Formula 1 Discussion - And favourite driver?

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Lewis might have the number achievements but no one will ever convince me he's anywhere near as good as the likes of Lauder, Senna, Schumacher.

All 3 built a team and car around them to achieve what they did, Lauda practically designed his car.

Senna was getting podiums and a fastest lap in his first season in a crap car and in '94 was busy dragging his Williams to pole and staying in touch in a car that was crippled by the loss of electronic trickery from the previous season.

Schumacher went to a Ferrari team that hadn't won shit in years and built it back up to what it was (and arguably still is, prior to Schumacher they were absolutely nowhere now we think it's odd for then to be back there).

Lewis has had everyone else build the car around him and lucked into Merc coming up with the best engine. I mean look at the percentage of 1-2 finishes in each of these dominant eras, how can people argue it isn't the car? Yeah, Lewis has to beat his teammate but we all know Bottas isn't allowed to get at Lewis like Rossberg did. I'm fine with a number 1 and number 2 driver set up but stop lying to everyone that you don't have a favourite and they're allowed to race.

View attachment 1597562

If Lewis is so against driving his car collection then he should also quit F1 and go to formula E. They have a plan to be neutral by 2030? Well that isn't now is it Lewis? Only you won't actually do anything that harms you, once again it's performative virtue signalling at no personal cost.

I guess Hamilton is a good driver, but I, too, think that the car is doing like 75% of the work. You could put Maldonado in it and watch him get title after title and break record after record. I just hope that once they change the cars in the future, that other teams will be much closer to Mercedes... heh. Imagine Mercedes being Number 3 or 4 team, then we could see how good Hamilton actually is, but I think his "expertise" relies a lot on having a car that beats every other car per lap by at least half a second and having his mechanics tell him in very fine detail what he has to do and when.
There was that one season where the team wasn't allowed to tell their drivers what to do with their car settings and Hamilton was completely dumbfounded and unable to set it appropriately for the situation. His response? Whining and bitching and yelling at his team to tell him what to do, even though he knew they weren't allowed to do that.
I think I have to slightly alter my first statement here: He's a good driver, but he's dumb as a doornail.

 

[LiveFromNS]

Couple things just saw. New Indy track in Nashville. Check out that layout! But its only 3.49kms in length!

The RaceFans.net guy made this tweet. But when I went to look on Kimi's IG they weren't there, but the pics show a few times under the "tagged" section of his IG. So I think the RF guy got that wrong or Kimi deleted them! But it still is a great meme.

https://twitter.com/keithcollantine/status/1306318086199537665

Keith Collantine on Twitter: "Kimi Raikkonen taking a swipe at @Lewis…

archived 16 Sep 2020 23:37:49 UTC

archive.li

 

[Coccxys]

That track looks fucking awful, one more step towards "fuck it, let's use an oval". If there is one lesson they need to take from this season, it's that tracks that have a shape and elevation changes dictated by shit like hills and forests will always be better than what some designer can think up as an "exciting" corner/elevation change/anything else. Silverstone, Spa, Monza, Murgello etc none of those were designed with "what layout will generate the most excitement with 2020s F1 cars yet the old tracks consistently give better racing than any of the sterile "our sponsors want us to race in this country so we need a track" circuits.

 

[Pee Cola]

Lewis might have the number achievements but no one will ever convince me he's anywhere near as good as the likes of Lauder, Senna, Schumacher.

Quite. If you go even further back, there were some real badass racers. Think along the lines of Fangio, Clark, Brabham Sr. etc. In the case of the latter, Sir Jack is the only F1 driver to win the F1 Drivers' Championship in a car he built himself. Coincidentally, his team won the F1 Constructors' Championship in that same year (1966). Having said this, Senna is still the GOAT F1 driver IMHO.

Really puts Hamilton's achievement into perspective, doesn't it? Hence my comment about Hamilton being one of the F1 greats on paper only.

