The new season of Drive to Survive is now available.
Lights out and away we go!
Was that a tire popping or did the extinguisher causes metal to fail from rapid cooling?
Not clear, but I think the metal failed in some way. The link I followed for that clip described it as "breaks catching fire and exploding" but I'm not really sure about that. Regardless, not a great thing to have happen to your car!
Really excellent analysis of Mercedes' interesting new sidepod design.
Final classification for day 2 of Bahrain testing.
The only real conclusions anyone seems to be drawing is that everyone except Ferrari think Ferrari is ahead at this point. However, Merc seem to be very open that they're still figuring their car out, sooo...
Sure looks like brake failure to me. If you watch the wheel on the left during the rear view portion (what is actually the rear right wheel), you can see bits of brake disc flying out. As far as the explosion at the end, I would guess that it's the brake disc getting finished off by the extinguisher. As the car enters the spin, the rear left wheel and suspension are already falling apart.
Enjoying season 2. Why was there a Red Bull and a Torro Rosso? Wouldn't it make more sense to spend all that money on one team? Why have a junior team at the same level?
Red Bull has ridiculous amounts of money, and Formula 1 is by no means their only effort in racing. They have lots of other sponsored entries in lots of other racing series, from open wheel feeder series to completely different styles of racing.
Along with that comes a pretty extensive young driver program. Toro Rosso, now Alpha Tauri, serves as a junior, feeder team for their young drivers. Other teams have something similar - Alpha Romeo and Williams have, in the past, fostered young Ferrari and Mercedes drivers, respectively, although their obligations are somewhat less obvious to their parent teams. But the basic idea is to provide a team where inexperienced drivers can get their feet wet in Formula 1 before driving for the parent teams.
Without exception, these smaller teams are customers of the other, major teams who develop their own engines, i.e. Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull (Honda), and Alpine (Renault). There is a general feeling that any team that must buy an engine from another team will basically never win a championship, because the big parent teams develop the engine and the car to function together in a way that customer teams can't. So Mercedes' engine and chassis are designed and built as a whole unit, whereas Williams, for example, has to build their car around a Mercedes engine that perhaps doesn't conform to their own design philosophy. The teams that build engines and cars are called "works" teams (as opposed to customer teams). But, such is the prestige of achieving a Formula 1 drive that this does not deter most drivers from getting a seat at one of these customer teams. It is the hope of most F1 drivers to move from a customer team to a seat at a works team.
Red Bull's arrangements with Toro Rosso / Alpha Tauri include contracts that make drivers work not specifically for each team, but for Red Bull's F1 concerns in general, meaning they can move drivers between teams as they see fit. They used this to move Max up to Red Bull, and Kvyat down to Toro Rosso in the middle of the 2016 season, whereupon Max won his first start with Red Bull after the two Mercedes drivers, in a tight and contentious bid for the championship, took each other out.
Current Alpha Tauri driver Pierre Gasly also suffered a mid-season shift from Red Bull to Toro Rosso more recently. He has thrived at Alpha Tauri since, and expects to get another shot at the second Red Bull seat someday, but I suspect Red Bull is pretty happy with Checo at the moment. Interestingly, I believe Checo is their only driver ever to not come up from the Red Bull young driver program.
Thanks! That clears things up a bit. It makes sense given how complicated those cars are to drive that the best way to improve young drivers is to be in the same race. That wheel is insane.
I just saw the DtS episode that focused on that Gasly/Albon swap, which is what made me wonder about the two teams.
Starting Season 3!
Mr Bismarck wrote:The new season of Drive to Survive is now available.
Lights out and away we go!
Nice.
Ooops.
So, Ricciardo returned a negative COVID test in time to be able to compete this weekend, but Vettel just tested positive today (Hulkenberg will be filing in for him this weekend).
The bigger question, though, is who else is going to test positive in the next 72 hours, since all of the drivers except Hamilton were present last Wednesday for a GDPA photoshoot (where Vettel likely caught it from Ricciardo) and then all of them except Ricciardo were together the next day for the official F1 drivers and cars photo shoot.
Going to be an interesting weekend in many, many ways. 
Still hoping for a Hulkenburg podium. Fingers crossed!
I mean, anything could happen, but I'm going to guess Aston will be solidly midfield (or maybe even back of the midfield) to begin with here. The guy sure deserves some good luck though!
That said, anyone who still had "Magnussen and Hulkenberg have another moment on track" on their bingo card somehow is suddenly looking very good right now.
The bigger question, though, is who else is going to test positive in the next 72 hours
Anyone know if they are planning to do any more sprint race qualifying this year?
Sadly yes.
Teams asked for more money for sprints which the organisers didn't want to give them, so no decision to add new sprint races could be passed. As a result we have three, same as last year, except this year they're at Imola, Interlagos and Austria.
They're worth more points this year though, with 8 for first place all the way down to 1 for 8th.
The Hulkenback memes in FormulaDank have been a-mazing, but this sealed the deal on my McLaren stan choice.
FP1 is complete. I didn't wake up early enough to watch and there's no highlights package yet, but it sounds like no one was doing any serious quali sims yet (the times are all at least a second slower than folks were posting last week), so it's all pretty meaningless, but it's the start of where patterns can be seen. Also, sounds like the Mercedes is still doing a lot of porpoising even after adding some new parts compared to last week, so I'd anticipate they still will need a race or two at least to iron out the kinks.
In other news, looks like Hamilton's slightly modified 2021 helmet from testing isn't the design he's using this year -- instead, he's going with a color scheme that's a throwback to his early years in competition (and a Senna tribute as well). In hindsight it makes a lot of sense given that at the Bahrain test his number on the car was highlighted in the same yellow, his wheel covers had that color as a highlight vs the red on the standard livery, and he choose to drive in the car with the yellow camera pod (which generally denotes "car 2" for most teams).
FP2 results:
McLaren was having issues with their engines, hence their poor showing.
In general, potentially dicey times for Mercedes powered cars. Ferrari engines seem to have made a strong step forward this year, leveling out the field there, and if McLaren is having reliability issues this early on, well, it's going to be a very different year for a whole additional set of reasons.
Definitely looking more and more like at least the first couple of races might be a Ferrari/Red Bull fight though.
When you finish ahead of Red Bull and McLaren in the opening race
My heart really needed to see that happen.
If I was the sort to believe in karma, I'd say karma put in a good day at the office today.
My heart really needed to see that happen.
If I was the sort to believe in karma, I'd say karma put in a good day at the office today.
I watched the YouTube highlights. Wish I still had the cheap subscription. May have to break down and get that again this year. The changes seem to have made everything very exciting.
Is there a somewhat easy way to watch the cheap F1 TV subscription without hooking up a damn laptop to the TV?
Late last year they released an app for ChromeTV, so they may have done so for other streaming devices as well. And before that, I was able to Chromecast from my phone app or from my browser on my computer.
Hard to beat free
It was fun watching Leclerc & Verstappen trade places multiple times. Glad the cars are able to follow more easily.
Is there a somewhat easy way to watch the cheap F1 TV subscription without hooking up a damn laptop to the TV?
If you have a Roku or AndroidTV device, there are apps for both. Probably AppleTV too, but I don't have that device.
Pages