The official Formula 1 and general motorsport thread for 2019

This Ricciardo renault combo is career ending gooseberry fool.

It’s amazing how (considering what I imagine is a sizeable budget) that Renault haven’t closed the gap to the top 3, after last year being quite strong for them I expected more of the same, this weekend they have been woeful though.

Unlucky for Gasly, his one race with Red Bull so far where he’s had decent pace (still not great mind) and he’s retired, VSC though, wonder if any of the top 4 will pit?

The absolute state of those sofas

Lewis' hat :lol:

Great job from Bottas, lets hope it stays like this for a good chunk of the season between Bottas and Hamilton. Not a bad race all in all, after the F2 races and F1 qualifying I was surprised we didn’t have a little more drama though.

Barcelona up next, I wonder how (and if) Ferrari’s very strong pre season performance round there will help them. Ferrari or Red Bull do need to beat Mercedes and soon if they want to stand any chance of challenging for the WDC come the end of the season, although it already looks like its starting to get out of reach for anyone but the Mercedes duo unless they start tripping over each other on a regular basis.

Ad7 wrote:Lewis' hat

Fashion icon :lol:

I thought that was another dull race, but that's Baku for you. A lot of the time these modern street circuits only deliver a decent race if there are a number of safety cars.

I'm not sure what Ferrari's problem is. But it seems they either lose their pace for some reason when the chips are down, or their ultimate pace is just slower than Merc once Merc dial in the car over the course of a weekend.

Barcelona will be interesting, even if its usually a crap race. We may get to see where Ferrari's pre-season pace has actually gone. Have they lost pace, or were Merc sand bagging and just have lots in reserve.

No doubt that was a dull race, in what's shaping up to be a very dull season. But for my money Baku is the best new circuit there's been in ages (toss up between it and Texas). Not only does it look amazing but aside from this year I think every race so far has been great. Who cares why. You get safety cars because it's a hard track and cars bunch up thanks to the straights, if that leads to incidents all the more entertainment for me.

I still think the best possible thing that could happen to f1 would be a tyre war. Have 3 manufactures that must split the teams between them, then watch the racing come back.

Ad7 wrote:I still think the best possible thing that could happen to f1 would be a tyre war. Have 3 manufactures that must split the teams between them, then watch the racing come back.

I just don't think it would work unless the teams could choose which manufacturer they wanted each race. Otherwise you get a situation like 2005 where one manufacturer will have an incredible advantage and 50% of the grid don't stand a chance. Plus in the tyre war days, all the talk was just tyres, tyres, tyres. It got so monotonous.

What the sport needs in my opinion is more engine parity, a budget cap, reduce pit teams to one person wheel, refuelling and some kind of solution to the B team issue where it is either banned outright or teams can purchase kits off the major manufacturers and have equal ability to compete.

Ad7 wrote:I still think the best possible thing that could happen to f1 would be a tyre war.

Definitely.

I remember when Bridgestone first arrived in 1997 and we had loads of really unusual results thanks to them (Damon Hill in Hungary being one such event).

twitter.com/FormulaMoney/status/1122571781070630913

https://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2019 ... n-britain/

Hardly surprising that viewing figures are down in the UK when the sport is behind a paywall

floydfreak wrote:

twitter.com/FormulaMoney/status/1122571781070630913

https://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2019 ... n-britain/

Hardly surprising that viewing figures are down in the UK when the sport is behind a paywall

Yeah I don’t see why anyone is surprised by it really, Liberty really need to get it back on free to air in various countries and sooner rather than later. Hopefully they’ll tell Sky where to go once their current contract is up but Sky will probably just throw money at them till they let it continue as is.

Also on a tyre war, I really don’t see why people want one back in the sport? Surely you’ll just get a similar situation where if (for example) the Bridgestones are vastly superior to the Pirelli and Michelin offerings then you’d just get the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull throwing money in Bridgestones direction to get the tyres on their car meaning the current top 3 will remain at the front unless other changes are made. Obviously you’d have the odd race where the tyres played a big role but they’d probably still be few and far between.

captain red dog wrote:What the sport needs in my opinion is more engine parity, a budget cap, reduce pit teams to one person wheel, refuelling and some kind of solution to the B team issue where it is either banned outright or teams can purchase kits off the major manufacturers and have equal ability to compete.

A well implemented budget cap (along with cheaper, simpler engines) would certainly be a good start. Ted mentioned in his notebook today that one of the ideas they’re discussing for 2021 (I think he said 2021 anyway) is only letting the teams have so many front, rear wings etc to choose from so a team couldn’t rock up to Monza with a super low downforce package and hope for the best, this would probably help save a little. Cheaper, simpler engines would also be better as well in my opinion, I actually love the current power units, they’re an amazing feat of engineering and it’s truly amazing how much power can be produced from a 1.6 V6 turbo hybrid and considering the performance the reliability (of the Mercedes mainly) has been remarkable but they cost far too much and only being allowed 3 before penalties is just daft. A cheaper engine that the teams had more of would mean they could run them harder but for shorter overall distances, this on its own wouldn’t improve the racing but in the current era as soon as someone has a gap (or are stuck behind a driver due to aero) they just drop back to save the tyres and power unit anyway, if the aero and tyres were designed to allow for closer racing then having more engines available should mean they aren’t as obsessed about saving them.

I quite like the idea that a team lower down the gird (they could maybe restrict it to the lower half of the grid based on the previous years constructors standings) could for example buy a suspension/brakes package, or a power unit/gearbox package, maybe there could be a standardised chassis they could have the option to buy as well. The only aspect of the car I think a team should have to design completely themselves is the aero package, aero plays such a big role in F1 that it’d be a bit of a cheat if you could buy an aero package, also if they could buy the rest of car to put together themselves they’d be saving a huge chunk on R&D that they could then direct to the aero department to try and improve. Only issue I can see with this is if a team kept jumping between 5th and 6th in the WCC meaning they alternate years on being able to buy parts rather than designing them themselves so they could just give it to most of the teams as an option, they could then allow teams who sell these packages (so Mercedes, Ferrari, technically Renault and maybe Red Bull?) an increase in their capped budget to cover the extra cost they’d have in designing these packages for the other teams to buy.

floydfreak wrote:

twitter.com/FormulaMoney/status/1122571781070630913

https://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2019 ... n-britain/

Hardly surprising that viewing figures are down in the UK when the sport is behind a paywall

Anyone with half a brain could have told Liberty that this would happen, it's not entirely their fault though as they've found themselves having to honour a crap deal Bernie signed.

Zandvoort set to replace Barcelona on 2020 F1 calendar

25 years ago today Senna died & Roland Ratzenberger yesterday the darkest weekend in Motorsport

twitter.com/1990sF1/status/1123361620284014593

never seen this pic before

Watched it all unfold live on TV, it's something i will never forget.

Me too, it was the first F1 race i watched in full

Wiv da armco now x

https://web.archive.org/web/20080225170 ... /senna.htm

floydfreak wrote:https://web.archive.org/web/20080225170106/http://www.sportspromedia.com/senna.htm

Thank you for sharing that, a lot of what was written i already knew, but there were a quite a few things i didn't.

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