The New F1 season is starting this weekend

[Peter King]

After the drama of the last race in which Lewis Hamilton lost the championship in the last lap (after some legal or less legal stuff with the race director and the whining of both the Mercedes and Red Bull team, who were fighting for their own agenda), it is time for a new season.

The season starts with brand new cars, for years cars have been having immense issues with passing and following closely after the car in front of what is called Dirty Air. Dirty air is caused by the first car creating vortices of air behind the front car and messing with the down force of the car behind, meaning they loose speed and traction as their down force is hampered. So in an attempt to stop this parade of cars with few passes on the track the F1 regulating body has created a fully new set of aerodynamic rules and demands of the cars.

If you look at the difference between the 2 cars the difference is huge, for example this is a comparison of rear views of this years and last years car

The side view is also a lot different

The tires are also very different and in the past cars had a ground effect system which kept their car almost sucked to the ground on high speed areas which increased the speed and minimizes the effects of dirty air.

The teams have been testing the cars for 2 weekends and in today's 2 free practices. Last year's second in the end ranking, Lewis Hamilton, has been having huge problems with their car (the same goes for Russell his team mate). The problem they have is called porpoising in which the car does not maintain the ground effect as it is supposed to do. Look at this



As you can see on this video from another F1 team, the driver's head is behaving like a bobble head toy if you have it in your car and you are driving over an extremely bouncing road.

So the 7 time world champions also has the same issue as the above driver. For some reason the car bounces like mad. Making it difficult to get a fast lap in and just imagine having massive head bobbing for the entirety of the race, all 57 laps and a distance of over 191 miles.

In my next post I will talk about the teams and the drivers.

 

[Manc Skipper]

The Alfa livery looks great this year! I caught a glimpse of practice this afternoon. Ferrari seems to have caught up with the front runners mechanically this year.Unless Mercedes are sandbagging, they need to find several seconds to be in with a chance!

 

[Peter King]

The favorites for this season so far are the Red Bull of Max Verstappen, the Mercedes of Hamilton and to some degree (we will have to see how successful they will go) the Ferrari's. Those three teams will most likely win the races (first three or four places).

But the difference from last season is that the best of the rest (the midfield) battle might be very different compared to last year.

Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes and Alpine seem to be the teams who will be in the running for the first 5 or 6 places in qualification, behind them it is a bunch pack with I assume the Williams ending up last in the field.

Last years worst team Haas seem to be a lot better. Schumacher Junior was actually in front of Hamilton but that had a lot to do with the DRS issues Hamilton was having.

It also seems that Perez seems to be having the same issue as last year, slow as hell. Even though he has the same car yesterday he was 1 second slower than his teammate Verstappen.

 

[Manc Skipper]

If Bottas qualifies over the Mercedes pair in his Alfa like he did in !st qualy then Toto Wolff might be regretting letting him go! Got to love Magnusson too. Two days ago he got a phone call telling him he was Mazepin's replacement and last night he was in a Haas outqualifying Lance Stroll, his teammate!

 

[Peter King]

F1 in Jeddah is again giving the wrong message to the royal family in Saudi Arabia. They killed a journalist, covered it up, are as backward as can be towards women in Saudi Arabia. The whole sharia hell hole has to be punished for that and not rewarded by holding WWE events there or having F1 races there.

This was proven when an attack against the Saudi oil company was successful by creating a blaze in Jeddah. They hit the State Oil company and the sky was red with flames. Just a few miles away from the f1 track. The powers that be from the F1 could have given off the right message but sadly they decided to keep going on with the F1 race of tomorrow and the training and quali today.

As a response they again attacked Yemen as they say the attack come from there or was committed by the Yemeni.

 

[Higgins86]

An explosive start

 

[Peter King]

An explosive start

Especially for Mick Schumacher



Wonder how many G forces he went through when he hit the wall there. But in the past the wheels were supposed not to break off the car, the wheels were connected to the body by some sort of cable to prevent breaking away wheels after one steward was either seriously hurt or killed by a runaway wheel.

The good thing is that he was conscious and while sitting on a stretcher, ready to be brought to the hospital for a checkup, he was talking to his mother about 20 minutes after the crash. It will mean that the team will only start with one car tomorrow because there is no way they can bring in a driver and repair a car that heavily damaged.

 

[Peter King]

Well, after a few races where especially the Red Bull team had issues with reliability. Ferrari driver Leclerc had a huge lead over Verstappen (last years winner of the total championship). Leclerc had opened up a 46 point lead after 3 races over Verstappen. But then the twist in the season started coming, Max scored great points and now it was Ferrari who was having reliability issues.

With 8 races gone, Ferrari's engine problems with Leclerc have caused him to go through a large chunk of his engine parts allowance.

For those who do not know, the modern F1 engine is built up out of 3 parts, the internal combustion engine, the turbo charger and the MGU-K (sort of a battery which can give you temporarily more horsepower and you charge it up during the race).

The rules are:

This regulation states that F1 teams may only use three internal combustion engines, three heat motor generator units, three turbochargers, two energy stores, two control electronics, three kinetic motor generator units, and only eight of the four major components making up an exhaust system per driver.

Now Leclerc has already gone through 2 internal combustion engines and three turbochargers. Which means he will have to take his 4th turbocharger this weekend in the race in Canada.

Which means that he would be placed back 10 places after the qualifying sessions. Say he does need a turbocharger and he qualifies on pole, he will have to start from the 11th place. If he uses more parts he will be placed even further back.

