The inspiration for this blog entry is this week's Thursday Thoughts question, posed by Maverick at Sidepodcast:

"Which blog article or articles have you written that you were most pleased with writing and why?"

This is a tough question for me. In the 1301 days since I started blogging, I've written hundreds of entries, some of which have pleased me greatly for different reasons.

In chronological order, the blog entries that have most pleased me are:

Renault and long-term driver strategy - April 29, 2007

This entry broke some boundaries for me. I'd happily discussed general F1 matters, stuff I'd done and stuff relating to Spyker, but this was the first time I'd done a blog entry at length on a team with no particular connection to the one I supported. Also, it was the most speculative blog entry I'd done up to that point.

Writing the entry entailed a lot of consideration of consequences and getting into the mindsets of various people to figure out what the situation was most likely to become. Getting my first link from another blog gave me a lot of confidence (thank you, Ollie!) It was also the entry that "launched" the blog into the minds of readers and established its reputation - I'd been writing articles nearly nine months with a readership in single digits up to that point.

To celebrate, I've reserved April 29 for Renault strategy discussions ever since. One Year On and Two Years On describe Renault's path to stagnancy pretty well, but I feel neither of them are quite as good as the original.

Spyker, Albers and the search for profits - July 10, 2007

This was the first time I felt that I'd managed to make a series work (later entries include driver speculation, sponsorship cookery and a thinly-veiled bit of Winklehock cheerleading. It wasn't a formal series; it just so happened that the Albers affair inspired me to write large amounts about the intersection of money and driving.

As Media Collide (Part 1) - October 26, 2007

I really enjoyed doing the thinking for this one and the ideas just flowed onto the screen. Unfortunately the FOM haven't implemented any of these ideas yet... (Oh, and it's a three-part series, with instalments on the FIA and Mosley on TV).

OK, Now I Believe The Rumour - January 10, 2008

Scoop by hairdo. That is all.

Racing For Ethics - February 24, 2008

This is my favourite blog entry of all. It started out with a news story, steamed in my head for three weeks and after a lot of passionate typing, resolved itself as a call for morality unfolding through the prism of festivals gone wrong, business "ethics" and counter-productive visas.

I felt incredible after I'd finished. Even more so when I saw that my research had caused fellow fans' thinking, and possibly behaviour, to change. Two years after I wrote it, I still smile - and try, so far in vain, to write so well again.

Pros and Cons of Driver Hierarchical Arrangements - July 16, 2008

This was an entry where I felt I made a distinctive contribution to the understanding of a concept in F1. I looked at how teams tended to structure their driver arrangements, categorised them and drew up advantages and disadvantages. While that may sound simple, it is also something I've not seen elsewhere before or since - and something that goes a long way towards explaining the diversity of driver arrangements seen on the grid.

It still doesn't explain everything about them though. Or why I still haven't got round to writing the driver-culture link entry...

Advantages Of Travelling By Rail Instead Of By F1 Car - September 25, 2008

Of the humorous pieces I've written for my blog, this is probably the one that will date slowest. The sheer absurdity of the analogy helped a lot.

Re-Analysing The Championship Duel - November 16, 2008

As soon as I picked up the question of whether Massa had lost through misfortune or something more arose, I knew there was going to be a good blog entry in it. The analysis was a lot of fun and there was a nice mathematical edge to the whole thing. I even ended up attempting to discuss objective v. subjective interpretations of Singaporean performance (in Portuguese) on a Brazillian blog (not easy considering I didn't even have my own Portuguese dictionary at that point...)

Leavetakings

When Honda left F1... ...I found myself thinking a lot about why manufacturers bother doing F1. While it didn't do much for my December 2008 theme of thanksgiving, I felt that it explained the whole sorry affair rather well. Thankfully, Honda did get a buyer as I'd hoped at the end of the article.

(There are some stupid sticky trackbacks here that I can't remove )

My Silverstone Trip (Saturday) - June 30, 2009

My first full live F1 weekend made a huge impression on me. There's an entire swathe of entries about it, covering Thursday, Friday, Sunday and fuel stints.

Saturday, though, was the one I felt captured my feelings and the atmosphere of a magical weekend best. I think I managed to convey that whole sense of a special, shared sporting spectacle.

Fisi To Ferrari - An Emotional Moment

Any topic involving my favourites tends to read fairly well. However, this one was particularly tricky to write because I felt so many conflicting emotions... ...but I couldn't not write about something having that big an effect on me. The resulting entry expresses the bittersweet happiness pretty clearly.

