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The 2018 F1 Thread

Tony Lockhart

Tony Lockhart

Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
Love F1 or loathe it, the new season will be kicking off before we know it.
There'll be seasoned haters watching every race.
There'll be Rip Van Winkles wondering why on earth they bother.
Some of us will watch no matter what, until it's only available via the evil church of Sky in '19.

There might be new rules, technical and sporting. There might be new, and old, drivers.
Boring tracks will be mixing it with classic beauties.

Will Hamilton regain his focus? Will Vettel and Ferrari raise themselves to a new level?

Will Aston be able to enter as an engine manufacturer in 2021 with a simpler unit that the current over-complex, expensive and flat sounding donks?

Love it :)
 
By the time it's exclusively on sky it will be un-watchable as it pure grim since they brought the fake effects into it.
 
And they are planning a form of four wheel drive for 2021 onwards aren’t they?
Fronts driven by electric motors.
 
On Today I caught a bit of a discussion around the kick-off of Formula-E’s new season. The point being made was that F1 might eventually decline as folk identify more with electric power, and the involvement in E of marques that they actually buy.

Interesting, though I personally struggle to engage with E as it just doesn’t have the right sound.
 
I wonder if that or one of the other Formulas will fill the gap on C4 once F1 goes to Sky? I suspect I’d watch it, especially E as it sounds genuinely interesting. Electric motors can have some quite interesting properties, e.g. really high torque and instant delivery, so it may have the potential to be faster than F1!
 
Tony L said:
I wonder if that or one of the other Formulas will fill the gap on C4 once F1 goes to Sky? I suspect I’d watch it, especially E as it sounds genuinely interesting. Electric motors can have some quite interesting properties, e.g. really high torque and instant delivery, so it may have the potential to be faster than F1!
Click to expand...

Tony, have you watched Formula E? It's a challenge, to be polite. Underpowered cars, car swaps half way through the race because of flat batteries, mostly crap tracks, no sound to talk of, little innovation being promoted during the meeting to impress the viewer.
 
Never seen it, if the cars are underpowered that is no fun. I suspect it will grow with time and investment though, the underlying technology is starting to look interesting.
 
Yup, and I do wonder if the sound thing will matter less and less over time. It’s odd, as to most of us the connection is deep routed between engine noise and ‘performance’. But it’s just happenstance that ICE was the way things developed.
 
It will be the same old, same old.

One team/driver will be in the lead, a few will try and follow, occasionally they will win, the rest of the field will get lapped.

The new management is trying to attract people by making it a more level playing field, changing car designs, engines, logos and marketing.

In the long term that will spoil F1, in my opinion, and it will slowly fail and become a minority sport watched only by those interested in it, not by the public in general who the new owners are trying to attract.

I got told the other day by a guy that his £20 a month Sky package comes with the F1 coverage, no need for Sky Sports, I am going to call Sky to find out is that is correct.
 
Formula E needs faster, less dorky looking cars, and fewer Mickey Mouse tracks to be taken seriously.

But given the level of manufacturer support, I suspect it's here to stay. It's the obvious platform for car makers to parade their e-credentials.

And it provides pay cheques for a whole bunch of drivers whose F1 dreams turned to dust.
 
F1 is a wonderful reflection of Western society.

It's lost what magic and soul it had in the relentless pursuit of nothing but money and corporate exposure.

Warning kids. Commercialism kills.
 
Pirelli have stated that there should be two tyre stops per race, on average next year. For this year they were too cautious with the performance leap of the cars over 2016, and 15 races became one-stoppers. So, softer tyres with a higher wear rate for 2018. Even faster?
 
Some interesting thoughts from the latest Autosport:

We had a great race in Abu Dhabi last Sunday - but it wasn't the grand prix. As at Monza, the excitement came in the morning, when Charles Leclerc topped off his championship-winning Formula 2 season with a stunning drive.

The future Ferrari driver sliced through from sixth on the second lap to pass Alexander Albon for the lead on the last, a move at once superbly judged and extremely brave.

Leclerc was suitably exhilarated afterwards, and he should savour the memory, for it will be a long time before he has another race like that: next year he is in Formula 1, where the cars are so sophisticated that they can't actually race each other.

Yas Marina yet proved capable of producing a memorable race, as Leclerc, Albon et al demonstrated. It was their cars - devoid of fancy aerodynamics - that allowed them to do it

After the grand prix, Lewis Hamilton came out with another of his self-effacing observations: "Congratulations to Valtteri [Bottas] - he did an awesome job to hold me off..." He then went on to say that "as soon as you get to 1.2 or 1.4 [seconds behind], you just lose downforce", and his conclusion, after sitting endlessly behind Bottas, was that Yas Marina was not suited to F1 cars.

Hamilton's right, of course - but then where is? After shadowing him throughout the Belgian Grand Prix, Sebastian Vettel might have said the same of Spa: given that they were never more than a couple of seconds apart, it was tense - but not more than that, for 'dirty air' decreed that only a mistake by Hamilton would have allowed Vettel to take a run at him.

Being old-fashioned and having grown up in this era, I'd love to see more refined and safer versions of this:

https://www.sportscarart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Gurney-Eagle-1.jpg
 
As lovely sounding and beautiful looking the Gurney Eagle is, by today's standards it is comically slow. Probably slower lap for lap that a BTCC car.

So, in my dream land.....

A 1960s pre-wings car.
Modern materials for the body and tub. (Carbon tubs have been around for what, nearly 40 years?)
Tub able to accommodate drivers up to 2 metres tall.
Manual, 6 speed gearbox, ratios fixed for the year.
Engine..... Hmmmmm. 18,000rpm limit if a N/A V8? Freedom over V angle.
Tyres? Big and black.
 
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