 

[Coccxys]

Strange development. I thought Chase was well established in the role. Wonder which odd internal politics have forced this.

 

[LiveFromNS]

Strange development. I thought Chase was well established in the role. Wonder which odd internal politics have forced this.

View attachment 1615511

I seem to recall a few months back there was talk of him stepping down. Its a vague memory that came back when I saw the makings of Ferrari's return to absolute power beginning! Todt running the FIA, now we get Stef running F1!

In all seriousness though, while there may have been something more to it than Chase just wanting to leave, I am pretty sure I remember talk of him leaving before. Not sure if it was during an interview between Chase and Brundle or something I saw on Reddit or RaceFans.net.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Man, in the last few days, I watched a bunch of classic Formula 1 videos, like iconic moments of the mid 90s up to the early 2000s...
Watched a couple of videos of crashes and I always tense up when I see a crash from back before modern barriers, before the wheels got tethered to the chassis and when a 3 car pile-up next to the track was merely a Safety Car issue and not a red flag.

So many times, you see wheels bouncing across the racetrack and cars swerving to evade them, cars getting burried beneath tyre-stacks and pilots being shaken around like crazy within their cockpits, cause they don't have HANS yet. It's really fucking scary at times and it almost makes you wonder how F1 got away with so little casualties in those days.

But aside from that, I really miss the old designs of cars, especially the shape of the nose and front wings were so much more pleasant to look at. I don't know, I just really dislike the clusterfuck-of-winglet designs, especially with giant washboards and tiny fins all over the car, that we got nowadays. It's such an unclean, busy look.

Seriously, what is this garbage?

I don't really care if this is super efficient and effective, I prefer the straightforward designs of the past. Whoever mandated that weird stub-nose should be shot and expelled from FIA.

Compare that to these neat designs:

1996:

2002:

2006:

I even have a bit of a soft spot for 2008's front wing design:

It looks kind of strange but in a good way.

These latter designs have a bit more going on, too, but it still looks less messy than today's stuff.

Formula 1 cars just don't look as cool nowadays. Hell, even Formula E, for all it's faults, has a pretty neat shape to its cars:

Strange development. I thought Chase was well established in the role. Wonder which odd internal politics have forced this.

View attachment 1615511

Kind of weird. This season isn't that long after all, so why the rush to change it? From an outside perspective, they'll always pretend everything is hunky dory, so we won't learn what the reasoning behind this move was. Still, weird.

 

[WhiskeyZuluLima]

I seem to recall a few months back there was talk of him stepping down. Its a vague memory that came back when I saw the makings of Ferrari's return to absolute power beginning! Todt running the FIA, now we get Stef running F1!

In all seriousness though, while there may have been something more to it than Chase just wanting to leave, I am pretty sure I remember talk of him leaving before. Not sure if it was during an interview between Chase and Brundle or something I saw on Reddit or RaceFans.net.

The issue with people making this leap is that Todt has already announced he will not run for FIA President again.
I largely suspect the reason is that he still hasn't got the Nobel prize he was hoping to get for safety or EV related interests.
So to eulogise early, I shall: he must have simply come to resign himself to the history books as the man who watched and allowed WRC to become so insignificant that there is no sponsorship beyond the energy drink brands and a brake manufacturer or two, the man who did not intervene in the WEC/ACO catastrophe which left us last weekend with a laughably poor Le Mans race with the death of GTE clearly looming and the failure of LMP1 and it's successor class LMH, someone who endorsed such a complicated system for license requirements to compete in F1 that it has completely harmed the sport through creating problems for the teams involved (Red Bull driver program, lmao).

Man, in the last few days, I watched a bunch of classic Formula 1 videos, like iconic moments of the mid 90s up to the early 2000s...
Watched a couple of videos of crashes and I always tense up when I see a crash from back before modern barriers, before the wheels got tethered to the chassis and when a 3 car pile-up next to the track was merely a Safety Car issue and not a red flag.

