It's more the cars that are boring than the circuit. The only real stinkers on the calendar are Barcelona and Russia (and Monaco I guess if you use pure racing logic).
It's more the cars that are boring than the circuit. The only real stinkers on the calendar are Barcelona and Russia (and Monaco I guess if you use pure racing logic).
The layout itself is bobbins but it's very easy to make mistakes which has made up for it so far. Last year was helped by Herr Fauntleroy chucking his toys out of the cockpit but both have been better than most 'European' street races tend to be.
Some muppet needs to get into the barrier now most of them have pitted, a nice safety car would make the end interesting.
Sweet. Might make things interesting.
lol
Initial reaction is that Max made 2 or 3 movements, together with Danny Ric over committing toward the end of the move.
Adrian Newey's face is priceless, he should probably just drive it himself from now on.
Combination of Max moving around in the braking zone (like a twat) and Ricciardo being committed to the move. 60/40.
How can that useless French cunt crash under the safety car?
Blaming the sweede
Grosjean
"I think Ericson hit us".
We need a red flag here (unless that means an automatic result).
Red Bull are partially responsible for this themselves with their strategy. They see the whole race that the car that stops first has the disadvantage, then they call Ricciardo in first while he's in front.
That was absolute dogshit from Vettel.
Holy shit. This ending.
Puncturemania.
I note that they call it 'incident' and not 'drama' or 'excitement'. They should just run tyre simulations and save money on building things.
Lol at Hamilton managing to win that. Spent most of the race being sarcastic on team radio.
Mid race, they should throw shuriken on the track to make thinngs exciting
Something quite nice about God Save the Queen playing behind that murderous dictator bloke in his backyard.
Nice to see Ferrari throwing away advantages and leads left right and centre again, well worth the Ł100m
Vettel shitting the bed will get lost now, brainless load of shite from him.
I was wracking my brain to work out the Ferrari angle for Grosjean chucking it into the wall, but I guess he was just being useless. Then trying to blame Ericsson was the icing on the cake. How does he continue to achieve gainful employment in the field?
Harsh on Bottas but Hamilton winning that, and taking the lead in the championship is beyond lol considering, as Jimmy said, all he's been doing is be snarky on the radio since they botched that VSC in Australia.
If I remember correctly, it was not Grosjean himself, but his race engineer who blamed Ericsson. Still bizarre.
I've been meaning to find a book on racing aerodynamics. It seems odd to me that for so long it was mainly about streamlining, despite the fact that many of the designers were ex-aircraft engineers who ought to have been more conscious of what now goes into it.
Early aircraft people didn't have much of a clue of what they were doing to be fair.
Also, weren't all early F1 tracks this ultra-long, high-speed jaunts through the countryside? Top speed was probably more important back then.
They will have known in the fifties and sixties. Somebody like Malcolm Sayer was a genius at styling low-drag racing cars, but he got Jaguar to send a bunch of long-tail C-Types to Le Mans in 1952 that started lifting off at high speeds. Would he not have realised that?
You'd think so. Then again, on that extra-long LeMans straight, maybe they thought the top speed was more important. It is also possible that top aerodynamicists understood drag and lift, but not so much its effect on grip.
Lack of testing and proper data is a big factor. Airflow does funny things at high speed and it's not always obvious when something at the front of the car is adversely affecting something further back, especially if it only happens at 150mph. In the days when pre-race tests amounted to a jaunt down the A1 at 2am you went with whatever seemed to work. There's also a fundamental difficulty with aerodynamics (downforce in particular) in that it's most useful at high speed but that's normally the point where you want less of it. It's only fairly recently (post wind tunnel / cfd modelling) that downforce has been made to work efficiently at the kind of speeds useful for cornering, even then it's all just extra drag once you stop turning.
Yeah, they built the long-tails specifically to go faster on the main straight. That's why it seems odd to me. It wasn't just some new style they were messing about with, like when Bruce McLaren killed himself pissing about with different spoilers. It was designed for that, and presumably the sums (because that was how he worked) showed it would have been more beneficial; but it never occurred to them what else might happen. I'm not an aerodynamics expert (I'm Yevrah), but it seems like a weird blind spot for somebody with jet age aircraft experience.
Is aircraft experience necessarily that transferable though? Once you work out how to do wings most of the rest is stability and streamlining, the parallels for which you can see in early racing cars. The sticky bit comes when you introduce the need for mechanical grip.
Most of it seems to have been transferable, which is why I would like to know more about why those other aspects developed relatively slowly. There is a book about/by Jim Hall out next year which might have some answers for me, but in the meantime I should e-mail Adrian Newey pretending to be a curious twelve year old.
John Barnard would be more likely to answer (and is less of a cunt) as he just does furniture these days.
I suppose there's also more margin for error when you're 1000ft off the ground, a few feet left or right won't have you picking bits of Frenchman out of the scenery all weekend.
What about Ross Brawn? He was active in sportscar racing when they completed downforce.
He's too busy trying to sneak sprinklers into the rules for next year.
Aero regs are changing for next year at least. Simplified front wings and rear wings which channel the Dirty Air™ away from the pursuing car. I actually think Ricciardo and Verstappen’s crash actually did some good for this cause too as the combo of aero regs atm made it nearly impossible for DR to break out of the tow once he was so close.
@Magic Why does my World Supersport now have a pitstop in it?
Phillip Island did but then it's gone by the next round, same for the Superbikes.
That was tyre wear concerns at Philip Island.
Ah ok, weird that they didn't mention it once on commentary. I'm more than ready for a non-Kwaka champion but I'm not sure anyone has the consistency (Melandri seems to be riding a washing machine).
It'll be Rea again this year so don't worry about that, just enjoy the close racing which seems to be more frequent this season. WSS (I mean World Yamaha Series) is amazing though.