I bet Vettel would not have tried that with Hamilton or Schumacher, its obvious what would have happened, he simply thought Webber would fold and got a nasty shock.
Seems to me that Vettel put himself in position where he was relying on Webber to brake and give him the room, but in almost any form of motor sport, when someone is coming inside you, then you make them take the corners tight so that they overshoot and you can get better drive out of the corner.
I also wonder if it was a bit of Vettel trying to intimidate Webber by forcing him to brake and give way, make himself the top dog. One thing is sure, Vettel has to realise he is not the only playing in Redbull racing, and he is not necessarily number one either.
From the POV of the championship, I expect that Webber is quietly pleased. Sure he didn’t win the race, but his main rival scored zero points, and he’s now 15 points ahead.
I’ve never seen a GP in Canada before yesterday’s - does that track always eat tires like that? Just when I didn’t think the SpeedTV guys could say ANY MORE about tires during a race, along comes the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve. It seemed like everyone was struggling through that race.
Definitely the best race this year. It’s really sad to watch just how far Michael Schumacher has fallen. I used to forgive his dirty tricks when his driving ability was in its prime, but noe, all he has left is dirty tricks. Time for him to go.
It’s pretty common in just about all forms of motor racing, it’s why they change tires all the time. In Formula 1, or any track that isn’t an oval, there’s one optimal racing line through each corner, so rubber gets pushed off that line. It’s a lot less noticeable in NASCAR as drivers use a lot more of the track, so the rubber is more evenly distributed.
I think the tire-eating is more pronounced this year because they eliminated refueling. The cars must start the race with their entire fuel load onboard, and that load weighs over 300 lbs. In the past even cars doing a one-stop strategy would only have to load half of the race fuel, so they would be at least 150 lbs lighter.
Notice how fast the tires wore out at the beginning of the race, but the drivers were able to get many more laps out of one set near the end.
At least, that’s my take on why the tires degraded more than in the past.
Sort of a clusterfuck of a race today, what with the safety car and related shenanigans. Absolutely terrifying wreck that brought all that on - the on-board camera was amazing. Every time I see an F1 car horrifically wreck and the driver just tosses out his steering wheel and climbs out, I’m impressed. Fantastic engineering.
I was also sort of impressed with Sauber’s call on Kobayashi and how he handled his race. Watching him today, I thought, “Well, you’ve just saved your job, mate.”
And I know Schumacher got reamed by a bad strategy call, but he didn’t qualify well again to start. Is his name such a powerful draw that Mercedes will keep him running the whole season, even if he’s not performing well? At what point would you make the call to ditch the name for some more points?
The really dodgy moment was the car hitting the ground upside down. A failure of the rollbar would have ripped Webber’s head off. Once the car was back right-side up; well they’ve been building cars to withstand that sort of impact for a long time.
The medium tyres lasted really well. Changing with a few laps to go gave him the chance to use the fresh grip to make up places. Good call.
They nearly squeaked another place; Barichello, after his 5 second penalty, was less than 1 second ahead of Kobayashi.
Here’s the question; if they dumped him now, would they get more points?
I don’t think so. Look at what happened to Ferrari last year. Once Massa went out, their test driver (who knew the car) was simply not up to snuff. They tried replacing him with Fisichella, but he couldn’t get to grips with the car.
Who could Mercedes recruit now to do better than Schumacher would? Personally I think any replacement would take too long to get up to speed.
They’ve got Nick Heidfeld as their third/test driver. Presumably he should know the car, and while he wouldn’t qualify for the extra testing session to get him up to speed, they can start putting him in the car on Fridays instead of Schumacher. I don’t know much about Heidfeld though - I only started following F1 last year, and he was stuck in the BMW which wasn’t really a top car. I bet he could at least reliably place the Mercedes higher in Q2 than Schumacher has done recently.
Anyone watch the recent race on the Korean circuit? We were there this weekend and managed to get great seats (they failed to get a proper safety inspection for the cheaper stands so everyone got bumped up to the more expensive seats - people who paid full price were not happy). CRAZY race, drivers spinning off and crashing everywhere. Poor Red Bull.
I’m very jealous. The race was very entertaining though. Particularly Kobayashi. Sutil spent most of this race trying to emulate Vettel’s last race. But in general I loved the cars spinning off - great recovery by Button - going off and getting back on. That’s so much better than them just crashing out.
