Brought to you by TJ13 Contributor Mattpt55

Sad Days at Renault

Now that F1 school’s out, and Sakhir is a dusty memory with the drivers off to “train hard” in places like St. Barth’s and St. Moritz, whilst the engineers for Renault and it’s customer teams see how many continuous cycles the espresso machine can run before it bursts into flames, let’s take a brief (and possibly humorous) look at how everyone’s doing at the Winter Break.

Mercedes is like that kid in school who not only started the project when Teacher began talking about it in vague terms months ago, but they also did all the extra credit work and wrote a completely separate paper that wasn’t even asked for but it seemed interesting so they went ahead and did it anyway. Plus, the cutest girl in class is going to the dance with them.

Ferrari is the quiet kid in the corner right now, doing the work well and not saying much, but definitely one you want to keep your eye on.

Red Bull is the clever kid who waited till the last minute and turned in a brilliant assignment, but sadly didn’t read the directions properly because they were in a hurry and now has less than a week to redo what is a month’s worth of work, which sadly means their parents won’t let them go to the dance at all unless they get it all done by… like tomorrow night.

Caterham, on the other hand is the mediocre student who read the directions carefully and followed them to the letter and received a higher grade than anyone would have expected, which is good because frankly, if they brought home another disappointment, their parents were going to take away their Xbox for good, not just during the week, and send them off to military school.

Even Red Bull’s little brother Toro Rosso has done their homework better, as they weren’t trying to be clever and merely knocked out the assignment according to the Teacher’s spec. Now they just need a date and life will be looking much better for them.

On the other hand Sauber is the kid that normally gets very good grades who forgot to proofread and has been sent back to the drawing board.  With a little luck they’ll be able to catch up over the break, but it’s not going to seem like to much of a holiday.

McLaren and Force India are the cool kids riding Mercedes’ coat tails at the moment, already with dates and invited to the party at Mercedes’ house after the dance. But with McLaren getting an unexpected bad mark the last day of classes, they are off to the tutor during break and if it goes badly, their parents might not let them go to the party.

Williams is determined to gain notice by being the hardest working student and as Mercedes et al make plans for the dance, they have booked extra time at the library and are in excellent position to surprise everyone and steal top spot in the class, if Mercedes get too distracted by all the adulation and hoopla and party planning.

Lotus have failed to turn in the assignment altogether but were granted an extension. Unfortunately they forgot about it because they went on a skiing holiday so now they’re in the same boat as Red Bull, except they also got in trouble because they got caught smoking in the restroom. Their parents have completely cancelled the planned vacation and they are “totes” grounded.

And Marussia is the dutiful student who did the assignment in full and then couldn’t get their printer to work so they had their Dad print it at work, except it printed in orange which the teacher wouldn’t accept, but then it didn’t matter because his younger brother drew comics on the back of the first three pages and then the dog chewed on the rest.  And so back to the drawing board as it turns out they hadn’t saved their work properly on the computer and so had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Amazingly, they still managed to turn it in on time and are looking good to get a date for the dance.