Be Excellent To Each Other

/snigger

YOU'RE A SNIGGER.

Your mums a [edited out by damnyouautocorrectfakeprevention]

Plus what else would they put on at 10:30pm on BBC2? Not exactly a primetime slot.

Kimi is back !!

That is all I will now return to the basement .....

Has the last half of the season been that boring that people didn't want to discuss it? I quite enjoyed it - the first season in a long time where I managed to see 80%+ of the races live (or time-delayed in full). Despite the championships being wrapped up early, there were still some cracking races.

Yeah I've enjoyed it too, I did fall asleep on Sunday though and apparently the most exciting thing I missed was a gearbox problem.

Not really, no. I'm quite surprised sbout how disassociated I am from something I've followed rather religiously until now.

It's been a pretty dull season. Vettel is not an interesting champion. There needs to be something done to equalise the cars or the sport is going to diminish beyond recognition.

He's interesting if you like seeing the same thing over and over.

But the longer term health of it all is evidentally not important to the powers that be.

I thought it was a great season, I only lost interest once Vettel had won and the BBC had lost...

Next year there will be 6 world champions on the track at the same time, has that happened before? No idea, not that it matters because I doubt I will be watching it that much, due to the Sky debacle.

It was good seeing Webber back on form - yes Vettel had a problem, but up until the last couple of races he's had all the luck go his way this season. Impressive the way he brought the car home in 2nd despite all the issues.

You must have short memories - this is nowhere near as boring as the Ferrari/Schumacher domination years.

F1 cars have never all been equal, that's kind of the whole point of it. Anyway the disparity can't be that huge when you look at the finishing standings. Webber isn't some sort of bum and yet he came in third. As much as it pains me to say it Vettel was just outstanding, I don't think any of the other drivers could have pulled out all the qualifying laps he did and then make so few mistakes.

It's not so much boredom as extreme irritation.

Why watch something that pisses me off?

I agree, as much as I dislike the guy, he is an outstanding driver and head and shoulders above the rest of the field.

You mean the *last* time I gave up on it? Hamilton vs Ferrari drew me back in. Sport needs renegades.

I don't know, why keep moaning about something you don't even watch then? It would be like me moaning about how every football game ever was dull as fuck.

Yeah, don't watch it then.

I don't dislike Vettel and I wasn't displeased when he won the title last season. However, I do feel that people naturally dislike people who continue to win again and again, as it makes it less entertaining as a spectacle. However, we've had some great victories from Button, Hamilton and Alonso's win at Silverstone.

I also think the BBC have brought really good production values to the programming - it almost feels like a story playing out now. Without wanting to go back to the BBC/Sky debate again, I will be interested to see what it's like next season.

I must admit, I have enjoyed the BBC presentation. It's not helped by the irregular timings of the races (natch), but I think they've done a good job with not much. Having the presenters standing around in the paddock instead of sat in a cheap plastic/aluminium studio was a stroke of genius and Eddie J is worth the license fee on his own, the fawning, over dressed idiot!

It did get to the point where every time you saw him reach the first corner in first place you knew that he'd already won. Again though not his fault at all, it's exactly what they'd all like to do and it's not like he can't race other cars when he needs to. Incidentally how does that go down with the sponsors I wonder? Throughout most races Vettel would hardly appear on TV at all until he crossed the line.

Eddie Jordan is a fucking idiot.

I think he's brilliant. Some of the looks to camera Coulthard does are worth the licence fee alone.

Why don't you marry him then?

I think you're not quite getting what I'm annoyed about. See: dodgy pfficiating, dubious rules changes.

Domination as such didn't bother me in 2009,2002 etc etc. The commentary on top of it grated somewhat, mind.

No, I had no idea what you're annoyed about, because you hadn't mentioned it until now. My second paragraph was a separate point.

Yes he is. And therefore perfect. It amuses me that they chose to stand him next to Jake and Coulthard too. He looks like a teddy bear.

