F1 2019 (Not the game) Spoiler-All

I'm not sure if this is the right place or time to have this conversation, but I definitely feel like the outlier when it comes watching these catastrophes. My morbid curiosity makes me seek this stuff out. I guess it's similar to how I like my true crime to go into all the horrendous detail. I know I'm not alone, but I'm probably also just sick.

No, I don't think you're alone in that. Seeing the impact in this case is a matter of whether or not you're ok cognitively with it, since you don't really see much more than a splash of carbon fiber, and it is essentially the death blow, but not the moment of death. I acknowledge that I should've warned about it.

I am saddened by this whole thing, but the impact itself isn't like watching a Faces of Death video or anything.

I have a much harder time watching MotoGP accidents, even those where the riders are actually fine, because in most cases you're watching a body get flung and skid across open pavement and runoffs.

To me there's a world of difference watching legacy races and seeing, say, Gilles Villeneuve get flung out of his car and into the catch fencing to his death in 1982 and watching something that happened a few days ago. Seek out the things you want to see, I suppose. For the record I don't want to rewatch Gilles die, either.

My issue is more with the video being presented as "Somebody made an animation" and then hey, actual footage of a young man tragically losing his life.

Chain Bear managed to show exactly what transpired without being disrespectful to Anthoine, his family, and the motorsport community.

Is it disrespectful to want to know what happened? I know you said that Chain Bear did a video without showing it, but that means that Chain Bear had to study the incident and presumably watch a lot of videos. Is it not disrespectful if you plan on making a "tasteful" video about the incident for money?

I legitimately don't know what the answer is. Every time I sit down and watch a race I am signing up to watch something like this happened. Does that then make it disrespectful to watch races at all? It is honestly something I stress about. Is my fandom contributing to the early death of these drivers?

Well when the FIA / Liberty Media pulls all official video of the incident out of respect for the family, I feel like that's enough good for me. I don't personally want to seek out peoples' cell phone videos of the event.

Chain Bear reviewing footage is different because that's his job. He's an analyst. A journalist. Same with FIA's own analysts. They will review the footage to try and make racing safer going forward, as they did with Jules' death before.

If what you're interested in knowing is what happened, you can get that from analysis videos like the one Chain Bear produced, and presumably in the future whatever FIA decides to release. You have the ability to seek out information without contributing to the sharing of awful videos of somebody's son, friend, colleague being killed.

Which person would you rather give views to? For me personally, the clear and obvious answer is the person who is doing their best to explain what happened to concerned fans, while maintaining their concern for the dignity of the deceased, and the feelings of family and friends.

How do you think Charles Leclerc would feel if he stumbled upon that video? How about Juan Manuel? Which of those 2 videos do you think they would be more comfortable seeing? (neither, right now, I'd wager).

It's not disrespectful to watch races. These things may happen, and everyone involved knows that. Your fandom contributes only as far as the fact that if nobody at all watched, there'd be no way these people could race.

Again, watch what you're going to watch. I'm honestly not judging anybody for seeking out the gory videos if that's what they want to see. Hell, I was that guy at one point in my life. But don't mislead people into clicking on sh*t like that, that's completely f*cked up.

(I acknowledge that NSMike apologized for linking it without warning, and I'm not mad at 'em.)

That must be the absolutely craziest qualifying session I've ever seen (and I've been watching F1 since '94). That a bunch of professional drivers can get themselves into such kerfuffle is phenomenal.

Hard to apportion blame to any one driver, although Hulk and Sainz after T2 seem to cause a lot of the stuff up as they back up the entire field with no space for other drivers to pass them.

Well, the official result was a reprimand to Hulk, Sainz, and Stroll. Many seem baffled as to why at least a few penalties weren’t handed out, but apparently in the driver meeting beforehand they were told that penalties wouldn’t be handed out for slow driving, so I guess hands were tied a bit by that? Still, it seems wild that the there isn’t some other recourse on the books to address behavior as egregious as some of what happened out there.

You know overtaking is difficult in Formula 1 when no one can find their way past Lance Stroll, who's doing about eleven mph out of Rettifilo.

I'll just leave this here https://streamable.com/zzjd6

Awesome race. I'm really enjoying this season, more for the individual races than the overall World Championship (Hamilton has that completely sown up).

Since the French GP there has not been a single dud of a race. Today was again excellent. Leclerc having to fend of the Mercedes team for almost the entire race was epic racing. Vettel completely botched it, in terms of helping his team today.

Speaking of, it really seems that his career is lurching towards the end. Hope he turns it around, but he seems all at sea against his teammate at the moment.

The battle for podium was absolutely fantastic. Great racing all around.

Could do with less of Lewis' whinging. He's about as bad as I am when playing the game, it's embarrassing. If he doesn't take P1 he whinges, if he isn't 100% certain he'll take P1 from lights out he whinges. He's insanely talented, and I am not on the hate train in any way, but goddamn.

I want to know what was up with Kimi this weekend. He's my favorite driver on the grid, and has been for a long time. But 3 massive offs in one weekend? Dude.

Vettel is losing it for sure. He's way too deep in his own head. It's sad to see because I like him a lot. Seems like a super good dude.

