I am somewhat confused why the brakes in f1 cars are unassisted. What’s the point of requiring the drivers to push really, really hard? I’m best with powerful brakes that I can squeeze as opposed to stomp.
Also binged over the weekend. And as an avid f1 fan. It’s nice to see bigger coverage. But lots of little things where the commentary is on their qualifying time in q3 but they are on a hard compound in the footage.
I liked season 1 better cause it kinda bounced team to team and followed the season. This one kinda had one team per episode. Kyvat was shutout. So his one line at the end was funny. Kimi also had a great one liner.
Either way it’s doing a great job of bringing new fans to f1. And that’s a great thing.
It doesn’t really seem to be an issue. I don’t recall ever hearing drivers complaining about the brakes being hard to modulate or that they’re excessively hard to push.
I was watching a video or something where it was said that the one big thing about f1 was how physical the braking is and how hard you have to push compared to other cars. Maybe it was older cars.
Any braking assist banned - it’s the easiest way to safeguard against ABS, or brake-based traction control.
Also, when you’re braking at 5G, once you get the car’s descent started, you don’t have to push that hard when your foot and leg weigh 5x as much.
I will say having watching these cars in person last year, it is absolutely bonkers how quickly they brake. You would swear that they’re going to crash every single time they come into a heavy-braking corner. We were sat at T11 at COTA this year and popped over to T12 to watch - both being good examples of that.
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To add to what Martin said, they want to remove any assistance between the pedal at the wheels to avoid electrical or hydraulic or mechanical abs systems being deployed.
I’m lucky enough to have driven a slick and wings car, I’d imagine there’d be some cost in getting the feel right too. With aero dominant cars you really need to press the brake as hard as you can while the aero is high and release the pressure and you slow down to avoid locking up (not too dissimilar from a rear braked kart) which is totally different from a shifter kart where you can increase the pressure as the weight shifts onto the front wheels increased your grip coefficient.
Anyway i’m 3 episodes into season 2. And what I am very keen to see if the level of feedback provided from drivers to their engineers, I’m desperate to see mercedes or ferrari.
As example you have so far is the Haas drivers saying its “all over the place” without any detail, then on the other hand in a later episode you have Carlos Sainz explaining the minutiae of braking pressure and feel. THAT is why Carlos Sainz (if given the equipment) will win things and why Kev and Romain will never.
Hopefully I get to hear some super feedback from one of the 3 top teams.
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Very cool. Were you racing or testing?
Episode 2: Aargh. Don’t want to watch the Haas ship implode, but I can’t help myself. I can’t tell if its brilliant editing or if the morale is particularly bad there.
A friend of mine works for Haas F1. It’s the later. They were dealing with an aerodynamic stall at some speeds which led to them overworking their rear tires. Hopefully with their work over the winter they’ll have sorted that out.
I got the feeling watching Haas that Romain is stressed to the point that he actively doesn’t want to drive the moment there’s something wrong. I don’t blame him because they have had a rough slog of it. That being said, it seems pretty toxic and negative under that tent. How can a team expect anything positive when it’s all shouting and “look in the mirror”.
Accept that your car is fucked and work together or just pack it in. When KMag and Romain have that embarrassing mutual suicide pact and take each other out, I was like “Don’t you have enough problems?”. It probably played out different IRL but in the edit, they sure did make it seem totally avoidable.
This f1 stuff is baffling. Why did Claire even race last year if it was such a disaster? Why do they keep spending $? If they stop they drown?
Magnussen kept his head down and seems to be likely to survive all this nonsense. I guess I’ll find out!
This was a big issue. KMag and RoGro were getting desperate to show their own value, so ended up running into each other quite often. A bit like the ship was sinking and they both were pushing each other out of the way to get the last life jacket and save themselves. Toward the end of the year, after Gunther verbally annihilated them at Silverstone, they were more in testing mode and did a better job of trying things on the cars and using the races as tests.
Williams is a race team, that’s essentially their entire company, so if they were to not race, it would be catastrophic for them from a branding and business perspective. Plus, they paid the entry fee, and there are FIA repercussions if you enter for the season and fail to show up at the races. Plus, plus, they need to go to the tracks and verify their wind tunnel data and all the other data on the actual racing surface, which they can’t do in the factory. There isn’t in-season testing, so it would be extra bad to skip a year, show up in 2020 and realize you were developing with bad correlation for an entire year without checking it, and the new car is abysmally slow and unstable.
Williams needs a manufacturer tie-up if they want to get back on track, but they’re too proud to do so. I imagine that when Frank dies, they might be a little more open to that idea, but I don’t think Claire wants to crush her dad’s pride. Hopefully the 2021 regulation overhaul will help the smaller private teams get back into the fray a bit more.
Grosjean is massively quick on the right day and has podiums to his name, but his good days are getting further and further apart. The 4th place in Austria in 2018 was a good example of him in his prime. The spinning in the pitlane during practice at Silverstone last year is a good example of his trough. The poor guy seems like a genuine dude, family man, and all-around nice guy, but definitely has some mental weakness when it comes to racing. KMag is hard-headed and aggressive and told Hulkenberg to “suck his balls” on tv so I quite like him.
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Well that answers the Claire question. Good to know. I guess they aren’t crazy, then.
Ironic that trying to prove their worth to highly agitate-able management turns into damage to the vehicles and 2 retirements. That’s clearly not working.
Yeah not an ideal situation this past season. Hopefully with the Rich Energy debacle out of the way they’ll be better focused and can bear down. Testing was interesting, as they were one of the only teams not to do any “glory run” qualifying runs, so they look quite slow but it’s always hard to say. They’ve been good in qualifying, so it would make sense to focus on race pace in testing.
Very excited for the season to kick off properly. I consume F1 news/rumors/gossip/content voraciously, especially in the off-season, so I am itching to see the real action start.
I did a couple of partial seasons in Formula Renault.
Very cool. In iracing there’s 2 formula Renault. One is called 2.0 and one is called 3.5.
The 2.0 I like very much, the 3.5 is turbo lag Hell. Was it either of these? I understand it was it’s own series like formula 2000?
Formula Renault 2000, the 2 litre engine. At the time was the only class to do on your way up the ranks. In the two part seasons i did i raced with Hamilton, Di Resta, Petrov to name a few.
Karting is more fun.
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Very cool. Thanks for sharing. That must have been interesting.
Well I got to be one track with the (soon to be) most successful F1 driver, I even got slapped on the helmet by him once lol.
The fact that Haas did not go all in for Ricciardo is disappointing. It seems like Haas peaked and took a giant step back. Guenther doesn’t seem to lead with any inspiration and the driver situation at Haas should’ve been changed two years ago. Sadly I don’t see Haas doing any better this season.
There’s no way they could outbid Renault for Ricciardo. He Renault deal is worth almost 10x as much as Magnussen and Grosjean each.
The Haas car was wicked on one lap. Magnussen qualified the thing 6th, on the heels of Red Bull and Ferrari at Monaco. The issue was the tire issues in the race, from some aero deficiencies. I feel like that’s just growing pains from a young team without all the past data of the other teams. I think they’ll be somewhere around 6th or 7th best this year when it all shakes out.
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