It’s been a long time coming, but the first Grand Prix of the 2009 season is almost upon us.

This is the first race in an awfully long time where I won’t be automatically supporting David Coulthard following his retirement at the end of last season.

It begs the question as to who I should follow this time round - or in fact is it really necessary to follow anyone in particular?

After the Italian GP at the weekend, I wrote about how I felt Lewis Hamilton took a few unnecessary moves with his style of driving during the race.

Obviously if you want to win then you have to take risks, but these moves don’t really fall into that category - they weren’t daring lunges up the inside to pass people, they were what I would consider fairly simple yet inconsiderate driving incidents.

Given Hamilton’s track record with the stewards, I would have thought it in his best interests to stay well clear of any controversial incidents but that just doesn’t seem to be his way.

During yesterday’s Bahrain Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton managed to smash his McLaren straight into the back of Fernando Alonso’s Renault whilst accelerating out of a corner.

It’s not the first time two cars have had a coming-together like this, but it is mighty unusual for it to happen which caused a wide range of “reasons” to be put forward in explanation.

From Lewis’s onboard camera it looked like he was simply faster than Alonso and didn’t move to the side in time to overtake, therefore ending up hitting the Renault.  Why would he do that though?  Who knows, he certainly wouldn’t have done it on purpose so presumably he just misjudged things - in other words he made a mistake.

The hot topic of the day is of course what happened in qualifying for the Malaysian GP earlier on today.

The session was a little mixed up due to the constant threat of rain which ensured most of the teams went out earlier in each session than usual to put in a decent time in case the heavens really did open - which they didn’t in the end.

I think I’m destined to fund fault with every F1 magazine I ever read!  I’m not really the type to complain too much, although reading this blog you would be forgiven to think the opposite!

As the new season gets underway this weekend, I decided to splash out on Autosport so I could soak up the info in their F1 Season Preview magazine.  So with all good intentions I have been making my way through it and my break away from reading such magazines meant I was actually learning things and being reminded of things I had forgotten.