I dunno. It’s interesting that RP is the second best car on the grid right now but I don’t particularly enjoy that it’s turning into a Mercedes A/B spec series.
Personally, I’m hoping that Russel and Ricciardo can keep it on track and make some noise in the midfield. I think those two have become my favorites to watch now.
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
I dunno. It’s interesting that RP is the second best car on the grid right now but I don’t particularly enjoy that it’s turning into a Mercedes A/B spec series.
Personally, I’m hoping that Russel and Ricciardo can keep it on track and make some noise in the midfield. I think those two have become my favorites to watch now.
That's my point, though. Like, Mercedes have so clearly got everyone beat in car development. RP is showing how utterly broken it is, and why small market teams can't compete.
Unless they just start copying the Mercedes. And then we have spec car racing (sorta). It's the logical conclusion of the way things are set up right now.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
F1 might be the only sport in the world where an underfunded underdog comes up with a clever trick to stick it to the big boys and beat Ferrari and Red Bull with half the budget or less, and people condemn them for it
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I think it's great. I wish more small teams did it. It's still not a spec series, because the components are not provided to them (e.g. the Dallara IndyCar chassis). They still have to copy the Mercedes correctly, which they did in this case.
Ferrari and Red Bull, with their budgets, have zero excuses for a Mercedes copy to be beating them, and for Mercedes works to be 1+ seconds ahead of them.
I'm all for Racing Point doing their thing, I think it's great. It also highlights how badly Ferrari (for several years now) and Red Bull have screwed up. As GnomeTank says, there is zero excuse for being so far behind Mercedes for those two teams and their ridiculous budgets. Kind of like how Toyota never managed a damn thing in Formula 1, despite spending tons of money.
The sad part is that this is not even historically that much of an aberration. Ferrari had a stretch of absurd dominance, which was then exceeded by Red Bull for a while, and now it is apparently Mercedes' turn. I don't recall exact numbers, but I think Red Bull might have had a similar gap on the rest of the field at points during their dominance, and I think Ferrari was not quite as far ahead but had a lot better reliability? My memory isn't really all that clear on that point. So it's not really even a new problem, but it's kind of unusual for it to be this pronounced this far past a major rules overhaul. Like in the first year of a new set of regulations somebody is going to get something majorly wrong, but the regs have been pretty static for a bit now and the problem is just getting worse somehow.
It's gotta be a work culture thing. I'm sure each team has their share of clever cookies when it comes to designing a race car, but bringing the most out of them is perhaps something Mercedes is also fantastic at. Certainly seems like a nice place to work...
It's gotta be a work culture thing. I'm sure each team has their share of clever cookies when it comes to designing a race car, but bringing the most out of them is perhaps something Mercedes is also fantastic at. Certainly seems like a nice place to work...
It might also be hell. Winning a lot but the individuals are certainly under immense pressure to keep that gap up.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Did some laps for the Belgium time trial in the 2019 Ferrari, and have so far managed a 1:55.437. I'm cutting this session short because it's already late and if I don't I won't get to sleep until like 5 AM at the earliest. I already know several places where I can make up significant time, though I have my doubts about cutting 9-10s off. I'll do some more later and work on improving things some more to at least get within 5 seconds of you more experienced drivers. I did try it this time with my DS4 instead of my Steam Controller, and honestly I think it felt better. Spa is an interesting track and there are definitely a lot of places where I can keep the throttle wide open that I was not expecting.
The cries of outrage over the Mercedes dominance I've seen in other places borders on farcical. I can't help but think some of it is being used to distract from how badly the other big teams have messed up. While the 2020 Merc looks like an amazing car, it's flattered slightly by both Ferrari and Red Bull going backwards.
Ferrrari have went from the best engine on the grid to the worst after being caught cheatingfor no apparent reason. End result is that they've gone from challenging Merc and occasionally having an outright faster car, to being mired somewhere in the midfield. Their chassis this year doesn't look particularly great either. Meanwhile they continue to play internal politics and unceremoniously dumped their former lead driver. Best example is probably Russia last year, where they rather blatantly gave Vettel a poor strategy to ensure Leclerc got ahead at the pitstops. How can a team working against itself hope to succeed?
