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[Formula One & motorsport] Post-season: Bull shuffle?
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I was actually pretty impressed with the pace of Norris in the McLaren, if he hadn't been stuck in that DRS train behind Albon (and didn't earn a 5s penalty) he could have finished with decent points.
Stroll, on the other hand, is looking increasingly lost. When your teammate is comfortably finishing second (including making a pass on track for second) and you are struggling to get into the points that is generally a bad sign. He's obviously a talented driver, or he wouldn't be in F1 at all, but he is just so consistently outclassed by his teammate and it looks bad for him.
Perez is driving what is, by far, the best car on the grid but hasn't really challenged for a podium spot in the last three races.
Stroll is driving the overall second best car (so far) but hasn't even threatened a podium at any point.
Sort of reminds me of his first season with the team, in that the car was working completely against what his preferences are. I'm guessing the latest changes to the RB are similar in nature, just keep moving it away and away from his style.
And it's going to keep on being that way because they want to keep Max happy in the team and they won't do anything that would challenge him away from #1 spot.
So it sucks, a lot...
Does that speak bad of him as a driver? I wouldn't say so: he basically is doing his best against the flow, and the flow is basically all about keeping Max happy. Any other driver in that seat would face the same.
Could other drivers that like looser cars do better in that particular car? Maybe. Probably.
It's the sad nature of the sport, in a way: the sport wants to have "teams" that fight for a WCC, but also have individual drivers that fight for a WDC, and chances are the teammates are fighting each-other for that because it's common enough to have dominant cars.
I had to turn it off after like five minutes. Neither seemed to have any real energy. It was bad.
Thank Fuck TSN just copies the sky sports stuff and we're not cursed with ESPN.
In actual F1 news, apparently hot off the success with Wrexham, Ryan Renolds and Rob McElhenney are putting some money into Alpine
Plus Michael B. Jordan and some other investors as well. Overall, putting $200 Million in, for 24%, thus valuing Alpine for around $900 mil.
Can't wait for Reynolds marketing genius to take on F1.
He is just gonna slap aviation gin logos everywhere and do a netflix series called welcome to Enstone.
I had just enough left in the kitty to replace him with Piastri, so we'll see how that goes.
And for the first time in several races I've at least remembered to put in some "banker" predictions. My drop down the rankings has very much been down to me forgetting - I was running out of mental bandwidth, quite frankly.
Steam | XBL
10points per change. Which would mean 40points to return to my lineup from two races. Which is a serious point loss.
I had thought you got 6 weekends of changes, not 6 change’s in total.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Perez really screwed himself with this one, the bosses at Red Bull have to be getting pretty pissed by now. Especially since he had the pace to challenge for pole, and failing that secure a front row start. Let's not forget he won two races earlier this year, so clearly he's able to compete. Just his last four races have been just terrible, it's pretty astonishing that Hulkenberg has gotten into Q3 more often than Perez.
It does also mean that you cannot strategically take engine / gearbox grid penalties on a sprint weekend because unlike last year, you can't make up for the poor grid position in the sprint. So I definitely understand why they went to this format, but I'd rather have a traditional race weekend than either sprint format anyway.
https://the-race.com/junior/18-year-old-formula-regional-driver-killed-in-spa-crash/
Still don't like the disjointed "2 events in one weekend!" thing.
it's the best way to get more race time without overworking and overtravelling teams
(I am pretty sure they'll still have horrible race pace, but a man can dream)
It's all personal preference, to be honest.
To me, personally, I'd even prefer a 90 minute P1 on Saturday morning, Qualy on Saturday afternoon and single race on Sunday.
F1 seems to want to have more action, more races and so on. I'm decidedly tired of having 20+ races on the year, with half of them being in random street circuits. And now we add sprints? It feels like dilution of the Sunday race just to be able to sell weekend tickets at stupid prices.
It's perfectly fine to like what they're doing, but at least for me they're driving me away little by little.
The track limits thing is getting out of hand though. They really need to do something for next year about that. I think 6 or 7 drivers got a penalty already and we are a bit over half distance.
The lines are there, the drivers can see them, and not everyone is getting the penalties.
I'd rather it be like this than some nebulous "gained advantage" thing that gives us races like Bahrain VER vs HAM senselessness.
Also it still didn't feel evenly applied through the course of the full GP. I only got the broadcast angles but at the start when they played Lando complaining about Hamilton going over the limits they kept showing shots of the Ferrari's way outside the lines. Probably using some reasoning like they're teammates and not actually racing right now but still seemed bullshit, especially in light of how much of the grid got penalized for it
Very high tire degradation this weekend, they probably shouldn't have brought out the three softest compounds but there was some pretty solid action on the track so I can't really complain too much.