TBK-Light.com

This makes me feel unwell.

A very poor look for the sport. One can say "Oh, Verstappen is simply that much better," "He's a once-in-a-century talent," or whatever else, but at the end of the day, it shows a glaring lack of competitiveness no matter how we slice it, and I really hope it changes soon and is never repeated again.

We had many years of Hamilton domination, so I wouldn't hold my breath

_________________
"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government"


3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion

Change is not going to come before 2026. So Verstappen will add at least 30 more to his total before the end of 2025.

Nice trophy, tough.

well if you see that the opposition ditched their best driver and the other has an unmotivated champion is quite hard to change things

plus you can see Max is always looking to tick the boxes, from all the tracks in the current season, he hadn't only won at Singapore and he just need to win starting from 5th to snatch a record that he shares with Alonso

_________________
Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

3 years of team mate battles, 2 years of Ferrari battles and 2020 was a batshit crazy covid year with OTT races and surprise winners

Also FIA waded in and banned DAS, and screwed Mercedes car concept for 2021 to favour short wheel based cars, so they did try to hinder Merc, no word yet on anything to hobble red bull "for the good of the sport"

_________________
RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

They also banned Merc's 'party mode'...

The '22 regs effectively ruined Red Bull's high rake concept, but that's about it.

DAS was a loophole and not "in the spirit of the sport". It was allowed because FIA could not ban it straight away since their own rulebook wasn´t clear, but the loophole was closed.

Mercedes had a full years benefit of "we know it´s illegal but you didn´t think of it so you can´t ban us".

Bringing this up as an argument to show FIA was slowing down Mercedes, is weak. FIA didn´t ban it because they wanted to slow down Mercedes, but because the team did something illegal.

Knowing that Ferrari cheated on their engine but making a secret deal so they don´t get disqualified and you can buy that private plane or yacht you have always wanted since you were a kid, now that´s something else.

well if they wanted to slow down Mercedes then FIA wouldn't had forced Ferrari to revoke their engine shenanigans and wouldn't put lame penalties to take a win away like Canada 19

_________________
Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

The point is they did do something about it. And as Gaara said, banned Party mode, and did a short change rule change for 21 to favour red bull's car concept because they couldn't wait until 22's rule change to end their dominance
(And the Merc dominance wasn't as bad because at least you had Lewis and Nico and then Lewis and Seb fighting (by its very nature making 17 and 18 years where they weren't dominant. I hate the revisionist history that those years are part of the dominance just because Lewis won at the end and Ferrari fell apart, because for the majority of those seasons the Ferrari was the fastest car on some circuit types, Mercedes on others. We may now know why Ferrari did that, but we didn't at the time and they were seen as close championship battles with Ferrari expected to win them, if anything)

So far they've done jack shit about red bull, putting all their eggs in the "welp, 26 regs will sort them out" basket (though red bull may well have fallen apart by themselves by then and do the job for them, but we'll see about that)

Even during Ferrari's dominance, you had 03 (change the qualy regs fast to hurt Ferrari's huge fuel tank concept) and 05 (last minute change to ban tyre changes hurts the longevity of the exclusive bridgestone relationship they had at the time and forced them to scramble and ultimately put out an uncompetittive car) so old school FIA knew how to play the game too

Hell, during 2010-2013 they played with various rules to hurt Red Bull, so its odd they're not doing anything for the good of the sport now....

_________________
RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

I feel like we´ve had this exact conversation already, and I´m not continuing this one anymore.