Red Bull meanwhile have developed a just plain bad chassis by the look of things. Perhaps sticking with their high rake, short wheelbase concept might not have been the best of ideas when Merc were having success going in the opposite direction? This year's car seems very unstable, and they've had to revert to barcelona spec parts because the upgrades simply haven't worked. Almost unbelievably, the Honda engine seems to be one of their strengths when it's working - but who could have imagined a Newey designed car would have trouble with engine reliability? On the operational side, they're clearly 'team Verstappen', to an extent that's probably to their own detriment. They seem to develop the car exclusively for Verstappen, and he's capable of driving the wheels off most of them, but it might not make it the best car. It may help if they paid more attention to their second driver now and again.
As for Racing Point, there's more to it than just copying Merc. They've been getting more investment overall and have put work into improving hteir facilities. For example, the article on how they copied the Merc points to how they needed to be able to produce models much quicker than they had in the past. That sort of improvement lends itself to more than just photocopying last year's Merc. With that said, I'm still not convinced on their race pace. In Austria they had some good moments (driving from the back to 6th/7th), but also bad (qualifying at the back in the first place).
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
It's absolutely baffling how Red Bull keeps winning the narrative game.
Their budget is exactly the same size as Ferrari's, but it's Ferrari that gets constantly blasted for failing to challenge Mercedes. At least Ferrari showed up with a credible car at least a couple times. Red Bull shows up weak at the start of a season, develops a bit, challenges for a pole or two, develops a bit more, improves, wins a race or two, says "we'll be here next year" then repeats it all again.
And now they're winning the narrative battle again, because Albon is getting blasted just like Gasly was, and instead of thinking "Hm, maybe we're doing something wrong as a team" they just start the whole media circus around Albon as they did with Gasly last year, despite the fact that both drivers were spectacular in Toro Rosso.
The cries of outrage over the Mercedes dominance I've seen in other places borders on farcical. I can't help but think some of it is being used to distract from how badly the other big teams have messed up. While the 2020 Merc looks like an amazing car, it's flattered slightly by both Ferrari and Red Bull going backwards.
Ferrrari have went from the best engine on the grid to the worst after being caught cheatingfor no apparent reason. End result is that they've gone from challenging Merc and occasionally having an outright faster car, to being mired somewhere in the midfield. Their chassis this year doesn't look particularly great either. Meanwhile they continue to play internal politics and unceremoniously dumped their former lead driver. Best example is probably Russia last year, where they rather blatantly gave Vettel a poor strategy to ensure Leclerc got ahead at the pitstops. How can a team working against itself hope to succeed?
Red Bull meanwhile have developed a just plain bad chassis by the look of things. Perhaps sticking with their high rake, short wheelbase concept might not have been the best of ideas when Merc were having success going in the opposite direction? This year's car seems very unstable, and they've had to revert to barcelona spec parts because the upgrades simply haven't worked. Almost unbelievably, the Honda engine seems to be one of their strengths when it's working - but who could have imagined a Newey designed car would have trouble with engine reliability? On the operational side, they're clearly 'team Verstappen', to an extent that's probably to their own detriment. They seem to develop the car exclusively for Verstappen, and he's capable of driving the wheels off most of them, but it might not make it the best car. It may help if they paid more attention to their second driver now and again.
As for Racing Point, there's more to it than just copying Merc. They've been getting more investment overall and have put work into improving hteir facilities. For example, the article on how they copied the Merc points to how they needed to be able to produce models much quicker than they had in the past. That sort of improvement lends itself to more than just photocopying last year's Merc. With that said, I'm still not convinced on their race pace. In Austria they had some good moments (driving from the back to 6th/7th), but also bad (qualifying at the back in the first place).
Fun fact: Ferrari is the best engine supplier in F1 2020 because Codemasters were basing it on their data before the... settlement.
As far as RP, they're also getting used to a completely different car with entirely different philosophy (high-rake car vs low-rake and actually working well.) But the qualy shows the car and the talent is there.
As far as RB, I find it very worrying that in a high-downforce circuit they ended up facing such issues with a barely driveable car. Sounds like they're trying too hard to be competitive and making the car be a nightmare to drive on the limit.
One of RB's other narrative tricks was convincing the world that they had the best aero and that it was just the engine holding them back. Even worse they were talking shit about the engine while they were dominant and ignoring the advantages the Renault engine had at the time - advantages they made full use of. It's somewhat funny to see their aero shown up now with the engine being a relative bright spot.
Amazing Verstappen holding out until the end for that second place. Happy for him having wrestled that car into a good result, but it kinda sucks that he stayed ahead of Bottas leading into the expected result at the end of this Championship.