Analysis of the 2010 Technical Regulations

FIA regulation documents, although frustrating, work well for me. They also seem to flow better each time. That said, this document almost defeated me - which made me particularly pleased when the result worked so well as a document.

Warning! Long post alert!

I am quite aware that many interesting things happened during the European Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton appeared to have picked up some sort of jinx (very unlike him). How else do you explain skipping off the track on lap 2 (OK, maybe that was just because Turn 1 resembled Sheffield a couple of weeks ago...), swapped to the dry behind the Safety Car when conditions clearly indicated the opposite, did the second pit stop too late to avoid getting baulked by Fisichella for nearly a lap and then swapped to the rain tyres too early?

As the ITV commentators said, it would be inadvisable for Lewis to visit a casino on the way home. About the only right decision he made today was to keep his engine running when everyone else in Turn 1 gave up. Even then, that one smart decision was nearly enough to net him a point.

There was a neat tussle for the final podium spot between Mark Webber, David Coulthard and Alex Wurz. All three had got there against the expectations of their grid slots to some extent. In the case of the Red Bulls, reliability had for once been impeccable. David Coulthard had done particularly well out of the early chaos, which explained his rise from 20th position. Wurz had fought like a tiger, while Webber had simply driven a tidy race and benefited from Hamilton and Raikkonen's woes. Well done to all three for keeping us entertained.

Heidfeld was being controversial, which would normally be like saying the Spyker is really fast (more on that later). Besides crashing into his own team-mate at the start, he also managed to be involved in a collision with Ralf Schumacher, which is being investigated as I write. Personally, I think Ralf Schumacher shut the door a little too tightly, but Nick probably shouldn't have expected there to be a space round the last term.

That said, if Nick had won the race, it wouldn't have been as important to him as the birth of his second child, Joda, the previous night. Joda is a cool name, and best wishes for his future. Congratulations also to Nick Heidfeld and his family.

As a Spyker supporter, though, the thing I will remember most from this race is the flash of orange in the first sector of lap 2 going round what appeared to be a cruising red car. The red car was Raikkonen, and he was cruising because he'd missed the pit entry on the previous lap. Those dry tyres really weren't up to much.

The orange flash was Markus Winklehock. This was the same Markus Winklehock who 24 hours earlier, had been 1.5 seconds slower than his team-mate Adrian Sutil, who in turn was considerably slower than his non-Spyker-equipped rivals. The same guy, I might add, who got his race debut because two richer blokes were stuck in testing contracts. How we grinned and laughed at my house when we saw the brilliance and absurdity of the overtaking move - and that's even with Dad being a Ferrari fan!

A few seconds before this overtaking move, they had passed a large body of water. This body of water had, two minutes before, been a dampish piece of road called Turn 1. Now it resembled the roads around Sheffield and Chesterfield a couple of weeks before. This wannabe lake had been responsible for several cars falling off the track. Dry tyres just don't deal with wannabe lakes very well. Just ask Lewis Hamilton, who spent a good two-and-a-half minutes removing his car from the gravel trap. And that was with the help of several well-muscled marshalls pushing him.

Lewis Hamilton did at least have company at this point. Felipe Massa spun there, but neatly regained the track without beaching himself. Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg, both Toro Rossos and Adrian Sutil finished their races with tyres full of gravel. Although Adrian Sutil nearly clipped Hamilton's car (that would have changed the complexion of the race if it had happened!) but the winner of the "scariest crash" award was Vitantonio Liuzzi. He crashed last out of the five retirees. After he began the aquaplane, he nearly hit the Safety Car. For good measure, he also tapped a crane that had come to retrieve the other stricken cars from the gravel. Fortunately, the crash wasn't very heavy and everyone was fine.

Even so, a lot of people were struggling in the conditions. Giancarlo Fisichella found somewhere else to spin on lap 2 without getting into too many difficulties, and most drivers were very, very slow. Especially as much of the first sector was only navigable at a slow pace. Nick Heidfeld said on the team radio that "the conditions are undriveable", and he had a point. Especially with Lake 1 needing a bow wave to get through properly, and F1 cars having no bow wave worth mentioning.

Winklehock, on the other hand, was fine, because he was the only driver on the grid on wets. Why was this? Well, the Spyker staffers had looked around at the start of the formation lap and decided that the weather report stating that rain was due in 20 minutes (five minutes previously) might have been a little lengthy in their predictions. The people opening their umbrellas in the stands and getting wet hair in the pit lane were good clues. As a result, they split their strategy - Adrian Sutil did the conventional thing of using dry tyres, and Markus Winklehock pitted at the end of the formation lap for fuel and wet tyres.  

