I fear the weebs of the F1 world are about to be sorely disappointed.
I fear the weebs of the F1 world are about to be sorely disappointed.
Tsunoda will still be at least 4-5 tenths off Verstappen at Suzuka. Even more if the transition between the teams isn't at all smooth.
If he gets to Q3 in that car he'll have done extraordinarily well.
He only needs to not be 20th at this point though in all fairness in qualifying. At the end even on newer tyres he was a second a lap behind Max on Sunday. He was I'm sure I saw 3 seconds a lap off Max in Melbourne. The car isn't great but it isn't as bad as the Sauber which is about where Lawson has had it. Get him out, a full season in the junior team and you might still be able to make something of him as a driver. Leave him in and you just end up with the next Perez.
Why are we pretending the Red Bull car is a tractor. It’s not any worse than the Ferrari.
It's been developed around Verstappen's driving style for 8 years, a style which is very specific. Trying to ask a rookie or mid driver to adapt to that without being given any grace is always going to backfire.
I don't know if you watch MotoGP but Honda did exactly the same thing. They got a once-in-a-generation talent (Marc Marquez) in 2013 and coupled with a good bike he won immediately. Then it started getting developed around him 100% and by 2016 when the sport switched to Michelin tyres, they'd probably already jumped the shark. However, Marquez was that good that he pretty much hid the flaws and kept winning (particularly in 2019 which was just total genius on his part). Then he almost killed himself in 2020 and never really rode for the team again. And guess what, Honda went straight to the bottom of the standings because it became apparent the bike was impossible to ride for anyone else.
I guess my point is, the Verstappen factor cannot be understated. I'd say he's got 2-3 tenths on the whole field (all else being equal). He's massively quick in qualifying but his consistency is mesmerising. If the driver wasn't a factor, he'd be 7th every race at the moment.
Exactly as above. If Verstappen is dragging a car to 4th it's because it's an appallingly slow car. He's even been saying himself that it is.
Surely for red bull 20th or 11th are the same, no? They need points or they risk finishing fourth in the constructors championship, which would be traffic for them.Originally Posted by Luke Emia
I wonder what the biggest difference in finishing positions between team mates has ever been.
Lawson more likely to shit all over Tsunoda.
Yes, I meant from the viewpoint of he just needs to do that to be an improvement on Lawson at the minute. Long-term if he's finishing 14th all season he won't be in the car any longer either. The car isn't great but the second driver in the team should still be able to finish in and around the top 10 and pick up points. It's not a fucking Minardi.
Ayrton Senna 4th / Johnny Dumfries 13th
Michael Schumacher 1st / Jos Verstappen 10th although both missed quite a few races
Can't think of any bigger than that.
No one called Johnny Dumfries should be good at anything.
The fact cars are so reliable and so close together now in terms of speed is a huge detriment to the "inferior" teammate. Previously they'd make up for their lack of guile just by simply breezing past the slower cars, or be propelled up the leaderboard by cars blowing up ahead of them.
Now everyone finishes a race and we've even seen the likes of Hamilton, Leclerc and Norris get stuck behind "much slower" cars when they qualify out of position because they really aren't that much slower anymore. I'd argue only Verstappen has really mastered the art of how to overtake quickly and consistently in these cruise liners, and even he regularly has to bend the rules to do it.
If you hit up an early 90s race on Youtube (which I do more often than is necessarily healthy) it's almost like a different sport, the cars are so twitchy and a nightmare to drive, huge gaps open up in the opening laps (but can also be closed again), and more than anything there are shit tons of random retirements, bizarre stop-go penalties and also a weight of shit backmarkers getting in the way that you just don't have now.
Today's races are so optimised in comparison that someone who normally finishes 16th finishing 9th is cause for hugs all round and a massive team celebration. Similarly, anyone (hi Logan Sargent) who is particularly off the pace of the field turns into a massive burden on the sport rather than just part of the game as it used to be.
The cars looked much better too.
My favourite genre of motorsport photo is shots taken down the start finish straight seconds after the race start in that era. Like so, I think this is 1991 at Suzuka:
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We must continue to find the most average of drivers for what we have, for no good reason, made the hardest seat in F1.
Sport was better when it was worse etc.
As for watching old races the guy I use is up to 2010 now but this might be the best thing he's posted so far, some incredible foreshadowing here:
https://rumble.com/c/BigZeddie
https://www.youtube.com/@bigzeddie76/featured
As for hiring average team mates, there's a reason that Schumacher and Senna in particular always had crap team mates, which was because they vetoed the hiring of good ones, and it's hard to believe Max wouldn't do the same.
I also just remembered Red Bull are switching to Ford engines next year. I hope they don’t bring their disastrous wet belt with them.
Btw not sure if I shared it in here but having visited a friend who worked for Williams and knows the paddock, the Jos mention reminded me.
The whole Horner sexual harassment thing last year was an intentional leak because Jos was hanging out the back of the same bird and she told Verstappen Snr that she was no longer interested.