Solid race from Stroll. He still needs a bit more experience to actually extract more from the car he's got. Really sucks for Pérez that he seemed to have started the race going backwards and it took him a while to switch on the car and tyres.
Gotta love that Haas were the only ones with the right idea (start on slicks) but pretty much one of the only teams that could do nothing with having gained that given how shitty their car has been running this year.
McLaren nowhere to be seen, but amazing fights from Sainz and Norris in the tail end of the points.
Still have no idea why nothing seemed to come out of Bottas' jump-start?
Nobody was even close to touching Hamilton today. Probably would have won by a bigger margin but for pitting for the fastest lap.
The damp start messed up the running order quite badly and led to a load of "against the grain" performances - most notably Haas who gained massively from immediately going to slicks. Granted it was because they had full wets on (lol), but gotta take these things when they come your way.
I genuinely don't know why Bottas didn't get a penalty for a jump start. Sky reckon it was a technicality with tolerance built into the timing loops. Personally I think it looked every bit like a jump start and should probably have copped a penalty. The poor start and difficulty catching Verstappen cost him P2.
Red Bull seemed to have much better race pace than qualifying pace. Their mechanics were indeed miracle workers too. Verstappen had good pace throughout and did well to hold off Bottas. That said, I'd still be concerned if I were Red Bull. They've got a potential disqualification looming for Albon due to drying the grid spot. I'm also not entirely sure of the rules around what you're allowed to change on the grid with respect to parc ferme, but I'd assume that RB know well enough what they're allowed and worked within that.
Ferrari were something of a mess. Still, pretty good race by Vettel despite the 9+ second pit stop. The two offs costing position to Albon could have been better though. Leclerc was nowhere but that was largely down to awful strategy.
Racing Point still not on the podium. Genuinely don't know what happened to Perez to be so far off. Stroll had ok pace but nowhere near enough to get into podium positions. Their race pace is not on the same level as their qualifying pace.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited July 2020
Re: Bottas
I assume he wasn't penalized because it was within tolerances (like Vettel last year...or was it 2018?) and also because he lost so many positions and never got his P2 back. So he effectively penalized himself.
Rest of the race...
Hamilton just on another planet. My prediction a couple weeks back that he might do something special this year wasn't looking good after race 1 but I'm sticking by it. Next two races are at Silverstone and I see no reason short of reliability that Hamilton won't take both of those wins.
Silly, silly mistake by Max. He's lucky his mechanics are world class.
As I expected, and others here have noted, RP's race pace isn't the same as their one lap pace. Shows how incredible it is that Mercedes has built a car that can do both. It's also terrifying for the competition that Lewis says this is the best Mercedes he's driven so far.
More protests lodged against RP by Renault. Not sure of the details yet but probably just a continuation of last week. Also a stewards callup for Haas over deriver aids on the formation lap.
Also seen that Vettel made the call to use mediums instead of the the softs the team wanted to put on. Pretty good call. The replay of his stop is also baffling. So much time waiting when they could easily have released him sooner.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited July 2020
A little poo came out today during the PA League funday sunday race:
Sucks for Perez that he got totally boned by Bottas' jump start; it clearly held him up and he lost a ton of places at the start.
Nice move by Haas to switch tyres (too bad they got a penalty for it) which made things a little interesting, but otherwise kind of a snoozer. Bet Alpha Tauri are kicking themselves for not listening to Kvyat; they could have actually taken advantage and gotten points.
So, I finally got a chance to do some laps in the GT4 cars in ACC... Man, are they different! Essentially, speed and brakes are worse, but in general, you can recover your car better. This far I'm partial to the Alpine and McLaren... The BMW is clearly not for me though, screw that car!
Haas got penalised for the call to pit as outside of some very select circumstances, communication to drivers is not allowed on the formation lap. It dates back to when they banned driver coaching and is in principle there to prevent communicating about all sorts of start settings/procedures. It probably needs updated to allow some more flexibility, and in that sense the penalty might seem a bit harsh - but other teams were aware of what they could and couldn't do, hence why Kvyat didn't get a response.
Surprised RB got away with drying Albon's grid slot considering there was a specific warning about it on the morning of the race and they were reported by FIA technical delegate Jo Bauer.
The Indy road course is really neat, but yeah it'll never happen. There is no way F1 returns to the site of such a huge debacle any time soon. That event was the biggest shitshow I've seen in racing that didn't involve any injuries or fatalities.
