Formula 1 2024

[wood 11103]

49 minutes ago, elfenix said:

you talked to jim goddamn motherfucking hall?!?!?!  holy fuck!

Yeah I've been very lucky to have met more than my fair share of sports figures I admire a lot. Jim Hall is right there in the top handful of them. Great guy, and as humble as he could be for a guy who's done what he's done and seen what he's seen. And re: that museum, I need to get out there, too. It has to be awesome.

Quote

like, if y'all don't know what i'm on about, those are arguably the most revolutionary race cars ever.  aerodynamic downforce was invented by a couple of guys in midland goddamn texas.  not a prancing horse in maranello.  not some antipodean in the british midlands.  not some midwestern corn salesman.  no, a couple of oilmen in texas. 

Yep. As soon as they made the 2E work, the motorsport game was changed. Completely. Forever. And everyone knew it. Thus began the aero arms race. The 2E and the 2J were each eventually banned. Didn't matter. 

Edited December 14, 2023 by wood

[utee94 15742]

12 hours ago, wood said:

Yeah I've been very lucky to have met more than my fair share of sports figures I admire a lot. Jim Hall is right there in the top handful of them. Great guy, and as humble as he could be for a guy who's done what he's done and seen what he's seen. And re: that museum, I need to get out there, too. It has to be awesome.

Yep. As soon as they made the 2E work, the motorsport game was changed. Completely. Forever. And everyone knew it. Thus began the aero arms race. The 2E and the 2J were each eventually banned. Didn't matter. 

With computer aided design and modeling, and potentially generative AI, just imagine the innovation that the teams would be capable of today, if the technical regulations weren't so strict and prescriptive. 

 

 

Edited December 14, 2023 by utee94

[wood 11103]

Relative size of proposed 2026 cars vs current cars ...

[Guest]

Just looks so much better to me. Makes the one on top look like a pig.

[deft 6772]

It’s a start

[G650 13989]

13 hours ago, deft said:

It’s a start

Beat me to it

[morehornsepower 865]

2 hours ago, G650 said:

Beat me to it

x3.

Good step in the right direction...

[VABuckeye 2472]

Get them down in size.

[deft 6772]

Peak masculine performance

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C05c8cCCOxs/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

[wood 11103]

I wonder what pier that is.

BTW, that video reminds me. Don't tell anyone, but I heard he has a new sponsor for 2024.

 

 

[wood 11103]

 

[elfenix 34167]

Bahrain taking full control of McLaren


https://www.gpfans.com/en/f1-news/1009939/f1-mclaren-group-sold-bahrain-state-huge-deal/

[G650 13989]

[wood 11103]

4 hours ago, elfenix said:

Bahrain taking full control of McLaren


https://www.gpfans.com/en/f1-news/1009939/f1-mclaren-group-sold-bahrain-state-huge-deal/

It was always a matter of time, I guess.

[ConferenceRoom 6123]

This seems like it matters more for the road car division. 

[Guest]

From Reddit:

GR is the new boyfriend from the movie that your ex has now gotten together with:

 

Albon is just living the life:

 

Valterri lives the life that I dream of. Simple, enjoyable, down to earth, but a hell of a lot of fun:

 

 

[NoName 16271]

1 hour ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

From Reddit:

GR is the new boyfriend from the movie that your ex has now gotten together with:

 

Albon is just living the life:

 

Valterri lives the life that I dream of. Simple, enjoyable, down to earth, but a hell of a lot of fun:

 

 

VB is absolutely the most "normal" driver on the grid

[G650 13989]

3 minutes ago, NoName said:

VB is absolutely the most "normal" driver on the grid

The grid hell, he is more normal than half of Surl

[faps 806]

Damn. Gil De Ferran died. Apparent heart attack. 

[G650 13989]

9 hours ago, faps said:

Damn. Gil De Ferran died. Apparent heart attack. 

I just saw this, what a shame

[PittsburghTiger 6136]

Damn. 