So many times, you see wheels bouncing across the racetrack and cars swerving to evade them, cars getting burried beneath tyre-stacks and pilots being shaken around like crazy within their cockpits, cause they don't have HANS yet. It's really fucking scary at times and it almost makes you wonder how F1 got away with so little casualties in those days.

I don't disagree that it was much more tense and spectacular, but I doubt you'll disagree with me that a lot of the safety implements which have come in the last 20-25 years do make sense in their own right if they are on their own.
Where it becomes an issue is when loads of different safety implements start to interact and create issues, the HANS device being the example stops a driver from being able to look around all too much, but once you develop the roll-hoops and survival cells as they now have, the inability to turn their head is the least of their worries when they now cannot effectively see the mirrors yet are expected to.

I even have a bit of a soft spot for 2008's front wing design:
View attachment 1615769
It looks kind of strange but in a good way.

I do wonder why you dislike the current wing which okay has a load of smaller appendages than this one, but at least it does follow a very fundamental design - you can visually follow what the current spec front wing is doing with little to no understanding of aerodynamics, but the 2006 through 08 spec cars were ridiculously over the top on all parts.
I agree they look strange and are really cool, but I find it hard to complain about the visuals of the current car (although I agree with you mostly) but to then say this car looks good, but now bad I don't know it feels wrong.

Formula 1 cars just don't look as cool nowadays. Hell, even Formula E, for all it's faults, has a pretty neat shape to its cars:
View attachment 1615768
Kind of weird. This season isn't that long after all, so why the rush to change it? From an outside perspective, they'll always pretend everything is hunky dory, so we won't learn what the reasoning behind this move was. Still, weird.

Just because I'm a picky bastard, the photo you used for FE is not the current spec, it was the original concept for the Gen2 car, which got a fair few changes

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

I don't disagree that it was much more tense and spectacular, but I doubt you'll disagree with me that a lot of the safety implements which have come in the last 20-25 years do make sense in their own right if they are on their own.

I didn't mean to say that it was better then, I am in support of current safety measures (be that Halo, HANS or the use of red flags when the track is obstructed), I was more remarking on the way how crazy and risky it was back then. There are a couple of accidents where you can really see the helmets bounce back and forth and from side to side like ping-pong balls inside the cockpit and it gives me whiplash just by looking. From a modern perspective, it's almost unfathomable that people were racing under these conditions back then. F1 safety has made leaps and when you compare some lethal crashes of the early 90s with -say- Kubica's infamous 2007 crash, it's just surreal how safe cars are now. And still we lost Bianchi.

On that note, I always have to chuckle when I hear people complain that F1 is stopping races for bad weather and compare it to stuff like touring car racing, that races on during such conditions. Given that an F1 car is open wheel racing (Driver is much more exposed during a crash and has to deal with bad visibility due to a only wearing a helmet) and about twice as fast and significantly quicker in accelerating... Yeah, wonder why F1 doesn't race at 200mph during bad conditions compared to another series that does their 120mph top speed race during similar weather conditions. Guess that must mean F1 drivers are pussies.

I do wonder why you dislike the current wing which okay has a load of smaller appendages than this one, but at least it does follow a very fundamental design - you can visually follow what the current spec front wing is doing with little to no understanding of aerodynamics, but the 2006 through 08 spec cars were ridiculously over the top on all parts.
I agree they look strange and are really cool, but I find it hard to complain about the visuals of the current car (although I agree with you mostly) but to then say this car looks good, but now bad I don't know it feels wrong.

I think it has to do with the nose of the car as well. I just like those more pointy noses, but what I really dislike are those tiny fins all over the place like the ones in front of the radiator, too. It's not as bad this season, but some of the older cars had a ridiculously complex setup with a dozen tiny fins redirecting airflow all over the place. I understand what they are doing with it, but I still think it looks meh. I guess I just like the nostalgic designs with very basic aerodynamic parts.