Managed to marginally improve my laptime to a 1:44.932, but damn it was frustrating. So many ways to wipe out any time gained, and so many decent laps binned due to stupid mistakes. Had a lap where I was half a second(!) up into Campus, binned it in Stavelot due to messing up the turn in. Incredibly frustrating.
I have grown to hate La Source though. It's pretty much the only part of S1 that matters, and I find it very hard to judge. Very sensitive to braking and turn in points, and very easy to spin the rear wheels and lose a lot of time (with my current setup anyway, an unlocked diff would probably make it much easier).
Surprising nobody at this point, the US, Mexican and Brazilian GP's have been cancelled. Canada is also out. Nurburgring, Imola and Portimao in to fill out the calendar. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/53527355
Surprising nobody at this point, the US, Mexican and Brazilian GP's have been cancelled. Canada is also out. Nurburgring, Imola and Portimao in to fill out the calendar. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/53527355
The Grand Prix track at Nurburgring isn’t so bad but it makes me feel bored knowing the Nordschleife is right there.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
The current cars couldn't do the Nordschleife. There are entire sections they wouldn't be able to safely navigate because of their ride height and aero compression. Not to mention it's not a Grade 1 facility (the GP circuit is, but not Nords).
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Personally, I’m hoping that Russel and Ricciardo can keep it on track and make some noise in the midfield. I think those two have become my favorites to watch now.
That's my point, though. Like, Mercedes have so clearly got everyone beat in car development. RP is showing how utterly broken it is, and why small market teams can't compete.
Unless they just start copying the Mercedes. And then we have spec car racing (sorta). It's the logical conclusion of the way things are set up right now.
Ferrari and Red Bull, with their budgets, have zero excuses for a Mercedes copy to be beating them, and for Mercedes works to be 1+ seconds ahead of them.
The sad part is that this is not even historically that much of an aberration. Ferrari had a stretch of absurd dominance, which was then exceeded by Red Bull for a while, and now it is apparently Mercedes' turn. I don't recall exact numbers, but I think Red Bull might have had a similar gap on the rest of the field at points during their dominance, and I think Ferrari was not quite as far ahead but had a lot better reliability? My memory isn't really all that clear on that point. So it's not really even a new problem, but it's kind of unusual for it to be this pronounced this far past a major rules overhaul. Like in the first year of a new set of regulations somebody is going to get something majorly wrong, but the regs have been pretty static for a bit now and the problem is just getting worse somehow.
It might also be hell. Winning a lot but the individuals are certainly under immense pressure to keep that gap up.
tldr, "While trying to keep pace with your illegal engine we developed a superior legal engine. Congratulations, you played yourself. "
Ferrrari have went from the best engine on the grid to the worst after being caught cheating for no apparent reason. End result is that they've gone from challenging Merc and occasionally having an outright faster car, to being mired somewhere in the midfield. Their chassis this year doesn't look particularly great either. Meanwhile they continue to play internal politics and unceremoniously dumped their former lead driver. Best example is probably Russia last year, where they rather blatantly gave Vettel a poor strategy to ensure Leclerc got ahead at the pitstops. How can a team working against itself hope to succeed?
Red Bull meanwhile have developed a just plain bad chassis by the look of things. Perhaps sticking with their high rake, short wheelbase concept might not have been the best of ideas when Merc were having success going in the opposite direction? This year's car seems very unstable, and they've had to revert to barcelona spec parts because the upgrades simply haven't worked. Almost unbelievably, the Honda engine seems to be one of their strengths when it's working - but who could have imagined a Newey designed car would have trouble with engine reliability? On the operational side, they're clearly 'team Verstappen', to an extent that's probably to their own detriment. They seem to develop the car exclusively for Verstappen, and he's capable of driving the wheels off most of them, but it might not make it the best car. It may help if they paid more attention to their second driver now and again.
As for Racing Point, there's more to it than just copying Merc. They've been getting more investment overall and have put work into improving hteir facilities. For example, the article on how they copied the Merc points to how they needed to be able to produce models much quicker than they had in the past. That sort of improvement lends itself to more than just photocopying last year's Merc. With that said, I'm still not convinced on their race pace. In Austria they had some good moments (driving from the back to 6th/7th), but also bad (qualifying at the back in the first place).