[NoName 16271]

https://www.planetf1.com/news/sauber-new-f1-2024-team-name

"Stake F1 Team" is a terrible name 

 

[PittsburghTiger 6136]

49 minutes ago, NoName said:

https://www.planetf1.com/news/sauber-new-f1-2024-team-name

"Stake F1 Team" is a terrible name 

 

There was an interesting story linked in the one you linked. It was about Ron Dennis being knighted and how McLaren has ignored that fact.

[NoName 16271]

4 hours ago, NoName said:

https://www.planetf1.com/news/sauber-new-f1-2024-team-name

"Stake F1 Team" is a terrible name 

 

 

[Goofyboy 3156]

Terrible name, but I’ll still be a fan because of Bottas.

[PittsburghTiger 6136]

Has anyone ever been to Zandvoort? We are thinking of going and wondered if anyone had an idea of best place to sit. My German cousins have a place at the beach just north of the track so we thought it would be a nice track to check out.

[Guest]

• So national championship game that I'm actually interested to watch because it's not some conglomerate of Alabamaohiostateclemsongeorgia.
• NFL playoffs (by far the best playoffs of any sport and I'm not a huge NFL fan)
• Daytona
• Start of F1 season

Not a bad next few weeks

[PittsburghTiger 6136]

On 1/4/2024 at 10:24 AM, PittsburghTiger said:

Has anyone ever been to Zandvoort? We are thinking of going and wondered if anyone had an idea of best place to sit. My German cousins have a place at the beach just north of the track so we thought it would be a nice track to check out.

We are going. Achim bought tickets the other day. Should be fun.

We are going to pass on Monaco this year. Last year was good enough. I’ll stay at the beach and drink Bier and watch on TV.

[wood 11103]

3 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

• So national championship game that I'm actually interested to watch because it's not some conglomerate of Alabamaohiostateclemsongeorgia.
• NFL playoffs (by far the best playoffs of any sport and I'm not a huge NFL fan)
• Daytona
• Start of F1 season

Not a bad next few weeks

Don't forget Dakar and the Bathurst 12H. Love the NFL playoffs, but the NHL is right there with them imho. Playoff hockey is one of the best things in all of sport. /ot

Re: Daytona, do you mean the 24 or the 500? My kid & I are making late plans right now to go to the 24.

[VABuckeye 2472]

50 minutes ago, wood said:

My kid & I are making late plans right now to go to the 24.

Bucket list item for me along with Le Mans.

[G650 13989]

5 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

• So national championship game that I'm actually interested to watch because it's not some conglomerate of Alabamaohiostateclemsongeorgia.
• NFL playoffs (by far the best playoffs of any sport and I'm not a huge NFL fan)
• Daytona
• Start of F1 season

Not a bad next few weeks

I agree on the first point that this is the most compelling championship game in ages, and I'm an Alabama fan. But I still probably won't watch. I didn't even watch Alabama's last win in the championship game.

 

The last two, yeehaw boys.

[utee94 15742]

I volunteer on Monday nights so I haven't seen many (any?) of the CFP finals.  Even if Texas had made it this year, I'd be recording and watching later. 

NFL playoffs are always at least mildly interesting to me.

Don't much care about Daytona, but count me in for F1 season.  Williams and Sauber F1 reveals are the first currently scheduled, for 2/5.  Bring it on.

[Guest]

As you watch the CFP tonight, which "starts" at 6:30, remind yourself how great it is that F1 races start at the time listed.

I'm betting with a 6:30 listed start time, kickoff won't be until after 6:50.

[Tyrone Krivacs 48]

9 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

As you watch the CFP tonight, which "starts" at 6:30, remind yourself how great it is that F1 races start at the time listed.

I'm betting with a 6:30 listed start time, kickoff won't be until after 6:50.

PM me if you really believe that

[G650 13989]

Cryptic

[utee94 15742]

WTH is going on around here?

 

 

In other news, current reveal schedule:

Williams: 2/5

Alfa Romeo/Sauber/Audi: 2/5

Aston Martin: 2/12

Ferrari: 2/13

Everyone else is yet to be confirmed, as near as I can tell.

 

[Native Horn 3484]

1 hour ago, utee94 said:

WTH is going on around here?

