Formula One - 2017

etifosi wrote: This was how nearly ALL F1 races played out in the pre-DRS era:

Only if you have a short memory youngster I recall lot's of passing before F1 got boring 20 years ago.

In reply to etifosi:

We live in a high score country - people are watching football and basketball. Imagine the horror of a 2-1 finish in the final bracket game of March Madness. A parade without floats is boring.

The rest of the world watches futbol... and celebrates the subtle nuances of the well-to-do starting 10th and finishing 10th as a much as they do the overall victory provided it feeds their jingoistic ideals. Otherwise they venomously hate the little bitchy fellow driving the car. Or something like that.

The rest of us fast forward thru it and watch MotoGP or BTCC start to finish.

In reply to Huckleberry:

True up to a point, but a lot of the bitching about the current state of F1 comes from the UK, the most rabid of fan bases. I don't need to see over taking every lap, but I do want to be able to see those nuanced drives of stalking down the opponent and setting up a move, pass or even perfect pit pass. The issue with what we've got now is that once you're within around 2 seconds you can't get closer to set up or even think about the pass because of dirty air. Lack of passing doesn’t = lack of action or spectacle. But lack of spectacle and action does = lack of passing. They're missing on both accounts right now.

etifosi wrote: This was how nearly ALL F1 races played out in the pre-DRS era: qualifying-order parades with occasional disruption of said order via pit-wall strategy. It might just be scarlet fever induced by 'lil red pony stable win, but I might like this "classic-style" F1 over the sitting duck DRS/hi-deg tyre stuff we've seen in recent years. Does a great race REQUIRE dozens and dozens of passes?

It's not about passing itself that makes the racing more fun to watch. It's about the faster cars getting around slower cars that makes it more fun to watch.

Lets say Hamilton got around Verstappen- the Mercedes was clearly the faster car, but because of the aero effects, it was unrealistic that he could have gotten around. It sucks to see fast cars held up by slower ones.

But if it did- Hamilton thinks that Vettel would have passed him anyway. Would he? Is the race fun because Vettel closed on Hamilton at 1-2 seconds a lap, only to sit behind him 2ish seconds because he can't close? Or would it have been more interesting to actually have a challenge because the Ferrari was faster at the end of the race compared to the Mercedes?

Right now, it's about track position, and that's about it. The regard to the robustness of the car's pace during the race is very secondary- even when they loose 100kg of fuel weight.

Another way of looking at it. Lets say a fast car has an issue in Q3, putting them at the back of the grid. Practice times puts them at the front of the pack with the front row drivers. Right now, the best he could do is whatever can be done before the first corner and whatever can be done via pitting. Wouldn't it be better to see that driver pass his way to the front, too? We hold VERY high regard to historic drivers who were able to pass though the pack. But the cars prevent that from happening anymore. That kind of sucks.

So don't confuse the issue of fast vs slow cars with the ADD excuse of # of passes.

Last year we had multiple instances of fast drivers starting at the back and working up through the field. Heck, remember Verstappen in the final race of 2016? That was only one race ago :)

Like everyone else, I'd like to see the cars more tolerant of dirty air. If this was a competitive advantage, we'd see the teams design for that - except for the fact that they're so constrained by the aero rules that they can't. So again we get back to an over-restrictive rule set causing the problems.

I don't like DRS, I don't like weird tire rules that require teams to run on a second choice tire. These are highly artificial means of trying to get speed variation across different cars. Let them run as fast as they can all the time and let them use aero to get close. Why isn't this a problem with LMPs?

Hmm. Now I know why I like Nascar racing.

iceracer wrote: Hmm. Now I know why I like Nascar racing.

NASCAR has the opposite problem of F1. With F1, all you need to watch is qualifying. With NASCAR all you need to watch is the last 5 minutes of the race, because everything that happens before that gets invalidated due to yellow flags for invisible debris on the track.

Actually, there's a lot of subtle maneuvering going on that you might miss if you only watch the highlights. Attending Daytona gave me an appreciation that it's a very different kind of racing, but not a simple one. And every yellow flag was extremely well deserved :)

Keith Tanner wrote: Actually, there's a lot of subtle maneuvering going on that you might miss if you only watch the highlights. Attending Daytona gave me an appreciation that it's a very different kind of racing, but not a simple one. And every yellow flag was extremely well deserved :)

There are important subtleties to both, yes, but I think my statement about NASCAR is about the same level of correctness as the one about F1. :)

On the topic of LMP cars and passing, note that they have a lot less drag than F1 cars do (fenders and closed cockpits, vs open wheels and open cockpits), and I would speculate that that produces a lot less disturbed air.

Keith Tanner wrote: Actually, there's a lot of subtle maneuvering going on that you might miss if you only watch the highlights. Attending Daytona gave me an appreciation that it's a very different kind of racing, but not a simple one. And every yellow flag was extremely well deserved :)

I've said that quite a bit having crewed in Nascar for a couple of years. The sheer amount of work in a typical race weekend far exceeded anything I've experienced road racing. The work at the shop was greater as well.

Keith Tanner wrote: Actually, there's a lot of subtle maneuvering going on that you might miss if you only watch the highlights. Attending Daytona gave me an appreciation that it's a very different kind of racing, but not a simple one. And every yellow flag was extremely well deserved :)

To me, the problem with NASCAR is more about passing due to your position than your speed, especially on restrictor plate tracks. Indycar is/was similar on the middle sized speedways- where they are constantly passing and near each other.

Both are the opposite of F1, where passing is because of aero and not because you are faster. And while I 100% agree that's there massive skill to do that, I'm also not a fan of going to that extreme for the sake of passing.