I think qualifying between Spa last weekend and Monza this weekend just shows that they need to rethink the entire process, at least for these high speed tracks. I say go to one-shot. Every driver gets one hot lap on an empty track. That's your time, end of story. Strategizing around tows should be reserved for the race. I'm sure there are flaws with this idea, but it can't be worse than this absolute clownshoes bullsh*t.

Glad nobody was hurt in that horrifying F3 crash. That kerb was an incredibly stupid idea.

I don't hate Lewis, but I do hate seeing him win all the time, so I'm happy to hear him whine. It means he has to work.

Quali for the past two races has been a cluster, but I don't like the idea of a shootout. Those are so boring to watch.

I'm very in the "tired of seeing Lewis almost definitely winning every race" camp. There's definitely a generational thing going on right now, plus the stewards being both more and less active assigning penalties to the younger drivers doing the more aggressive things that older drivers will tend to avoid doing, and the older drivers getting annoyed at the kids getting away with stuff.

Hamilton's answer to that question was "well, it's good to know it's working like that, we'll see what happens." And I think that's pretty much the right answer, as long as you either start pushing the envelope a bit, or quit whining about it. If you push harder and get punished where the other drivers aren't, then you've got something to complain about.

The Q3 debacle looked to me like the inevitable conclusion of the thing I've never quite understood where everyone does a lap, sits in the garage for most of the session, then goes out again at the very last second. I hope there's a better explanation for that than some psychology thing, but I'm not sure what it'd be. This is what happens when everyone gambles on doing the same risky thing at the same time, and it turns bad for everyone. Maybe do your second hot lap with a few minutes to spare?

Tow nonsense aside, the standard reason would be changing track conditions.

More rubber laid down as other cars run laps
Warming or cooling of the track surface.

I think part of the reason teams wait to the last minute is because no one wants to lay down rubber that the other teams can use to get a faster time. So they all go out as late as possible to have more rubber on the road and to try to avoid unintentionally helping the other teams.

F1 could maybe introduce a negative feedback loop here. Something like, in Q3 drivers run qualifying laps in reverse order of Q2 times. I dunno. But as long as thousands of a second can be gained by running late, it's going to continue to happen.

So Chain Bear did a nice video on how Formula E does qualifying, it would fix this problem a little and might shake up the grid for race day.

Yeah, Formula E has been great, so I'm totally down with that idea.

I'm not sure FE's quali would work as well in current F1 because the top teams can put faster times down on a poor track than most of the field can do on a good track. I'm all in on giving it a shot though.

This kind of qualifying would have zero effect on the front of the grid.

At the British GP Danny Ric ultimately qualified seventh in a Renault that was almost a full second off Lewis and Charles in Q1. The Mercedes then got a whole half second faster in Q3.

Mercedes would put that Party Mode™ deployment wherever it was necessary to ensure serene process to final qualifying.

Hell yeah race weekend!

Just getting involved with FP1 now.

What a great race. Glad to see Ferrari actually competitive again!
Hopefully it continues and we can get more and more great racing going forward.

Also, lmfao @ that Knight Rider video. Needs a second episode with him taking out poor George.

I wouldn't call that a great race. It was a parade out front that was decided in pit lane and no one everyone in the back couldn't fight because if they did they would tear each other apart. This was just more proof for me that street circuits need to go away.

It was an exciting race in the midfield.

Up front, it was mostly proof that Mercedes' strategy team doesn't actually have access to either time travel or Skynet grade world destroying AI to make perfect predictions about what's going to transpire, and can occasionally make mistakes like any other humans. Well, that and that conversely, Ferrari's strategy team is able to do something OTHER than make one deeply human mistake after another.

Joking aside, yeah, it seems like Ferrari seems to have finally sorted out their aero package, doesn't it? Suddenly the rest of the season seems like it could be quite a bit more interesting than one would have anticipated at the start of the summer break.

Yeah, the midfield racing was fantastic. I can deal with a few slow laps in the beginning on a circuit that chews up tires like I do Cheez-Its. Danny Ric was amazing to watch until he got greedy, and hell, even that was fun. Hated seeing my dude Kimi out again, and it reinforces my opinion that something changed for him at Spa.

I agree that street circuits are pretty much bad and I'd love to see them get rid of all of 'em and put real tracks in. May I suggest... Hockenheimring?

Also, seeing a podium sans Lewis was extremely pleasant. Don't hate the dude at all, but tired of seeing him up there eternally. I was actually happy hearing the German anthem for the first time in a long time!

All four Red Bull cars are taking grid penalties this weekend for replacing engine parts. Three of them will get five place penalties, but Kvyat is changing almost everything so will start from the back unless someone else on another team now follows suit.

So there'll be at least some overtaking as they come back through the field.

Max's gonna make even more passes than last year's Russian GP!

..Interesting... race. I'll give it that much.

No kidding. It almost seemed like Ferrari had managed to finally get all their ducks in a row over the last few races outside of some small questions about driver politics, but wow, did they ever find a way to return to their pre summer break form of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory this weekend, eh?

Driver shenanigans aside they really got screwed with bad SC timing. And then allowing pitting under VSC was just the nail in the coffin.

...I absolutely don't understand what they were thinking pitting Leclerc a 2nd time and losing track position to Bottas. He was never going to get past him. They didn't have anywhere near enough of a lap time advantage to regain P2 against a strong defender. Bizarre call.