F1 2022 thread - see post 1 for rules

An interesting tidbit from the last race weekend in Austria I came across was that Ralf Schumacher's demo run in his old 2003 Williams set a time that would have been third fastest lap of the race. That's a long-retired driver showing up for a couple of laps with no practice, a car with no time perfecting setup, and just doing a demo run where minimal risks were being taken. Yet it was faster around the track than anyone other than Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, and the sound it produced while doing so was absolutely sublime.

They've spent billions upon billions since that machine was built, with far more advanced technology available to them, and have achieved basically nothing other than more bloated less exciting cars.

I do think the new ground effect cars are a huge step forward in the promotion of closer and far higher quality racing over the absolutely dreadful hybrid era that nearly killed the sport entirely, but just imagine how spectacular the new aero concept would be when married to those V10 engines and the vastly smaller, lighter and more nimble cars they allowed.

The power units introduced a huge weight increase, which dropped performance dramatically by multiple seconds per lap in 2014 compared to what came before. At many tracks the all conquering Mercedes set slower lap times than a Minardi built on a shoestring budget a decade earlier. At some tracks a number of GP2 cars, which still ran V8s, actually set faster qualifying laps than the back row or two of the F1 field. For example in Spain 13 different GP2 cars set times fast enough that would have put them ahead of the back row in the F1 race.

So to compensate for the lack of performance of the new cars which was becoming an embarrassment for the sport, they set about increasing the size to allow for more aero surfaces and more downforce, and gave them wider tyres to allow for more mechanical grip, all in service of attempts to bring the cars back up to speed and compensate for drop in performance caused by the weight of the power units. So while it's true that the cars continued to grow after 2014, the root cause was still ultimately the hybrid formula. There were other contributors for sure, like the Halo and this year's lower profile tyres, but to a large extent the cars could still be much smaller and lighter if they returned to V10s.

Remember that the V10s ran on skinny grooved tyres to slow them down, so they could easily accommodate additions like the halo without losing performance with modern tech and slick tyres available to them.

They'd use more fuel per race of course which the marketing people don't like. But I bet they'd have a smaller carbon footprint given how much lighter they'd be and given that 99.9% of all the distance they'll ever travel will be in transit rather than under their own power.

Unlikely, but if the rule was to be thrown out then those times count again.

Multiple cars can have multiple penalties, so if two drivers have 20 place penalties you can figure out who starts ahead if one qualifies 9th and the other qualifies 10th.

It works well enough, I think it would overcomplicate things to start saying you can't compete in Q3 and bump another car in instead, as there are so many possible situations to handle, all of which are very easy to calculate when you just let them qualify normally then add the penalty at the end.

Very occasionally you'll get a situation where a car has no reason to qualify quickly and can give their teammate a tow, but there's been plenty of occasions where teams have just sacrificed their number 2 driver to do that anyway, so I don't think it's a big deal.

They already introduced race length fuel tanks a good few years before the hybrid formula, and the hybrid ones were actually smaller because they had to carry less fuel.

There are some increases due to safety but some of that comes back to the hybrid too. The hybrid power units are more than 50% heavier than the previous engines. This extra weight needs to be dragged around corners. In the first years they were dramatically slower than what came before and even slower than GP2 in some cases. So in order to drag all that weight around at a more respectable speed, they increased the size of the car to allow for more aero, and a bigger chassis means more weight. They also increased the size of the tyres to increase mechanical grip to allow for all that extra weight. And bigger tyres means more weight. And a heavier car means larger forces in an accident, which means stronger impact structures, which means more weight.

So the cars got heavier because of the power units, and that had multiple knock on effects that also added yet more weight, in addition to making the cars wider and longer. Some safety advances would have happened regardless, like the halo which weighs 7kg, but they're a fraction of the close to 200kg increase overall.

The result is cars that are still fast due to all the aero and mechanical grip that allows them to maintain high mid-corner speeds, but they are absolutely huge which makes side to side racing harder, and are significantly less nimble which is also less desirable for racing.

Not that the early 2000s V10s were a dream for racing, dirty air was a major problem and there was no DRS to help out. But just watching one of those cars being wrangled around a track can be as exciting as a whole race in the modern era. Marrying their lightness, their sound and their nimbleness to the current ground effect aero concept could be absolutely spectacular, and would also likely be the fastest F1 cars ever made.

I will be hungry for some rain at Hungary.

I Know Ricard was hard to watch , but rain shouldn't be the fix ...even though it regularly seems to be the fix 😁

Forecast at the moment :

You’ll need to translate it

Details from The Race:

Huge risk for RB to take you would imagine. I guess they didn't have much confidence in their own ability to develop the Honda PU.

It’s an easy thing for RB to do. Porsche are well tested in LMP so that should transfer over to F1, and then couple that with RB and new engine formula, can’t lose really.

RB will be developing their engines until the new regs anyway, so plenty of confidence.

Honda are continuing to develop the PU (in the limited ways they can) and the Porsche engines won't be coming along until 2026 when they will be built from scratch to new regs alongside RBPT which is obviously what this tie up is going towards. I've no idea what you are trying to get at with that comment....

What is it you were expecting RB to develop for Honda exactly?

Wasn’t Honda just there in an advisory capacity?

Not sure how I feel about Porsche joining F1. And Audi taking a steak in Sauber. Its great there’s more variety but leaves a sour taste in the mouth for some reason

Seb Vettel just announced on his new Instagram that he's retiring at the end of this year

Let the silly season begin. Not a bad seat open in Aston Martin now.

He'll be missed...