Meanwhile, at the back of the classroom…
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Oh my god🤣
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Has everyone already switched to MotoGP? Could hear a pin drop in here
Gonna be a dull season if all we have to get our teeth into hoping for some fortnightly “wow, what a dickhead” bitching in the RB garage.
Impressive, if that’s the right word, how quickly AM swung into action with examples of the FIA not correctly policing the pitstop penalty regs.
Mildly surprised though they couldn’t find plenty of similar examples to Alonso’s grid-position mistake not being penalized. I’m not questioning whether it’s a mistake, just that my mind’s eye says that it’s a mistake that often goes unpunished
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It seems to me, that a penalty should only apply, if that person gains an advantage, or, disadvantages someone else.
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They certainly need to speed up the process.
The alleged infraction, I believe the rear trolley jack under Alonso’s car whilst the penalty was being served, was apparent before halfway in the race.
To only then decide after the podium ceremony shows they have a way to go yet.
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First race I just couldn’t be fucked to watch for many years…
Really just not ‘feeling it’ this year 
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The Aussie on the fly re-writing of the rule book killed it for me back in Abu Dhabi, and I haven’t been bothered to watch a race since.
The lack of any credible challenge to the spoiled brat egotist isnt helping either, but the resurgence of Fred is the one light down the end of the long tunnel atm which may draw me back in, just needs a lot of parts to fall of the caffeine vehicle on a regular basis.
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This. Been a joy to behold.
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I doubt anyone’s surprised to hear I agree on this score: RB are clearly long-gone this season, but I hope we can see him scrapping with Leclerc and Lewis, as there’s little more entertaining than a fired-up Fred
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A three way fight between AM, Merc and Ferrari for the scraps might be interesting.
Looks like McLaren have fallen off the grid
What might be the solution to better engagement?
Sports always have issues with competitiveness. Football has the buy-to-win thing right now. There is always a balance between excellence and spectacle; sometimes the former is achieved by too few teams and the latter is lost.
I find that F1 seems to have very few instances of actual racing excitement - the tension tends to come in non-racing things like weather and hence tyre choice.
There seems to be a clear hierarchy of car, and that drives the result, in general. But to some extent it’s always been like that - is it just that no-one actually likes RBR?
Are there any rule or other technical changes that could add some actual racing tension to the sport?
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British Touring cars add weight to the winning cars, and they have wider race tracks.
Might help?
Only making it like Indy cars and only allowing one manufacturer and everyone races the same car.
But then it stops being F1
Whenever technical rules change - as they did prior to 22 - it’s normally the best / best-staffed teams who initially come out on top. Whether the 22 technical rules serve their purpose has been a source of discussion here (@IanW has a few views 
)
What I find odd this season - and I’d love for @IanW / @f1eng to share their thoughts cos I’m genuinely stumped - is how it appears (thus far) that several teams have gone waaaaay down the rabbit hole despite there being very few changes (porpoising-related floor changes?) to the regs, yet the gap to RB seems even bigger than last year.
Engines change in 26, but the stability of tech regs nearly always diminishes returns and compresses the field. The budget cap should help this too, but I’d assume it’ll be a massive problem for those who’ve fallen so far off the map to move back to the sharp end, as they will have limited resources to previous eras??
That said, it’s exceptionally rare that the WDC isn’t the best driver from the best team, but RB isn’t Mercedes, and Perez isn’t Rosberg (and won’t be allowed to be either) so we’re surely in for a dull season.
Yeah, I think that’s a large part of it. (Fuzzy) memories of Weber getting screwed by the team (despite having his arse thoroughly handed to him be Seb) and the behavior and attitude of Verstappen don’t help.
It’s a shame. Verstappen wouldn’t lose a free for all against Perez in a month of Sundays but it’s be better viewing than what we had last season, and will probably have this one
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As you have suggested, stable rules will bring about a grid that gets closer over time. And in fact most of the grid has closed up with even the team finishing last expected to get points and 6th to 9th, possibly 6th to 10th being close. Alpine looks a solid 5th already and then we have a close 4th to 2nd and then RBR.
