As far as the championship goes... it is more of the same... One team on top with very little competition. The sport as a whole is getting worse... The spectacle is suffering and fans are being distanced from it more and more. F1 just isn't what it was and probably wont be until Bernie is replaced. Maybe then somebody can come in and revitalize it.
And yet even when we get great finishes like that, they seem to feel the need to dick about with rules here and there, remove/add gizmos/dick about with tyre compounds etc and bugger it all up, rather than just letting the teams evolve the cars and giving us more of the same...
Let's face it... who doesn't want a title fight with 4 drivers in contention for the title right to the death? I know I do. I think that's why I'm more interested in Indy these days. Yeah, the cars aren't the most advanced on the planet, but there's no telling who might win on any given weekend... And there's both friction and comradery between the drivers that doesn't feel either forced or restrained. It feels more real where as F1 feels like I'm looking in to a bubble.
They say that there's more than one way to skin a cat but not in F1. The rules are to restrictive so those who got it right win (red bull recently, now Mercedes even more so). In the past you got cars going at the same problem in different ways, making cars unique with form constantly changing. Drivers stood out and weren't berated for showing personality. WEC is opening up to various ideas and in many ways it's far more advanced than F1 so there really isn't any excuse for forcing F1 to be dull and predictable.
I agree on all that BLS. Right now they spend a shed load of cash to find a tiny loophole that inevitably gets banned because it's too much of an advantage. The sport needs some diversity and a lot more testing. The current engine freeze is beyond ridiculous to me. How is anyone supposed to catch up? Shouldn't they be developing and improving these engines constantly? I don't see the benefit for the engine manufacturers.
One team will always get it right, this year it's mercedes, last year it was anyones guess until the tyres detonated (shame that). They've tried to stiff Merc and only seem to have stiffed Lotus, it's as Frank said, and pissed off the 'tache, "the cars the star", you just hoe you get a Senna/Prost situation when it happens. We have something a bit similar, except Hamilton doesn't have the same mental strength or dedication of Senna imo, and Rosberg is no Prost behind the wheel, I think he would've come home behind Ricciardo if their starting positions had been reversed.
The car is the star in many a season in F1, but almost more so recently, in that if you get it right out of the box then there's little the competition can really do in-season to try claw back the deficit. There's has been a multitude of F1 dull seasons for many differing reasons... But over the years there's not really been anything done that has really remedied those problems unfortunately As for Senna/Prost... I wouldn't expect to ever see two drivers like that again in F1, so trying to compare anyone with those two is redundant. The sport and the world just isn't close to how it was then. But let's be honest, neither of those two were close to being saints. There's a lot of romance involved with looking back.
Turns out that despite Massa having a little moan that all rookies are dangerous and its never his fault the stewards investigated him and him alone for the first corner shunt. http://f1news.cz/pictures/article/2014/07/23/10_hoc_massa-zapis-1406095718.pdf
Now I thought the FIA declared that first corner incidents would never be investigated because 22 cars going into 1 corner would cause all sorts of unpredictability. Have they changed this or just forgotten?
I agree that I badly worded my post. I was more referring to Lewis taking every slight opportunity to get past,and him colliding a couple of times and him being lucky his car was not damaged more. Not that he was lucky in how he passed. Alonso and Riccardo's battle was great and they seemed to give each other just enough room not to collide. I don't really have favourite drivers or teams for that matter. I enjoy watching the differing skills of each driver, most have good points and bad but most are good to watch. As for the teams, well I would love to see more technical stuff getting published at the end of the year but that is never going to happen as the teams always want to keep their secrets. So sorry for my badly worded post.
I think they would still be investigated, but just looked at differently because it is more crowded at the start. Anyone being reckless should still be dealt with accordingly.
Only got around to watching the proper BBC highlights yesterday. Good race, lots of 3 wide action into the hairpin and another great duel from Alonso and an RBR. Thank goodness the safety car didn't come out for Sutil, imagine the ****storm on here for the FIA helping out Hamilton to close up on the leaders Clearly the FIA read this forum and were aware of that so decided to sort it out under yellows .
