"You'll get more benefit from F1 than F1 will get from you" -- Alpine has been in F1 for a few years now, and I honestly don't know what it is. Is it a Renault brand? Is it a completely separate thing? I have no idea.
Based off the team's performance in Bahrain, I'd say it's a bag of dog s**t.
Seriously, Alpine might be in the running with Toyota for "most pathetic works team from a major auto manufacturer in the 21st century."
I agree that the cost cap and in-season testing restrictions are anathema to what I've always understood Formula One was supposed to be.
But the rules are the same for everybody. It's not the responsibility of the sport to help make teams competitive. Cleaning up airflow isn't going to close the gap to a team that's building cars that get 1km up the road and start sandbagging. Copying? Red Bull is copying Merc's engine cover design from last year.... that Merc itself couldn't make work after the failed no-pod concept. It's not the governing body's responsibility to help teams do their jobs properly.
Last edited by tifosi77 on Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Toyota, such a funny thing. They had more actual cash on hand - like, in a checking account - than all of the teams at the time were spending on F1 combined. Their resources were, in practical terms, limitless. If they had possessed even a single clue, it's possible they would still be willing today. lol
Watched that Senna clip last night. It's......... I don't know how I feel about it. They certainly know how to set the hook in Senna fans like me, but it also feels very.................................................. weird. It's like a multi-tiered Uncanny Valley.
RBR is imploding and its fun to see how the cool kids when they first entered became uptight corporate sellouts and are now snapping at each others necks.
And yes, I'm not sure how you top the Senna documentary but the actor they've got portraying Ayrton is definitely in the Valley. The one glimpse of Ron Dennis I saw though was spot on enough I had to do a double take.
Eh, we'll see what comes of it.
Just hired Pat Symmonds and has the Silverstone facility pretty much up and running. It's hard to say this is anything other than the teams wanting more money than what they put in the Concord Agreement.
The sport's dubious public grounds for rejection notwithstanding, it's odd to me that the current Concorde Agreement caps entries at 12 teams (so there would still be an open grid slot available). But the agreement expires in 2025. So I wonder if there will be an effort by the extant teams (incl Sauberaudi) to permanently reduce that to 10 beyond '25.
Andretti aside I think the sport would be generally better w 12 teams.
I need to go to more short track races. This was all precipitated by the crew chief's 15 year old son, Slate Myers refusing to obey race control and move to the back of the pack after wrecking someone.
In bonus action, another dumb crew chief father tried to pick a fight with Ryan Newman of all people after his son wrecked Newman. I don't think I realized how much of a brick shithouse Newman is.
- It was the first time in F1 history that the top 10 qualifiers all finished a Grand Prix in their qualifying order. That was put out on iirc official F1 social media, and I frankly still have a hard time believing this was the first time that happened.
- This was the first time in the Pirelli era that cars ran a full GP distance without changing tires. Weird rules quirk: Because of the lap 1 red flag, teams were able to make their tire changes ahead of the restart and satisfy the tire regs, but that also meant the full distance was still run after the restart. Granted, Monaco isn't technically a 'full' GP (it's only 260 km instead of the usual 305 km), but that's still a noteworthy event. I maintain the sport would be more interesting without the compound change rules (which were first introduced by Champ Car in like 2003 or so) to shoehorn in a contrived talking point about tires in a single-supplier category, and instead they made tires that were maybe capable of going the distance without stopping. I know I'm 30 years behind the times on this, but stopping at all should be a sort of penalty; GPs aren't long enough to make pitting a necessary evil.
Also went down a bit of a trivia rabbit hole:
Chucky is the first Monegasque winner of the Monaco GP in the modern World Championship era. But the first Monegasque winner of the race ever was a racer called Louis Chiron.............. who was a bellboy at the Hotel de Paris and grew up to become a professional dance partner. To that end his first benefactor was an American heiress who was, and I quote, "particularly impressed with his footwork". (ahem) He won the pre-war 1931 Monaco GP (which was only like the second or third running of the event) driving a Bugatti in a field with over a dozen other Bugatti entrants. The full field included pre-war greats Achille Varzi and Rudi Caracciola (Scuderia Ferrari/Alfa Romeo didn't attend, and so Tazio Nuvolari was not an entrant). Chiron took a break from driving racing cars after 1938 , when the entire world also took a break from such activities. But he returned when the F1 World Championship was launched in 1950 and his last official entry was in 1958. The Bugatti Chiron hypercar is named in his honor.
Incidentally, the 1931 Monaco race is one of the events featured on those cool retro posters I'm sure most of us ITT have seen over the years.
So so happy for Leclerc. My favorite driver on my favorite team winning Monaco is awesome, and when you consider all his bad luck previously, the win is even more enjoyable. Vasseur has done a great job with Ferrari. A few years ago with Binotto, they would have probably stuck with mediums after the red flag for an idiotic reason and ruined their race. The team is more confident, the car is more stable, and the positivity of the team is apparent
In regards to the race, I was fine with a snoozefest because that was the best scenario for Ferrari. But they gotta do something with this race. Cars are getting slightly smaller with the 2026 regs but that won’t be enough. Pirelli might needs to do something with their tires for this race. They are just too durable when everyone is pacing themselves
Monaco and I think Baku are the only circuits on the current calendar where teams could even ponder completing a race distance on one compound. It's more a function of the abrasiveness of the track surface than tire durability.
There is nothing that mandates the cars be as enormous as they are. There are rules for where the driver has to be positioned relative to other bits and whatnot, and certain pieces have to be positioned relative to other parts, but the overall sheer size of modern grand prix cars is purely a function of balancing aerodynamics. I saw a thing where a 2024 F1 car has a bigger shadow print than an F150 pickup.
Like I said in the fantasy thread, Monaco is the absolute worst, miserable, dogs**t track on the calendar, which as usual produced a boring, miserable, dogs**t race. It was pathetic listening to teams radioing their drivers to slow down, and I actually felt bad for David Croft and Martin Brundle as they tried to come up with anything positive in their commentary to polish the enormous turd that was that race. There was a point after the restart, maybe 1/3 into the race distance, where a bit of honestly shone through and they basically admitted that Monaco produces terrible races and that people come for other factors (the setting, the historic nature, etc.) than seeing a good race on the track.
There is no way that Monaco should still be on the calendar in 2024. It should have been retired decades ago.
It was won by a cheater that shouldn't have been in the field, the ROY was a NASCAR turd who finished in the back of the pack after making multiple unforced errors, and the broadcast spent a disproportionate amount of the time talking about zero-time race winner and human excrement pile Santino Ferrucci (probably because he races for walking ****-stain AJ Foyt) who also finished well down the order. Legge failed to finish, again.
I haven't paid much if any attention to US open-wheel racing since colossal buttwipe Tony George, a pox on his name, basically ruined the entire genre. I haven't watched an Indy 500 in decades.
