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The Formula 1 2013 Season |OT| End of the Webber Era
- Thread starter Leunam
- Start date
Yep. Gonna be hard to watch quality & the race in UK, unless you only want 4 hours sleep
fu3lfr3nzy
Member
So many delays only to postpone it for tomorrow....
Way to fucking go FIA. Off to bed. Peace.
Way to fucking go FIA. Off to bed. Peace.
Indeed. I'm now tired and have to stay up until midnight to watch the delayed quali. Ah well, at least it should be dry.
Such a joke starting the race so late here in Australia....I'm sure Europeans can handle getting up early for one or two races a year!
How many times has this happened now? If Bernie wasn't so insistent on Euro-friendly race schedulling, we'd have qualifying completed today.
Too scared to do even this, he sent the medical car...
Well, that was fun. Not sure if the weather was really that bad or if they just fucked up but probably the latter. Hard to tell anything from Q1 except for the fact that McLaren will probably have an embarassing start to the season while Mercedes looks pretty good if the car doesn't fall apart during the race.
Yes, actually for me it was like a tradition, getting really early so eager to watch the first race of the season, felt kind of unique. Anyway, here in Greece even with the late hour the local tv is gonna broadcast it later.
Its been said that WIL brought both sets of exhausts with them. Begs the question, what the hell did they do in FP1, 2 and 3?!
BTW, has it already been discussed that the MES electronics system is down for the weekend? There is no wireless connection between the cars and race control, so the drivers are not getting the flags from the track as light signals in the cars. Oh, and the automatical DRS deactivation doesn´t work either. Could be fun... :/
Aaand another edit: the "we´ll start in numerical order" rule was to be changed this winter - but RBR vetoed, they didn´t want to lose the #1 and #2 advantage...
BTW, has it already been discussed that the MES electronics system is down for the weekend? There is no wireless connection between the cars and race control, so the drivers are not getting the flags from the track as light signals in the cars. Oh, and the automatical DRS deactivation doesn´t work either. Could be fun... :/
Aaand another edit: the "we´ll start in numerical order" rule was to be changed this winter - but RBR vetoed, they didn´t want to lose the #1 and #2 advantage...
But he wasn't doing it on prupose!
PS. I actually thought Q1 was exciting as fuck. It just pisses me off that they could easily have found 20 minutes from ~6pm to run Q2. And the no telemetry or electronics or whatever is not fucking good at all. Whose fault is that?
Envy, thy name is Hammer...
Doin' it all for you, buddy.Gah, forgot to mention... saw Webber do this promo thing at the Infiniti stand where they had this drag race thing with two of their cars on dynos. In the mini post "race" interview, Webber mentioned something about mixing it with the top teams like Mercedes, Lotus and Ferrari (may not have mentioned Lotus, but I think he did). Perhaps not so important takeaway from that was that he didn't mention McL at all. May have been an oversight, but I doubt it.
Makes me wonder... could McL be heading for a Williams-esque fall from grace? I don't know how theirs came about so I honestly don't know if it's possible, but it's not a great start so far and Button has been REALLY pissed off with how the car is running currently (moreso than usual).
So, I missed qualifing, but from the looks of it, so did everyone else. Too bad, but not I know why the channel programming was off my 30 minutes, I guess.
On the bright side, the delay caused me to not miss the broadcast of Senna. Never saw that documentary before, interesting, and kind of sad. Especially that onboard lap in the end. You know what coming, making it worse. And all those clips they found about Senna talking about living long and how he wasn't afraid of crashing an so on. Powerful stuff. Glad I saw it. I remember the crash itself from back when it happened, except I was too young to understand exactly what it meant back then. Racing lost one of the all-time greats there. But at least F1 hasn't lost anyone since then.
On the bright side, the delay caused me to not miss the broadcast of Senna. Never saw that documentary before, interesting, and kind of sad. Especially that onboard lap in the end. You know what coming, making it worse. And all those clips they found about Senna talking about living long and how he wasn't afraid of crashing an so on. Powerful stuff. Glad I saw it. I remember the crash itself from back when it happened, except I was too young to understand exactly what it meant back then. Racing lost one of the all-time greats there. But at least F1 hasn't lost anyone since then.
Telemetry is there, its just the car - race control connection thats not working.
No word yet, on whose fault this is.
Appreciate the sacrifices you bring for us!
All signs point into this direction. The brain drain, driver and technician wise, leaves its mark. BUT can drive, but he´s not the best when it comes to setup (insert LOL Perez here). And without proper input, the engineers can only do so much.
PS: RSC ends his career, despite just signing a contract for another year of DTM. He´s said to go to DTM Team Mücke in a management role (developing young drivers).
2012 vice champ of Formula 3, Pascal Wehrlein, gets his cockpit.
