TL;DR
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It’s sad, but I’m kinda glad it’s over. The optimist in me hopes next season will be less of a slagging match between apparently rival fans who care more for beating someone - anyone - at any cost than they do for the racing.
I remain fanatically interested in the tech.
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The BBC page on the race had a comments section, which has gone precisely as well as you would think.
Idiots.
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IMO Matia is the best boss Ferrari have had since Todt.
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25 years ago I joined an F1 forum thinking it would be interesting and I could tell some true stories about the past when the truth was lied about to keep the other teams in the dark about what each other were working on.
It didn’t go well. The most enthusiastic fans most definitely did NOT want facts if it conflicted their existing fanaticism.
I didn’t stay long.
Since then there have become far more fans who are even less knowledgable as well.
It has been heavily marketed as fundamentally a competition between drivers to increase the fan base and make more money. It has been a deliberate and successful (financially) strategy. But F1 has never been that and still isn’t.
There is now a huge fanbase of vociferous but profoundly ignorant fans who have changed the whole complexion of the public face of F1 and a weird idea of what to expect.
It is very much not to my liking.
A lot more people are accumulating a lot more money though.
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So many of those fans cannot conceive that F1 is a team sport. The F1 champion is the yellow jersey winner in the Tour de France.
There is absolutely no way - it is impossible - one person could win it on their own. Or even with one or two others, however brilliant they are.
The vast majority of F1 drivers are quite brilliant. But they’d be completely lost without their teams.
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I think for most fans it has always been about the drivers but for teams it has always (and still) is about the constructor’s championship (yes I’m aware who I’m mansplaining that to)
As a kid in the 80’s I watched the drivers not the team (Mansell, Senna, Prost etc) I guess it was the same in the 50’60/70s with Fangio, Moss, Hunt and Stewart etc. Mate at school who went on to be an engineer for a few teams Jordan, Honda, Brawn and Mercedes followed the teams rather than the drivers so I did get a lot of insight and advice from him (as well as pit lane access 
)
I’ve never had much of an interest in the politics, drivers personalities or teams and prior to races don’t follow any of the gossip or news. I’ll watch a race on the sunday not having a clue who is on pole, have never watched the qualifying or sprint bullshit on the fri/sat. I just want to see drivers go at it and would be happy if all teams were supplied the same car and are not allowed to fuck with them.
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I have nothing like your perspective, but entirely agree - I fear Ferrari are about to make a BIG mistake rolling his head across the floor…
Again, while lacking anything resembling insight, I’ve tried an assortment of forums &c and rarely lasted beyond one post. This is the sole exception, and I have learned a good deal over the years from several of you.
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I realise most fans followed drivers.
It has just been exaggerated more since Liberty bought the promotion rights.
The fact is that all the drivers making it as far as F1 are brilliant. Obviously some better than others but rarely enough for it to outweigh any benefit they get from the car.
There are only a tiny handful of seasons in the last 70 years where the World Champion wasn’t the better of the 2 drivers in the best car.
It is ironic in a way that the World Championship for drivers is in a series where the car makes more difference than the driver but it is setup as well as car design so even the one make formulae are not just inter-driver competitions.
Jackie Stewart always said the most important talent a driver needed was to get into the right team.
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Absolutely, a fantastic driver in a good car is unlikely to beat a good driver in a fantastic car.
Liberty are guilty of turning F1 into a “social media” sport by reducing everything down to snippets or short bits of excitement to keep the newer/younger fans transfixed.
I remember when qualifying used to be a few laps followed by lots of tweaking and fiddling in the pit garage then followed by a few laps to get the best time. Liberty have now turned the whole “qualifying” days into it’s own entertainment event.
It’s been such a dreadful season , I doubt if I’ll watch it next year.
Jackie Stewart was a big fan of Jim Clark. What a truly remarkable driver he was.
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Hey, what has Sodder’s rant to do with UK politics?
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In other news (and especially for the stats nerds), Mr Vettel’s retirement means Lewis Hamilton has won more F1 races than the entire rest of the F1 grid combined.
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They were close friends.
IMO Jim Clark was the best driver ever.
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didn’t you give him his first driving lessons?
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I was 18, mechanicing at a hill climb when he died.
Still my hero.
I missed seeing him race by a few months - first F1 race my dad ever took me to was Brands in '68. Admittedly I was 4 and my chief memory is how agonisingly, unbearably loud the cars were! Among others, I think that might have been the 16 cylinder BRM’s last season…
IIRC, both Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart rated him as the best of the best, and both admitted their careers would have been different had he lived.
I used to live near Hockenheim and went to a few of the F1 and historic events which included a Jim Clark memorial race.
Unlike the UK 
, ticket prices were 25 euros for F1 etc.