F1 2018 Random stuff that does not warrant a thread.

[Everso Biggyballies]

Bottom post of the previous page:

It is all up for FIA WMSA final approval and ratification, so hopefully Brazil will be back in its rightful spot as the season finale.

[kals]

It is all up for FIA WMSA final approval and ratification, so hopefully Brazil will be back in its rightful spot as the season finale.

As far as I'm concerned, the rightful owners of the season opener are Brazil and the finale Australia.

[DoubleFart]

It is all up for FIA WMSA final approval and ratification, so hopefully Brazil will be back in its rightful spot as the season finale.

As far as I'm concerned, the rightful owners of the season opener are Brazil and the finale Australia.

I was brought up on grand Prix 2, so this.

[John]

It is all up for FIA WMSA final approval and ratification, so hopefully Brazil will be back in its rightful spot as the season finale.

As far as I'm concerned, the rightful owners of the season opener are Brazil and the finale Australia.

I was brought up on grand Prix 2, so this.

I was brought up on Grand Prix Legends, so the season opener should be South Africa and the finale Mexico.

[Antonov]

It is all up for FIA WMSA final approval and ratification, so hopefully Brazil will be back in its rightful spot as the season finale.

As far as I'm concerned, the rightful owners of the season opener are Brazil and the finale Australia.

I was brought up on grand Prix 2, so this.

same here.

those colourful Adelaide kerbs made it for a truly fantastic finale.

[John]

Allowing Formula 1 teams to run a third car for young drivers would be the best way to get new talent onto the grid, says Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff.

Amid frustrations about the lack of opportunities he has available for his junior drivers Esteban Ocon, George Russell and Pascal Wehrlein, Wolff suggested the current two-car limit should be dropped and a third car - reserved for a young driver - permitted.

"I have a simple solution," said Wolff, whose annoyance at the situation has led him to question the future of Mercedes' junior programme.

"Give us a third car. Make it mandatory to put a young driver, with maximum two years [of F1 experience], in that car.

"The costs wouldn't be huge. The grid would be packed and we would have fantastic shows of new kids on the block coming up and fighting hard with the Valtteris and Lewises of this world and surprising us."

Although Red Bull opted to run a second team to school its young drivers in F1, with Toro Rosso having brought through Sebastian Vettel (pictured below), Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen, Wolff ruled out Mercedes making a similar step.


"Owning another team just to find a place for your young drivers doesn't make sense for us," said Wolff. "And I think the big teams are not going to take risks with young drivers.

"Now you can say that is boring. I think it is boring. I think we should take risks, we should put 18 or 19-year-old top talents in a top car and give them a chance.

"But the problem is that if you lose a drivers' championship or a constructors' championship because they are on a learning curve, that is obviously not great.

"We have not done it and Ferrari have not done it in the past. So we need to question it."

Ocon backed the idea of teams running a third car, but is sceptical that it could be achieved.

"If that could be the case that would be fantastic for sure," he said.

"But I don't see that happening, to be honest. I would like it to happen.

"It would create opportunities for young drivers like me or like Charles [Leclerc] or like George. A great opportunity.

"The costs [third cars] would bring for teams in difficulty, I think it could be tough.

"I don't want to dream too much about that and I try to think about the actual rules."

Ocon's F1 future is uncertain following current team Force India's takeover, with the driver moves related to that situation also the main factor in Formula 2 leader Russell's chances of getting on the grand prix grid next year.

Fellow Mercedes protege Wehrlein lost his Sauber F1 seat last season and returned to the DTM, which Mercedes is about to pull out of.

Yes, yes and yes.

[MonteCristo]

Or, get rid of Kimi and Nando for starters.

That said, it would be great for grids, and whacky races with youngsters all over the place. Can't see it happening through.

[kals]

I agree with third cars but the points system needs to accommodate the outcome of a third Ferrari and Mercedes taking points away from other teams.

[MonteCristo]

I agree with third cars but the points system needs to accommodate the outcome of a third Ferrari and Mercedes taking points away from other teams.

Nah - it would take it back to the days of points for the top 6.

[Everso Biggyballies]

I agree with third cars but the points system needs to accommodate the outcome of a third Ferrari and Mercedes taking points away from other teams.

In the days gone when we would have three or four BRM's or Ferraris entered there would only be two pre chosen entries that would classify for WCC points. Some years (early 70's?) IIRC only the best single brand result would count from each GP. The drivers would all get drivers points, but say 3 hypothetically different Marches were in the points only the leading March car would score the team constructors points.

So for instance in Spain 1970, Jackie Stewart won in a (Tyrrell entered) March, Andretti finished 3rd in an STP March and Servo Gavin finished 5th in a Tyrrell March. They all scored drivers points but March only got 9 constructors points for the Steward entry.

Confused?

[erwin greven]

Would be a great way to enter a third car indeed. And like @Everso Biggyballies mentions: only let the first car score the constructors points.

[John]

I agree with third cars but the points system needs to accommodate the outcome of a third Ferrari and Mercedes taking points away from other teams.

In the days gone when we would have three or four BRM's or Ferraris entered there would only be two pre chosen entries that would classify for WCC points. Some years (early 70's?) IIRC only the best single brand result would count from each GP. The drivers would all get drivers points, but say 3 hypothetically different Marches were in the points only the leading March car would score the team constructors points.

So for instance in Spain 1970, Jackie Stewart won in a (Tyrrell entered) March, Andretti finished 3rd in an STP March and Servo Gavin finished 5th in a Tyrrell March. They all scored drivers points but March only got 9 constructors points for the Steward entry.

Confused?

Same as the manufacturer's championship works in MotoGP, no? Or to that extent.

[kals]

This is featured on Autosport.com currently, written by Peter Windsor and requested by @John.