And now comes the political games. There are only really 3 teams who are really fast cars. So normally at best if you start even at the
4 or 6 places. Now ferrari have a choice to make, do they change out a 4th combustion engine after the Friday practice, a new turbo charger and a new MCU-K plus several other parts to put them in the usable parts pool. Because if you take loads of places back in this race you will have more parts to use in the next 14 races.

And then the Red Bull team will have to think good and hard, do they do the same, switch out several parts and do a Leclerc, get placed to the back of the grid and race with Leclerc to end up in front or just behind him, loosing the fewest points possible or do they change out parts later in the year.

Because due to the issues with Ferrari (several busted engines and strategy mistakes) Leclerc's 46 point lead is now a 34 point deficit to Max Verstappen.

The several races Leclerc was not able to finish and his team mate Sainz having the worst of luck have caused them to now have a huge deficit to Red Bull Racing with Red Bull having an 80 point lead in the constructors championship. The second driver of the Red Bull team has been performing much better than the second driver (Sainz) of Ferrari.

With 8 races gone, Ferrari have won 2 races (both Leclerc in Australia and Bahrain). Red Bull racing has won 6 races. Max Verstappen has won 5 (Saudi Arabia, Emilia Romagna, Miami, Spain, Baku) and his team mate Perez won in Monaco.

Mercedes will come in the next post, they had the 3rd and 4th place in Baku due to 2 Ferrari retirements. In fact there were 6 cars with Ferrari engines in the race, 2 retired due to blown engines and 2 due to hydraulic issues. But that meant that Hamilton and Russel got 4th and 3rd. But the Mercedes story needs some more details

 

[Peter King]

The Mercedes team suffered hugely in Baku. As a not specific F1 track, but a road track (where normally cars drive) the Baku track has LOADS of bumps and with the Mercedes team already suffering from the earlier mentioned porpoising, they suffered massively. This is how Hamilton got out of the car (remember, a 37 year old very fit and well trained person)



He looked more like me, a 53 year old morbidly obese person with a bad back, rather than the extremely fit 37 year old.

This is what F1 drivers do to stay fit and healthy

 

[Peter King]

And the reason is easy, porpoising to the extreme.

Here you can see in one shot Perez (left), Leclerc (center) and Verstappen (right) and while Leclerc has some porpoising and you can hear his car hit the track a few times, the 2 Red Bulls have nowhere near the head bobbing that Hamilton had in his car.



Now the Mercedes team has been leading the call for the FIA to change the regulations for the rest of the season to protect the health of the drivers due to the porpoising. But some teams do not agree with that, they have spent good money and time in creating a car that does not bounce like an idiot when driving fast (red bull, Mclaren for example) who do not have great issues with the porpoising effect.

The fact is that Mercedes can solve the issue right now and protect their drivers, just raise the ride height and the porpoising goes away. But that will also results in dropping away some speed. But it will protect Hamilton and his bad back. Is it fair to force all the teams to raise the ride height just because Mercedes has created a car that cannot drive around without bottoming and porpoising. For years all other teams had real issues coming even anywhere close to the Mercedes speed (leading to 6 or 7 year total dominance in the sport), they did not go to the FIA to slow down the Mercedes car so that the others could catch up.

Sorry, this was the view from Hamilton's car



the man is a human bobblehead.

 

[Peter King]

The FIA has dmost iecided to intervene, but not in the manner Ferrari and Mercedes had hoped. They had hoped that the FIA would force everybody to drive at a minimum ride height. But that would have benefited the teams who did not do all they could to stop the porpoising and bottoming out.

The FIA has decided for the protection of the drivers they will:

1. more strictly look at the bottom plate (every team on the bottom of the floor has a wooden plank put there by the FIA to make sure teams do not break the ride height rules

2. teams for the foreseeable future (until after the summer stop or maybe for the rest of the season) will have to prove in the third free practice that during 3 sets of clear and unimpeded rounds of the track prove that the G forces and the bouncing is so small that the drivers health will not be impacted. Then the cars will be approved for the race and the team will not be allowed to change the setting to increase the speed and worse the bouncing.

This is bad news for Ferrari and Mercedes. Ferrari's drivers were bouncing pretty badly but they were still able to set very fast rounds, if they want their cars OK'd for the race they will have to solve the bouncing, probably by increasing the ride height. Mercedes also have to solve the bouncing by most likely increasing the ride height.

The FIA has chosen not to hand the bouncing teams a competitive edge over teams who did not have the bounce issue because if the teams who solved it (red bull/alpine/mclaren) would have had to increase their ride height they would loose speed even though their drivers did not have the bounce problem.

 

[Aristaeus]

Horrific looking crash in the British GP. Driver has no serious injuries.

 

[Loulit01]

Horrific looking crash in the British GP. Driver has no serious injuries.

I saw this. The big problem was getting the guy out of a car on its side wedged against the fence because it flipped right over the tire wall. Dude was fine. Hamilton went on a rant about how F1 should structure tracks better so drivers don't wind up trapped in cars.

The most impressive technological achievement of F1, I think, is that a man can walk away from a crash like that and race again next week. That was brutal.

 

[Loulit01]

The NYT hops on the F! bandwagon.

‘Drive to Survive’ Made Americans Fall in Love With Formula 1

The Netflix show sold the European sport to a U.S. audience. But will the romance last after the series is gone?

www.nytimes.com

 

[element94]

Mercedes needs new decision makers in the pits. An inexplicable display of decision making at the end today, mediums with 12 laps left?

 

[element94]

Did anyone else not enjoy the Max Verstappen cruise around while 19 other cars raced? Then when a caution bunched the field for a last lap dash to the finish, they ended it behind the safety car! Bad form, gentleman.