RandoEFC

Tempted to do a save where I only buy domestic players at some point, means I have to commit to one club when I usually prefer to move every 3-4 years though...

Yep, people often mouth off about kick off times in England but La Liga have been whoring out every single match to be on at a different time every weekend causing Friday night kick offs and 11am starts on Saturday and Sunday routinely. I'm sure we'll catch up soon.

Hope they're more Leclerc than Hartley. Will make my mind up on them based on their performance on and off the track in F1 rather than listening to what's gone before.

Ferrari and Mercedes bashing the laps in already.

What's killed some of my enthusiasm for F1 in recent years is the gulf redeveloping between the top teams and the rest. I'd love to see it like 2007-2008 again where if one of the fastest four cars spun at the start or lost a front wing they'd have to fight just to get back into the points. Nowadays if Bottas loses half a lap with a puncture you know he'll be 6th again by the halfway point. I remember in 2008 especially that if you were a Williams or a Honda you'd struggle to get into Q2 most weeks like the Toro Rosso or Sauber drivers today, but with one wet race or safety car you could suddenly get 4th or 5th if you kept your head straight and drove well. DRS is part of the problem as it makes recovery drives much easier but even without DRS, at most tracks it would be pretty easy for a top three car to cruise past the entire midfield without much resistance. Hopefully this year the Renault, Force India, McLaren, Alfa Romeo, Haas league of cars is more like 0.7-0.8s slower than the top teams rather than almost 2 full seconds.

My Spanish moneyball save was alright but now I'm looking for some inspiration. Any ideas for a good save? Not so much taking over a specific club, but a more general challenge...

@Storts you go to Cambridge often?

When we were kids my Dad used to take us out on a Saturday afternoon so my Mum could listen to the Cambridge game at home and type up her match report. These afternoons often consisted of us walking into TV shops and my Dad getting Ceefax up to check the scores and see if it was 'safe to go home' .

Hamilton's Dad famously worked several jobs to support Lewis' motorsport career. He wouldn't have done it if Lewis wasn't as good as he was. Even in F1, he has had to scrap at times. He's hardly the first talented rookie to get a shot at a top team straight away because he was that good. He drove a dog of a car in 2009 and has rarely had a team mate that hasn't pushed him. Alonso, Button and Rosberg are all world champions and all of them even finished above Lewis in the championship once. It's not as if he's often had the number one status to help him out either, he's had to earn superiority and the right to having a rear gunner at times in his teams. I don't like him but he's clearly improved as a driver throughout his career as he used to make mistakes and rash decisions all the time. Let's not rewrite history based on his weird behaviour off the track.

It's class that these teams are setting things like this up all the way down the series.

Williams dominated the sport for much of the 80s and 90s, and are probably the last "proper" racing team left on the grid that haven't sold out to a manufacturer, or become a highly commercialised conglomerate in their own right like McLaren. It's sad but it's starting to look like they'll join Lotus, Tyrrell, Jordan, Brabham and the rest on the scrap heap before long. They've had a great run to be fair but if Claire Williams isn't able to emulate what her father was able to do with his ingenuity and that of the people around him, there's no shame in that. We have Haas and Manor to carry the torch for the independent teams I guess .

2010: one of my favourite and most memorable Australian GPs. One of the years I actually delivered on my promise of getting up at 4am to watch the race in full. Memorable as Jenson Button, who moved to McLaren to partner Lewis Hamilton that summer, defied the doubters and critics and delivered the team's first victory of the year. This race wasn't the opener in 2010. Also notable were Vettel's brake failure while leading in a race he'd probably have won otherwise, and Kubica taking 2nd place in the Renault pretty much on merit.

Does it send out a message? Is this the third case of clear diving working in a teams favour since the start of last season? Niasse, Lanzini and Gayle have been randomly chosen as the FA favour making an example out of someone reasonably high profile but not big enough that there'll be significant kickback, rather than tackling the problem with a consistent approach.

Ridiculous. If they want to do a slap on the wrist and correct their rules to stop it from happening again then fine but you can't fine someone for breaking what essentially amounts to a gentleman's agreement.

Bremen 2-0 Stuttgart Bayern 2-0 Hertha BSC Gladbach 2-1 Wolfsburg Freiburg 0-1 Augsburg Mainz 1-1 Schalke Düsseldorf 3-0 Nürnberg Hannover 2-2 Frankfurt Dortmund 3-2 Leverkusen Leipzig 2-1 Hoffenheim