After this, Markus flew on the extreme wet tyres. He clearly can race well in those conditions, and that combined with being the only bloke on the right tyres meant that he was 33 seconds ahead of the beleaguered field by the end of lap 3. The last had indeed become the first.

Alas for Winklehock and Spyker, the race director decided he'd had enough of errant drivers colliding with his safety vehicles and of drivers going water-skiing at Turn 1. Firstly, he called the Safety Car. This neutralised the field... ...but most of the F1 cars could not keep up with the Safety Car. Even Winklehock was struggling to go as fast as the Mercedes SLR. A great advert for Mercedes, but not much use for F1 cars, which need to go at a certain speed to keep their tyre pressures up. Therefore, Charlie Whiting did the sensible (but unfortunate for Markus) thing and flew the red flag.

This led to the only error of the race for Markus and his crew, albeit an understandable one. A prediction appeared that there would be more rain five minutes after the race re-started. Markus left his extreme wet tyres on. I know Jarno Trulli joined him in the extreme wets, but the rain didn't return until lap 51. And then it was heavy drizzle...

When everyone got going again 20 minutes later, everything was back to normal. Everyone except Lewis Hamilton passed Markus Winklehock (when you're on the wrong tyres, you sure do know about it!), Markus retired ten laps later with broken hydraulics, and I wondered if I'd dreamed up the whole thing. But no - the ITV crew assured me after the race that what I thought I'd seen was indeed true. Big grins resulted, as I confirmed my notes about my new favourite rookie.

Forgive me for being a little overexcited at what on the face of it seems a pretty unremarkable result. But rest assured, it is a result that will long be remembered by Spyker supporters everywhere. And it will be a long time before the paddock forgets Markus Winklehock's debut.

I wonder if he'll get a drive later this season? If Spyker can afford it, I would strongly recommend that they take Markus on again for the next wet race...

This entry follows on from the Spyker entry I did last week.

At some point today, I expect Spyker to state who will be their driver for the rest of 2007. The candidate list appears to have narrowed to three, if you believe the speculation.

Pitpass points out that Narain Karthikeyan "had a chat" with Colin Kolles, and given that he's not done a lot of driving for Williams this year, you have to assume the chat wasn't purely social. We know that Spyker needs more money if it is to be competitive - or even supply the requirements of the car company that is its parent - and I was impressed by his speed in the first part of 2005.

That said, his technique kinda fell to pieces in the second half of the season, and I don't know whether the testing he's done for Williams will have sharpened his edge enough to make him the best candidate. Also, Frank Williams is unlikely to relinquish his secondary tester easily, given that he brings a lot of sponsors to Williams (which is an independent team and needs all the sponsors it can find).

Spyker are considering Klien as well. We know this for a fact, because Klien has tested for Spyker. He did pretty well too, though it's difficult to tell how well, given that every team has different objectives when testing. However, he was much better than Giedo van der Garde, which is as good a reason as any to throw van der Garde off the shortlist. Klien's strong points also include being the most experienced driver on the candidate list. The catch is that he probably doesn't have significant funding and Nick Fry has a track record of not letting testers go without strings attached (ask Anthony Davidson).

That most reputable of rumour machines, Bild, thinks that Winklehock will drive next race. He would be my preferred choice - he looks fast, is familiar with the Spyker and doesn't have to be negotiated out of a test seat. However, even he admitted (to a site called f1grandprix.it that I've never heard of before) that he doesn't have enough sponsorship money for the season.

There is another point in his favour, though - one that proves that mid-season sackings are always messy. Christijan Albers may be starting legal proceedings against Spyker (as if we didn't have enough high-profile court cases in F1 at the moment!) Christijan claims that his drive had a guarantee clause that meant that in the event of a sponsor default. With Mingya claiming it hasn't sponsor Albers or Spyker for some time (despite signage on this year's car), this is set to run and run in the background.

The point of stating all this is that there is a theoretical chance that Albers may claim unfair dismissal and ask for his seat back. The compensation Spyker would have to pay Christijan if his or Mingya's claims are accurate would probably exceed the amount of spare cash Spyker has got. It is possible that Spyker may therefore have no choice but to take Christijan back for the duration of the contract. I would not like to be at Spyker if that happened. However, any contract Spyker enters into now has to have provision to remove the substitute driver in case Albers has to be placed in the team. This is a point that goes heavily in Winklehock's favour.

My tip? Winklehock for the minimum amount of time needed to sort out the Albers debacle, followed by either Albers or Karthikeyan for the rest of the season. Klien will use the lost opportunity as leverage to negotiate a race seat at Honda or Super Aguri for 2008, and Albers will not be seen in F1 after 2007 regardless of what happens next.