TBK-Light.com

This is a pretty cool interactive comparison of each of this years cars. Looking at the airboxes, its almost like we are going back to the 70s with how fat and squat they look from front on!

Also I hope Red Bull have some tricks up their sleeve because that car looks to have the least amount of aero development of all of the cars!

(I'm well aware that its actually how the aero is directed and used that's important rather than just having bits on it, but I think I like everyone else was expecting a beast of a car from Red Bull)

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2017/03/17/i ... 2017-grid/

Mercedes will walk the race if they have a good start

As for overtakes, I don't expect to see anything much

Keep in mind that Mercedes have only lost a couple of races since 2014 that they were well and truly outpaced. People are mad to think that a team that has virtually a 100% win rate outside of mechanical is all of a sudden going to lose.

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You are aware that *all* drivers habitually use DRS in the other sessions to reduce their lap times, right?

I have no idea what you meant there

From what I know, DRS is available for everybody to use, on FPs and QLF, on the DRS zones, to improve their lap times. On the races, afaik, only a driver that is less than 1s behind another one can use it, on the DRS zones. I just didn't understand what you implied there.

DRS as drag reduction, per se, isn't bad at all. What I don't want see is it used as an overtaking tool. There is nothing artificial(unless you wanna see it as an artitificial way to reduce lap times) by using DRS on flying laps, imo.

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two bits from the drivers:

A negative prospects:
Hamilton: "Now the turbulence is easily twice as powerful coming out the back of a car.It magnifies the issue we had before. Let's hope the racing is fantastic, but don't hold your breath."

A positive view on the new stuff:
Fernando Alonso: "Sometimes last year the slower you drove the better lap time you could do because you were saving the tyres, or maximise the stint.This year it seems you are able to push the car a little bit more and use your own driving style a bit to maximise the timed lap."

Finally, this might, partially, explain Stroll's incidents:
Bottas: "...especially with the harder compounds, it is sometimes quite tricky to get them to work. Then they are quite snappy, if you have oversteer it’s very sudden. But if you have the softer compounds and once you get them into the temperature it feels like very much the same rate of sliding or losing the grip than last year’s."

Only soft-branded compounds for Melbourne but I hope we still have many crashes

Alonso can run flat out in every corner, so he might be able to work his way through the field

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Whenever DRS is brought up, a lot apples vs oranges comparisons get thrown in. I made a table to try to get this sorted out a bit depending on what case we're talking about (call me crazy, but I have a lot of procrastination to do. You don't know my life )

You can see that, based on my interpretation, the DRS may have degraded case 1 a little (Depending on how the DRS is tuned vs the track layout), but provides much better value in case 2, which is the most interesting one in terms of on-track battles - i.e. between closely matched drivers.

Personally, I was especially frustrated by the first red cell back in the days before DRS, and I'm glad that we got rid of it. Nothing worse than two drivers following each other and they can do fuck-all (Ralf vs Michael at Brazil and Montreal 2001 comes to mind, Montoya vs Schumacher at Monza 2003,etc.... You knew damn well that these guy could do nothing to even start attempting to pass. It was frustrating as Hell.)



So, long live the DRS (and any similar "artificial" competition-enhancing device) until F1 gets their head out of their asses and solve the dirty air problem once and for all.

Dirty air is also artificial btw. It's created by greedy aerodynamicists to enhance their downforce and make it difficult for the guy behind to follow. Get rid of that shit first, and only then I'll accept more "fair" competition with no added gimmicks. No way in Hell am I going back to the early 2000s days of snoozing in front of a one-second gap battle hoping for something to happen while knowing that it will never do. I'm way too old for that crap now.

Big fat slicks, 3 solid elements (one base plane, one element for left and one element for right) for front wings with no gaps, slots or holes in the elements. 2 element rear wing, uniform shape (no scoops, elements must not dip or rise along the horizontal). No flow conditioners, shark-fins, winglets, bargeboards or any other "bolted on" aero devices permitted. Lower ride height, small diffuser.

NB: Not an aerodynamics engineer.

On aero ... road relevance is peddled for the engines, what road relevance does massive aero spending provide? Fair enough for super-cars from manufacturers like Ferrari and even Merc, whatever, but those are a fraction of the market and even still, their aero demands are radically different from F1 and far more relevant to WEC, say. The shape of most average cars that people like us, regular F1 fans, are buying has almost no influence from F1 aero I would say, particularly as basic shape has hardly changed much in the past few decades apart from basic streamlining so that cars no longer look like Volvo 240s or the Trabant. They don't have wings, front or rear, side-pods or diffusers (and where they do I would question whether these achieve anything other than aesthetics) and are unlikely to ever have such things due to the needs a car has to fulfill such as carrying four passengers in safety and comfort and being able to handle speed bumps. Despite the occasional fancy looking concept car, these never seem to actually materialise - the design of cars has been really very static for a long time now.

None of us are stupid, we already know all of this, but I just have to wonder why teams are so committed to aero and aero spending ... obviously they need to be in order to win, but apart from that, what actual purpose does it achieve? Winning, attracting sponsors who spend money to make money ... all seems a bit pointless to me. It's sort of like the Adidas Predator football boot ... except, please nobody make me explain why exactly, I'm hungover.

I have no idea what the point of this post is, either, to be fair.

Same shit happens in cycling ... for all this talk about disc brakes in the pro peleton, if they wanted to make cycling relevant to most consumers they should all be on JJB mountain bikes with grip-shifters, a slightly rusty chain and a buckled back wheel that knocks the brake pads every rotation. That'd sort the men from the boys. Power meters to be replaced with a Halfords coil lock and bell ... which would apparently have solved Movistar's TTT problems. [/OT]

Case 3 will turn green if you change Driver A to "driver that you support"

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Looks like Nico's changed his helmet.

In the really good old days, even if the B driver is slower than A driver, the A driver could still miss a gear or have a mechanical issue and in the other two cases we would have either an awesome fight, or a nice overtake without any assist!

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All those bollards are frustrating, you can't ride them curbs

Only thing I would add to this is pwopa ground effects instead of small diffuser - the wings would calm down the turbulent air, and the underbody aero won't be half as affected by it in the first place. I have a concept image of this whole setup if you're interested:



(It's only a concept; the tyres can be made fatter and the sidepod crap can go)

Keep the sidepods, they help cut down on the top down aero the cars use nowadays, if you look at a DW12 or any recent F1 car, the entire profile of the car is one big wing. Squaring the stuff off is the answer.

this concept is perfect should be used for at least 20 years with changes only to safety and minor engine tweaks

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Is the F1 pit building used for different purposes when the Grand Prix is not on?

So, F1 is gonna start being broadcasted at UHD this year. Who has UHD tv around here? Is there a big noticeable difference to a full HD screen(1080p)?

4k videos are popular on youtube for quite some time now. The same for games but I have two fully functional full HD tvs in my house and don't like the idea of spending some very considerable money into a new tv anytime soon

I don't have it, but have seen plenty on display in electrical stores here. The picture quality looks great even compared to HD - it's so sharp that colours seem much more vivid and defined.

I suspect 4k is going to suffer from the same adoption problems as HD though; I wouldn't expect too much broadcasting in it for a while yet. I would also expect some kind of shitty premium to 'unlock' the 4k F1 broadcasts