 

[Coccxys]

I agree with a lot of the safety points being made but there is such a thing as being too risk averse. The use of the safety car for things that could be sorted under double yellows in recent years has definitely impacted upon the racing as it neutralises strategy in some races and makes strategists all go the same way to head off the high probability of a safety car. I also think the wet weather "Safety car start" and delay the race approach is used far too easily, yes the cars don't do standing water but they can drive cautiously in a lot of the conditions that they neutralise the race in these days. I think too much of the safety development is hindsight, always chasing what would have prevented the last major smash.

As for front wing complexity 2022 is going to have you covered with much much simpler wings to mean the cars can follow eachother. I mean look at the mock up of a car following the regs. If we get anything like that then I'll be very happy.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

I agree with a lot of the safety points being made but there is such a thing as being too risk averse. The use of the safety car for things that could be sorted under double yellows in recent years has definitely impacted upon the racing as it neutralises strategy in some races and makes strategists all go the same way to head off the high probability of a safety car. I also think the wet weather "Safety car start" and delay the race approach is used far too easily, yes the cars don't do standing water but they can drive cautiously in a lot of the conditions that they neutralise the race in these days. I think too much of the safety development is hindsight, always chasing what would have prevented the last major smash.

As for front wing complexity 2022 is going to have you covered with much much simpler wings to mean the cars can follow eachother. I mean look at the mock up of a car following the regs. If we get anything like that then I'll be very happy.

View attachment 1616235

2022 is going to be the year where I hope F1 will become more interesting to watch again, too.
Way too much dominance from Mercedes, Red Bull and (if they manage to get their shit together) Ferrari. Hopefully, a new concept will make the field more even for a short time at least.

 

[The Grognard]

The new F1 license system is not complicated, it's just trying to formalize the semi-official path to F1. If anything, it's main benefit is that it's the ultimate anti paydriver system. It has done zero harm for the sport, unless you consider Red Bull not being able to throw random 19 year olds to their junior teams or some Mahaveer Raghunathan tier nobodies not being able to just buy a seat is a problem. But yes, Todt fucking sucked and focused far too much on dumb greenwashing bullshit.

And the real reason why all the focus went to aerodynamics over the past 20 years is because it's the only real venue where every team has room to find solutions in. Trying to find a clever solution elsewhere is not gonna work because it's gonna be banned and there was no underbody development allowed because people bitched about ground effects back in 1981 like you guys are bitching about wings being well optimized compared to older ones. If the looks of the car are somehow the problem for you, i think this is the wrong sport to follow.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

like you guys are bitching about wings being well optimized compared to older ones. If the looks of the car are somehow the problem for you, i think this is the wrong sport to follow.

Dude calm down. I just said I like the look of the old cars better, no reason to get your knickers in a knot, mate.
Edit: This is the opposite of calming down, mate.

 

[LiveFromNS]

So, assuming Lewis wins Sunday (80/20 odds), do you think he will act this way in the post-race conference? Somehow I doubt it.

 

[Full Race Replay]

Man, in the last few days, I watched a bunch of classic Formula 1 videos, like iconic moments of the mid 90s up to the early 2000s...
Watched a couple of videos of crashes and I always tense up when I see a crash from back before modern barriers, before the wheels got tethered to the chassis and when a 3 car pile-up next to the track was merely a Safety Car issue and not a red flag.

So many times, you see wheels bouncing across the racetrack and cars swerving to evade them, cars getting burried beneath tyre-stacks and pilots being shaken around like crazy within their cockpits, cause they don't have HANS yet. It's really fucking scary at times and it almost makes you wonder how F1 got away with so little casualties in those days.

But aside from that, I really miss the old designs of cars, especially the shape of the nose and front wings were so much more pleasant to look at. I don't know, I just really dislike the clusterfuck-of-winglet designs, especially with giant washboards and tiny fins all over the car, that we got nowadays. It's such an unclean, busy look.

