Most liked posts in thread: F1 - 2011

am0eba · May 4, 2011

Also a proposal in the works for "career" numbers for the drivers, similar to NASCAR... No more rotating numbers based on the previous season's finish...

Haven't figured out if I like this idea or not, but it would definitely help in ID'ing drivers...

Try to base on helmet colors, but they keep changing those around too... Then there's the camera pod color, but those can be pretty hard to see on an old CRT TV in standard def...

_Dave_

Minidave · May 4, 2011

Well, it's sure not hard to tell the "brand" name cars from each other - Ferrari in red, big Mac in dark silver or grey, Williams in blue, Renault in yellow/blue, Farce India in orange and white and so on....

In any major sport today it's all about maximizing the $$$$, there's realy no sport in it anymore, it's all about the show - that's what they call it too....the show.

Used to be the sport was the show, now the show is the show.....

I'm in the same camp, just watch it for what it is, but the more it becomes like All Star Wrestling (it's not fake, it's staged! :frown2, the less inclined I am to watch. Instead, I go to one of my local events at the road course and watch SCCA or one of the club events, or head out to the local drag strip for some real one on one stuff!

You think there's cries of favoritism for Ferrari in F1 now, can you imagine if they had a substantial ownership stake in the series?

Nathan · May 4, 2011

Minidave said: ↑

You think there's cries of favoritism for Ferrari in F1 now, can you imagine if they had a substantial ownership stake in the series?
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Be careful what you wish for...

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Agnelli family's Exor confirm F1 plan

Follow the money here...

Exor, the investment company owned by the Agnelli family and chaired by its scion John Elkann, who also heads up the Fiat Group... which in turn owns Ferrari.

And runs the FIA...none other then Ex-Ferrari team leader Jean Todt.

There are back hollows deep in the WV woods where the family all looks like they were fathered by one person that are less incestuous.

Steve · May 6, 2011

Vettel did very unkind things to Kinky Kylie* during P1 today. This is the ugliest of the damage but all four corners hit the Armco to some degree and he missed P2 entirely...no surprise. Video here if you're interested.

* For any who haven't heard, that's how Vettel named his car this year.

goaljnky · May 7, 2011

Any word if they are letting Kobayashi race tomorrow?

Steve · May 7, 2011

goaljnky said: ↑

Any word if they are letting Kobayashi race tomorrow?
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A fair question given he obviously didn't set a lap time in the 107% zone, but every mention of Kobayashi I've read talks about his having to start from the back of the grid. Not a word about not qualifying.

goaljnky · May 7, 2011

From F1 website:

"This order, however, becomes Kovalainen, Trulli, Liuzzi, Glock, Karthikeyan, D'Ambrosio, Kobayashi (granted permission to race without a qualifying time by the stewards) for the grid once D'Ambrosio's five-place penalty for ignoring yellow flags on Friday is taken into account."

Minidave · May 7, 2011

Beat that!

says Redbull.......as they take one lap in Q3 and park the cars.

Result, Redbull P1 and P2.....pretty confident, wouldn't you say?

Rosberg looking better every race, MSC not quite so much....

Looks to me like Redbull, Big Mac and Mercedes have got it going on.....should be fun tomorrow morning!

Steve · May 7, 2011

Minidave said: ↑

Beat that!

says Redbull.......as they take one lap in Q3 and park the cars.

Result, Redbull P1 and P2.....pretty confident, wouldn't you say?

Rosberg looking better every race, MSC not quite so much....

Looks to me like Redbull, Big Mac and Mercedes have got it going on.....should be fun tomorrow morning!
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There's clearly no reason to wonder why RB poached Newey from McLaren...

'Last dinosaur' Adrian Newey has vision to drive Red Bull's F1 dominance (guardian.co.uk)

Paul Weaver in Istanbul
The Guardian, Saturday 29 May 2010

Adrian Newey, the chief technical officer, has been the brains behind Red Bull's success this season

Adrian Newey may not be as famous as Karl Lagerfeld or Gianni Versace but among the designer labels of Formula One he is king of the catwalk, the name every driver wants to be seen with.

