I’ve driven pickup races online which were much more sedate than today’s idiocy-several people take each other out on the 1st lap, and then some moron leaves the pits with his fuel hose still attached, spewing flames everywhere.
not typical. But also not very unusual.
It’s quite common for crashes at the start, but driving off with the fuel line still attached is not very common.
But that ain’t the driver’s fault. The driver is trained to rely on the pit-crew to tell him he’s ok to go. He is NOT trained to be looking in his mirror to see if the fuel is still attached,.
I found F-1 races online after seeing how the Top Gear guys were into them, but I just can’t be bothered to watch even the 1 hour highlight videos. First of all, the teams run identical cars so I can’t tell their drivers apart. Then, after the first lap, there are seemingly at most 4 lead changes in a race that runs about 1.5 hours. It’s very hard to pass on those tracks, and the announcers admit that at Monaco it’s very hard. It’s as if baseball teams were given three more fielders after the first inning, so that whatever happened at first was likely to be the only scoring for the rest of the game.
Can you convince me otherwise?
Probably not. A typical F1 race is something that you have to pay very close attention to in order to appreciate the strategies involved. On track overtaking is almost vanishingly rare, and usually only happens when one driver makes a mistake. Races that happen in the wet, like the Brazilian Grand Prix are always “interesting”, if not always a great spectacle of motor racing skill. One instance of slow to develop strategies that you often get in F1 happened this year in the Japanese Grand Prix where Jarno Trulli spent most of the race in 3rd, extracting tenth of second by tenth of second from Lewis Hamilton in 2nd. He was able to pass Hamilton in the pits after the final pit stop of the race. It helps to have a good announcing team that point out the evolving strategies as the race develops. Meanwhile Vettel was unassailed in the lead for the entire race. Boring? Well, if that’s boring to you, you aren’t going to be much of an F1 fan.
No, you basically love it or don’t - although the sheer difficulty of overtaking in F1 generally makes up for itself when you actually see somebody overtake, because it tends to be the sort of move that requires the balls of a concrete elephant and the reflexes of a ninja on angel dust.
You get used to the identical-paint-scheme thing. After a short time you get to be used to identifying the drivers by their helmets. This was a lot easier back in the day, though because drivers had more distinctive helmet liveries. David Coulthard’s helmet was just a big St. Andrew’s Cross; Damon Hill’s was a bunch of oar blades on a black background.