There's a beauty to this picture that 8 sponsors are clearly visible
1 no longer exists
1 isn't legally allowed to advertise anymore
1 fashion company that sponsors lewis hamilton not the sport
2 are the sole remaining companies of a dead print industry
2 are petroleum companies
The front 6 cars (if we take the Jordan on the right to be narrowly leading what I guess must be one of those Dallara / Scuderia Italia shitboxes) all sporting a different main colour, and not a centimetre of naked carbon fibre in sight. Take me back there.
I believe it's Hitachi on the rear wing of said Jordan who I can report are still going strong and one of their competitors Komatsu are on the side of the current day Williams. Some shred of continuity to cling onto.
I'm wrong, Hitachi was on the Lotus, not the Jordan, and not until the following year. I'm a day late and a dollar short, as Brundle (driving some nightmare Brabham at the back of shot) would say.
I've long advocated for Livery paint not counting towards the weight limit. Similar to how they changed it so drivers weren't sweating themselves to death to make the car lighter.
There’s a joke for the most famous modern Hitachi device being a vibrating dildo and you attaching their 90s branding to Jordan’s Lotus that would absolutely kill on the after dinner circuit of a mid level insurance company.
He's saving it for his retirement speech at Komatsu.
The paint should be irrelevant. The rules need completely re-writing. Haggling over a bit of paint to save a few grams when you've got 800kg to play with is ridiculous.
I thought the issue with paint was the aero effect rather than the weight? Could be wrong, or could be both.
Given nobody has ever claimed their car was quick because they found lighter paint we can immediately disregard any talk about heavy paint as code for 'our car is crap'. Won't be a problem soon as they'll be swimming in weight capacity once the hybrids go.
A couple of cars could have used an extra kilo or two of paint very recently.
Me likey.
Special liveries are so tinpot. Going to paint a bulldog on the side for Silverstone or a cheeseburger for Miami? Thought not.
Are the F1 cars going to be caught by the new US tariffs when they have to go and race there?
They already ruined helmets, now liveries are the bleeding edge of pointless crap to keep the marketing department busy. Deduct a point for every alteration throughout the season.
I do feel a bit for the makers of DTS when they sit down with the six new rookies to try and churn out some sort of episode for series 100 next year, and the most charismatic thing they can find is that Ollie Bearman has a very camp-looking bear on his helmet.
Doohan lost it during the start of turn one. Big impact.
https://x.com/extremecars__/status/1...EhNxUgKtg&s=19
Those "Colapinto in the seat by Europe" rumours won't be simmering down after that one.
Villeneuve at Suzuka for us this weekend.
Colapinto of course not crashy at all. Why isn't, say, Kevin Magnussen in the seat?
I know FP2 was largely a waste of time and Racing Bulls had fortunate track position in between red flags, but them both only being 0.4s off McLaren (with Lawson in 5th) isn't really a good look for Red Bull.
I saw a wag suggest that rather than worry about who is in the second Red Bull seat, they should just put Max in the RB. Get it done.
World Champions switching seats mid-season like it's the 50's.
I see we have grass randomly catching fire on an Asian circuit again.
I do think this. Colapinto did well at Williams last season by virtue of not being as completely fucking useless as Sargent and Latifi. He made quite a few mistakes(which is to be expected), but I don't think he's going into that car and getting points consistently or anything and seems just as likely to be chucking it into the wall as Doohan is as well.
I think this impatience by teams seems to be getting worse partly because there are no real 'backmarkers' on the grid anymore who are content to pootle around and get zero points every season. I know Alpine are French, Haas are a bit shit and the Sauber is terrible(but even they are being bought out). In a previous life the likes of Doohan, Lawson etcetera would have had a year in a shitbag at the back of the grid being a lap or 2 laps behind the leaders and if they showed any talent at all they would have been picked up by a bigger team. Now the teams at the back are parachuting these guys in and can't fathom why they aren't automatically in the points after 2 or 3 races and why they are making mistakes.
This is it. No team gets consistently lapped every week anymore, so they all believe they have a shot of points.
Sauber were the only team to get lapped in China and that was because of mistakes, not just outright slow pace. They got a 7th place the race before.
Even looking back to the first Chinese GP 20 years ago. Everyone up to 10th got lapped, with the Minardi getting the privilege three times.
The Concorde Agreement (don't know which one it was) that give top teams ultimate power and essentially made the barriers to entry impossible for independents really started the ultra-reliability and competitiveness we see now.
It wasnt that long ago that Hamilton and Mercedas on a weekly basis, lapped the whole field up 6th place.
I'm talking more recent than that. Probably post-COVID (or maybe just before, when everyone started to close the huge gap on Mercedes).
Just looked it up. 2018 to 2019 the mechanical retirement rate almost halved overnight, and it's only getting lower. Once everyone kept their cars on track for the full race, it was a matter of time before they made more performance gains.
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