Skip to comments.
F1 - GP (General Purpose)
Chode ^
| 8/5/2009
| Chode
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.
TOPICS: Sports
KEYWORDS: chode; f1; f1gp; formula1; formulaone; grandprix; kmg
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 7,241-7,260, 7,261-7,280, 7,281-7,300, 7,301-7,312 next last
To: Paal Gulli
Mrs. BBB333 has a close friend whose son was a SEAL..
After he graduated from the Naval Academy he immediately tried out for, and became a SEAL.
— hold your horses —
He left the military after 18 1/2 years having been married for the last eight or so of his ‘tenure.’
He is a RADICAL leftist — can you believe that?
He did go to school at Choate and one of his best friends is the step son of Lurch (John Kerry). Until his downfall the son considered Devin Archer a close associate along with Hunter Biden...
He married a wealthy woman (who smokes pot all day) and they have two children — the oldest, I believe, now attends Choate.
There are actually a few BAD SEALS out there...Pity.
Time for a Bloody Mary and the race!
Best!
To: BBB333
I thought I was the only F1 fan who subscribed to this belief.
F1 is killing itself as Monaco Grand Prix change highlights huge problem
He traces F1's suicidal tendencies back to the banning of in-race refueling because that decision resulted in a series of cascading screw-ups to restore what refueling provided naturally.
Refueling made races less processional because it was a 'natural' source for randomly jumbling the order of the cars in the race.
What makes refueling "natural" but DRS and disinte-Pirellis "artificial?" The racers didn't have to refuel. They did it because it was strategically advantageous to do so.
Every kilo of fuel slows the car by 0.03-0.04 seconds. A car that only fuels to 50 kilos is 1.6 seconds faster per lap than a car fueled to 90 kilos and expecting to complete the race without a pit stop. So inside of the first 20 laps he already as built up sufficient lead to pit for a refuel without losing position.
So to try to replace what they lost with the refueling ban, F1 has introduced stupidity like DRS and battery power that is only available sporadically.
But I go back with the suicidal tendencies to the change to grooved dry tires in 1998. That was the beginning of F1 trying to groom the outcomes of races and time has shown that they suck. Better they should create a minimalist rule set and let the teams duke it out.
To: Paal Gulli
Forgot something.
RE: the 1998 tire rule change, that was why Goodyear left F1 after 1997. They were in motor racing to build race-winning rubber and what F1 was asking for was something else.
And it bears mention that Goodyear hasn’t returned.
To: Paal Gulli
The last year we had two tire mfgrs. was 2005 with Pirelli and Michelin — the Michelin tires did not stand up to the high stresses on the banked turn at Indianapolis...so only six cars ran the race...
Just Pirelli since then...
To: Paal Gulli
Jezza Clarkson has prostate cancer. He says it’s ‘aggressive’ but it’s been caught early.
Which makes me curious because I understood prostate cancer to be rather slow. Most elderly men who are diagnosed with it will die from something else before the cancer kills them. So I’m wondering if this is “non-standard” prostate cancer.
But at least it’s not lung cancer (yet). I find Clarkson hysterically funny, and I’m a YUGE fan of Top Gear/The Grand Tour, but I didn’t find out until this morning he stopped smoking in 2017. They never tried to hide his smoking on the old Top Gear but he’s never been shown smoking (or talking about it) on his farm show. And I noticed his breathing sounds less “rattly” on the farm show, so I searched on it. And I found an article at express.co.uk dated 2020 stating he was celebrating his third year since quitting.
Good on him. But he’s now 66, and over a sufficiently long timeline, everyone’s chances of surviving fall to zero.
To: All
I don’t think they’re filed a formal protest but Red Bull has asked the FIA to at least review their ADUO data.
From Laurent Mekies:
“You go to Canada, high ICE power sensitivity, we qualified sixth. You go to Monaco, low ICE power sensitivity, we qualified pretty much 0.04 from pole. You go to Barcelona, again high ICE power sensitivity, you qualify sixth again.
“We do not see one single data sample where we estimate ourselves higher than competition, let alone being consistently above them.”
To: Paal Gulli
F1 is on it's Net Zero soap box again, claims it's on-track to be carbon neutral by 2030.
I've been collecting and collating data and crunching numbers on this for weeks and there was so much research involved I couldn't expect you to read it all so I'll (mostly) stick with the results. If you want to know how I got there, ask.
If the whole 24-race season had come off as planned, F1 would have burned (at a minimum) 39,000 gallons of racing fuel. The 2025 cars would have burned about 7000 gallons more, so that's the gross savings from this ridiculously overcomplicated and under-sporting engine formula. Lift-and-coast and super-clipping for a measly 7000 gallons of fuel.
But if F1 wants you to think that's in any way significant, they're pissing down your leg while telling you it's raining.
