wood

In the box score it said it was to CF. Was it over the monster?

Huh? The car's race pace was dreadful in Bahrain, but it was improved in Jeddah, and with that came better defense by Alonso. He held George out of DRS range for the last 37 laps of the race, keeping him behind by 1.0 to 1.5 seconds almost the entire time. Put him in a quick car, and watch him go. Racecraft is not a problem for Fernando.

And Alonso to slide nicely into his car at RBR. I could go for that ...

The tires are quite vanilla. There's no reason they can't mix things up by separating the compounds by more than just 1 step, varying the compound choices at each track from year to year etc. It's stupid and just adds predictability rather than variability, which is what they should be trying to add. Same thing with the engine reliability rules.

Indeed. He was stationary on that stop for 42 seconds, dropping him from P14 to last on the track. Huge hit to his race that he had no control over. With even a decent stop, he'd have left the pits ahead of Sargeant, Bottas, and Ocon, and very likely would have finished right behind Yuki at worst. Yep and last year he was parachuted in mid-season, to a car he'd never driven in anger. Raced 2 races and then broke his hand and returned while rehabbing that. That crash wasn't his fault as he simply had nowhere to go when Piastri crashed in front of him. I'm not saying he's back yet, but IMHO he's done a lot more to warrant a further look than some others out there have.

I'm not so sure he was still in the box. It looked like he was out of it to me, but I guess the transponder says he wasn't. It adversely affected his start. The problem is that whether he was out of the box, and whether he stopped or not, and whether or not he gained an advantage, he clearly moved before the lights were out which is a clear no-no according to the rulebook, because of how other drivers can react to the jumped start, etc. He moved before the lights went out and was moving when they went out. He didn't stop until after they went out.

I just saw the ruling. They said that even though they could see that he moved early, the transponder didn't indicate a jumped start. Idiotic rule. So even though we can see that he jumped the start, our machinery that's less sensitive than our eyes says it didn't happen, so we're gonna go with what it tells us. It's happened before, too. So stupid. Don't remember Alonso getting away with it. He did get penalized in China 2010. I was thinking Bottas had gotten away with it on this basis though, and Vettel, and Lewis in Brazil last year.

Haven't had a chance to look anything up yet. Was it ever explained why Norris got no penalty for an obvious jumped start? Oh, and apparently RB botched RIC's pit stop, dropping him from 14th to last, and it was never even mentioned.

Yep. I saw somewhere that this AM would win last year's Bahrain GP by 53 seconds, yet they're still 4th or 5th quickest this year on Sunday. The improvements by all of the top 5 teams over the offseason was amazing. Yeah, man. He's impressed both days. Yeah, like years ago. I really enjoyed watching Fernando toy with George all day, like when a cat sits next to the lizard he just caught, pretending to ignore it, making it think it has a chance to escape but having no intention of letting it get away. Funniest quote was Russell saying if he had 2 more laps he would have been on the podium. LOL. Sure, George. 30 laps weren't enough, but 32 would've done the trick! Ya! Fersure! Youbetcha! He didn't say he intended to do it, but he said recently he thinks he could go close to 50 yo. He said his preseason physical testing results this year were as good as 10 years ago. I think he'll probably go beyond 50, just not all of it in F1.

Yep, and we used to hear this kind of thing about Lewis and Vettel too.

Well, see, (1) you didn't say you were in a class or left a class. You said you heard stuff around training during 'classes 125 and 126', which makes it unclear, and (2) nobody here has said we chase down fires all day, but we get a lot more fires, even serious, active structure fires, etc than the way you're characterizing it. Fires aren't all we do though, by a long shot. 60-70% of our calls are medical, and the fire department gets all the calls nobody else wants or knows how to handle. And nobody's disagreeing that there are some not-so-shining examples of 'the perfect employee' working in the fire service or in AFD, but you're taking your very small sampling of AFD that you got at training and a handful of incidents across several years, and applying it to the entire department and the entire fire service. Every department has those people going against the values of the profession, as does every profession, and we're always trying to keep them out or get them out if they get in. Training is Training, but what you experience there is not what you experience out in the 'real world' of the fire department. I'm not astonished and wasn't acting that way. What's weird is you projecting onto the entire fire service your narrow view that you formed in what was apparently not even an entire training academy term. Yeah I know about Devon Coney's death, which was horrible. A lot of AFD people knew Devon before he got in the academy. As Bob Nicks said in the article you linked, even though he was screened per fire service standards for incoming cadets, AFD learned from that and set about doing more than the national standard - which is typical of how AFD and some other departments work. I know about the crap that happened 7 years ago at station 15 at the hands of one bad actor, etc. That was all beyond despicable, but once he was found out, he was dealt with and was drummed out of the fire service because of it. In the old days, nobody would have ever heard about it. Painting the whole fire department and/or fire service with a broad brush based on your extremely limited experience and the actions of a handful of individuals is idiotic. If you're going to do that, you'll never find a single line of work that isn't 40-60-70% assholes in your mind. But hey, maybe you're right and we're all wrong.

