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Race Recap: For the 2013 Monaco Grand Prix, NASCAR comes to the principality

Lots of contact, debris cautions, trips into the wall, full-course yellows and a red flag - these are the kinds of racing terms you unbox when you want to have a conversation about NASCAR... or the Formula One grand prix of Monaco. In this case we're not talking about the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, we're talking about 78 laps in the South of France that even featured a fallen camera cable just like that stock-car race.
This year, Mercedes-AMG Petronas drivers treated their chassis' like busses instead of F1 cars, Romain Grosjean treated his Lotus like a battering ram, Sergio Perez kept sticking his McLaren's nose in places and eventually got it smacked, and maybe the size of the drivers' mirrors should be changed instead of the tires as there were almost as many firsts as there were crashes. Plenty of F1 fans wish Monaco were removed from the calendar, yet even though it doesn't specialize in traditional thrills, that doesn't mean nothing happens during the parade through - and into - the barriers.

2015 Spanish F1 Grand Prix makes its Deutsche mark

The first race of the European Formula One season inaugurates the second phase of the Championship. Teams overhaul their cars with the big updates they've been working on since Australia, and at the end of The Battle of Spain we find out how the positions on the field have changed. Mercedes-AMG Petronas driver Nico Rosberg brought a big update to his psychology, straight-up beating teammate Lewis Hamilton to take his first pole position of the season. Mercedes owns the front row and Ferrari maintains its status as primary challenger, Sebastian Vettel lining up in third. Williams proved it's been hitting the books to do better in class, though, Valtteri Bottas slotting into fourth. And Toro Rosso's visit to a track that rewards strong aero rewarded them with the best team grid position since the Italian Grand Prix in 2008: Carlos Sainz secured fifth, ahead of Max Verstappen in sixth. Kimi Raikkonen's bout of Saturday woes – it seems the Finn is always handicapped by lots of tiny issues – continued in Barcelona with one of his sets of prime tires getting cooked by malfunctioning tire warmers. He recovered well enough to take seventh on the grid, but he's got some strong competition ahead of him. He led three other drivers in the Continuous Issues department, Daniil Kvyat unable to wrestle his Infiniti Red Bull Racing higher than eighth, Williams driver Felipe Massa getting it wrong in Turn 3 to fall five places behind his teammate Bottas, and Daniel Ricciardo in the second Red Bull enduring another engine change and sloppy car behavior to get tenth. And while it turned out to be a steady race a little rough around the edges, the positions on the battlefield just might have changed. A little. Of the 66 laps in the race we might have seen Rosberg for three of them – maybe. The German got a smashing start, had a clear lead into Turn 1, and after that we checked in occasionally during his two pit stops and again at the checkered flag. He owned the entire weekend the way we're used to seeing his teammate do, and the cameras left him alone to run his race. No one got within seven seconds of him during the first third, and as the pit stop strategies played out that cushion grew. He finished seventeen seconds ahead of Hamilton, and 45 seconds ahead of third-placed Vettel. Hamilton, on the back foot all three days, stumbled out of the gate.

Behind the scenes of Lotus' spectacular truck-over-F1 jump

A Lotus F1 car and the truck in which it's transported may both be powered by Renault and share a common JPS livery, but as far as size and performance are concerned, they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. So if you had to jump one over the other, you'd think it'd be a no-brainer to skip the single-seater over the tractor-trailer. Right? Well that may be the more logical conclusion, but it's not the way the Lotus team and its technology partner EMC decided to go for this latest promo. Instead they jumped the semi over the grand prix car. The stunt was obviously geared towards publicity, but while they were at it, they set a Guinness World Record for the longest truck jump at 83 feet, 7 inches. The previous record, according to Guinness, stood at 50 feet, 6 inches, and was set on MTV's Nitro Circus on November 17, 2008, by Gregg Godfrey at Rocky Mountain Raceway in Salt Lake City. That record stood for six years, but (as best we can tell) was set without the trailer attached, or the F1 car tracking underneath - which only makes this latest stunt that much more impressive. You may have seen the promo clip circulating the interwebs late last week, but we've included a making-of video below as well to show how the stunt team managed to pull it all off. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. News Source: EMC via YouTube (1), (2)Tip: Joe Lotus Renault Truck Videos F1 viral video semi lotus f1 team