Their budget is exactly the same size as Ferrari's, but it's Ferrari that gets constantly blasted for failing to challenge Mercedes. At least Ferrari showed up with a credible car at least a couple times. Red Bull shows up weak at the start of a season, develops a bit, challenges for a pole or two, develops a bit more, improves, wins a race or two, says "we'll be here next year" then repeats it all again.
And now they're winning the narrative battle again, because Albon is getting blasted just like Gasly was, and instead of thinking "Hm, maybe we're doing something wrong as a team" they just start the whole media circus around Albon as they did with Gasly last year, despite the fact that both drivers were spectacular in Toro Rosso.
Fun fact: Ferrari is the best engine supplier in F1 2020 because Codemasters were basing it on their data before the... settlement.
As far as RP, they're also getting used to a completely different car with entirely different philosophy (high-rake car vs low-rake and actually working well.) But the qualy shows the car and the talent is there.
As far as RB, I find it very worrying that in a high-downforce circuit they ended up facing such issues with a barely driveable car. Sounds like they're trying too hard to be competitive and making the car be a nightmare to drive on the limit.
If he starts the race those mechanics are miracle workers.
Right now the pitstop craze for slicks just got started.
Well, at least his engine was.
Wondering how that looks for the rest of the Honda-powered engines.
Solid race from Stroll. He still needs a bit more experience to actually extract more from the car he's got. Really sucks for Pérez that he seemed to have started the race going backwards and it took him a while to switch on the car and tyres.
Gotta love that Haas were the only ones with the right idea (start on slicks) but pretty much one of the only teams that could do nothing with having gained that given how shitty their car has been running this year.
McLaren nowhere to be seen, but amazing fights from Sainz and Norris in the tail end of the points.
Still have no idea why nothing seemed to come out of Bottas' jump-start?
The damp start messed up the running order quite badly and led to a load of "against the grain" performances - most notably Haas who gained massively from immediately going to slicks. Granted it was because they had full wets on (lol), but gotta take these things when they come your way.
I genuinely don't know why Bottas didn't get a penalty for a jump start. Sky reckon it was a technicality with tolerance built into the timing loops. Personally I think it looked every bit like a jump start and should probably have copped a penalty. The poor start and difficulty catching Verstappen cost him P2.
Red Bull seemed to have much better race pace than qualifying pace. Their mechanics were indeed miracle workers too. Verstappen had good pace throughout and did well to hold off Bottas. That said, I'd still be concerned if I were Red Bull. They've got a potential disqualification looming for Albon due to drying the grid spot. I'm also not entirely sure of the rules around what you're allowed to change on the grid with respect to parc ferme, but I'd assume that RB know well enough what they're allowed and worked within that.
Ferrari were something of a mess. Still, pretty good race by Vettel despite the 9+ second pit stop. The two offs costing position to Albon could have been better though. Leclerc was nowhere but that was largely down to awful strategy.
Racing Point still not on the podium. Genuinely don't know what happened to Perez to be so far off. Stroll had ok pace but nowhere near enough to get into podium positions. Their race pace is not on the same level as their qualifying pace.
Rest of the race...
Silly, silly mistake by Max. He's lucky his mechanics are world class.
As I expected, and others here have noted, RP's race pace isn't the same as their one lap pace. Shows how incredible it is that Mercedes has built a car that can do both. It's also terrifying for the competition that Lewis says this is the best Mercedes he's driven so far.
Also seen that Vettel made the call to use mediums instead of the the softs the team wanted to put on. Pretty good call. The replay of his stop is also baffling. So much time waiting when they could easily have released him sooner.
I'm the black "Mercedes" that scoots by on the outside.
Nice move by Haas to switch tyres (too bad they got a penalty for it) which made things a little interesting, but otherwise kind of a snoozer. Bet Alpha Tauri are kicking themselves for not listening to Kvyat; they could have actually taken advantage and gotten points.
Need to try a few laps in the Camero.
Surprised RB got away with drying Albon's grid slot considering there was a specific warning about it on the morning of the race and they were reported by FIA technical delegate Jo Bauer.
But make it turn 3 and 4...
I have grown to hate La Source though. It's pretty much the only part of S1 that matters, and I find it very hard to judge. Very sensitive to braking and turn in points, and very easy to spin the rear wheels and lose a lot of time (with my current setup anyway, an unlocked diff would probably make it much easier).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/53527355
OP updated
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a nice short 15-18 lap race would be just the thing
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
I believe it would be "Monaco, the 20KM edition" given current regulations.