His interviewing style is abrasive, to say the least, and he's plain rude at times, believing he's Paxman on newsnight or something. Really grated on me. I'm sure I've complained about him before. I've to try and find something +ve to say today.

God no. The competitiveness of the sport is already a joke - I can't think of another sport that goes so far out of its way to penalise the people that are good at it.

I love the way he schizophrenically changes between pandering and aggressive. It's nice to have someone on the panel who was a team boss, though, as opposed to a driver. Gives a different insight.

Golf?

That I watch.

At least they don't have "success ballast". It does seem like not a very easy sport to run to everyone's satisfaction. It had become so expensive that it had got to the point where there were worries over how many cars would actually end up on the grid.

Hence the 2 (3?) teams that are not only in a sub-league to the others, but are unable to even compete with each other.

They just don't do it with weights.

The whole season could be as boring as it liked if, after the last race, they did 20 exhibition laps in identical Ford Kas, or something.

Why not have a standard engine and let the teams build around that? Or a standard chassis? Or stick the budget cap on and let Ferrari fuck off in a huff.

Why not just let them build fast cars?

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't remember Red Bull being unfairly penalised this year.

Nice idea but it is all too political in the halls of power

I don't just mean Red Bull, or a team in particular, I mean "things that make you go fast".
Like F-ducts, for example, or whatever that thing was called that forced the exhaust gases over the chassis to produce downforce when the drivers came off the throttle.
Or Schumacher, a few years ago

Because they like to pretend it's all about the driver, when it's clearly not. Take Timo Glock out of the Virgin and put him a Red Bull. Would he still finish last?

It's a horrible idea. F1 has always been about the fastest cars possible, using the latest technology and the best drivers in the world (except for rally drivers, natch). They need to start heading back in that direction, not further away from it.

And they need to stop.


Probably not, but I'd be surprised if he finished first.

Or turbos or great big fans that suck the cars onto the track. Pegging back the performance of F1 cars is something they have had to do one way or another for a very long time (in fact were they ever truly unlimited?). It's always been about designing a car that is fast but fast within a set of rules. The front running teams still seem to be the ones with the best designers and engineers. It seems pretty inevitable that as the sport has progressed that more and more rules would need to be introduced.

Sure, but not for a long time. Remember the Tyrrell P34 with six wheels?


Sure, but they're running the risk of making everything so similar that it's going to be about the team that can do the fastest pit-stops, rather than the team that can put the best combination of ideas and talent things on the track. There are plenty of racing disciplines that require the drivers to use the same car, but I don't think F1 should be one of them.

Although I wouldn't be adverse to massive turbos, it'd mean the cars would blow up more, thus more unpredictability (which is the core thing everyone seems to dislike). I also think a "you can have one of the following things each race" type-thing wouldn't be a bad idea.

Even that Tyrell was a workaround for the rules though - they specified a maximum wheel width and diameter but not number of, or something.

Remember the ground effect cars? The Brabham with a giant fan to suck it down onto the road?

Wasn't there a point in the early to mid 90's when the drivers were complaining about the cars being too easy to drive? About the Mansell era I think. They had launch control, semi-auto gearboxes and the like and I seem to remember Senna saying he felt like ballast.

Although we are talking 20 years ago and I was about 11 at the time

I know what you mean but it still seems tricky to me with more or less any approach prone to massive pitfalls. Were they to allow more or less anything then the team with the largest budget would probably end up at a colossal advantage, they'd have the freedom to explore all the different options before them. It's not like the olden days where a small handful of people are likely to come up with and then build a completely new and winning idea.

But I don't think the current balance is too far off really. Generally the best teams still manage to find an edge, arguably it's a far greater engineering challenge to do so within such tight constraints.

They already have that. It's called IndyCar, or GP2, or F3, or Formula Ford, etc, etc. Formula One isn't about that.

Irrelevant. Why was Mark Webber totally dominated by Vettel this season if it's all about the car, then?

Because Vettel is better than Webber. My point is, is Webber so much better than Glock?