It looks like RBR have developed their concept further (i.e. it had / has greater potential than other concepts) and this has really paid off, despite having less wind tunnel and CFD time than other teams. I was expecting RBR to have less of a gap in front this year and a close fight with Merc. But the Merc technical leadership have really messed up and are likely to be beaten by Aston. Ferrari have stepped backwards (it is never good for a team to have no Technical Director and the Team Principal’s position under question all season). And so we have a very distorted grid.
Exactly. Everything is set up to compress the field, but RBR have such a lead that the budget cap and the way that the rules have been framed will make it more difficult for the rest of the grid to catch up with the outlier RBR. Ultimately the other teams just need time and to improve the way that they develop vehicle performance.
I am sure that the rule makers did not anticipate this happening!
As to not liking RBR, I have personal reasons to not like Horner, but as Frank has said on here, Horner has achieved far, far more than Toto Wolf who just inherited what Ross Brawn, Bob Bell and Andy Cowell had set up, to win many championships, long before Toto was involved. All Toto had to do was not mess it up, which he broadly did until the new rules were announced, when he and the technical leadership in the team failed to understand the new rules well enough and ultimately who knows how to make a fast car when big changes occur in the rules.
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Unfortunately this prediction seems highly plausible - barring midfield shennaningans.
I’m actually starting to wonder how long Toto can hold onto his throne with Merc doing such impressive flatfish-impersonations…
The personal obnoxiousness of Christian Horner, the running-crying-to-teacher stuff, the unpunished rule infringements, the more-than-merely-fortunate stewarding decisions made in their favour, the A-team vs. B-team driver apartheid, the stomach-churning arrogance mixed with peevishness of Verstappen Jr. … They make it very hard to love them (unless you’re Dutch…), but they get results - and in busine… errr.… racing - that’s all that matters.
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The new rules were a massive change in both concept and flow field.
The big front vanes and high floor entry mean a totally different requirement for the under floor flow, which is the important bit, and the objective is more generating downforce here whereas it used to be mainly minimising how much of the meagre flat bottom downforce was lost by the inflow and wheel wakes.
Though avoiding this will always be important the big change is the opportunity to generate far more under the car in the first place.
There are few engineers left in F1 with any ground effect experience at all, just Rory consulting for Ferrari and Adrian at Red Bull, but Adrian was very junior at the end of the old ground effect era and not working for a top team.
Anyway I think few current F1 aero guys had any idea how much performance was now available, or where to look for it.
The only rules I worked on in any way similar were the now defunct US Champ Car rules, which had quite similar underfloor possibilities, though more restrictions.
As it turns out the only engineer in F1 I know of who ever worked on Champ cars is Dan Fallows who was a new graduate working on CFD at Lola on the Champ cars.
I am pretty sure he had a much better insight into what was possible with this sort of floor, and by then was head of aero at Red Bull so my guess is Red Bull were way ahead in understanding the potential of the new rules , and now Aston Martin is too.
The sidepod shape is a second order influence on a ground effect car IME so the modern obsession on the top surface shape is looking in the wrong place.
But I am an old bloke who worked on both original and Champ car ground effect, so what do I know.
Patrick Head recommended Dorilton took me as a consultant, like Ferrari did with Rory, last year (too late anyway) but told me they were insulted by the insinuation.
I really think the teams understand what the cars need fairly well by simulation but how to get it not well enough.They understand the cars aerodynamically less well than they think and the broad view is not available because the teams are so big.
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Is there any merit in the thought of reducing the number of team members and employees?
The argument from the teams is likely to be that F1 is now such a technical challenge, more people are needed; my counter would be that by (drastically?) cutting team membership, it would leave more room for variety in approach from the different teams on the grid because they would be unable to focus on everything, which in turn could mean more exciting racing.
Mercedes employ nearly 1000 people in a 24/7 working environment. Cut that to - say - 100 and see how things go!
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I remember a Team Boss back in the early 2000s stating that Aero could NOT be unlearned.
Well, well, well, I think you’ll find….
The importance of aero can not be unlearned but big rule changes do separate the micro development boys from the whole flow field concept men IMO.
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