Are the races available on the app, too? Can you watch them any time, or only live?
F1 and IndyCar are among the only reasons I still hold on to my cable subscription. I could get almost everything else I want to watch without it, and save about $150/month.
Liberty has announced that they will have a full streaming service set up next year. I haven’t seen any details yet, but I know they’ve said it will be available in any country that doesn’t have an existing exclusive TV deal (which is why NBC isn’t going to cover F1 next year, and coverage will move to ESPN, the new deal Liberty is offering isn’t exclusive).
IndyCar has been posting full races to YouTube a few days after the race for a while now.
Yes, the races are available anytime (within a few weeks or so, anyway). It’s how I watch em, usually Sunday night after the race. But as mentioned above, it’s all going to change next season.
I know we (deservedly) give Buxton a lot of crap here but I literally laughed out loud during qualifying when Buxton asked Grosjean how he felt about the only slower car than his on the grid being the car that didn’t have an engine and Grosjean pretended to walk away.
Spoiler because while the race is done, it’s not broadcast on UK TV until late tonight.
And Hamilton wins the Driver’s Championship. Cracking recovery drive by Vettel, though.
I’ll spoiler my comments but to be honest, if you are an F1 fan and you decide to look into an F1 thread before you’ve watched the race then you probably deserve all you get…still…
Well deserved championship for Lewis. Looking at how the relative times played out with Verstappen, Bottas and Raikkonen, even without a collision on the first lap I don’t think it was ever in doubt. The ferrari and Red Bull were about 3 tenths quicker and the worst Hamilton was going to do was fourth. Fair result from the stewards regarding that clash. Hamilton had judged it nicely and was keeping out of the way but the initial collision from Vettel on Verstappen unsettled him and him slid off into Hamilton. Racing incident and Hamilton was just desperately unlucky. Otherwise he just tucks up behind Verstappen and Vettel and runs through to an easy podium, a fair enough result on a track that they knew they’d struggle on somewhat.
Geez, those announcers were falling over themselves trying to come up with anything worthwhile to say to try to make that interesting.
And they failed. We all knew well before the lights went out what was going to happen.
Kimi: 90th podium. 6th on the list. I had no idea it was that many.
A surprising points day for Haas, mostly as a result of their engineers cleverly removing the “halt and catch fire” command from the engine settings.
Really? Vettel carving his way through the field was magnificent.
Did you really predict what happened to Hamilton and Vettel?
Ted Kravitz showed a picture of damage to Hamilton’s diffuser caused by the puncture, suggesting that was why he didn’t carve through the field in the same manner as Vettel. Martin Brundle suggested that Mercedes designed the car to run at the front of the pack and it just doesn’t do well in traffic. I don’t know if I buy that’s in any way intentional, but it does seem to be the case that the Ferraris and Red Bulls can get a lot closer to make overtakes happen. Next year should be interesting, I can see Mercedes falling of a cliff a bit if this turns out to be the case. Qualify P3/P4 and they might not be able to recover.
That’s my understanding, The Merc following closely just can’t handle the dirty air as well as the Ferrari and Red Bull. This would be exaggerated on a Mexico track that didn’t suit them anyway and by the damaged diffuser. The* undamaged* Merc was a good few tenths off the Ferrari in clean air so not surprising that Vettel did better cutting through the pack, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
That said, I suspect that Mercedes will be concentrating on that specific issue over the close-season and wouldn’t put it past them to get a handle on it.
Also, I did enjoy the wheel-to-wheel stuff between Hamilton and Alonso at the end. Wouldn’t it be great to have him back up with the big boys next year?
Congratulations, Lewis! A well-deserved championship. Regardless of Ferrari’s late-season buffoonery, Hamilton has simply been on fire since the summer break and I don’t think there was much chance of him losing this title (short of a couple of retirements) regardless of what Ferrari was doing.
My wife prefers Vettel because she thinks Hamilton is a boring driver - he doesn’t take enough chances on overtakes, etc. - and she doesn’t like his canned interview answers (I have to admit I’m getting sick of “the [whichever country they’re in] fans are probably the best in the world!”) But she definitely had to revise her assessment of him as boring when he came out of turn 2 on the outside of three cars abreast. I, on the other hand, was yelling at the screen for him to drive conservatively. Of all the times to get hyper-aggressive…
I’m not sure the accident was clearly a racing incident, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the initial wing damage from Verstappen was what caused Vettel to run wide into Hamilton. Had he been trying to take Hamilton out - and it has to be said this was an awfully convenient time to cause a puncture - he would have avoided hitting Verstappen first and thus possibly kept enough wing to continue the race.
Brundle’s theory does make some sense; Lewis has seemed to have trouble moving up from the back of the field relative to Vettel and Ricciardo several times over the last two years.
Still, I don’t think that was the problem in Mexico. He was having trouble catching up with Sainz from dead last even when he was 2-3 seconds back. We’ve seen that quite a few times when Hamilton’s car has been damaged in a collision.
It does seem like the Mercedes just doesn’t have any mechanical grip. It’s clearly more aero-sensitive than the other cars, which is odd since it doesn’t have as much downforce. I remember Vettel losing a wing endplate in Canada a couple of years back and being able to lap as quickly afterwards as he did before. Riccardo lost half a bargeboard and one of the baffles on the sidepod in Russian in… 2015ish, and finished on the podium.
My theory is that the 2021 rule changes are going to severely limit wing sizes given that the current rules have made it even harder to overtake, and that doesn’t bode well for Mercedes.
Race and championship were over at the first corner. While it was fun to watch Vettel carve away, there really was nothing much to talk about.
Reported for spaminess.
They need to shit-can the post-qualifying interview clusterfuck and just have the guys sit in the room, instead of chasing them around the garage and the pit lane. Sad!
Should be fun to watch Lewis storm through the field tomorrow. Might get second or third after Verstappen takes out the Ferraris. 
The only way I can explain the pronounced change in Hamilton this year is … meditation. Good for him if accurate.
I got a kick out of the announcers piling heaps of praise on Brazil and Sao Paulo in the pre-race show. Stark contrast to yesterdays reporting of hold-ups at gun-point. 
I wonder if the F1 powers that be or the promotors of this race had a little talk with these guys last night?
What profound change? Only thing different about Lewis is the absence of a Rosberg-shaped thorn in his ass.
Sucked to be Sainz today…
Well, that was pretty boring. Another season in the books, and a boring few months with nothing to watch. Not even boring races. 
I’d rather be Sainz today than me tomorrow.
Formula E does start next week, if you need an open-wheel fix.