Chase. I am still skeptical the Chase is the way to go. If the Chase has been so successful, why hasn't NASCAR implemented in the Nationwide Series or Truck Series? And if your argument is that is because the Nationwide Series and Truck Series have close championship battle then I will ask then why hasn't NASCAR tried to make the Cup Series more like the other two instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

As for the new qualifying format, it works but Fox has to learn that it doesn't have to be shown in it's entirety. Fox Sports 1 goes to commercial with 7:25 left in the first segment and comes back with 6:50 remaining. Do they really think we are that stupid? After three and a half minutes of commercial, we only missed 35 seconds? Come on. I can accept missing nine minutes of a half-hour session if it means finding out who wins the pole live and not twenty minutes before it is shown on TV through social media.

One other thing about the new qualifying, the first session is way too long at a half-hour in length. If you have drivers coasting around the bottom of the track like it's keirin on the velodrome at the Summer Olympics, you have a problem. Shorten the segment to ten or fifteen minutes if it means not showing ten to fifteen minutes of drivers trying to cool their cars down.

Pass of the Year Nominees Down Under
Moving on and to Adelaide. The V8 Supercars started their 2014 season this weekend. Race one saw defending champion Jamie Whincup picking up from where he left off and held off teammate Craig Lowndes for the victory. Shane van Gisbergen rounded out the podium with Mark Winterbottom the top finish Ford in fourth. Fabian Coulthard finished fifth ahead of the Nissan of Rick Kelly and Scott McLaughlin finished seventh in the return race for Volvo. Jason Bright, James Courtney and Scott Pye rounded out the top ten. The top Mercedes-Benz was Will Davison in thirteenth.

Race two saw Craig Lowndes take the victory but the battle for second between McLaughlin and Whincup had everyone talking. The Volvo driver led the defending champion at the start of the final lap and Whincup stayed on the bumper of McLaughlin until turn nine where he made a move on the outside. The two drivers ran side-by-side through nine, ten and eleven with Whincup forcing McLaughlin over the curbs and within inches of the barrier and back into third position. But McLaughlin was able to keep Whincup within his sights as they entered the final hairpin. Whincup ran wide and it opened the door for McLaughlin to swoop in and take the second position for Volvo in their second race back on the grid.

Winterbottom and Coulthard finished fourth and fifth again with Chaz Mosert in sixth. Garth Tander finished seventh ahead of the Nissans of Michael Caruso and Todd Kelly. Davison cracked the top ten in his second race for Erebus Mercedes-Benz.

Race three saw a massive accident take out Jason Bright after he flipped twice and landed on his roof. He would be ok. Whincup was leading when he was issued a penalty for a illegal crew member worked on the car. This handed the lead over to Courtney and he was able to hold off a hard charging Lowndes for the victory. Van Gisbergen picked up his second podium of the season with Coulthard finishing fourth. Rick Kelly was the top Nissan in fifth. Tim Slade finished sixth ahead of the Fords of David Reynolds and David Wall. James Moffat finished ninth with Dale Wood in tenth.

Whincup finished fifteenth and was penalized twenty-five points after avoidable contact with Nissan drive Michael Caruso. Lee Holdsworth was the top Mercedes-Benz in sixteenth. Both Volvos of McLaughlin and Robert Dahlgren retired from the final race of the weekend.

Lowndes leads the points standings after round one with 282 points. Coulthard is second, 52 points back. Van Gisbergen is third, 61 back. Rick Kelly is fourth, 84 back and Courtney is fifth, 90 points back after being penalized twenty-five points for avoidable contact in race two. Winterbottom is  93 points back in sixth and Whincup is seventh, 108 points back after his penalty.

V8 Supercars will run their annual non-championship round at the Australian Grand Prix in a fortnight with their next championship round being the Tasmania 400 form Symmons Plains Raceway March 29-30th.

Formula One Testing Wraps Up From Bahrain
The new 1.6 liter, turbocharged V6 engines Formula One has adopted for 2014 has been giving many in the Formula One headaches and has everyone wondering if anyone will run the full distance of the season opener at Melbourne. The Mercedes-powered teams appear to have the upper hand after accumulating 17,994 KM. Ferrari engines were able to accumulate 10,214 KM with two fewer cars than Mercedes (four teams have Mercedes engines, three have Ferrari engines). The four Renault teams struggled to completed 8770 KM in testing.

Felipe Massa was fastest at this final four-day test at Bahrain driving for Williams-Mercedes but the factory Silver Arrows of Lewis Hamilton was only 0.020 seconds back of the Brazilian. Nico Rosberg completed the most laps in preseason testing and was third with Valterri Bottas in fourth. Fernando Alonso rounded out the top five, over a second back of his former Ferrari teammate.

Force India's Sergio Pérez was sixth ahead over two seconds back of Massa with Kimi Räikkönen in seventh with Pérez's teammate Nico Hülkenberg in eighth. Jean-Éric Vergne was the top Renault-powered car in ninth with Daniel Ricciardo rounding out the top ten driving for Red Bull.

Kevin Magnussen was eleventh fastest. The McLaren rookie completed the third most amount of laps in testing, behind only Rosberg and Alonso. The 2013 GP3 champion Daniil Kvyat was twelfth for Toro Rosso ahead of the Sauber-Ferrari of Adrian Sutil and the Marussia-Ferrari of Max Chilton. Jenson Button rounded out the top fifteen.

Jules Bianchi was ahead of Esteban Gutiérrez with Sebastian Vettel over four seconds back and leading five Renaults rounding out the field. Caterham's Marcus Ericsson and Kamui Kobayashi were nineteenth and twentieth with Kobayahsi over five seconds back. The Lotus-Renault of Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado rounded out the test with Grosjean over six seconds back and Maldonado 7.341 seconds back of Massa.

Part of me thinks Red Bull is playing possum with everyone and when the cars touched down in Melbourne they are going to come out guns a blazing and win by a country mile but nothing has been overtly positive out of the Red Bull camp. The Mercedes teams appear to have the most reliable engine and quickest engine and the only team that appears capable of giving them any trouble is Ferrari.

As much as we want to say it is just testing, remember the Brawn GP cars came out and were wicked fast in preseason testing in 2009 and everyone thought it was just going to be testing success and nothing more. Then after winning six of the first seven rounds, Jenson Button was being crowned champion and Brawn GP took the manufactures' title in a cakewalk.

I think it is great to see Williams up at the front after the disastrous 2013 season and it would be cool to see if Hülkenberg break through and not only get a podium but get a victory but I am hoping the Renault teams are able to pick it up over the final two weeks so the gap from top to bottom isn't so great.

But there is always the chance something goes wrong in the race when the cars are going at the maximum and stressing every component to the car that just can't be replicated in a test. You could see teams be able to do 56 laps at Melbourne but have it all go horribly wrong two laps until the finish.

It's all very intriguing. Speed will not matter if your car isn't reliable and reliability hasn't been this tested in Formula One in such a long time.