DHL uses a fleet of 300+ semi tractor-trailers to haul F1's combined 15(-ish) thousand tons of freight a distance of 160,000 miles (at least -- could be more) to get it to and from the nine Continental races (Azerbaijan straddles the two continents but F1 flies there because it's a 2000 mile drive from the UK). Plus Pirelli sends 15 trucks full of rubber, and each team has their own fleet of motor homes to use as paddock offices, press rooms, physio clinics, and nap spaces for the drivers. I figure they couldn't do that for less than 390,000 gallons of diesel (based on an 8mpg average for all those trucks, which is extremely optimistic).
For fly-away races, DHL uses at least five Boeing 777 cargo planes (as many as seven if there's F2 or F3 at the same circuit on the same weekend). That's 2.3 million gallons of jet fuel. DHL brags they saved 1000 gallons per hour per airframe by replacing their old Boeing 747s with modern 777s but that's a false economy because they're ignoring the costs in energy and carbon of building the 777s.
Building a 777 costs a great deal more in energy than building a 747 did, and there's more environmentally un-friendly material in it. For instance, the 777's wings are made from carbonfiber, which you might have guessed is made from that evil carbon stuff. And these modern high efficiency, low emissions jet turbine engines are made using some of the rarest materials on earth. Stuff like rhenium and praseodymium. No, I'd never heard of the stuff either, and it's used in manufacturing turbine blades and such in tiny amounts, but it takes excavating hundreds of tons of earth -- all done with diesel-powered mining equipment -- to get a thimbleful of the stuff.
Plus DHL doesn't tells us what became of their old 747s. Did they take the write-off and cut them up into pieces so they could never fly again (which means they're now taking up a YUGE amount of space in some landfill somewhere) or did they sell them to another air carrier and at this moment they're still belching death and destruction by the ton? If it's the latter, DHL's gesture hasn't saved diddly.
And I haven't tried to figure fossil fuels burned by team and F1 personnel. Most fly commercial, especially F1's worker bees and the teams' wrench monkeys, even to the non-fly-away/continental races. I'm not sure if all the higher-ups fly commercial or if any of the teams have private jets, but I know for certain two of the drivers do (Verstappen and Alonso). So 2.3 million gallons is definitely on the low side.
But the worst part is the fans. In 2025, F1 sold a record 6.7 million tickets to race weekends. When I saw that number I had to try to figure how much gas they burned to get to the races. I know my numbers are off because they're entirely a guess, but they could be off by a hundred or 200 percent and the scale would still be staggering. But my guesstimates are so absurdly low, I don't think you can reasonably argue it's any less.
Let's assume that one in five who attended an F1 race drove there in their own automobile. The other four carpooled with someone else who was driving or arrived by public transportation, bicycle, skateboard ... or just walked. That comes to 1.34 million automobiles being driven to an F1 circuit. Lets further assume the average drive to the circuit is 50 miles, 100 miles round-trip. And let's also further assume every one of those 1.3 million cars gets 35 mpg.
I'm ignoring all EVs from this experiment because the electricity they ran on came from numerous sources INCLUDING fossil fuels, but it would be exceedingly complex to make even a reasonable estimate of that amount, and Mom says I have to be home before supper. I'm also ignoring the helicopters that the high-rollers arrive in, but for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that any reduction in CO2 emissions resulting from fans driving Teslas to the circuit is offset by the Sikorskys and Eurocopters that the likes of Prince Harry and Leonardo DiCrapio flew in to get there.
I think we can all agree that those are pretty conservative numbers, and that the actual numbers are substantially higher than what I've proposed. For one thing I ignored the jet fuel burned on behalf of everyone who took a commercial flight to get to the race city. Or took a train or bus. And the fuel used by their taxi to get to the track from the airport/hotel. Nonetheless, my 'rose-tinted glasses' analysis is that F1 fans would have burned AT LEAST 3.8 million gallons of fossil fuels attending the 2025 races (and probably A LOT MORE).
You're looking at about 6.5 million gallons of fossil fuels burned by the business of F1 versus the stupendous savings of 7000 gallons from what is burned by the competition itself.
In my best Strother Martin voice, "What we have here ... is unmitigated virtue signaling."
To: Paal Gulli
“... claims it’s on-track to be carbon neutral by 2030...”
“For instance, the 777’s wings are made from carbonfiber, which you might have guessed is made from that evil carbon stuff...”
As are the F1 cars.
Thanks for the post.
To: All
I found this amusing.
It's been some time but I've been to Mme. Tussauds, but I was thoroughly underwhelmed. Most of the dummies looked like rejects from the props department of the 1960s TV series, Mission Impossible. Some of them were of well-known personalities that I wouldn't have recognized if there wasn't a sign to tell me. It might have been a thrilling experience in the 19th Century but in the late 20th, not so much.