The man who makes the world's fastest cars, the genius who actually "sees" airflow, hardly looked at the vanguard of sartorial fashion as he strolled through the paddock yesterday, unrecognised by all but the cognoscenti.

Newey, who has placed Red Bull at the front of every grid this season, and who made champion cars for Williams and McLaren before that in a career dating back to the early 80s, was dapper, grey, balding and sporting jeans.

He is quietly spoken too, though the burning eyes are a clue to the ultra-competitive nature that has kept all rivals in his team's slipstream this year and could yet see the season evolve into a straight shoot-out between Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. This is the boffins' boffin, a middle-aged man with paper and pencil who is running rings around a generation of new designers with their computers and on-screen CADCAM technology.

"I think I am unique â€“ or the last dinosaur, if you like," the 51-year-old says. "I've been lucky. I'm one of the last generation of engineers who were involved when motor sport was somewhat smaller and you could get involved in all its different areas. In my early days at March I was a race engineer at weekends, a draughtsman in the drawing office during the week and an analyst down at the wind tunnel at some other time. So I got involved in everything.

"Unfortunately now, though you try to move people around as much as possible, the teams have gone from being five or 10 engineers â€“ when I started â€“ to being more like 200 engineers in a top Formula One team. So it becomes difficult for people to get involved in everything.

"The way I work, I try to absorb a particular problem through looking at results, listening to drivers at the circuit, looking at a problem on a computer, trying to understand how the car is operating mechanically and aerodynamically, and what problems it has. And from that, if it ticks away in my subconscious for the next week, an idea will pop out." He makes it sound like some happy serendipity.

Newey has brought what could be described as the "Red Queen effect" to Formula One. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice finds herself running hand in hand with the Red Queen, who shouts "Faster! Faster!" But "however fast they went they never seemed to pass anything". The Queen says to Alice: "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and the rest of Red Bull's pursuers are only too familiar with the feeling.

After some signs of mechanical fragility early in the season, followed by some instances of poor in-race decision‑making, the Red Bull cars have consolidated their dominance over their competitors in the past two races in Barcelona and Monaco, with Webber and Vettel now first and second in the drivers' championship, respectively.

Red Bull, insists Newey, are his last Formula One team. The only difficulty is in deciding what he does next. "It will have to be something stimulating, something that challenges my mind. I've looked at yachts but that seems the only sport more anti-social than motor racing. I don't know. But I will find something. I can't see myself staying in this in my 60s but I can't see myself lying on a beach either. At the same time I can't see myself moving on to another Formula One team. We've managed to create a very good working environment here. It's a good, honest, engineering-based team that goes about its task."

Newey was 13 or 14 when his father first took him to a local kart race. "He made the observation that most of the kids were racing because their dad wanted them to, rather than them wanting to do it. He said: 'Look, you have to show your determination.' And every pound I put in he matched me.

"So I got this rather tired old go-kart, which together with my driving was hopelessly uncompetitive. But the interest in modifying it and trying to make it go quicker overcame my driving aspirations and cemented my career choice."

After nearly a decade flitting between Formula One and IndyCar as a race engineer and designer, Newey joined Williams in 1990 and began to build a reputation as the world's leading car designer, making world champions of Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Damon Hill.

He left Williams in 1996 for McLaren because he could not get more control of the team (this is a man of such independence that he once painted his office in non-regulation colours â€“ a demonstration of his strength of mind). Williams, needless to say, have never been the same team since; under Newey, McLaren and Mika Hakkinen went on to win two world drivers' championships.

Patrick Head, then technical director of Williams, says: "Adrian is a very astute and clever designer. Having him contributing to Williams was a plus, and having him contribute to another team was a minus. So if you add the two together, it is a big loss."