I read the article a couple of days ago and to be honest wasn't impressed. I've heard Windsor talk about a couple of these items before and all this article is is a nonsensical rant about a few items he dislikes

Firm believer that I am in the importance of creating a raft of new national heroes for the F1 grids of the world, I do nonetheless concede that this may take a couple of years or three.

What, then, of the short-term?

I'm not massively impressed by the new aero regs for 2019, if only because they'll inevitably be tweaked and re-tweaked by brilliant F1 engineers over the next six months to the point where...guess what? It'll still be difficult to follow another car closely. I'm still smarting, I guess, from Pat Symonds' revelation in early 2017 that F1's Strategy Group had been commissioned by Mr E to make the cars faster without any consideration at all to making them easier to drive in traffic. I can understand Bernie not really caring about any of this stuff, but why did the Strategy Group acquiesce? We're still undoing the damage...

Anyway, if you want a quick fix for next year, here are my three absolute necessities for improving the racing in F1.

Get rid of the Virtual Safety Car
I can see its beauty: it's quick to activate (much quicker than a real safety car) and it maintains those hard-fought gaps between cars, even if Sebastian Vettel is concerned about the couple of milliseconds that can be shaved from the legal VSC delta by clever use of certain sections of road.

Let's remember, though, the reason we had safety cars in F1 in the first place: Ecclestone introduced them in a hurry in 1993, when IndyCar's ratings began to soar. He felt no fear from the American cars and circuits - but he wasn't happy about Nigel Mansell's defection and needed an instant reply.

His answer was the Formula 1 version of the pace car - the safety car - an apt re-casting, as it turned out, because F1's early versions were anything but pacey.

In time, though, the whole F1 safety car thing became not only a part of the scenery but also a neat, Mercedes-financed source of income. There were many glitches, of course - not the least of which was the problem of unlapping the back-markers on long circuits
like Spa - but in general the safety car concept has worked well over the past 24 years, bunching up the cars for re-starts and improving safety conditions for drivers and marshals in just about equal proportions.

I don't think anyone was negative about the VSC concept when it was mooted three years ago and then perfected: the drivers felt it was fairer, and the race directors thought it much faster to implement and thus safer - a major plus in the aftermath of Jules Bianchi's accident in Japan.

No-one, to my knowledge, raised the obvious point: with the VSC, the whole safety car system was also losing one of its key components - its ability to re-bunch the field. The theme was safety, safety, safety - and who could argue with that?

Well, I think it's time that someone does. We've got a major image problem in F1 and it's to do with a lack of overtaking and/or close racing.

Admittedly, safety cars can be time-consuming to deploy, and lapped runners can take forever to find their correct position in the line-ups, but the upside of bunched re-starts is the punctuation they supply to otherwise processional narratives.

Get rid of blue flags
This goes against my natural grain, flag marshal that I was, and so I've come to the conclusion only reluctantly.

If we don't have enough overtaking going forwards, let's back ourselves into it - use the slower cars to break up the processions at the front.

Again, I'm the first to admit that it's never been safer to pass slower cars: a driver about to be lapped listens to clear radio warnings before he faces an electronic blue, and usually the slower driver then backs right out of it, losing 10-15 sec in the process.

Sadly, though, that has taken away one of the great arts of high-speed driving.

James Hunt won the 1976 Canadian Grand Prix by his strategic use of the back-markers; Carlos Reutemann out-fumbled Niki Lauda to take the lead around a back-marker at Brands Hatch in 1978.

OK, Jochen Mass had no idea what he was doing when he moved over on Gilles Villeneuve at Zolder in 1982. And I'm certainly not suggesting that drivers should be left to do exactly what they please, with no thought at all being given to rear vision.

What I am saying is that the pressure should be on the leaders when they approach a mid-field bunch late in the race. They should effectively be plunging into the dark - and the speculation should be about which driver will make it easier for which front-runner.

There is an art to it - to making the move at the moment that causes maximum issues for your nearest rival - and it's something you always associate with the great drivers, from Stirling Moss to Jim Clark, from Jackie Stewart to Alain Prost.

To Lewis, even, in his GP2 days.

We should still penalise slower drivers who do something stupid but that's it: otherwise, let the race take its course. We have enough cars to make a motor race: let's use 'em all.

Get rid of Drag Reduction Systems
They're chasing their own tails. They artificially help some car/driver combinations in some conditions, but we've overdone it - added more and more zones until there's no point in running low downforce at circuits like Montreal, or giving drivers like Daniel Ricciardo so much speed differential at circuits like Baku that they have nowhere to go when they're suddenly staring at a rear wing in front of them.

There's a theme here, of course, and it's called Return to Nature.

Racing drivers by definition are designed to overtake or defend, not to stand aside and say obediently, "After you, Claude." And the Drag Reduction System is swallowing itself in a plague of detection and activation zones that bear no relation to real racing.

That's in the short term. Medium term? It's going to be all about drivers, as I keep saying. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with F1 that a new era of Chinese, UAE, American, Indian and South American drivers won't put right.

We just need a system to make it work.

[John]

Thanks again @kals. I do agree with him on the last two points anyway. At least to some extent. I do believe lapped cars shouldn't be forced to throw their way out of the path as they do now, but a place like Monaco would be chaos without the blue flags.

[kals]

Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with his last two points either. But the way he's written his points is nothing more than an old man shouting at a cloud. He also contradicts himself and (talking of DRS specifically) always ignores all the other fake devices that take away from the 'purity' of racing in F1.

[MonteCristo]

Easy fix with SCs... Don't allow lapped cars to gain their lap back. They just either move to the back of the line, or heck, even stay in whatever position they are mixed between cars on the lead (and on other) lap.

Shorter SCs would be a win in everyone's books.