This is the thing. I don't know how they can get out of this state, but it seems like the days of seeing drivers push through lower teams and slowly move up the ranks is over. Watching someone like Webber (and to a lesser extent, I guess... Ricicardo. And there are probably a small handful of others) work his way through Minardi, Jaguar, Williams and finally onto RBR was a great thing to follow. Now it seems that unless you have a buttload of cash you can't get your foot in the door and if you're lucky enough to get through on skill you'll probably be dropped for someone who isn't as skillful who can pay the bills.
There are probably a whole bunch of contradictions and examples that I'm missing that makes everything I've said wrong, but it doesn't feel like it right now... at least with some of the drivers in Marussia and Caterham.
Maybe the solution is to have at least one driver in the team that's had multiple years experience (as either a test/reserve driver or an *actual* driver) in the team. Would help us avoid situations where there are teams that barely have a single season's experience between them and they can actually develop cars rather than try to develop their drivers at the same time.
Cheers, that's what I wanted to clarify. I can sometimes see how things are going and make my own calls on them, but I have a tendency to overlook one or two major things that completely screw my theory
And that last point you made follows on nicely to the last thing I said about having experienced drivers in a team. You can have all the pay drivers you want, but if you don't have anyone with experience in actually *driving* an F1 car, you're spinning your wheels.Caterham should've held onto Petrov
Not at all, from what it looks like.
F1 teams are in dire straights right now. Radio Pitlane says that five teams don´t know how to survive the season. Two more (McL and WIL) don´t know how to survive next year.
McL loses 50mil from Vodafone - they do have a new sponsor, but he´s said to pay way less. WIL is about to lose the Chavez millions.
Add to that, that the engine constructors NEED to get 20 to 25 mil a year from the customer teams to get return on their investment into the new V6 engines. And what team is there, that could pay that??
Lets be honest here. Lauda once said, that a trained monkey could drive a modern F1 car. While that might be an overstatement, there is some cold hard truth in this.
F1 cars are all about development, off season and in season. Turning the steering wheel and trampling on the pedals is about 20% of the drivers job description. 80% is setup, and giving proper feedback to the engineers, so the car doesn´t get developed in the wrong direction. Or not at all.
And of course, a team being short on money exponentiates such shortcomings.
brotkasten
Member
Looks like I wasn't the only one who missed quali.
Very true. I have some races from the 60s/70s/80s, & F1 racing today is easy compared that insanity. Those guys were really road warriors, drivers today are more like pilots. Which isn't a bad thing, too many people died back in the day.
It is still thrilling to watch a guy like Senna drive a 1300 BHP Renault engine in the days of unrestricted turbos and stick gearboxes. Watching Vettel this decade, or Schu last decade is much less thrilling.
It is also great fun to see the changes that happened to the cars each season before the rules became so locked down and technical.
Salacious Crumb
Junior Member
Complete shot in the dark I submitted on Friday. I think I was too kind to Mclaren.
How do you think I feel?
That was before FP1 so I really didn't know how bad McL were going to be. I'm pretty sure I'm almost entirely wrong, too. Button won't be anywhere near where I put him, Massa would be higher than Alonso and Hamilton would be higher as well. Should've put Maldonado as my "Positions Gained", too.
I wish we had F1RM back. I prefer strategising across multiple races with a restricted budget than just "tipping". But we can only do what we can do
That was before FP1 so I really didn't know how bad McL were going to be. I'm pretty sure I'm almost entirely wrong, too. Button won't be anywhere near where I put him, Massa would be higher than Alonso and Hamilton would be higher as well. Should've put Maldonado as my "Positions Gained", too.
I wish we had F1RM back. I prefer strategising across multiple races with a restricted budget than just "tipping". But we can only do what we can do
bobnowhere
Member
Come on loldonado!
zomgbbqftw
Banned
The thing is, this is what everyone told McLaren when they dropped Lewis in favour of Jenson. Lewis has star power and brand power, Brand Hamilton is worth a lot more to them in sponsor money than Brand Button. I'm sure Carlos Slim will put some money in, but Telmex/Movil is not a relevant sponsor for McLaren, Vodafone were. With Santader looking for a way out as well, I don't really see where McLaren go from here without the star power that Lewis gave them to bring in the big bucks.
What they really needed was for the car to be far ahead of the competition and to win a few races in the first half of the season, that would have got sponsors interested at least.
Goldrusher
Member
Maldonado
brotkasten
Member
I'd be surprised if Alonso gets on the podium. I just don't see it.
SunhiLegend
Member
Bloody hell, fell asleep 10 minutes before qualifying. Looks like I didn't miss much, qualifying and the race the same day means little to no sleep at all now.
Pizza Luigi
Member
The new Dutch commentary is so bad!