How does being there compare with watching it on TV?
I wonder if Hamilton might have won if he’d come in for a tyre change?
It’s definitely more exciting being there - I’m not really an F1 fan, got dragged along by my boyfriend, but even I got caught up in the excitement of the race once it got going. It was a very chaotic day even before the race started, though - there’s only one road in and out of the circuit so traffic was backed up for miles. My boyfriend and the other friend we were with forced me to get off the bus with them and trek across a muddy field so we could get there in time to get a good seat (in hindsight it was a wise move, but at the time I was not a happy camper!).
There were a lot of people angry with the seating arrangements (it turns out that the local authorities had GIVEN AWAY a bunch of tickets for FREE because they were afraid the turnout would be crappy and a stadium with empty seats would be an embarrassment for them). Tempers were running high for quite a few, although most people sat there cheerfully enduring the chaos and the rain until the race. But then the race got delayed and then they spend forever behind the stupid safety car and it’s MUCH more frustrating when you’re actually there because you can feel everyone’s impatience for the race to just bloody start already! And I saw on Twitter that Webber was complaining how dangerous the track was and how they should just call the whole thing off. Grrrrr.
Yeah, but once the race got started it was all good. We didn’t get to see any of the crashes firsthand from our seats, although we did see quite a few of the cars skid off track.
Anyway, if we go next year we are taking the motorbike and some wellies.
I watched the race live, which meant I woke up at 6:30am (for a 7am start time.) Frustrating here too.
I wouldn’t be too angry with Mark Webber, though. Drivers opinions on whether the race should be started (or shortened) tended to be governed more by what they had to lose than anything else.
Mark Webber led the drivers championship by about half a win (you get 25 points from winning, and he had a 14 point lead). If the race had not run, he’d still be in the lead. As it is, he trails Fernando Alonso by 11. After his race ended he admitted that conditions were perfectly ok for racing.
The driver who really wanted the race to start was Lewis Hamilton, because no points awarded would mean that his chance of winning had just collapsed. When it did start, he lost his 4th place on the third corner, and only regained it when Webber took Nico Rosberg off the track in his spin.
Martin Brundle (an ex-F1 driver now a commentator for the BBC) said before the race that he would have had the race start regularly, not under the safety car, but in post-race coverage that he had been wrong, and starting under the safety car had been the right decision.
I missed the last half of the race because my Tivo stopped after 2 hours and 40 minutes. The rain delay caused me to miss Vettel’s crashing out, though I did make it far enough in to see Webber’s hopes take a bad blow.
Doing some quick arithmetic, I can see that if the four drivers ahead of him have bad races in Brazil and Abu Dhabi, Button can still defend his title! It’s probably not worth the effort of crossing my fingers though…
To beat them all, Button must win both races. And Alonso must score not more than 8 points. One podium by Alonso and Button is out. Realistically, Button’s had it. Given what he said after the Korean GP, though, he might well try and help Lewis, perhaps by taking out Alonso or Webber.
Listening to Hamilton’s on board radio was hilarious. “Yeah, it’s great! Lets go! Lets drop the flag! Things are fine!” You’d think conditions were 70 degrees and sunny how he was describing it.
Nitpick: Vettel blew an engine instead of crashing.
Interlagos should be interesting. At only 2.6 miles it would seem to fit Red Bull’s cornering more than Ferrari or McLaren’s top end. Qualifying could be huge.
I fell asleep during the rain delay while watching it live, but had it recording. I had added a 30 minute extension, but right before I decided to just go bed I set it to record the following 1 hour program (Drifting :rolleyes:).
Anyway, the 30 minute extension went halfway thru the Drifting, so I only had 30 more minutes in addition to the extension.
That got me right to the very end of the race, but no podium or interviews.
Only if he uses a brand new engine. If he uses one of the engines that has already had a couple of races on it, then no penalty.
From what I gather, the engines are made to last about 3 qualifying/race lengths, but they usually only run them for 2 race weekends. So you can pick a used engine that’s still got some life left in it and no penalty.
Webber had just installed his (I think) last new engine for Korea. If it wasn’t damaged in his crash, it’ll probably have enough life left to finish the season.
But in general I loved the cars spinning off - great recovery by Button - going off and getting back on. That’s so much better than them just crashing out.