Even I get lucky once in a while! 
The race director goofed and copied and pasted last year’s Monaco driver briefing notes into this year’s briefing - so the rule change that no longer permits a car to have any portion of a wheel across the pit line wasn’t mentioned. Instead, last year’s language that allowed a car to have anything less than a complete wheel across the line was kept in, so the stewards decided that Red Bull couldn’t be held accountable (though it’s not clear if they actually relied on the briefing notes).
Interesting start to Baku, though it looked like the early pit may have been good for Leclerc. Ultimately Ferrari lacked reliability, Mercedes lacked speed, and Red Bull only needed to race to keep the tires warm.
I can’t decide if Vettel’s excursion into the run off was skill or luck, but it was amazing either way.
Oh, and my back hurt watching Hamilton exit his car.
Hamilton worked hard for that 4th.
Dents my vibe to see Ferraris electing the Pope.
I’ve always thought that Baku more interesting than Monaco, what with all the chaos on the former and cars being unable to pass on the latter. It was different this year. Monaco had the cars following closely and passing each other (or in some instances being unable to pass). On the Baku circuit, all chaos happened during practice and qualifying. The only interesting thing that happened on the race itself was Ferrari’s double DNF.
That’s how Italians do.
Checo is going to get Lyme disease 
I don’t know who’s making the strategy calls for Haas, but I could do a better job. Magnussen had to pit early to fix some damage, so later in the race he was on the oldest tires in the field. With 20 laps to go, there was a safety car. Obviously, they’ll bring him in for fresh tires. They didn’t. He was 12th out of 17 when the race restarted. Within 5 laps, he was running last.
Can anyone explain this; do they get a rebate for every tire they don’t use, or something?
I must be broken. Despite all the action, safety cars and goings on, I was not really being entertained by that race.
I thought it was a decent race as there was always something happening. Expectations were set low however - thought Max was going to drive up the road and cruise to victory but he had to fight off Sainz so we even got a bit of fun at the front.
Teams seemed extremely concerned about degradation on the mediums, although plenty of drivers went to 20 laps on theirs. KMag didn’t have any more hards so they would have had to put him on mediums. He had one set left but I don’t know if they were used. He was out of the points anyway so maybe they figured gambling for track position on a day where it was difficult to pass even with DRS was better than gambling that the mediums wouldn’t fall off a cliff at the end.
His hard tires were already spent; he was passed by everyone within five laps of the race going green. A new set of mediums couldn’t possibly have been any worse.
In retrospect, it was clearly the wrong call. To reiterate though, they were already out of the points. Finishing 17th instead of 12th didn’t really hurt them. He was 14th before the safety car, 13th I guess once Yuki crashed out. Keeping him out gave him track position over Stroll, so that was a plus.
At that point in the race the only person who’d done more than 40 laps on the hards was Bottas, and there was no appreciable drop off in his lap times. To be fair, there wasn’t much drop off in folks who had done 20 laps on the mediums, but maybe they were seeing something in the take-offs that weren’t reflected in the lap times.
Vettel also did more than 40 laps on the hards but it was at the end of the race and they wouldn’t have had that data available. He also didn’t see much of a drop off in lap times.
What became apparent after the restart was 1) KMag’s lap times fell off a cliff and took a few laps to come back to where they were previously, indicating that cold hards were the wrong choice, and 2) other mid-field teams who stopped for mediums saw an immediate improvement in lap times, even if they were coming from mediums, indicating that the track had evolved to a point where the mediums finally started working (they weren’t better than the hards really until that last stint). So in retrospect keeping him out was the wrong call, but I don’t think Haas had enough data to know that at the time, and they weren’t gonna get points anyway, so it didn’t matter.
I knew it was the wrong call at the time. Haas has been leaving their tires on too long all season, and dropping through the field as a result. I was waiting for it to happen again. When the safety car came out with 20 laps left, I thought they finally had a bit of luck and could put on fresh tires without losing too much time. I was stunned when they didn’t bring Magnussen in. You’re right, they were not in the points at the time. At this rate, they never will be.
I could have called a better race.
I agree that pitting him was not an obvious call absent a safety car. But the teams all know that it’s really hard to get old tyres back up to temperature after a safety car period, because there’s less bulk to absorb heat. Anyone who didn’t know that certainly learned it after watching Hamilton get screwed at the end of last season. So when everyone else is pitting under a safety car, you have to do it unless you already have newish tyres on.
So, I don’t know if some other existing thread is more appropriate, but this one seems the most relevant one to grab actual F1 fans:
What do people think about the Hamilton/Piquet thing? Especially curious about opinions on Verstappen defending Piquet (well, he is his FIL)
And the Ecclestone/Putin thing? Ecclestone’s always been a bigoted dick, but he also was F1 management for so long.
I don’t really need any more reasons to dislike Verstappen, but we’ll throw this on the pile. The whole thing with Kelly and Max is pretty… well I guess we’d call it unconventional if they weren’t celebrities, but it’s pretty fucked up – Kelly’s obsession with F1 drivers and living a certain lifestyle, Max’s seeming ambivalence for Daniil’s feelings. RBR seems like a toxic place to work based on how many drivers have been chewed up and spit out by that machine, with the relationship between Christian and Max being exhibit A. Even though a lot of the “we race as one” jingoism rings like hollow corporatism, Max has never really seemed interested in even playing along, and is definitely not on board with Lewis’ activism like some of the other drivers. His apologies for the mongol incident were weak.
I dunno, throw this on the pile. I didn’t watch F1 in the Nelson Piquet days so I know nothing about him.
I think it is just another in a long line of dickish things that Nelson Piquet has done and said over the years. He made veiled accusations of homosexuality against Ayrton Senna, and made fun of Nigel’s Mansell and his wife for no real reason. There’s a reason why he couldn’t get a drive at a top team in the second half of his career despite having three titles.
It seems that the Brazilian Portuguese term he used is not directly equivalent to the n-word in English, though the Brazilians who have discussed it on F1 forums have noted it is used in many of the same ways - as a disparaging term for blacks, as an in-group identifier for friends, etc. However, it is clear that it was not being used in anything other than an offensive sense, and it’s important to note that a Brazilian newspaper publicized the whole thing. (Lots of F1 fans, eager for any chance to moan about Hamilton’s fame, are claiming the British press brought up the story to add spice to British GP weekend.)
I think Verstappen is tone-deaf at best, but I don’t blame him for that. His dad was a shithead, he was brought up in a pressure cooker, and he’s been expected to deal with the global media like an adult since he was 16. He’s about as normal as a person who grows up like that can be. He should really shut up about this sort of thing, but the Dutch press will hound him endlessly for comments about everything.
I’m not sure I would have banned Piquet from the paddock, though I would have made him go back and apologize properly. But I don’t think he adds anything to the paddock nowadays anyway, so fuck him.
Ecclestone is senile. Other than his bank account and historical ties to F1, he might as well be a drunk yelling at trees in Hyde Park.