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.
This is rich.
Somebody in a Mercedes probably is going to win the 2026 WDC. Kimi Antonelli seems to be the fan favorite but over a 22-race season, wiley veteran George Russell still stands an even money chance. But that’s provided Mercedes can keep both their cars running which, after Montreal, isn’t the cinch it might have been before Russell’s DNF.
The battery konked out on him while he was in the lead, scuppering his chances at an almost certain win. And not knowing what went wrong with Russell’s battery is costing every engineer on the Mercedes’ PU team sleep for fear that some of their other batteries might have the same problem. But they can’t check them until they learn what went wrong with George’s.
And they can’t rush the ex-battery back to Brackley for an emergency autopsy because of safety protocols involving shipping a lithium battery with a known fault. It’s going to take MONTHS for it to get back to Old Blighty.
Months. Plural.
And people have rowed across the Atlantic in less than two months. On more than one occasion even.
And two months finds F1 in summer break, so it might be seven races on at the Dutch GP before they find out what they’re facing.
All of which begs the question how Elon Musk ever convinced people to park a car with a passel of lithium batteries in them in their garage.
If you didn’t know, Red Bull (corporate, not just the F1 team) puts on a steady stream of mind-blowing stunts, most involving airplanes, helicopters, bicycles and such. The craziest one (IMHO) was when two skydivers flew side-by-side in identical Cessna 182 airplanes. Both simultaneously jumped out of their plane (leaving it empty) and tried to “fly” into the other guy’s plane to take control of it before it crashed.
Only one of them succeeded.
Here’s one of their stunt helicopters (MBB 105s) flying overhead of a barefoot water skiier. The water skiier grabs one of the ‘copter’s skids and continues barefootin’, sometimes on just one foot. One-footed barefootin’ behind a helicopter. Then the ‘copter flies up to about 30 feet, water skiier still hanging on the skid, then he drops off and backflips into the water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-dYi6EGW3A
Fernando Alonso Is Angry: 2026 F1 Cars Are the ‘Worst Ever’ and ‘Should Not Be Racing’
The two-time world champion is sick of hybrid F1 cars, and is making sure everyone knows about it.
Just because it’s ‘Nando’s ox that’s being gored doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.
“Just because it’s ‘Nando’s ox that’s being gored doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.”
True words.
True words.
The first lap isn’t yet complete and I will bet that Max just decided to quit F1 at the end of this season.
This battery crap is just too frustrating for the drivers.
I did not have a chance to watch the race until late morning yesterday...I cannot believe Hadjar held onto third! He was 3 seconds per lap slower but no-one could pass...
F1 has sunk to such a low with $700 per gallon fuel and $3,000,000 battery allowance to save the planet.
Stay strong, PG — we’ll see a better F1 someday.
You probably not going to find this believable.
The first ADUO adjustments are in.
Red Bull/Ford, which has been on the podium three times in six races (3rd place on each occasion) is the benchmark. They get NO ADUO adjustments.
Mercedes, which has eight podium results (six wins, two 2nds) gets one ADUO adjustment.
Audi, Ferrari and Honda each get two ADUO adjustments.
What’s secret is whether Honda is considered more than 10% adrift of Red Bull/Ford. If so they will receive a gift of $19 million from F1 to offset development costs and that doesn’t go against their cost cap.
Ferrari was banking on the ADUO catching them up to Mercedes, but as always even the leader is a moving target and they get one adjustment to offset Ferrari’s two.
Hambone is so upset that Merc got an ADUO adjustment is that his hair straightened all by itself.
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/f1-shock-red-bull-aduo-verdict-consequences/
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/how-honda-19-million-dollar-f1-bailout-will-really-work/
Politics with Ford, they are not European longtime engines MFGs, and forget about Cosworth, too old or not one Name in brand…. 😂
I tried to like e car racing, but could never get into watchi g that kind of racing- so stinking. Boring! Wanna see the v-10’s come back!that would draw the crowds I’m sure. Nasc a r started their industry destroyin segments (stages i think they are called), and of course went full moron by embracing blm and wokeness, and fi has just steadily gotten worse and worse.
