F1 2022 thread - see post 1 for rules

Not sure Toto is just a front man. Does he not own 30% of Mercedes F1?

Sorry , but your whole point makes no sense.

you said " They have no principles, they just put forward the company line about whatever the topic is"

But Toto, who I have no regard for either, is putting forward his own line because he is the major decision maker in the company. I accept that Horner's position is different

You may see him as just a mouth piece but he is far from it being a third share owner of the team.

He puts out this great tight team image and no blame culture etc but when the sh1t hit the fan last year, the mask slipped and we saw the real Toto..... A whinger who would stop at nothing to get his way.

You can do that without coming across as a total prick as that can only be damaging to a team whose whole purpose is to push the Mercedes brand.

Who wants to be associated with a dickheads team.

Ross Brawn was never a dickhead yet built success after success.

Stefano domenicali likewise and has got to the top of the sport.

Don't be a smart arse. I'm not trying to say I'd do it better than him. I gave you examples of leaders in F1 that have done it all without being or acting the dickhead.

You can use 'advocating' as many times as you like in your post but that doesn't make it any better. Advocating and all the while turning customers away from your brand is abit mixed up.

Sure, he didn't support his team with much decorum, but it was his job to back his team to get the outcome they wanted.

Not were why I need to avoid the term advocating. It best describes his job when speaking to us through the media. Whatever he says to us has notjingnto do with the truth or higher principles. It's just getting the message the team wants us to know. They're all the same.

One more year at Haas is about as much as he deserves. I read a lot of drivel from German ex-drivers giving him a bit of PR but hes not up to it really. He isnt better than Magnussen, who in turn isn't a world beater either. That crop of GP2 drivers (Tsunoda, Mazepin, Schumacher) are a mediocre bunch and you could argue none of them deserve to be in F1 past this season.

Mick has been performing alright - he's in only his second year in F1 and up against a very experienced and accomplished driver who's driving superbly. I think people have dramatically overstated how good the Haas is this year too, it's not the absolute back of the grid anymore but it's still no better than lower midfield, ahead of only Aston Martin and Williams. It's not really a car that should be scoring points regularly, yet Mick has still been racing with the likes of Mercedes on occasion who have a vastly superior car.

It should be pretty obvious from last season that Mick is not remotely in the same category as Mazepin who you've just chucked him in with. Is he a top tier driver like Leclerc or Verstappen? Certainly not. But he's done as well as guys like Russell or Sainz did in their early careers at lower grid teams and has as much potential as at least half the current grid. In the right car drivers like that can still win championships as we have seen many times, not everyone coming into the sport can be a Verstappen or Alonso level talent.

Same goes for Tsunoda - he's a lot closer to Gasly this year now that he has some experience under his belt but the car has gone backwards so it's gone unnoticed. The fact that an organisation as competitive and with as deep a roster as Red Bull has decided to keep him on says a lot about his potential.

I wouldn't call winning the nurburgring 24 dabbling, nor is competing in the GT championship

This 'my dad is better than your dad' bullshit is so pendantic

So the rules for the new engines are final. No more MGU-H so the sound should be very much improved over what we have now.

More MGU-K power and a lower fuel rate won't help the noise.

Appeasing to engine manufacturers again unfortunately. A lightweight V8 run on bio-fuels is what most fans would want to have.

It's entirely as predicted but still pretty disappointing. Removal of the MGU-H should be an improvement at least, and there should be a lot of torque with the increased electric output.

But they've stuck with a lot of stuff where the previous purported reason for it to exist is no longer valid.

The move to sustainable carbon neutral synthetic fuel completely negates the need for any of the hybrid systems - this was the point Vettel aimed to prove running the old Williams on carbon neutral fuel a few races ago. Now I realise there's a bit of creative accounting going on where the fuel will produce tailpipe emissions but they capture carbon during the manufacture process to get to net zero, but it's an absolute tiny drop in the ocean compared to transport emissions.

If you transport a 800+kg hybrid car tens of thousands of miles around the world on trucks, ships and aeroplanes so it can use half as much fuel for 200 miles on a Sunday, that's vastly more damaging to the environment than bringing a far racier and more cost efficient 500kg V10 ICE around the world so it can use twice as much fuel for that final 0.1% of distance travelled under its own power. And with synthetic fuel that's transferable to ICE cars on the road while full BEVs are increasingly surpassing hybrids in the real world, the case for sticking with hybrid tech is even more nonsensical.

Aside from that, I don't see the point of limiting the number of PUs if there's a budget cap now. If a team can use 15 engines in their budget or 3 that should be up to them, and bad reliability is its own punishment without doubling up on it. I hope we don't end up with the VAG engine being in a Honda situation for the first year or two without having that freedom to experiment. And there's just no logical reason for it - there's no cap on the number of wings or suspension assemblies or anything else and they manage fine, so why should the PUs be treated any differently now that there's a budget cap.

It feels like the new rules were designed to give up just enough ground to allow VAG to enter with their LMP1 experience while still maintaining huge barriers to entry for most other manufacturers or independent engine suppliers.

It's not just about the sound, though it was absolutely spectacular compared to what we have now. More important is the size, lightness and nimbleness of the cars. And you can cherrypick certain years in the early 2000s where dirty air was at the absolute max, no DRS existed, and a rare combination of greatest car and driver completely killed off competition, but you can equally look at years like 2012 when we had lightweight cars, a competitive grid, and DRS, and the quality of the racing was an order of magnitude better than the decade that followed.

And you just have to look at the reactions when Alonso drove his R25 a couple of years ago to see how much more spectacular the cars once were. Just seeing that car lapping the track on its own was more exciting than the average race had been for the previous few seasons.

The current cars do compensate for the fact that they're oversized barges with the ground effect aero which is fantastic for racing, and DRS that also helps massively, but the power units certainly hold them back. If you combined the current aero concept with more racing focused pure engines you'd have a fantastic formula.

I don't know how they work the figures. It's all about of a joke really with the big teams using side businesses to take costs away from F1.

Redbull for example doing a hypercar program with an insane price tag for the car so they won't sell many but it allows them to run hundreds of engineers outside the F1 team working on aero, suspension systems etc.

Spa next weekend. Yay!!