ther cracking race to add to several others this season. The Sky F1 end of season review is already virtually guaranteed to have loads of action left on the digital equivalent of the cutting room floor. I just wish influential people would stop slagging off our sport because it's contagious and plain wrong. I'm not 'head in the sand' pretending all is perfect because all sports,entertainment and media forms have to develop and evolve to maintain their place in an ever more competitive, diverse and accessible environment. Some try to tell me that the last turbo era in the '80s was much more exciting. It wasn't, I was guiding one of them for much of it, and plenty of those races were boring to drive in let alone watch, living on the fuel gauge while waiting for it to go bang. Reliability was appalling, pole to last on the grid was often 10 seconds, and it was perfectly easy to cruise home in 6th place two laps behind the leader. Some of the races were epic too of course, just like today. Sunday's race saw yet more side-by-side action with breathtaking skills, along with some over ambitious clumsiness. The new more lenient stance by the Stewards, as requested through a common sense discussion and process, has very quickly motivated the drivers to push much harder in combat in the knowledge that a little contact will not ensure a race-wrecking trundle through the pitlane. Ricciardo's 'never say die' attitude against the Spaniard who never gives up was a career defining moment. Even Alonso has publicly applauded that one, not that he could do much else, although he beat the initially delayed Aussie to the flag. We've long craved this type of GP2 ambitious and inventive driving in F1 again and taking away the stigma of so many penalties has helped enormously. Of course we still need rules, just as you couldn't possibly have a football match without a referee. There's much confusion though over 'track limits' where we saw drivers heavily penalised in Austria and Silverstone, but allowed to run wide in Germany. I really wish that this could be more rigid and spoke with Charlie Whiting about it. He explained to me that the kerbs and various run-off zones vary significantly from circuit to circuit, especially the older ones. This is not apparent on TV.* Moreover, those circuits which also have motorbike racing have very conflicting demands. Track layouts also vary massively in terms of what does give a lasting advantage. Most importantly he pointed out to me that if every corner needed a judge of fact and the Stewards had to investigate every incident of every driver on every lap running wide then the system would simply implode. *We should use the GPS technology already on the cars to measure and automatically flag up persistent track limits abuse, or maybe even temporarily slowing the cars after an infringement. Then the same impressive driving skills we saw on Sunday would immediately be used to keep the cars on track... Track limits are not an issue at Monaco, as long as they don't jump the chicane, but we can't have barriers or dangerously high kerbs alongside every corner. It's not such an easy fix, but more info as to why certain corners and tracks are policed more heavily will help us all to understand and explain it better. For example the kerb on the exit of the final turn in Hockenheim is twice as high and twice as wide, with two opposing cambers leading onto grass, as that of Silverstone. And so a different approach was taken. In hindsight, that most comfortable of places to visit, Lewis Hamilton didn't need to be quite so punchy with his overtakes in order to achieve his desired second place, his various skirmishes leading up to the rather firm and actually somewhat fortuitous contact with Jenson Button cost him three points. His team where also convinced that the Sutil last corner spin would bring out the safety car, but the damage was already done to his front wing and subsequent sets of tyres. It was interesting in my Sky F1 interview with Nico Rosberg that he finally admitted they had been very worried about how losing their very good FRIC suspension goodies would affect their performance. Every team and driver had dismissed the loss of FRIC as of little importance which made no sense. They've carried this equipment around the race tracks of the world for several years and spent millions developing the systems. Bit of an own goal to say it was all rubbish, and standing beside the track it was easy to see that the hurriedly newly set up cars were just a little more difficult to brake and turn in to slow corners. They'll iron that out soon enough and the budget will now go towards the next FRIC/F-Duct/Mass Damper/Blown Exhaust/Double Diffuser concept. Rosberg needn't have worried, he was cruising all race, his fastest lap was 1.3 seconds slower than Hamilton, and yet he lapped everybody up to 8th, and thrashed Red Bull and Ferrari by 40-50 seconds at a canter. What really spiced up the race was tyres which fell away reasonably quickly, somewhere between the chewing gum tyres of years past and the rather more durable Pirellis we have seen at other recent races. The combination of DRS and attack boost was a bit too powerful heading down to the legendary turn 6 hairpin but at least it gave the the spectacle of any number of world champions playing dare on the brakes and bouncing off each other. They love it. We love it.* MB ------------------------------------- What are peoples thoughts on Martin Brundles conclusion that F1 is proving everyone wrong? Turbo has been a breath of fresh air. However it has been restricted by FIA nonsense. I just think it is too artificial. I rarely see someone pass without DRS. Engine freezes surely are halting competitor development, and tyres are just ot complimentary for racing. Change those 3 things and I genuinely believe we would enter a classic era Formula 1- A fast, evolving, noisy spectacle with competitors on the limit. I don't think Brundle really thinks we are at that point at the moment and it concerns me that he is pandering to Sky to pretend what is happening is right.
I'd say Brundle is unlikely to say "please don't keep watching our show". The biggest issue F1 has at the moment is the fact everyone keeps on talking about the "spectacle". Thats whats driving these stupid rules about double points and standing starts after the safety car. Too many knee-jerk reactions to the dominance of one team. If we don't want a spec series we just have to accept this will happen sometimes.
I don't have any issue with the new engines at all (well, maybe other than they sound a bit naff), but why restrict them with fuel weight, fuel flow and development? They're revving something ridiculous like 4k below what they're capable of due to fuel usage limits. Sort that out and open up development and we may have something good. Fuel management, tyre management, engine and transmission management, etc... We can see all that on the M62. Let's race!!!!
I think the fuel weight is always going to be a factor, but I really struggle to see why the flow rate is restricted, yes if they derestrict it then the engines can be ridiculously powerful, but it has it's flaws, it should be up to the teams how they use their fuel allowance, the quicker a car gets around a track with 100kg of fuel then it's more efficient at what it does. As to development, yeah, they really poked themselves up the arse with that idea