I watch the old videos and hear the roar of those massive engines, and am just floored that f1 took a perfecf,y successful model and went down the road that they did. Now I’m even losing enthusiasm for watching it (not that I can because it went to apple TV now- haven’t even seen a race this year yet because of the switch to app,e.
Because Antonelli has been suffering with a crap car all year! LOL
Max must be beside himself.
Red Bull won’t be telling what went wrong with Max’s car on the start at Monaco. They claim they know, even that the problem first became evident on the formation lap, but they made no mention of what it was.
They’d planned to swap out Max’s PU after Monaco anyway but they were a day late and a few million Euros short.
Formula 1’s controversial ADUO engine assistance system is already sparking accusations of political manoeuvring before the FIA has even formally explained its decision.
https://www.grandprix.com/news/aduo-engine-ruling-sparks-fresh-political-row-in-f1.html
“...We are seeking any opportunity to see if BYD technology can help FIA, can help all other teams. We are seeking any opportunity to see if BYD technology can help FIA, can help all other teams....”
Not surprisingly, she left out the bit about conquering the world and subjugating Western civilization.
https://www.planetf1.com/news/byd-f1-fia-monaco-gp-meetings-update
In another article from the same source, they quote Li again:
“For us, the [12th] team has to add value to sustaining the business of Formula 1, and the business of Formula 1 is not about the income, it’s about the longevity of the championship itself.”
https://www.planetf1.com/news/christian-horner-byd-f1-return-chinese-team-speculation
Read that again and see if anything sounds amiss, like, Idunno, maybe, "...the business of Formula 1 is not about the income...." Pray tell how is it F1 (or BYD itself, for that matter) is supposed to survive without income????
This woman clearly speaks simultaneously from both sides of her mouth, so she should fit in nicely in the FIA boardroom.
The sport has been about NOTHING BUT the income since Bernie acquired total and exclusive authority over F1's broadcast rights in 1978.
Then there's the fact that doing DoD business with BYD is banned by its “1260H list” (link below) because BYD "directly and indirectly" is associated with Communist China's "State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council" (SASAC) and directly affiliated with the "People’s Liberation Army."
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/09/alibaba-baidu-byd-named-on-pentagons-china-military-list-.html
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-11571.pdf
So if Trump45/47/48 has a hair on his ass, he needs to exert all possible federal pressure on the F1 circuits to prevent them hosting any event with BYD as a participant or supporter of participants. And he needs to blackmail Canada to do the same, because F1 circuits have come and gone over the years but Canada has hosted an F1 race continuously since 1961, and at Montreal since '78. So losing all of North America would be a much more damaging blow than losing just the US.
Lewis Hamilton made the Dan Bongino Podcast
Ep. 2532 Election Day Shocker
https://rumble.com/v7b2yba-election-day-shocker-ep.-2532-06102026.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_f
Around 29:00
Dan initially mentions him as an Indy car driver, but corrects it later...
Hambone’s nuts are numb...
The Felipe Massa soap opera is the gift that gives on giving.
In our last episode, the UK’s supreme court ruled that Massa MAY NOT proceed with the case to claim the 2008 WDC, but his suit to recover the £64 million in damages he claims to have suffered may continue. It further ordered Bernie & the F1 mafia to pay Massa £250,000 to cover legal fees.
In the latest development, as was to be expected, the defendants (Ecclestone et Al) have filed appeal, asking to skip the appellate court and go right back to the highest court in the land.
This reminds me of the plot in the Charles Dickens novel, ‘Bleak House,’ in which the case to rule on the disposition of a YUGE inheritance estate in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce drags on for decades until when a decision finally is made, the entire state has been consumed in legal fees.
The question I have now is, considering how close to the knuckle they're running on reliability, will the IC engines have to be beefed up to support the additional 12.5% power, or can they simply turn op the fuel flow in the fuel mapping? Does this hing at a major re-engineering or just turning up the knob?
Red Bull and Ford are madder than a flock of wet hens over being “branded” the benchmark for ADUO adjustments.
I can’t recall Ford ever getting it’s panties in a bunch before over being accused of being the best at something.
I guarantee you the sweater Hambone was wearing in that video cost at least $5K. I’ve seen articles on his wristwatch collection and the one he wears when he’s gardening cost $20,000. The rest are more than $100,000 and two of them cost more than $1 million. And he changes watches several times a day.
