Gaara wrote:
Cook's been given a one race ban. The Jelley incident was his fourth strike.
https://www.autosport.com/btcc/news/131 ... -incidentsFunny how the last 3 banned drivers have all been with Triple 8.
codename_47 wrote:
Whataboutism itt
Shedden is less of a dick than Plato and doesn't actually have people hearing his moaning and acting upon it to favour him.
Also if they did alter things to favour him in the championship (which wouldn't happen anywhere but maybe the race before knockhill...), he'd at least have the decency to be grateful about it and not whine more.
Sometimes pointing out where a group think is wrong is useful, and sometimes that group all thinks the same way for a reason.
Plato's a dick
The series favours him because they think he's a superstar driver that puts bums on seats
This is hardly a new revelation
The series has been kind to most of its top drivers & teams over the last decade or so. How many times have we seen the likes of Plato, Neal, Collard & Shedden get away with contact? All about the same, while some "lesser" drivers tend to be penalised. Shedden was even a victim of this as a rookie in 2006, being DQ'd at Mondello for aggressive driving. And remember that incident between Giovanardi and Onslow-Cole at Knockhill in 2007? Clearly Gio's fault but O-C was penalised, being the rookie against the veteran. Although, of late it seems everyone is being treated more equally. Only the most major of incidents are pinged.
In terms of car performance it hasn't always gone Plato's way (yeah the SEAT TDI was a pain all-round and it deserved to win but didn't manage to win the title). Look at 2010 with the turbo LPG Fords running a type of engine that wasn't even strictly allowed by the rules. I have a suspicion that they were allowed mainly to satisfy the Chilton family's collective ego. They were quite rightly adjusted throughout the year.
And look at 2011 as well; the great NA v. Turbo row. They were supposed to be equal but weren't. Plato was overdriving, he admitted as much, and the number of crashes he had as well as the relative positions of other NA cars in the field were further evidence of this. Of course, it didn't help that a top team like RML was running practically obsolete equipment, but adjustments were made throughout the year to level the playing field as promised by TOCA. In the end, the best car running to the latest spec rightly won the title.
But looking at this year, there have been a couple of occasions where boost has been adjusted for better and for worse outside of the scheduled window (every 3 events) to try to even everybody out. And it's not as if all the changes made in an attempt to equalise RWD to FWD were scrapped as soon as Plato started driving a Subaru, is it? That particular car was hobbled further with rule changes at the start of the year. But you and Gaara are so obsessed with Plato and blinded by hate that you can't see the reality.
Plato does and says a lot of things which are wrong or inappropriate and even when he's right he goes about things in the wrong way, but at least he says what he thinks and says what he means, as do a lot of drivers. It might not be likeable but at least it's genuine.
What I really can't stand though are situations like Shedden's post-qualifying interview at Snetterton. A thinly-veiled jab at the organisers, not saying what he really thought and delivered through a forced smile. Frankly, as fake as a breast implant, just like Helio Castroneves and Craig Lowndes. I'd rather he just flew off the handle and started effing and blinding at everyone. The opposite of this was Mat Jackson's post-race interview yesterday. He scored only his third podium of the year so you'd think he'd be happy, but he complained about FWD/RWD instead. He was right in the way he went about this, even if I thought his opinion was wrong.
And on the subject of FWD/RWD (c/p from ten-tenths):
pimmy wrote:
thlbtcc wrote:
The engine boost and RWD debate around here seems to conveniently ignore that Sutton is a star. It's taking away from what he has achieved. Made a mockery of his team mates and driven superbly.
Exactly. Over the course of the year Sutton has scored 80 more points than his three team mates COMBINED. Even if you only count from Snetterton onwards (when all of the Subarus became competitive), Sutton has still been the highest scorer on the team to the tune of 48 points. Adding BMW into the equation, Sutton has only scored 12 more points than Turkington over the course of 24 races, so he hasn't exactly been blowing everyone out of the water. And let's not forget that Shedden and Ingram, in FWD cars, have done most of the points leading this year.
Regarding RWD, let's look at some facts:
- At Rockingham, the top 27 cars qualified within 1 second. This has never happened before, not even at Brands Indy or Knockhill. Looking at this, the BOP has been a success, with so many cars being covered by a small margin.
- Within the top 27 cars, the 7 RWD cars covered positions 1-20. If they were that dominant, they'd all be at the front. The lowest RWD qualifier was also NOT the heaviest, meaning that the result was not decided by ballast.
- As we know that RWD cars have no advantage in outright pace, then the obvious and logical reason for them achieving their results is that they have better balance and more even tyre wear across the course of a race.
- Even knowing this, we can look at how each race was led yesterday:
-- In race 1, Cole's lead only exceeded 1 second consistently in the second half of the race. Even Sutton, as excellent as he is, struggled to pass Goff in a FWD car, only managing to do so on the last lap, even though he spent the entire race (bar one lap) less than a second behind.
-- In race 2, Sutton led most of the race by around 3 seconds, aided by Cole carrying an amount of ballast that he'd had no experience with (he eventually finished mid-field), as well as a fierce battle for 2nd-back where the competitors were slowing themselves down.
-- In race 3, Jordan lucked into pole with the reverse grid draw. He led the entire race, but his lead didn't exceed 1 second until lap 11. He did get a good restart after the safety car though, which allowed him to pull away a bit in the last couple of laps.
So looking at this, do RWD cars have a great or unfair advantage? No. They're just better, like 4WD was better than 2WD and Diesel was better than Petrol. There's a reason why single seaters, GTs and Prototypes are RWD. It's that RWD is better at what it does than FWD is. You can't change the laws of physics.
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