Posted on 08/05/2009 7:57:45 PM PDT by Chode
This will be a general purpose thread for F1 news and pings that really don't require a thread of their own.
Wow!
What a way to disenfranchise black drivers...
</Hambone mind>
end of days...
LOLOL!!! nope...
i still miss Bloom County...
blk drivers matter? black cars no doubt
Me too, it was nice to have that regular dose of reality. Ack!
Dang, now I forget why I said that what was posted; must have been a goodie.
Okay, dug way back and saw it. Yep, a definite LOL for the day.
good stuff...
Everything You Need to Know about F1 Cars in 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efksL7CDC0g
And the Queen Mum would be delighted, if she gave a Nutrias A$$... Now where’s my Fleas and Trumpets ? Prince William the Sleaze ball of Windsor, come here boy ! Your new friend hammy the halfbreed is here to see you...
oh yeah
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix concluded the closest Formula One title fight in 47 years. Or sorry, no. It should have concluded the closest F1 title fight in 47 years, but instead, it created an extremely murky situation. I said back in November the only thing that could spoil a really awesome year of F1 racing was bad stewarding and, boy, was the mother of all bad race-control calls made. The outcome of that call we already know, but the outcome of the investigation launched because of that call we won’t know until the first Grand Prix weekend of the season.
First, Mercedes protested the outcome, which saw Lewis Hamilton lose the title in the final lap of a restarted race. Then, it dropped its protest and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was confirmed as the champion, just in time for the FIA prize-giving gala. At the same time, the FIA elected a new president and, well, it was the end of a very long season and also Christmas so most people dispersed to wherever they actually live. Hamilton himself went on an ongoing social media break, taking time to himself after what happened.
One of new president Mohamed Ben Sulayem’s first announcements was that there would be an investigation into what happened, with Sky Sports F1 later on confirming said investigation had started Monday, Jan. 10, the first day the FIA office was reopened.
Today, the FIA has issued a statement confirming the timeline for the results to be released from that investigation. It reads: “Following the decision to the World Motor Sport Council in Paris on 15 December 2021, the FIA administration, under the leadership of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, has started the detailed analysis of the events of the last Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The FIA president launched a consultation with all F1 teams on various issues, including this one.”
GETTY
The first stage of the investigation will be the FIA’s Sporting Advisory Committee looking into how the safety car should be used during races, which will take place on Jan. 19. After that, there will be “a shared discussion with all F1 drivers,” which will feed into the final report.
“The outcome of the detailed analysis will be presented to the F1 Commission in February,” the statement continues. That will let teams and FIA representatives drill into it further and ask for any details missing, then “final decisions will be announced at the World Motor Sport Council in Bahrain on 18 March.”
One of the key parts of the investigation is that F1 race director Michael Masi is no longer the head of the FIA’s single-seater racing commission, as confirmed in the statement: “FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has asked Secretary General Sport and recently-appointed Single-Seater Director Peter Bayer for proposals to review and optimize the organization of the FIA F1 structure for the 2022 season.”
This is all good, in the sense it lets us know what’s going on, but there’s a pretty big problem. Toto Wolff has said that Hamilton won’t make a decision on whether to return to F1 until he sees the outcome of the report, which won’t be shared until the Friday of the first race of the year—let alone the first pre-season test in Barcelona at the end of February.
there are already enough feeder series, but the girls, feel they need a league of their own... think i’ll go puke now
There’s only been a couple of racers in W Series from the Americas. First was Canadian Megan Gilkes, who won a reverse-grid non-championship race in the first season, and then driver-slash-engineer Sabré Cook, who flew the stars and stripes in 2019 and 2021. The women-only racing championship seems keen to change that given its new testing initiative taking place in Phoenix late this month.
Inde Motorsports Ranch will host a five-day test where 14 young drivers will be assessed using U.S. F4 cars. The drivers are mostly in their teens, with 27-year-old Corinna Kamper from Austrian F1 broadcaster ORF (who is herself a qualified racing driver) also joining the test, presumably for filming.
W Series undertook tests in 2019 to select the original drivers for the series, then fielded a mostly unchanged lineup for 2021; the pandemic limited assessment opportunities the previous year. Now that it’s moved to a team-based model, the search for talent has been extended to the Americas in an effort to reach more drivers.