And he thinks it deflects his privileged ass from criticism in social media if he publicly makes ludicrous claims about limiting accumulation of wealth that he knows will never come to pass.
And his sycophantic toadie fan base is too bog-ignorant to realize how he’s deceiving them. “Isn’t it so sweet of him to be so thoughtful of the rest of us???”
If you want to see a piece of astonishing mechanical engineering, look up the Tourbillion watch movement. It’s an escapement used in $100,000+ self-winding watches and even with that degree of sophistication, they don’t — and no mechanical watch in existence does — keep time as accurately as a cheap quartz watch does.
It’s all about the bling.
There’s never been a straight man in the history of straight men who paid the degree of attention to his personal appearance as Hambone does.
In the run-up to Monaco, the F1 press was desperately trying to turn Hambone into the front-runner for the race. And when he only managed to come in First Loser, they doubled down and now they’re claiming he’s a title contender.
“...look up the Tourbillion watch movement...”
Breguet has a nice Tourbillion:
https://www.breguet.com/en/watches/tradition/tradition-tourbillon-7047/7047pt1y9zu
Just $271,300.00 US.
Breguet is credited for using bi-metal main springs for his watches (two different metals fused together that have different levels of expansion/contraction with temperature changes) making the watches extremely accurate for the period.
Breguet’s masterpiece delivered 17 years after the person it was requested for was executed:
https://www.europeanwatch.com/blog/the-infamous-watch-of-marie-antoinette
I had for years (bought it new in Rapid City SD for $899.99) a Rolex Daytona that looked like this (Better look quick as it coming up for auction in 17 hours):
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6590176
Sold it and bought my first car and a Submariner with the proceeds
<;-)
This headline just came up in the main Freeper forum:
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4383520/posts
This highlights a basic principle of economics that that dipstick Hambone fails to grasp. The economy IS NOT a zero-sum game. Poor people AREN’T poor because rich people are hogging all the money.
Handing poor people fistfulls of money is in general wasteful and inflationary because the reason most are in that predicament to start with is they can’t or won’t manage money wisely.
But enough of that. I guess you saw that the Daytona that Joannne Woodward gave to Paul Newman when he started motor racing sold at auction for $17 million.
That’s one big chunk of provenance.
I’d have never heard of a tourbillion watch except a Vacheron Constantin (worn by a Yakuza) played a role in the storyline of the TV series, “Tokyo Vice.” I hadda look it up to see what (except gold and diamonds) could make a watch worth a quarter of a mil.
That inspired me to by an automatic watch of my own. I needed a new “field” watch anyway, so I splurged and spent 17,500 ... cents ... on a Seiko. It sometimes goes off three or four minutes a month, but that doesn’t much concern me because my phone is never off by more than a few hundredths of a second. And if the Internet goes auf wieder-bye-bye, having the exact time on my wrist won’t be a big concern.
But the Seiko is EMP-proof, so there’s that.
Speaking of provenance, I have this ‘thing’ for keeping up with the tools of the military trade, especially the snake-eaters. Back in the late 90s, DevGru approached Ernest Emerson about making a “hard use” folding knife for the SEALs. He created the CQC6 for them, and they’re still all made completely to customer specs, one at a time, made entirely by Ernest hisself.
And the waiting list to get one is up to 13 years. Yes, thirteen. I’d bet most SEALs don’t manage to spend 13 years on “the teams,” and the rest might not want to spend half their career waiting to get their Emerson. So Emerson started making a non-custom production knife with most of the same basic features as the CQC6 and called it the CQC7.
Matt Bissonnette (nom de guerre Mark Owen) is one of two of the SEALS who claim to have put the first bullet into UBL (Operation Neptune Spear). He was carrying a CQC7 on that mission, and he auctioned it off to give the proceeds to charity.
I can go to Emerson’s website right now and buy the same knife for $225 but it brought $25,400 at auction. And he didn’t even stab nobody with it!
If he’d had any marketing savvy, he’d have put a drop of blood on it long enough to stain the steel and claimed it was UBL’s. Would’ve jacked up the price AT LEAST 10x!
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