Interesting. I've never seen or even heard of any such behavior in nearly 30 years in AFD. Can you shed any light on your reason for being around all of those folks out at Shaw Lane and why these people would tell you any of these things? I can't tell if you're in the FD, or PD, work out there in some other capacity, or what. There aren't many FD personnel actually assigned to Training, so that's a very small sampling from a department with more than a thousand people in it. Also, most of the white shirts who would go to fires, ie Operations Battalion Chiefs, Shift Commanders, the Safety Chief, and the like aren't hanging out at Training much. All of them have multiple stations to oversee and plenty of fires to respond to. Any who are saying they can't remember when they went to a fire are almost certainly working an admin position running a support division.

And me and my kid last night were talking about Newey. He's 65. Who knows how much longer he does this. When he goes, it'll be his proteges all battling each other. Could be cool.

That's just F1. It's like this way more often than not. It's been similar to this for all but 2 or 3 of at least the last 15 seasons. It's not for everyone though. For me, it beats the alternatives, like BoP, success ballast, spec racing (which is fine but not in a constructor series), the lottery that NASCAR has become on big tracks, etc.

OBTW that Alonso guy seems pretty good.

I honestly think they stopped trying (again) sometime early last year. There have been rumors that Renault won't commit enough funding since before that. Embarrassing performance for a works team. I wonder if they're on their way out again.

Heh, don't beat yourself up. Your time is phenomenal. I've always been convinced that after all the hard work, the biggest CC differentiator was genetic, all other things being equal, much as it is in any athletic competition. For the CC you don't wanna be too tall or too short, too muscled up or too skinny, etc. I always thought guys in the 6'2"-6'4", 220-240 ish range always seemed to excel, conditioning and skill levels being equal. Your post reminds me of seeing Olympic Indoor VB gold medalist Riley Salmon chugging beers at every timeout, in 100 degree heat, and still winning open beach vb tourneys back in the day, half hammered. Speaking of hammered, you moving the sled in 4 hits is nuts. Wow. Impressive.

Combat Challenge. Good times. I was in training back in 1993-94, right around the time the FFCC came into existence. The hammer/sled always whooped my ass. The people that run really run fast times are some fit/strong mofos. Where do you work? (if'n you don't mind me asking)

Just curious, has anyone here ever actually seen someone put their hair over the back of the seat like that? Of course I've heard of it, but never seen it or seen credible evidence of it. I just can't imagine, but yeah these days some people absolutely 100% dgaf about anyone else.

I said above I was looking for Tilke's COTA plan. Well, I found one of them. It's his layout, but not the artist's rendering I had. Here it is. It's on the same compass orientation as the current layout below it. Hellmund had already given him the napkin drawing some of you have probably seen, and this is what he came back with. Hellmund saw it and said something to the effect of 'GTFOHWTS'. Look at this shit, lol.

Ah, yeah. Gotcha. And those dang paramedics hardly ever beat us in. There are just more of us and we're usually closer. I didn't do a whole lotta OT work. At shift's end, I'd usually seen enough and was ready to go home or do something fun. It's a helluva lot better than a real job though in most ways, and now my 20 yo is in the process of tryna get in with AFD. So we got that goin' for us. Which is nice. There's some sitting around, mostly after like 6:30 pm, but not as much as you'd probably think, and less and less with every passing day. They train pretty much every shift, and PT a lot, and do a lot of Medical and Fire/Rescue CE of all sorts, and inspections, Captain's Schools, Pre-Fire planning, hydrant maintenance that the Water dept used to do, the station's yard maintenance, keep all the equipment clean and in good working order, clean the station, the trucks, and their PPE, public education, and a whole lotta other shit. But in the end it's not so much about how much they do, but more about what they're willing to do. Not sure how to read you here. Were/are you in the AFD Training Academy or something? 60% assholes or 40%? Just trying to keep track on my scorecard here at home.

I still maintain that VY's performance that day was as good as his 2006 RB performance. Maybe better, but of course, that's another topic. Might make a good thread, actually, I guess. And yeah, Edwards was a fucking monster in that game as well.

Well, yeah, any profession is gonna have some of those guys & girls, and of course I worked with some during my career. 3 major fires a year? Where are you located? We have a helluva lot more than that in a typical couple of weeks in Austin. Yeah every flight nurse I ever met during my career was a total badass. Sadly, one that I met is no longer with us, having fallen from Star Flight years back during a rescue attempt at Barton Creek. And damn, 25 years Paramedic-ing and then back for more in the ER? My hat is off to you! Yeah working at fire dispatch/CTECC the last few years of my career really let me see how even in Austin the city never really sleeps and takes 'round the clock maintenance to continue working reasonably well. There are people out working on it, and people coordinating all of that 24 hours a day. PD, FD, SO, EMS, TxDOT, Water, Electric, TxGas, Street & Bridge, Solid Waste, Animal Control, and a lot more.

Wut?

For anyone who's interested in this stuff, I found some of what I was looking for. Some of these pics suck, and a lot of the changes are subtle, but you'll get the idea. I also have an old rendering somewhere of one of Tilke's original plans that Tavo axed. It'is absolutely nothing like what Tavo wanted and doesn't take advantage of the topography at all. There's no run up to T1 or anything. It's crazy how bad it is. I'm still looking for that one.