That loss was McLaren's gain first, and now the mantle has passed to Red Bull. "Adrian is a remarkable guy," their team principal, Christian Horner, says. "He's a unique character. He has tremendous creativity. And a huge eye for detail. But he's also very practical. He's come from old-school engineering.

"When Adrian came to us we weren't ready for him. When he went to McLaren and Williams they were very established teams. We didn't have the infrastructure they had. With Red Bull it was a clean piece of paper. A lot of people told him he was completely mad and he's proved them wrong. He has that element of flair and detail that pushes the boundaries."

For his part, Webber says Newey was one of the "clear attractions" of Red Bull, and his abilities mean the rest of the field is simply trying to catch up. According to Lewis Hamilton, it will take McLaren until the Silverstone grand prix on World Cup final day to get there. But by then Red Bull will have marched on once more. The rumour is that they have come to Istanbul with yet more weaponry to take them even further ahead of their floundering rivals.

Newey is so clever that it is strangely reaffirming to discover that he does not drive cars as well as he designs them, even though he is a keen weekend racer.

Horner says: "He's great fun to be with and he's got a great sense of humour. Last winter we went to see Graz in Austria, just before Christmas, to visit Dr Helmut Marko [a Red Bull consultant]. Helmut is waiting for us at the end of this tree-lined drive. So Adrian decided to put in a power-slide and he understeered our car straight into one of the trees, taking the side out of the car. Just a typical Friday evening with Adrian Newey."
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minimark · May 7, 2011

Thanks for sharing that!

It truly amazes how certain people come along and for a time.....just get it like no one else!

Steve · May 7, 2011

goaljnky said: ↑

From F1 website:

"This order, however, becomes Kovalainen, Trulli, Liuzzi, Glock, Karthikeyan, D'Ambrosio, Kobayashi (granted permission to race without a qualifying time by the stewards) for the grid once D'Ambrosio's five-place penalty for ignoring yellow flags on Friday is taken into account."
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Expecting a bit of a charge through the field? :ihih:

goaljnky · May 7, 2011

Steve said: ↑

Expecting a bit of a charge through the field? :ihih:
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Have to take a chance on it, yes. Although I hope that fuel system bug does not rear its ugly head on Sunday.

Steve · May 9, 2011

Weak! Who cares what the FIA's goals are or whether you hit them spot on right away? You have to start somewhere. If you ask me, these are weak, weak excuses used to avoid having to take on competitive risks associated with the unknown.

Ground effect return to be called off (autosport.com)

Mon, 09 May 12:50:04 2011

Formula 1 teams are set to rubber-stamp a move to abandon the return of full-spec ground effect on grand prix cars from 2013 at a meeting later this week.

As part of a major overhaul of regulations that are coming in place for two years' time, F1 teams had been considering a return to ground effect floor aerodynamics on - which would in theory have helped improve the ability of cars to race closer to each other on track.

However, following more detailed analysis of the implementation of the ground effect design, teams now feel that the move is too radical if they are going to achieve targets for downforce and drag that have been laid down by the FIA.

Meetings of FOTA's Technical Regulations Working Group (TRWG) over the Turkish Grand Prix weekend reached agreement that the ground effect plans should be abandoned for 2013 - and the move is expected to be signed off at a get-together of the FIA's Technical Working Group on Wednesday.

Williams technical director Sam Michael told AUTOSPORT: "That is the proposal. But it all has to be signed off on Wednesday.

"TWRG representatives had a meeting with FOTA and FIA last week, the day after a TRWG meeting and we met again on Sunday morning here to recap what happened - because three people went from TRWG: Paddy Lowe, James Key and Aldo Costa.

"The main thing was that the FIA had targets for downforce and drag, and it would have been very difficult to control to those targets [with a ground effect car].

"That is such a different design, whereas the current floor we have got, everyone has got a lot of experience with it. It means if you say that I want to target this drag and downforce, we can much more easily say that if you strip off this bargeboard or do this with the rear wing you can do it.

