Gentlemen ...Start your (F1) engines !

Chad Stapleton · Joined: 19 Jul 2001 Posts: 4403

so, they are on the track for the first race of an interesting season !
New rules .. no re-fueling, increased min weight, etc
new tires ....to suit the higher weight
New teams...Lotus, HRT, Virgin
New engines ... Cosworth return
New drivers .. Senna ?? etc
Old drivers .. Schumacher !

..let the games begin !!
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Chad
"Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us who do !!"

John Stewart · Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 5:14 pm Post subject:

This should be a very interesting year for F1 with all the driver and rule changes.

Looking forward to see which teams got it right.
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birel. Nothing else will do.

Chad Stapleton · Joined: 19 Jul 2001 Posts: 4403

Well, to start with, the McLaren aero development has certainly got people thinking . !!
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/81997
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Chad
"Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us who do !!"

Greg Nelson · Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 1710

While F1 does it better than NASCAR and IRL, or sports car racing, etc. I really dont like the spec rules it's becoming.
They continually stifle the engineering side with specifications to falsely make everything even. Why are F1 cars only V-8's with specific cams, crank locations, bore and stroke? and all the other crap. Why not any 2.4L round piston engines limited to 18k rpm, running on 70 or 80 gallons of gas in a 1300lb chassis with 4 wheels in a race about 180 miles long you want?
Why not say any type of motor currently available?, let rotaries in, diesels.
Anyone how wants to build a tire?, go ahead.
Want to cut expenses? allow only 5 mechanics per car and 3 race engineers for the team at the track, get rid of the $2million pit boxes and allow only minimal Q and race monitoring of the cars. Make them start cold, without laptops and with their own starters. No fluid warmers, tire warmers, start from the ambient temp.

With that said, the top three engineering companies with the best drivers, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren all finished in the front and 2 of the 3 newbies did finish.
If the rules were more open, it wouldn't change......most of the time. Rolling Eyes

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Motohead

John Denman · Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 9:04 am Post subject:

Personally I think if a team wants to cut expenses by running F1 they need to consider moving to Indycar.

No matter the program, F1, Indycar, Prototypes, NASCAR even karting, the top dogs will have an abundance of golden motorsports fuel AKA budget.

I'm a bit disappointed with the no-refuel rules. Adding an extra 25% in weight without an active suspension to compromise ride heights is a huge handicap to the car and driver. With little practice under a heavy load the risk level of passing has dampened the racing considerably. Drivers will settle to a pace for the first 2/3's of the race and watch for attrition to take its toll before focusing on a strategy. Kind of a Daytona 500 mentality.

We did some simulation of this with our rFactor league and had the same results. I was hoping it was just confined to the sim environment; it wasn't.
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John Denman
Producer for RTMP
http://www.kartweb.com

Greg Nelson · Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 1710

If this first race is what's to come, shear boredom will rein,
What are they going to do when Monaco comes around and they're trying to hustle these porkers around the first 1/2? how about rain?
Equalization rules don't work because the same teams with mega-budgets are the only ones up front and will be the only ones up front. Just like NASCAR, IRL and anywhere else. You're not going to have teams like Wolf winning it's first race, just look at Lotus, they were stoked to just finish with both cars.
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Motohead