Of the 14 pilots listed, three are American (Madison Aust, Lindsay Brewer and Chloe Chambers) and one is Canadian (Nicole Havrda), while the South American countries of Brazil (Julia Ayoub) and Uruguay (Maite Cáceres) are also represented. Bianca Bustamante from the Philippines brings another nationality not before seen in W Series to the test.
Both of W Series’ first titles were won by the U.K.’s Jamie Chadwick, who is moving on from the series following her second win. W Series is a junior program, intended to help drivers get back onto or move up the motorsport ladder, fully funding them all the while to mitigate the massive costs of pre-professional championships. This makes it different than a “ladies’ Formula One,” so it’s right to see drivers who’ve outgrown it progress into other series.
The 2022 calendar for W Series hasn’t been announced yet, and we don’t yet know if it will continue its 2021 partnership to be part of the Formula 1 calendar. As such, the Inde Motorsport Ranch test will be the first on-track action of the year.
W Series’ racing director Dave Ryan said, “The purpose of this test is to get to know a new group of drivers and understand what they are capable of as we finalize our 2022 driver line-up and look to the future.”
With some of the drivers in the test as young as 15, he added, “All of the drivers who will be with us in Arizona have demonstrated talent and potential in their careers so far and, while some may be a year or two away from racing in W Series, this is an opportunity for them to showcase their skills and for us to accelerate their development.”
Gordon Murray reveals the secrets to his new 663bhp T50 supercar. Better than the McLaren F1?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8PMXCMrsM
Inside Gordon Murray’s incredible lightweight car collection Top Gear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg6VED1vQRw
https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/44064/fia-says-it-might-remove-f1-race-director-michael-masi
FIA Says It Might Remove F1 Race Director Michael Masi
After the controversial end to the 2021 Formula One season, when the final lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was, in effect, decided by race control, there have been a lot of loud calls for one thing: Michael Masi, F1's race director, to be fired or resign. Now Peter Bayer, the FIA secretary general for motorsport, has said that Masi's job is anything but secure, with a replacement possible as part of a restructure.
During the longwinded FIA legal process to look into the regulatory impact of what happened at Abu Dhabi, there's been a lack of transparency about what the actual outcomes might be. Bayer, speaking to Austrian publication Voralberger Nachrichten, detailed more about what could have happened—and what might still.
He said that the FIA had a job to "catch up" in terms of race direction. "Masi had several options in those seconds in which he had to decide, all according to the regulations. He could have finished the race under safety car, he could have [thrown a red flag] but Nicholas Latifi's accident wouldn't have justified that. Or he could have done what he did, which was to get to the end of the race somehow."
Bayer continued that, if Mercedes had not dropped the protest it initially announced intent to lodge, he thinks that "the judges would have said it's different in the regulations [than] [Masi] decided. So we could just void the result. But even then—if it were canceled—Max Verstappen would have been world champion. It's also about having respect for the race director."
Masi is important to F1, Bayer emphasized, and his expertise shouldn't be lost. However, "We told him that, but also that there is a possibility that there could be a new race director. I can only make suggestions to the World Motor Sport Council, and they will definitely include Michael."
One other big change, Bayer promises, is that team bosses will no longer have the ability to contact race direction during a Grand Prix. The radio messages exchanged in the final four minutes of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix have played a major role in the controversy, with fans feeling both Mercedes' Toto Wolff and Red Bull's Christian Horner exerted too much influence on events, by turn.
“We will stop this harassment of race management and make huge changes. The team principals will no longer be able to use this channel," Bayer promised. "In [the] future, the race director will be able to concentrate on the race without distraction.”
For the record: I don't think Masi should have to leave, although I don't know why he'd come back. He was put in an impossible position: the race director's role is to agree on track safety and procedures, sign off on repairs or changes, and to be the final word during the race. They're not one of the stewards, nor do they have control over the stewards, and the point where things got out of control was having two brand-new-to-F1 circuits, followed by a radically reworked Abu Dhabi track, crammed into four weeks at the end of a triple header and the longest F1 season ever. It's not sane that that job was on the shoulders of one person, which the FIA has also acknowledged.
To stop a repeat of what happened, there has to be a restructure—not just in terms of who does the job but what it is, says Bayer. "The various tasks of the race director, who is also sports director, safety and course delegate, will be divided up. That was simply too much."
I’m so glad Hamilton lost. I hope he quits, woke faggot that he is.
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