"With a shaped underbody, it is something that has not been in F1 for a long time, so a majority of teams felt that if you developed that you would end up significantly away from target."

The idea for a return to ground effect, first revealed by AUTOSPORT last September, had come from Patrick Head and Rory Byrne, who had been put in charge of formulating new concept chassis rules for 2013.
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Vollgas · May 9, 2011

Bring back the old days when race cars were race cars, Bernie was just a mechanic the FIA made the rules and the teams went by what the FIA said.
F1 is so political now it has become boring to listen to.
It's also become boring to watch.
IMSA/Grand Am and ALMS offer far better racing that is racing.

Steve · May 13, 2011

I'm surprised to admit the teams have rather convincing arguments about why Todt's in-season testing proposal is a bad idea. I'm more convinced than ever that the idea of turning race weekend Fridays into full test days with extra tires, etc, is the way to go. Either that or just add a race weekend Thursday full test day a few times during the season and leave Fridays alone. Seems like either would add useful testing without having to form separate test teams.

Teams set to reject testing return plan (autosport.com)

Formula 1 teams are set to reject an offer from FIA president Jean Todt to bring back limited in-season testing from next year.

Todt revealed at last weekend's Turkish Grand Prix that he wants to bring an end to F1's in-season testing ban - and plans to discuss the matter with teams ahead of the European Grand Prix.

However, although Todt believes it makes sense for a return of some testing, teams are not convinced it will be a good move - as they fear it will simply lead to an escalation in costs.

When asked by AUTOSPORT for his feelings about the idea, Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner said: "I think that the balance that we have is right. Maybe we could do a bit more running on a Friday, or have a few more sets of tyres, which would encourage teams to run with more young drivers.

"The problem with testing is that as soon as you reintroduce it, you reintroduce test teams and the cost will escalate.

"One of the biggest cost savings we have seen is the reduction in testing, so I think the balance we have with the pre-season and the young driver test at the end of the year is right - and fiscally beneficial not just to the big teams but to the small teams as well."

Force India COO Otmar Szafnauer reckons that the return of testing would be a retrograde step for F1, at a time when big efforts had been made to reduce costs.

"We don't want to do it. Why go backwards?" he told AUTOSPORT. "There are some fundamental things that, when I was at Honda, at first we disagreed with but looking back I think we were wrong and [then FIA president] Max [Mosley] was right. One of which was getting rid of the qualifying car we used to run qualifying engines. What an expense? For what? Nothing.

"Pace ferme. Another fundamental thing to get rid of not just qualifying engines but cars. Great thing. It didn't hurt the show.

"Engines lasting more than they used to last. A fundamental thing that is right. Gearboxes lasting more than they used to last. A fundamental thing that is right. All of these things brought costs down and didn't ruin the show.

"No in-season testing saves a lot of money. We don't have a test team now. What would happen if we brought in-season testing back?

"We already do 19/20 races and our crew are stretched already. Now you are going to ask them to do another two or three tests. You will have two teams again and, once you have two teams, the costs escalate. Why go backwards on that front? Then you have to add on the cost of testing per kilometre as well."

FOTA chairman and McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh told Reuters in Turkey that the needs of the small teams would be a big consideration in any move to see testing return.

"Many teams would like more testing but we've got to be respectful of the small teams as well. We've got to contain costs," he said. "If the larger teams start testing and it's seen as to the disadvantage of the small teams then that isn't good for the sport."

Even if the testing proposal is rejected at the F1 Commission meeting scheduled for next month, Todt indicated in Turkey that he would push through the regulations for 2013 instead which will not need the approval of teams.

"I would have loved to have done it in 2011, but we could not impose it as there was no reason to impose it on safety grounds," said Todt.

"So, it will be in 2012 if we get enough [support]. It is something that we are going to present at the next Formula 1 Commission which will be on the Thursday in Valencia, and if not then, we can implement it in 2013 without any agreement.