Seriously, what is this garbage?

View attachment 1615775

I don't really care if this is super efficient and effective, I prefer the straightforward designs of the past. Whoever mandated that weird stub-nose should be shot and expelled from FIA.

Compare that to these neat designs:

1996:
View attachment 1615774

2002:
View attachment 1615771View attachment 1615772

2006:
View attachment 1615770

I even have a bit of a soft spot for 2008's front wing design:
View attachment 1615769
It looks kind of strange but in a good way.

These latter designs have a bit more going on, too, but it still looks less messy than today's stuff.

Formula 1 cars just don't look as cool nowadays. Hell, even Formula E, for all it's faults, has a pretty neat shape to its cars:
View attachment 1615768

Kind of weird. This season isn't that long after all, so why the rush to change it? From an outside perspective, they'll always pretend everything is hunky dory, so we won't learn what the reasoning behind this move was. Still, weird.

I just got into f1 last season but from watching the classic videos during quarantine, my favorite cars were from approx. 1996-2008. Cars with curvy designs with shiny finishes. And the 2005-2008 cars which had all sorts of different wings and fins for more downforce. That seems to have been the golden era for design and engine noise. Now all the cars look so blocky. And yes, The halo DOES make the car look far worse

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

So, assuming Lewis wins Sunday (80/20 odds), do you think he will act this way in the post-race conference? Somehow I doubt it.

He'll be an arrogant douchenozzle about it. You know, his usual behaviour.

Edit: Damn, I hoped Hamilton wouldn't make it in time to have his lap count. Would have been hilarious to see him start from position 15.

 

[LiveFromNS]

He'll be an arrogant douchenozzle about it. You know, his usual behaviour.

Edit: Damn, I hoped Hamilton wouldn't make it in time to have his lap count. Would have been hilarious to see him start from position 15.

Yes, that would have been great!

Perez gets 2nd row without the upgrades. Would he have got front row with them? RP got a chance to start getting podiums regularly if the snippets I heard about the upgrades being worth a few tenths are accurate.

Also, without spoiling anything in F2, the top 2 today are going to have enough superlicense points for F1 if they stay in the top 4 or 5. There are only 3 races left. One or both of the top 2 today may be in F1 next year.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Perez gets 2nd row without the upgrades. Would he have got front row with them? RP got a chance to start getting podiums regularly if the snippets I heard about the upgrades being worth a few tenths are accurate.

Maybe Aston Martin is off to a good start, engineeringwise. It certainly would be nice to see more teams compete for the top ranks, even if Mercs dominate 1 and somewhat 2, there's still room for some competition around the other ranks and as long as we get a few nice fights for positions, I'm fine with it.

Wonder where new drivers would fit in next year. The top teams have their pilots in place and the lower ones... I dunno. Making a debut in F1 by replacing Grosjean isn't boding well. Then again, most drivers have to break in their skills somewhere and it's better to have them work their way up than to put them in, say, a Mercedes and watch them catapult themselves into a huge crash due to a lack of experience.

 

[Coccxys]

An Alfa seat next to Raikonen could be a brilliant opportunity for a young driver *cough* mick *cough*. Yeah that car isn't up to much but having the most experienced guy in F1 for a team mate when starting out would be invaluable plus it is a chance to outperform a white car and make a name like Russel is in the Williams popping it into Q2 and shitting all over his team mate on one lap pace.

As for other F2 drivers, I'm sure Red Bull are hoping Tsunoda will get his super license, throw the Russian out (again) and make Honda happy with a Japanese driver in a car.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Any words on Albon and Gasly switching cockpits again? Albon isn't doing too hot in his current cockpit and Gasly wasn't too bad (Well, before crashing in Mugello).

On Tsunoda, as long as he doesn't turn out to be the next Yuji Ide, it's fine.