 

 

In other news, current reveal schedule:

Williams: 2/5

Alfa Romeo/Sauber/Audi: 2/5

Aston Martin: 2/12

Ferrari: 2/13

Everyone else is yet to be confirmed, as near as I can tell.

 

Ferrari missing out by not revealing their red car on Valentine's. 

[Anton Chigurh 3318]

Mercedes is on 2/14 again.

[utee94 15742]

 

I was wondering if there were any visual/graphic aids that depicted the current F1 teams and how they'd evolved from one name/ownership group to another over time, and found this embedded on reddit.  Of course it has WAY more than just the current teams, it appears to have every F1 team, ever, including plenty of one-year wonders.  Pretty cool.

[wood 11103]

Never thought I'd see Darrell Royal quoted on an F1 board, but here you go, from the Andretti - F1 thread on Autosport:

Quote

But GM has said repeatedly they're going to dance with the one who brung 'em.  Admittedly, everyone has a price, but...

What starts here, & all that ...

Edited January 10 by wood

[utee94 15742]

Saint Darrell also famously said, "When you drive a car with 6 wheels, only 3 things can happen, and 2 of them are bad."

[VABuckeye 2472]

Rumors Steiner is out at Haas.  Apparently references to him have been removed from the website.  I have not done fact checking on this.

[PittsburghTiger 6136]

7 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

Rumors Steiner is out at Haas.  Apparently references to him have been removed from the website.  I have not done fact checking on this.

He’s still on the official F1 site. But at the Haas site there is no mention, that I could find, of him anywhere.

[G650 13989]

44 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

Rumors Steiner is out at Haas.  Apparently references to him have been removed from the website.  I have not done fact checking on this.

Aww man.

20 hours ago, utee94 said:

 

I was wondering if there were any visual/graphic aids that depicted the current F1 teams and how they'd evolved from one name/ownership group to another over time, and found this embedded on reddit.  Of course it has WAY more than just the current teams, it appears to have every F1 team, ever, including plenty of one-year wonders.  Pretty cool.

[Anton Chigurh 3318]

[TonyTexas 10478]

Drive to Survive will suffer. 

[deft 6772]

He better call gene

[Mittens 8147]

Why Haas said farewell to its founding father – and ‘DTS darling’ – Steiner

Spoiler

Guenther Steiner’s plainspoken and self-deprecating manner, punctuated by the odd profane outburst in moments of frustration, made him a breakout star of Netflix’s hit F1 series Drive to Survive.

 

For a team which tended to compete in the lower half of the midfield, Steiner enjoyed a profile closer more like those at the helm of F1’s best-known and most competitive outfits, such as Red Bull’s Christian Horner or Mercedes’ Toto Wolff.

Now, eight years after Steiner brought F1’s newest team into the championship, Haas has decided he is no longer the person to take them forward.

Steiner is the latest in a series of team principals to find himself moved aside for performance reasons. Similar changes have taken place at Alpine and Ferrari within the last 12 months.

But Steiner’s position at Haas was different to those other bosses as he had done so much to bring the team into F1 to begin with. He had sounded out Ferrari to serve as a supplier of engines and other vital parts, and sold Gene Haas on the plan. His connections within F1 helped smooth the entry of the most recent new team to arrive in the sport – a difficult process to navigate, as Andretti is presently discovering.

Haas also enjoyed a remarkably successful start to life in F1 for a new team. The Ferrari deal Steiner masterminded deserved much of the credit for that. Rival teams variously emulated the approach or pressed for rules changes to the advantage Haas had gained.

The clamour over Haas’ performance was loudest when they turned up in F1 and scored sixth on their debut, courtesy of Romain Grosjean in Melbourne, then went one place better at the next race in Bahrain. They finished eighth in the championships over the first two seasons, then rose to fifth in 2018 (gaining one place as a result of Force India’s mid-season change of owner and identity).

