If it's as bad as that i can agree. It would be a big shame to effective lose 8 cars, but i expect Renault to have at least begun to get on top of it by the time the season starts (and perhaps for Newey to draw up plans for a car with better cooling)
I hope it won't come to that and I seriously doubt it too. Obviously, I have no special knowledge to offer here but I think it's worth bearing in mind that it's in the sport media's interest to dramatise this as much as they can. I expect that, in the end, they'll be there on the grid but they may be uncompetitive and unreliable; I think that, ultimately, there's too much at stake for it to turn out any worse than this.
lets not forget this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTg2rUx3xDM F1 really doesn't need that to happen again, regardless of which drivers are involved (or not), especially with teams struggling to get sponsorship as it is.
I think they have gone too far trying to spice things up this year, and they've flown pretty close to the wind in this regard in the last couple of years. I'm not basing any of this on the Renault fiasco which is an inexcusable **** up, but they've introduced one of the most significant rule changes in decades and then slashed the amount of testing time. Then to make matters worse they've been limited to five engines for the season. I've never agreed with people who say retirements are exciting, I think it's a farcical way for a race to be decided and can be completely unfair. 2012 at McLaren is a pretty good example, Hamilton thrashed Button, he was embarrassing him at certain points of the season, but because Hamilton was plagued with unreliability he only finished two points ahead. The Renault engines that year are a pretty good example as well, 8 drivers were running their engines, Vettel lost a win and a 6th place to alternators, Grosjean lost a second place, and I think the rest were largely unaffected. Of course reliability is part of the package, but sometimes two drivers or two teams can get completely different results from the same package and it's just luck who ends up with what. It wouldn't be good if a driver lost a load of race wins, and as a result the championship, to a driver who inherited a load of wins for example. We're almost a third of the way through testing and the teams still aren't running the engines flat out. On top of that they're trying to learn what the new tyres and new aero are like, and what the best way to approach a race is in terms of fuel saving and tyres. And even if by some miracle they get a handle on all that, all their hard work could be undone by one faulty component. On top of all this Bernie's pushing for double points in the last three races, by which time there's probably going to be grid penalties galore as everyone moves into their 6th, 7th and 8th engines.* I'm not saying the championship will be tainted, but it would be a crying a shame if it was decided by which driver happened to get the fewest faulty parts delivered by his engine supplier. There'd also be uproar if McLaren have a faster car than Mercedes this year but lose the championship to them because their engines seem to blow up more frequently than the works team's. *They also have a weird way of applying penalties this year: So basically if a team has a recurring issue with a specific component, say the energy store, they'll get a ten place penalty each time they replace it once they've used the first 5.
I wonder if Seb would get so pissed off that he would actually refuse to race? Considering there's no point in doing do because he would always start 18th+ and never actually go beyond 10 laps. Seb has very powerful clauses in his contract I read, during 2012 with Red Bull's struggles seemed worried they were actually going to lose him to Ferrari for 2013-2014. This is 10x worse already!
Even if the Renault cars failed in the first 4 - 6 races there would be Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes (maybe even Williams) fighting at the top. And it wouldn't be a tainted win. After all if it was the Ferrari and Mercedes engines failing every race and Vettels renault powered rock solid car cruised to every win he would come out with that stupidest of phrases.................................."You make your own luck"
It looks like it's going to be messy. As for tainted, championships are often tainted from many fans' subjective points of view but we move on anyway. From the sport's bosses' perspective, how much controversy functions as hype and how much is too much? I'd certainly agree that, at this stage, it looks like the sport has over-done the changes, not least because they haven't allowed extra leeway for the teams and engine suppliers to test adequately upfront; now, who's fault would that be?
mmm, that's all very good, if it happens, but if it's one team/driver dominating, when the dominant car from the last couple of years isn't on the grid, it obviously undermines their achievement, and damages the image of the sport, unless you're a fan of that driver of course. I did try to link a vid of the US 2005 Grand Prix as an example of how bad these kind of scenarios can get when teams are forced to pull out, if people had forgotten the whole 6 car grid incident, but i guess i'm not allowed to link yet or something. F1 really doesn't need those kind of scenarios, especially when teams are struggling to get sponsorship as it is, and people inevitably celebrating the downfall of Vettel will probably damage the image of the sport as well.
Does anyone know if a rolling engine test bed is allowed? i.e. Bolt a development power train to an old GP car or something like that and test even in a straight line?