Please, no using the N word in this thread.

codrus wrote: On the topic of LMP cars and passing, note that they have a lot less drag than F1 cars do (fenders and closed cockpits, vs open wheels and open cockpits), and I would speculate that that produces a lot less disturbed air.

They're certainly slipperier, although I do wonder if the air is less disturbed. Gotta figure wings and big diffusers mess things up. Probably not as many wacky vortices, though.

Still, if the FIA wants to "fix" F1, I'd be taking a good look at what's going on in WEC. It's got some problems but the ability of the cars to pass without artificial assistance is not one of them.

Any time you wonder what Formula 1 could be like, just look at MotoGP. The recent race had multiple passes for the lead per lap and nobody knew who would win until they crossed the line. This is because MotoGP lets satellite teams have more options than Factory teams but the biggest reason is the aero. The bikes have no downforce so you actually are FASTER when you get up close to another rider. Formula 1 needs to severely limit downforce so the cars can follow each other closely. Let them have active suspension but have a spec front and rear wing that are low, low downforce.

Aero is a big part of the magic of F1 cars, unfortunately.

MotoGP also has the advantage of very narrow vehicles, so there's a lot more room to move around on the track.

MotoGP also has the advantage that doing aero on a motorcycle is pretty much impossible because the angle of the bike relative to the road keep changing :)

As far as LMP goes, I think there is a fair bit of artificiality going on there as well, it's just better-hidden. AIUI, the ACO is constantly tweaking the rules in terms of per-car minimum weights, restrictors, rev limiters, fuel quantities, etc in order to balance the cars.

I haven't watched many of the ELMS (or whatever the Le Mans-based european series is call) races, so I don't know how much passing for the lead goes on there. I think passing at La Sarthe is helped by the lack of carbon brakes on the LMP cars and the very long straights with tight chicanes after them making for good passing zones.

There's no balance of performance tweaking in LMP, but there is in the lower classes. Which is why we get such great battles in the GT classes, and why Porsche was pissed off that Ford was sandbagging early in the season so they'd get an advantage at Le Mans.

Certainly 10 years ago there was a bunch of per-car rule tweaking in LMPs -- I assumed it was still the same, but perhaps not.

codrus wrote: MotoGP also has the advantage that doing aero on a motorcycle is pretty much impossible because the angle of the bike relative to the road keep changing :)

Dunno if you followed MotoGP in 2016 but wings suddenly appeared and the bikes got quicker because the wings kept the front ends down. However, riders reported that it was much harder to follow the riders with wings. Fortunately, wings were outlawed for 2017 [URL=http://smg.photobucket.com/user/loosecannon/media/PA1810628.0008_zps8efpiz6f.jpg.html][/URL]

Interesting video comparison Of G forces between 2016 and 2017.

Also, those cornering speeds are nuts.

Also also, It seems to be much easier to get decent F1 content since the new owners took control.

Nascar has improved the racing by reducing down force.

Passing has no "push to pass" help. It is all set up by the driver.

The last F1 race I attended was back when they had almost no down force.

Ah... cheaty cheaty. An interesting look at teams possibly burning "oil" as fuel. Ties back to the prior discussion about engineering around the new fuel limits. Cars are now pushing 5L of oil consumption in a race.

"The void inside the crankcase, between the sump and the pistons above, works best if its pressure is controlled, so the scavenge pumps can also work to draw a slight vacuum. The crankcase pressure also helps to control the oil on the cylinder walls, preventing too much oil passing up past the oil control ring on the piston. Again, this all quite legitimate. To control this pressure, teams are allowed another breather from the crankcase into the airbox, but the bypass is controlled by a solenoid valve under ECU control. With the scavenge pumps and solenoid controlled breather, the teams have the ability to control the oil in the crankcase either getting into the combustion chamber by the airbox or by passing the piston. Thus, the control and conditions to purposely burn oil are there and as with anything in F1 this can be exploited if someone wanted."

https://drivetribe.com/p/AlqP8ipBTayr9251BDyNiA?iid=TmS8UK72QI6xuyK9NEdU8Q

"Separating the normal oil function and consumption is near impossible by the FIA in a race, but oil consumption is now effectively capped and any escalation in consumption will be seen a sign of combustion boosting oil burning and will result in penalties."

I've only watched F1 since 2013, but it seems to me that at it's nature, without any gimmickry or mechanical issues, "normal" racing is all but guaranteed to be a procession (cars line up from fastest to slowest and slowly spread out as the faster cars pull away from the slower cars). Sure, sometimes a good battle might erupt from a driver and/or car being better on Saturday than on Sunday, but everything done to encourage overtaking is already down to a surprise mechanical issue or a gimmick: pit-lane starts, standing starts, mandatory pit stops, fragile tires.

It's baffling to me, therefore, that F1 would rig the system to force frequent overtakes and then not design the cars for it. I just read Scarb's article about how F1 undid all of the positive changes it made in 2009. I also read the radio transcript from Australia, and it seems like it's going to be as bad as predicted. Multiple drivers complaining about not being able to get close in dirty air. Seems like it's hard to even get into DRS range.

I don't get it. People complain about DRS but given the state of the aero, it's better than nothing. At least it gives drivers a chance to restore positions after pit stops.

I think the brake systems are way too good on modern F1 cars. Go back to steel or cast iron rotors. The braking zones will increase and the drivers will have to be careful not to cook the brakes, giving more opportunities to complete passes. I remember the days of drivers having to save something for the end of the race. Does anyone even do that anymore? The equipment is so good these days you can run as hard as you want green flag to checkered flag.