Things began to go awry for Haas in 2019 when it was perplexed by an ill-behaving car and distracted by a public row with its new title sponsor. This was the year the Netflix cameras captured Steiner’s notorious ‘fok smash my door’ remark at Silverstone, and the lengthy telephone debriefs with Gene Haas about the team’s latest setbacks.

Haas was therefore in a vulnerable position when the Covid-19 pandemic struck the following year. The team only avoided sinking to last in the standings by three points and Steiner admitted they were close to collapse.

In 2021 they did finish last, after Steiner took the calculated gamble of effectively writing off the season. He replaced their experienced drivers with a pair of rookies, which brought or attracted vital sponsorship, and the team elected not to develop its latest car, throwing its weight onto its 2022 machine in order to capitalise on a major change in the regulations.

At the beginning of the next season it seemed Steiner had played his cards and had fortune on his side. Factors beyond his control had forced the ousting of their underperforming rookie, Nikita Mazepin, allowing the experienced Kevin Magnussen to return. He found the VF-22 a competitive machine from the off and delivered fifth place at the opening round in Bahrain, the team’s best result for four years.

As the season neared its end, Magnussen scored an inspired and opportunistic pole position for the sprint at Interlagos. But given the team’s early promise, eighth in the final standings seemed less than they should have been capable of – even taking into account Mick Schumacher’s slight contribution to their points tally following a few too many crashes, amply highlighted in another Steiner-focused episode of Drive to Survive.

Their 2023 performance therefore came as a significant disappointment. Steiner got the experienced driver line-up he was keen for, pairing Magnussen with Nico Hulkenberg, yet the season felt like a repeat of 2019 at times. The VF-23 was beset with serious rear tyre degradation problems, and a string of promising qualifying performances resulted in precious few points.

The team hit a low after introducing a heavily revised chassis at the Circuit of the Americas, the 18th round of 22. It wasn’t enough to prevent them sinking to last place, and Hulkenberg reverted to the early-season specification for the final races.

He made his frustration plain at the team’s failure to make progress. “The lack of development is a disappointment,” he said at the season finale in Abu Dhabi. “It’s not great.

“It’s not good enough, frankly, and we have to address that. We have to do a better job next year because we started off, I think, in a decent position, but we just didn’t find performance. We just didn’t improve the car and others did, substantially, and that’s why we got left behind.”

Even in its strongest seasons, Haas had a tendency to fall behind its rivals over the course of a championship. That, plus their failure to build on their strong start under the current technical regulations, appears to have finally spelled the end for Steiner.

In the press release announcing his replacement by Ayao Komatsu, Gene Haas made it clear the team’s lack of results is the reason behind its change at the top. “It was clear we need to improve our on-track performances,” said the team owner.

“We have had some successes, but we need to be consistent in delivering results that help us reach our wider goals as an organisation,” he added.

Steiner achieved a great deal for Haas in bringing it into F1 and establishing it as a credible team. Few get the opportunity to do that in the first place, and making a success of it is a massive challenge.

The team’s fall too last place in the championship three years ago could be seen within the context of the decisions it had to make to ensure its survival following the Covid years. But propping up the table for the second time in three years, following the promising start made in 2022, proved one setback too many, and the team now feels a change at the top is needed to make the next step forward.

As Steiner admitted in the unvarnished style which makes him such a breath of fresh air in F1, he is the person who has to be held accountable for the team’s situation. “Another thing that the managers these days are very good at is blaming the team when something goes wrong,” he wrote last year in his book Surviving to Drive. “If I fail at something I cannot blame Ayao or Pete [Crolla, trackside operations manager] or Gene Haas. I blame me and I have to take full responsibility.”

 

[wood 11103]

Guenther gone ...

 

Others have already left weeks ago, too. I wonder if Gene's finally selling up - maybe to Andretti? I'd rather see Andretti in as the 11th team, but if this is the only way, then so be it. Instant upgrade. Such complete bullshit though since there is room for at least 2 more teams.

Edited January 10 by wood

[utee94 15742]

I'd rather see a competitive Haas-->Andretti team, than incrementally adding in Andretti and Haas remaining a dumpster fire.  When it comes to F1, I'm always going to be a quality over quantity guy.