But it looks like they've kicked up their game a notch.
Uncanny. They've perfectly matched the curl of his upper lip, the subtle contours of his chin, his dimples. It's so good I thought they might have switched to laser measurements and 3D printing but I checked and according to their website they're still making them the old-fashioned way, by hand.
In this one Lando looks a bit more animated but in the top photo, if the caption had said the real Lando was the one on the right, I'd probably have believed it.
Creepy, eh wot?
To: Paal Gulli
If Mrs BBB333 were to see these photos the would say: “One of those guys better have those moles looked at!”
To: All
It looks like the F1 press' eagerness to hand Hambone the WDC trophy after his win at Barcelona might have been just a touch premature.
Am I the only one who finds it too coincidental that Hambone's results only began regularly surpassing Leclerc's after Freddie Vasseur made the public statement that he was going to start acting on Hambone's advice?
It also occurs to me that this season has turned into such a jumbled-up mess -- made-up terminology, ADUO upgrades, etc -- that it's next to impossible for the fans to recognize what's going on and what was important to make it come to pass. I don't think it bodes well for the racing enthusiasts (as opposed to the F1 fans on the whole).
To: Paal Gulli
It was a good race and Max drove well — almost did not make it out of Q2 because he saved two sets of Hards and Mediums.
Best race of the season, IMHO.
The AM team is flailing away like a beached fish.
We ALL hope the technology is dialed back quite a ways.
To: BBB333
RE: the disaster at AM, this just came out from Newey today:
https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1099933/1/it-never-rains-it-pours-adrian-newey-opens-whats-gone-wrong-aston-martin-2026
https://www.motorsportweek.com/2026/06/30/adrian-newey-aston-martin-upgrades-f1/
In a nutshell, he says they started months behind everyone else because of his decision to scrap everything his predecessors had done (which was necessary, in his view, because the previous engineering team hadn’t invested as much as they should have in simulation “tools”) so they had no chassis to work on until mid-March, 2025, and nothing finished enough to go to the wind tunnel with until mid-April.
After that, he says, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. They had so many problems getting the PU, transmission and chassis to work in concert that they weren’t really able to evaluate the potential of the car (and measure how far behind they were) until FP3 at Melbourne!
Plus he was poorly all years last year and this year until recently. He says he’s ‘okay’ now but that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement. He’s an engineer and ‘okay’ is what you call something when you don’t want the opposition to know it’s only 75%. Not “fine,” not “well”, not “over it,” ... just “okay.”
He says there’s an upgrade coming at Hungary. He doesn’t say it’s a YUGE upgrade but at this juncture, nothing else will do.
He says the car is overweight because weight is the first victim when you get behind, and the vibration problem put everything behind. And aerodynamics aren’t spot-on because they didn’t have a car they could test on properly so they went with his gut choices instead of testing and evaluating multiple options.
Newey has maintained from the start that his design is “future-proof,” that he didn’t go down any engineering dead ends that would prevent him from adapting the car for future needs. He’d better hope he’s right.
To: All
Gazzetta dello Sport says Ferrari has pretty much squandered any chance of moving into contention, and they blame the PU for all their problems.
https://www.gazzetta.it/motori/ferrari/30-06-2026/ferrari-gli-sviluppi-funzionano-a-meta-in-austria-ha-pesato-l-assetto-ma-a-silverstone.shtml
The Scuderia got two (free) ADUO updates, which is supposed to be a 4% catch-up (2%+2%) but some F1 journos are guessing they were actually 6-8% behind the benchmark of Red Bull. I didn't watch Austria until last night and I was astonished how easily Verstappen motored past Leclerc after his first pit for tires.
Then there's the trap speeds from Austria:
At those speeds nobody's running out of gears or hitting their aerodynamic limit, and their corner exit speeds are among -- and might be -- the highest, so Ferrari is simply down on power.
To: Paal Gulli
To: Paal Gulli
If you know anything about Jeremy Clarkson, you had to know he’s been champing at the bit for decades to figure how to parlay his fame into some kind of a role in F1. He’s finally done it.
Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm will be the caterer for Alpine for the Silverstone weekend.
And God is in his heaven.
To: All
To: All
SS,DD.
In this a.m.’s sprint race, Antonelli motored past Hambone with the same ease as Verstappen blew Leclerc into the cheap seats at Austria.
On that pass down the Wellington Straight, Antonelli topped out about 15.5 mph better than Hambone. Best of all, the fans can’t tell if Hambone ran out of battery, or if his ICE is that down on power, or if he just didn’t have the accelerator flat on the floor. Isn’t this new era of racing thrilling?
Is it Live or is it Memorex??? It’s “Milli-Vanilli” racing!
To: All
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 7,241-7,260, 7,261-7,280, 7,281-7,300, 7,301-7,312 next last
Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson