F1 2023 thread

True, but that doesn’t apply to human logistics. Under cost cap the teams can only have so many human resources who have to travel, the drivers themselves are only replaceable in extraordinary circumstances, plus people like Tom Clarkson who moderates the press conference, David Croft who commentates every single race on site the race director, the medical team, safety car driver etc. Only one of each of those people.

Heads up to the F1 TV App.

Linked mine to the TV box and great UI experience with international feed commentators of Alex Jacques and Jolyon Palmer. Will Buxton and more.

Also tape of delay option, aka when you are 30 min late to a race start you can start from beginning.

I really hope the Sky contract will in future allow that here too, until then you will need to use VPN to signup.

They raised the ride height this year and teams have found various tricks which has undone some of the good work for last year's cars. There was a 30% increase in overtaking last year. This year so far it's dropped back down to where it was previously, but we've still got quite a small amount of data after 4 races.

Azerbaijan had some mitigating factors in that they shortened the DRS since last year which was always going to make overtaking harder, and the safety car came out essentially right in the middle of the one stop pit window so everybody pit then and there was no variation in strategy beyond the one or two cars who lost out by pitting early, who did make overtakes and find their way back up. You also had the guys who started from the pit lane running long, who specifically went with a low downforce setup making themselves impossible to overtake creating a train - this situation was really a side effect of the weekend format and parc ferme rules for the sprint race.

In general though Baku always goes one of two ways - either there are some crashes, safety cars and red flags that cause chaos, or very little happens. It is not a track that generates typical close racing or strategic battles and not a good predictor of how other races at more traditional circuits will go.

I think the current generation of Pirelli tyres need to be looked at though. They don't wear much over distance and could basically do the entire race on one set which kills any opportunity for strategy, while at the same time they're extremely sensitive to temperature changes so they can't run close behind other cars without losing grip nor do they allow for hard pushing. Ideally you really want tyres that do the exact opposite.

That nonsense would put me off the sport more than a team developing within the regs without a head start on everyone.

Hamilton is the same when he isn't winning

This was the full quote from Wolff

In summary, Merc would just throw the kitchen sink at the issues they had in the past.

From the article linked above "Entertainment trade publication The Hollywood Reporter says that the Apple Studios film will be directed by Top Gun: Maverick's Joseph Kosinski and produced by Top Gun's Jerry Bruckheimer". The top gun movie didn't interest me so I haven't seen it.

It's a movie. It doesn't have to be realistic to be entertaining. Sounds but bad movie are sometimes good.

I wait until it comes straight to video.

Finding out they are all out and "booking" it for the week after.

Yeah it looks like the RB is so comprehensively faster than any of the other cars I would imagine most races will be 1-2s for them. It’s very much like Mercedes a couple of years ago except Checo looks like he’ll be more consistent than Bottas was.

Horner keeps talking about other teams upgrading but it’s really difficult to see any other team essentially finding the 1 second a lap they’ll need to match the current RB, but likely they’d need more than that presuming RBs upgrades work as expected.

McLaren are a mess. I know they have plenty of new things coming down the line like the new wind tunnel but they seem like they really don’t understand their car at all. I would imagine Norris will be keeping an eye on seats opening up elsewhere.

Mercedes and Ferrari are in similar boats, flashes of pace followed by disappointment.

Hopefully someone gets their act together or it could be another long stretch of 1 driver winning the championship with several races to spare.

I must say that Alex Albon has been doing well for Williams quietly

Another fairly processional race. A lot of these circuits dont seem to have overtake opportunities outside of DRS. If I hear the term DRS train one more time. I think they have to start limiting DRS to specific windows during the race, every 10 laps for 2/3 laps maybe

Is it time for DRS to be banned. I certainly think so. It should either be binned this year from after the Summer break or banned from next year. They need to make F1 more exciting. We just had another dull race and DRS does not make it any more exciting g in fact it takes from it because it makes it far to easy for someone in a faster car like Max to overtake everyone else abd they have no way of defending from it.