But the question does present itself. With the driver's championship over and the constructor's championship just about over, will RB cars not push as hard, or conversely will they take this opportunity to start working on the next year's cars at the expense of staying competitive. Or will the competitive spirit and pursuit of less tangible records such as consecutive poles and additional Grand Prix trophies continue to spur them on?
If anything they will probably take more chances in going for the wins. Gloves are off, it's now a simple race to win attitude whilst possibly trying a few things and having some fun!!!
Teams are taking different views of their 2011 vs 2012 car development. Since there are few rule changes it's basically an evolution vice revolution. Some years it's only a matter of time before nearly every team declares a stop to current year development and focuses all (or at least most) of their design work on the next season. This year even though they're all working behind the scenes on next year's cars I think Red Bull and McLaren (among others?) are taking the view that almost everything they do this year can be applied to their new cars, so they're pushing to the end. Ferrari claimed a while ago that they were done with their 2011 car. They seem to have decided they didn't take enough risks with their 2011 design and they need to start over with something more "radical" so further development on the 2011 car won't carry over. Of course when asked recently about the 2012 Red Bull car Horner claimed all Newey will tell him is it's blue. They claim to be working on a "surprising" design...who knows?
Vettel celebrates in "questionable" (relative to F1 rules) style. Note toward the end the Japanese fans love Kobayashi, don't care that he finished 6 places back of his grid position in 13th. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4TV_966Drs]Vettel donuts turn at Suzuka 2011 - YouTube[/ame]
The powers at be in F1 can be so constipated at times, that a Polish victory lap by their now two time World Champion might loosen things up a bit... Besides having your Champion celebrate with the fans as was the donuts, is darn good for everyone!:beer
Congrats to Seb & the whole Red Bull team. Seb should get Alex Zanardi's dount recipe. That man knew how to do donuts.
Well, so much for the consecutive poles record.....and I seriously doubt it will happen next year either. MacLaren has definitely come on strong at the end of this season, and the Hamster seems to have finally woken up again, we'll see if he can keep it on track this time. Next year, I see stiff competition between Red Bull, Ferrari, Big Mac and even MBZ - I think it will be a much tougher championship in 2012.
It's possible. There aren't a lot of big technical rule changes coming so I suppose the odds are competition will be tighter as all the teams edge closer to getting the max performance out of the current set of rules.
....or Red Bull merely hones the blade that much more and severs any hope they have been clinging too.... Actually it will be very interesting to see what happens with all the teams not having to reinvent everything next year, could be a truly competitive season!!!
Well, Vettel showed them today that's he's not ready to just cruise to the end of the season! On to India then....
Do you think he meant that they would surprise the other teams if they win, or that it will be a surprise to them?
I'd say that's the sound of someone who resigned himself to the fight for 2nd. Gave up on anything higher than 2nd in the drivers championship a few races before Vettel clinched the title and I think he pretty much lost hope for race finishes atop the podium (barring Vettel DNFs) about midway through the season.