Man of Honour
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So it sounds like red bull were the ones who wanted quali modes banned. They’ve turned into a whiny team. I hope the mercs dominate the weekend again.
Motorsport Off Topic Thread
- Thread starter Shimmy
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Soldato
Red Bull always were the whiners. Renault too, but they're midfield so get less press.
Horner constantly complains. Even when they won 4 championship it was inspite of the Renault engine they had not partially because of it being custom to their requirements...
Add Marko on top and you've got a complete team of shining wits.
Add Marko on top and you've got a complete team of shining wits.
Man of Honour
Reverse grid sprint races instead of qualifying are back on the agenda:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/54063417
Ross Brawn keen to try after Merc wrap up the titles; so could potentially be late in the season.
To be honest I've never been a fan but I think F1 needs to do something to spice up the action so why not give it a bash.
It certainly works in F2/F3 to create some great racing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/54063417
Ross Brawn keen to try after Merc wrap up the titles; so could potentially be late in the season.
To be honest I've never been a fan but I think F1 needs to do something to spice up the action so why not give it a bash.
It certainly works in F2/F3 to create some great racing.
Soldato
Man of Honour
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Nothing lost in trying at that point. I have my reservations though.
Deleted member 651465
D
Deleted member 651465
For god sake, they have one race with someone coming from the back and they’re frothing at the mouth.
Next up; sprinklers!
Next up; sprinklers!
Man of Honour
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Heh, or the track that split in two briefly leading to a corner - well that’s how I remember the suggestion anyway.
Soldato
Got to agree with Toto on this one. It will be gamed to **** and is nothing but a gimmick. It would set it up that the best midfield team would be favourite for the championship considering the difficulty in overtaking, and the field spread at most tracks.
Soldato
Sunday’s race was good because the situation was unusual and (relatively) organic. If you started doing things like that every race the teams would like always work out the best way to get around it.
They did this before with the Pirelli tyres. Think it was Canada one year the tyres didn’t last and drivers had to do 2/3 stops so they got Pirelli making cheese tyres next year as they thought it would make exciting races. Seem to remember once teams worked them out it just made everyone drive in tyre conservation mode all the time!
They did this before with the Pirelli tyres. Think it was Canada one year the tyres didn’t last and drivers had to do 2/3 stops so they got Pirelli making cheese tyres next year as they thought it would make exciting races. Seem to remember once teams worked them out it just made everyone drive in tyre conservation mode all the time!
Soldato
Merc may well wrap up the season early, but if I was RP/McLaren/Renault/Ferrari the last thing I'd want is some clown show reverse grid races messing up my chances of securing the 3rd place WCC prize money.
Reverse grids do not belong in F1. Can we stop be so god damn knee-jerk after one fluke result.
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Caporegime
How do you game it? On the season level.
No, it wouldn't. It's a negative feedback loop, so any team that starts doing well gets penalised. If the midfield gets ahead in points, they end up behind the faster cars and do less well. The same teams will end up on top over a season. It's just more difficult for them to dominate every race.
I dunno. I'm not a big fan of a reverse grid qualifying sprint race format, but I'm happy to see it tried. I find it much less objectionable than things like DRS that feel entirely artificial, and it doesn't seem any more bizarre than some of things that have been tried in Quali. I like the Formula E Quali format.
Soldato
Quite. And while we're at it, can we quit with the unrealistic expectation of being wildly entertained by lots of overtakes for position every single race. We watch football matches knowing full well some are going to be exciting, some are going to be turgid affairs, some are going to be absolute curbstompings and that's okay - we don't go around changing the laws of the game to try and artificially spice up the show there, so why do it for the sport of Grand Prix motor racing?
Yes, it would be wonderful if it was an actual close battle at the pointy end but it's not. Mercedes are a long way out in front. Occasionally they'll screw up like they did at Monza, but on the whole they aren't going to be losing many right now. And instead of fixing the structural problems with the sport, we talk about crap like this. Not car construction rules that mean they very often can't follow each other closely, insanely long wheelbases with corresponding high polar moments of inertia, gimmicky DRS that still hasn't managed to strike the correct balance between difficulty level of overtaking and the artificial nature of said overtakes, lack of testing opportunities to help teams improve their cars, lack of testing opportunities to get new talent into the sport and up to speed, race win prize money dwarfed by salaries (hardly "Grand Prix" racing in that regard now is it?), an engine formula that almost no-one wants to build engines for, punitive rules on reliability that mean engines cost eleventy squillion pounds, punitive rules on reliability that discourage racing, tyres that discourage racing, fuel use rules that discourage racing, stewards decisions that discourage racing and tracks that sure don't encourage racing (though one or two are rather decent for hotlapping, I'll admit).
