Since I am sure all of you are rabid F1 fans, this is probably a totally unenlightening post. (OK. I’ll stop being a smartass.)
F1 season is off to an “interesting” start. LOADS of changes. For those of you who don’t follow/aren’t all that interested/couldn’t care to spend the time, here’s a recap of transpirings.
Last year saw the winning of the car championship by Mercedes (no surprise – they pretty much ran off and hid from all the other teams all year) and the drivers championship won by a truly icky person – Nico Rosberg, son of yet another icky person Keke Rosberg. Father was a nasty piece of work, and son had all the pieces in his corner and STILL won by luck, as his partner on the team was clearly faster. Nico’s bad behavior was obvious in all the post-race shots in the preparatory room before coming out on the podium, where he sulked and groused while the other two drivers mostly tried to avoid interacting with him.
Things are different this year. Nico’s gone! Retired rather unexpectedly, leaving Mercedes in the lurch for a driver, this after they bent over backwards on his contract last year. The difference is obvious immediately in the prep room – JOY, FUN, HAPPINESS with the win/place/show!
First race ran in Melbourne, on a track that is kind of a street race, so lots of close walls. Rules changes were aplenty, mostly with things like seriously wider tires (2.5″ front, 3.5″ rear) giving lots more grip, lower and wider rear wing, different aerodynamic rules. Mercedes has given its incredible engines to other teams, and lots of homework was done during the in-between season time. The results of all this was that the track record was dropped by a couple seconds from Schumacker’s old one of 2004 – this in a sport where 0.1 sec is considered significant and the front 5 rows are generally divided by hundredths of a second in times.
The other surprise was that Mercedes didn’t win. Ferrari did. Sebastian Vettel, who had real problems getting accustomed to new aero features in years past, has come back into his own and drove the winning Ferrari to victory. The new Ferrari IS impressive, but lest everyone get their hopes up too much, Mercedes took 2nd and 3rd, and that mostly because of a tactical mistake on the team’s part that ended up putting Lewis Hamilton behind Vershtappen who acted like the pouty kid he is and blocked him from being able to get by and take the Ferrari. Vershtappen was the boy-wonder of last year (17 years old and in F1!) and while he IS talented and fast, he also is often a jerk teen. Australia was one of those times. Lewis was not racing for his position and clearly faster and he ought to have done the right thing and let him by – but he didn’t.
Next race in Asia I believe – next week. Tune in for some very fast cars going very fast (track record come to average speed of about 144 MPH).
NB – Vershtappen drives for Red Bull, not Ferrari, so it wasn’t a team move blocking Hamilton – just petulance.
They need superspeedways.
I was a F1 fan for about 3 hours after watching Rush on the big screen. And I remember listening to the Indy 500 while out sailing with my dad (at least once).
The movie’s popularity rating is up 86 pts. Related to the start of season?
I love variety in posts. It is great to go from Barnum to the Races. From circuses to ovaltish. Thanks, Dev.
This IS a pretty eclectic group, centime. We can talk about more than just politics.
VROOM, VROOM and Boom!, Boom! go together somehow, do they, Dev?! :-) (Glad it’s back to being fun!)
M, fans of car racing, like most sports, usually are “involved” with cars. So the technical details are as much of interest as the actual racing.
F1 has improved the video coverage a lot. Much more in car shots so you have some sense of what it’s like to run that quickly.
I have a F1 game for XBox and it’s accurate vis a vis tracks, so I find watching I know just where the next corner is, etc. Makes it more interesting to watch how they run the track.
CT, superspeedways are a whole ‘nother kind of racing. Takes a different driving style and approach. The best guys can adapt to any track (see Andretti, Jim Clark, Nigel Manson as examples) but the cars are no where near the same.
Not as up on Indy cars, but I do know that today NASCAR has done a bunch of rulemaking that has changed how you drive. Now you side draft rather than rear draft and winning takes more thinking about how you’re going to pass a guy or hold the lead.
I recall an episode of Top Gear where they were poopooing NASCAR and sent Hammond over to check it out. He was really impressed and stopped the poopooing.
I used to follow it, but the pace of rule changes got out of hand and I started losing interest.
I agree. NASCAR has gotten a bit goofy. Seems it was more interesting in the bad old days. Kind of like markets, too much control leads to less interest, at least to me. One reason F1 this year is rather interesting – they have kind of unleashed the cars some.
Great post, I am really liking the little group of truly interesting folks here.
There is something about strapping yourself into a serious piece of machinery and letting it rip.
Google street view appears to have every last inch of the Circuit of the Americas covered:
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.1318939,-97.6398354,3a,75y,139.49h,82.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ss0INQ7lsUVI0mGjZi5W9Lg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en
What they need is an in-car lap. Be much more interesting and informative.