wood

Yep. Long run pace sure makes it look like RBR will be out front pretty comfortably on Sunday, with a very tight battle behind between Ferrari, Merc, Aston Martin, and McLaren.

Oh, and JFC, can anyone tell me why the fuck Damon Hill is allowed anywhere near a microphone? What a shitshow in the booth in FP1. The worst possible guy (Damon) is there, being corrected by the 2nd worst possible guy (Karun), who's being corrected by Zak Brown.

Yeah I don't really think we're really much closer to seeing the true pecking order than we were after testing, and even then, this track is an outlier. Drivers and others over the years have said that you don't really get an accurate picture of the pecking order until 4 or 5 races in. Alonso said this year it could be as late as Japan (GP #4).

Driver's Press Conference

It's not one thing. The guy just has zero personality. Dry and lifeless AF, and his employees seem to tune him out 100%, including Albon. They all look like they're thinking "Someone please shoot me". He met with Albon and was telling him how they were on the rise and would be fighting for championships soon. The look on Albon's face was like "Eh ... ok". He was having to fight back the laughter.

Wow, if you ever thought James Vowles was super boring and devoid of anything resembling a personality, just wait until you see Ep. 4. It's worse than I had ever imagined.

Bernie Collins said when the tests were held in Spain the teams would bring new parts every day. Those parts would be installed based on what the car did the previous day. Testing this far away from base with such a short lead time to the 1st race has changed that metric considerably. I won't be at all surprised to see a few 1.5 spec cars show up by FP2. In other news, ugh, Liberty Media coming to a MotoGP near you?

Yeah don't get me wrong. I still think Max will be quickest. I'm just curious where AM will shake out in all of this.

Yeah me too. Wewillsee. I do think this car has good to great long run pace, but they seem to struggle more in qualifying trim. If they can get on top of that, who knows ...

LOL. So, tl;dr ... Max's Day 3 long runs were more similar to Alonso's than anyone else's, and Max's and Alonso's tires were wearing very well. Alonso was slower than Max by less than 0.3s on average overall, and his quickest stint average (his last) was only about 0.13s slower per lap than Max's quickest one (also his last).

F1 Debrief on twitter (@f1debrief) compiled every testing lap time and broke them by driver and day, here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/11npchw-mS3BR0kwSkJUg0JKXkGjam7Zg/htmlview# I noticed something interesting and then realized he had already tweeted about it as well. Hmm ...

From what I hear hardly anyone in the paddock can even stand to be around Ocon - even the French guys.

... and some of the teams apparently think he was running with 85kg fuel weight much of the time.

From Autosport re: Vegas. LOL, what starts here & all that: Also, some testing analysis from a poster that I thought was interesting:

Drain cover strikes again. Another red flag, right at the start of the session ...

Dude's hair always reminds me of Strangelove lol. Helluva nice guy.

Not sure if they're all running low, but the Merc seemed to be running very low this a.m. on the main straight down toward T1. Sounded like maybe some porpoising too, but I couldn't actually see any evidence of that. ETA: In that video it does seem to be the Merc that's scraping/sparking the most, maybe a bit rhythmically in the slo-mo bit at the end, too.

Today's fastest lap

Good video, esp from about 28 min to 42 min. Seems to align a lot with what I posted above. Especially striking to me is where he talks about the cars being able to run 195-200 but are running as slowly as 175 in those big packs, because everyone just keeps going slower and slower, happy to save fuel and afraid to get out of line.

Even though I cancelled my F1TV Pro already, it's paid through like March 3, so I took in highlights of each of today's test sessions. The early session was fine, but when I watched the evening session, they had the audio from the early session playing over video from the evening session. Amazing.

No cr.

And of course, this all assumes that NASCAR wants to move away from pack racing ... which I seriously doubt is the case.

One way to do it is for the big super speedways to have their banking lowered, creating a flatter track that requires some lifting or even braking in the corners, allowing the cars to separate from each other. That, of course, will never happen. On the car side of things, I'm not sure penalites for coasting will help much. I think there would still be pack racing. I think they need to take away enough aero and mechanical grip on the cars, and up the power a bit, so that they have to lift for the turns. Even in the mid-1980s, they had to lift in the corners because of too much straightline speed and not enough tire or aero to handle cornering that fast. Basically until you can find a way to make the drivers have to lift for the turns, you'll get pack racing, even without restrictor plates, ECU restrictions, etc (and obviously Cup cars haven't actually used plates for a few years). I was told It was the 2000 Truck race at Daytona that inspired the late 2000-2001 Cup aero package. Granted, the Truck series didn't run plates at Daytona or Talledega until after 2006 iirc, but still had pack racing leading up to that time - due to a ton of downforce and drag (ie as aerodynamic as a brick and running in 2000 9:1 compression engines).

Ah, cool. You were posting while I was editing. That's what I thought. Hope it works out!! Fuck paying Bally.

:stupidquestionamnesty: What is DTC? Direct to Consumer? Free sounds very good to me. I'm currently paying bally monthly to stream my Stars.