No, instead we want to artificially put the (much) faster cars in the middle of the pack to get five or six laps of overtaking before they're back where they belong at the front.
Woo.
Soldato
Lack of testing is not the reason new talent doesn't get into F1. It is the fact that the current drivers stay in the sport far beyond their peak, stopping others getting a chance.
In F1 you get people like Kimi in the sport for 17 years (across 19), and he hasn't been near competitive since he came back after his break. He is kept because he is a known quantity rather than bringing someone new in.
Then you have people like Perez or Kvyat who continue to get chances, even when they have never really shown more than a year's performance peak.
At least in F2 and F3 you can only drive while you have the money to support it, but even then, some people should have moved on, but the good ones can't and the bad ones don't.
If you want new talent to come through, maybe there should be a time limit on F1, or even a limit to the number of championships you can win, before you have to move on.
Caporegime
You appear to have forgotten Kimi's years at Lotus. I agree he's probably stuck around a little long, but even last year he was turning in impressive results at the start of the season.
Soldato
Kimi has won races and even had poles (not many) since his return. He was utterly demolished by Alonso though. That should have been a warning to him.
We all know that Grosjean is probably the least deserving driver on the grid. Yet he keeps getting new contracts. He is faster than Magnussen over a single lap if everything goes right, but he's error prone, has constant setup problems, crashes, poor judgement etc..
We all know that Grosjean is probably the least deserving driver on the grid. Yet he keeps getting new contracts. He is faster than Magnussen over a single lap if everything goes right, but he's error prone, has constant setup problems, crashes, poor judgement etc..
Soldato
I certainly think a lack of cars for them to drive is probably a bigger reason.
Thirty years ago 19 teams entered the 1990 season. Yes, some were hopeless (Eurobrun, Osella, Onyx). Some were worse than hopeless (Life, Coloni). But still - if you use the current points system, 27 drivers across 15 constructors would have at least one point*.
What's stopping that from happening today? Money. It costs too much to make a car for this current formula. It costs too much to make an engine for this current formula. And the end product is so bland that sponsor dollars aren't what they once were either. Unless they make serious changes, the next time the TV deal is renegotiated there is no way in hell that it'll command the same kind of cash it did last time. The sport is dying. Oh sure, they'll still race and they'll cook up crap like reverse grids and fanboost and maybe revisit the spectre of success ballast and it might occasionally make for a vaguely entertaining TV show. But it won't be the sport of Grand Prix motor racing.
* - as an additional point, 4 constructors netted wins (McLaren, Ferrari, Benetton, Williams) and another three made trips to the podium (Tyrrell, Lola, Leyton House). The last time four constructors won races in a season was 2013 I believe, and that was over 19 races not 16.
Caporegime
Hmm... yet, if you look at '89 it was 3 constructors, and in '88 only a single race wasn't won by McLaren. '91-'96 also saw just three constructors taking wins. So it seems to me like '90 stands out as an abnormally competitive season by the standards of the era rather than a representative of a more competitive time.
Soldato
Under a rather different formula to 1990 though!
Again...the engine formula went from 3.5l to 3.0l for '95. Also the huge change from '93 to '94 when they canned active suspension, traction control et al.
We-e-e-ell...
1993 (the last year of the 'high tech' cars) saw 22 (out of 35 to make the attempt) drivers score points on the old 10-6-4-3-2-1 system. On the modern points, that 22 becomes 28. Five teams (out of 13) had podium finishes.
So, not abnormal. Not universal, to be sure. But not abnormal.
Caporegime
Sure, the rules changed. I'm not sure that's relevant to the point though.
Starting grids were larger. I'd like to see more teams on the grid, but let's face for most of the time there were so many teams around they were largely filler. Also, the majority of the difference in the number of points finishes was reliability: these days, 18 car finishes are about the norm, in '93 there were several races with less than 10 finishers. It's not that things were more competitive, but that the cars in between all failed to finish.
But returning to the comparison: these numbers don't seem all that different. In '19, there were 19 drivers with points, in '18 there were 20. Even in the ludicrously one sided '16 season, there were 20 drivers with points (out of a total of 24), and 5 teams with podiums. This doesn't seem that different to the 90s to me. Now, I didn't start watching F1 regularly until the late 90s so I don't really remember these seasons, but I do remember the years of Schumacher dominance, and I think there's a fair amount of tinted vision going on here. F1 has undergone periods where there has been minimal competition at many times in its history. I don't even think this is the worst era.