"At the latest it will be 2013, but hopefully people will accept a few days testing during the season from next year on."

AUTOSPORT.com / Eurosport
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Steve · May 17, 2011

Interesting comments from Newey re the crash that killed Ayrton Senna, esp. at the end...

Puncture a likely cause for Senna's accident - Newey (ESPNF1 Staff)

A puncture was the most likely cause for Ayrton Senna's fatal accident at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, according to Williams chief designer at the time Adrian Newey.

The reason behind the accident has never been fully understood, with a wide range of theories from a broken steering column - which had been made longer at Senna's request by welding an extra piece onto it ahead of the race - to low tyre pressures due to a long period behind the safety car. But in a recent interview with the Guardian, Newey, who admitted that the aftermath of the accident affected him physically, said those theories do not necessarily stack up.

"For the whole team it was incredibly difficult," he told the newspaper. "I remember the day after the race was a bank holiday Monday and some of us came in to try and trawl though the data and work out what happened. They were dark weeks.

"The honest truth is that no one will ever know exactly what happened. There's no doubt the steering column failed and the big question was whether it failed in the accident or did it cause the accident? It had fatigue cracks and would have failed at some point. There is no question that its design was very poor. However, all the evidence suggests the car did not go off the track as a result of steering column failure.

"If you look at the camera shots, especially from Michael Schumacher's following car, the car didn't understeer off the track. It oversteered which is not consistent with a steering column failure. The rear of the car stepped out and all the data suggests that happened. Ayrton then corrected that by going to 50% throttle which would be consistent with trying to reduce the rear stepping out and then, half-a-second later, he went hard on the brakes.

"The question then is why did the rear step out? The car bottomed much harder on that second lap which again appears to be unusual because the tyre pressure should have come up by then - which leaves you expecting that the right rear tyre probably picked up a puncture from debris on the track. If I was pushed into picking out a single most likely cause that would be it."

Newey, who is now Red Bull's technical director, said the accident had made him question his career in motorsport.

"The little hair I had all fell out in the aftermath," he added. "So it changed me physically. It was dreadful. Both Patrick Head [Williams's technical director] and myself separately asked ourselves whether we wanted to continue in racing. Did we want to be involved in a sport where people can die in something we've created?"

Â© ESPN EMEA Ltd.
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Minidave · May 19, 2011

Alonso signs with Ferrari thru 2016

Wow, just ......wow.......

Formula One superstar Fernando Alonso has extended his contract with Ferrari until the end of the 2016 season, the team announced on Thursday prior to this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix.

Until the extension, Alonso was committed to the Scuderia only for next season. The length of the extension is unpredecented in F1 terms, and it means that the Spanish two-time world champion will be with the Prancing Horse for at least seven seasons. He joined the team last year.

The announcement is also noteworthy for any other drivers who have ambitions of driving for Ferrari, since Alonso will now be there for the foreseeable future.

"It is a great pleasure to have renewed our agreement with a driver who has always demonstrated a winning mentality, even in the most difficult circumstances," said Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo. "Fernando has all the required qualities, both technically and personally, to play a leading role in the history of Ferrari, and I hope he will be enriching it with further wins very soon."

Alonso added, "I am very happy to have reached this agreement. I immediately felt comfortable within Ferrari and now it feels to me like a second family. I have the utmost faith in the men and women who work in Maranello and in those who lead them. It is therefore natural for me to decide to extend my relationship in the long-term like this, with a team at which I will no doubt end my Formula One career one day."

Read more: Formula One: Fernando Alonso extends Ferrari deal to 2016 - AutoWeek

goaljnky · May 19, 2011

I read it as Masa will be out next seasons for the red cars.

Nathan · May 19, 2011

Vettel and Alonso?

You heard it here first.

And the owners of Fiat want to own F1.

goaljnky · May 19, 2011

I though Vettel just signed an extension with McLearen?

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