Mmmmm....... I doubt this years championship would be tainted no more or less than the 2009 championship. Yes a lot of issues get thrown in the air with somebody being able to gain an advantage out of it but the best driver out of that group would still be up there. Unless of course it is literally 1 team taking all the wins I would just laugh since you replaced 1 kind of moderate dominance just for another.
Would be fine I think. I'm sure Renault could run an RB10 in their windtunnel to test cooling as well.
If they are allowed it makes Renault look even more stupid. Lets face it, it couldn't cost much to mount a development power unit to a test chassis and cloak it in fibreglass (cheap and quick) even just to validate their computer models. I used to test development jet and gas turbine engines and we had masses of instrumentation to assist the engine manufacturers developing and validating their models. I once did a 30 min test that cost over £2.5million to run. That was just to validate 'the model'!!!!
I think a 5th consecutive year of Vettel/Red-Bull domination would be more damaging for the sport than a new driver and team winning, which would be very refreshing. The dominance on the 2nd half of last year was very damaging for the sport with F1 losing fans in the drones and even the core fans getting sick of it. Few people want to see the same carry on into this year. And don't worry, I am familiar with Indy 05. At least that provided a major talking point unlike the 2nd half of 2013.
Interesting. That would mean that Renault would need to completely re-design the ICE to fix whatever problems they have. I remember Luca Marmorini saying that the ICE takes months to manufacture and that the V6 they had on the dyno in September would be almost the same as the final race-spec V6. This may explain why Renault need to take so long to fix the issues:
All the questions about whether the cars will last the races will draw more viewers in. This is exactly what F1 needed. Unkown quantities. What's wrong with only half the field finishing? Always used to be that way and often it was never 100% sure which cars they would be. We're all used to 90% finishing rates, and usually its accidents that take the cars out, so why not bring back another variable? Cars, engines, reliability, tyres & driver ability all will be tested more this year than for a long time. Brilliant! You doubt this? 45 pages after just 3 days of testing shows how much more interest there is just on this forum compared to last year.
But lets be honest it would be a very hollow victory against Vettel over a season if he wasn't able to defend his world title with one hand tied behind his back, let alone both at the moment + his legs. You might enjoy it for a while he struggles to get into Q2, but you guys will miss him if your favorite driver/team cant actually face him on equal ground and beat him and his team. I would know as I experienced it during 2009 when I used to hate Lewis' guts. Yes it was hand rubbing quality that Lewis and McLaren were struggling, but I got annoyed in that I couldn't see Vettel do it to him on equal ground for a WDC, 2010 and 2011 though did it for me. And the repeat of 'what if that driver had that car? would he won the WDC with that car?' would eventually reveal itself. So for example if Lewis, Alonso, Kimi or Jenson don't win the world title, Vettel will be applied to them as a benchmark in how much better he could of done and then the cycle would be complete.
I don't think the new rules have damaged F1 ....yet... Just look at the interest this new season is getting. Look how many posts are on this test thread. Look how much intrigue and fascination their is on the internet... All this on the back of the most boring season where fans vowed to not follow the sport anymore and switched off
Over the last year he has been pretty good with his sources tbh, as forza linked a few pages back he did say Renault were going to be in deep **** come jerez while nobody else did.
BamalamaVJ, until you've got 10 posts to your name, any link you post gets pre-moderated, to try to prevent spam accounts plaguing the site. I've approved it now, so it should slot in where you posted it. Tainted title? Just because reliability has been fairly bullet-proof in the last few years doesn't (to me) mean a season with lots of failures is suddenly worth any less than any other title. In the 80's and 90's reliability was dreadful at times and having a car that finished the race was an important factor. Raikkonen had a Mclaren that would have coasted to the title if it could just stop coasting to a halt. Having said that, if we get a third of the way through the season and a Renault engine is yet to finish ahead of a Ferrari or Mercedes engine, then it does seem like a bit much. World Champions have been in uncompetitive cars the next season, but generally they've at least made the grid each race. However, I really like the fact that F1 is pushing the limits of engine technology again. These engines are vastly complicated, cutting edge beasts that will produce technology relevant to the modern motor industry. Whether the FIA have gone too far in pushing reliability so soon remains to be seen, but hopefully the regulations can be tweaked if it looks like teams will be put of engines by the halfway point. F1 needs to remain a sport too!
