Is anyone else here following Formula One?
The Monaco Grand Prix is tomorrow. Qualifying highlights here. My money (literally) is on Vettel, Bottas, and Hamilton. Longer odds but a bigger payoff on Vettel (who did take first at Monaco in 2017).
There will be a memorial for recently deceased Niki Lauda as well.
Monaco is usually a boring race. Little more than a parade.
This one was far from boring for me, I was on the edge of my seat during the last 10 laps praying for Hamilton to fuck up, with anticipation growing each time he radioed in about his tires, with each message more dire than the last. Verstappen having incurred a five-second penalty, I was poised to make quite a bit of money on Vettel. In the end, Hamilton made it after all, and the safety bet that I placed on him helped me recoup most of my money.
I think I’ve missed 2 races in the last 40 years.
Kinda fucks up a lot vacations.
Watching the Indy 500 while I wait for the F1 race to start.
American racing is so boring! What is America’s weird obsession with oval tracks?
It must be ridiculously fun to drive the safety car.
There’s nothing weird about it. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was the prototypical racetrack and was intended to produce a race that was a pure demonstration of speed. NASCAR started out the same way on Daytona Beach. It simply evolved to be the dominant type of racing here. There are road courses all over the US, and in fact IndyCar runs more than half their schedule on road courses.
Anyway, Monaco was actually pretty good. That said, this year started out with so much promise of competition and is now looking like nothing so much as McLaren’s 1988 season. The only way Mercedes is going to lose is if Lewis and Bottas take each other out.
It was incredibly tense.
Hamilton’s tyres were utterly wrecked at the end and he could barely wrestle it round the Mirabeau complex. He did very well to keep Verstappen behind him and limit him to one hopeful lunge near the end but at least he pulled out of that dive before it all went tits-up.
In one other respect he was massively lucky not to get a bigger penalty for the unsafe release. Sure the team are responsible for giving him the nod but he knew fine well that he was squeezing Bottas who had no-where to go. I think we see it too often and as the pit is the area with lots of unprotected bodies a 5 second penalty seems very soft indeed. Cars going two-abreast down the pit lane seems insane. I’d change so that if there is not a clear gap for you to slot into a single file then you are at fault and it is a 10 second stop/go.
Not sure we learned too much from the race regarding the actual pace of the various teams as Monaco is something of a leveller. Leclerc had something of desperate air about him and you can’t blame him for having a go but…not his finest hour.
Vettel was neither here nor there and Bottas had his race ruined by Red Bull and the poor tyre choice.
I guess it did confirm, again, that Hamilton is still the class of the field. Fast when he has to be, patient when situations demand it, traffic doesn’t faze him, he revels in the wet and he’s as fair and honest a competitor that I’ve ever seen on track. He’s even nailing the starts now.
The race was tense, but the fact that you can’t overtake with a car that seemed to be a couple seconds faster per lap, does say something about track/ability to race. In essence the only way to get past is to hope for a mistake by the guy in front of you. You could even say Vettel and Bottas were smarter: they knew there was no way to overtake, so they just brought the car home without trying. Verstappen was taking a risk by following so close and the single attempt at a pass wasn’t even close.
Before the unsafe release I was wondering about Bottas though. Under the safety car he was bunching everyone up by going sooo slow. They obviously couldn’t overtake and it gave Mercedes the time to pit Hamilton and be ready for him. I guess that’s not braking any rules…but maybe it should be?
Verstuurd vanaf mijn moto g(6) met Tapatalk
This applies to many scenarios in many other sports too.
It’s not just oval tracks; it’s oval tracks with banked curves. The reason for that: more speed. You should read up on the US Grand Prix held at Indianapolis in 2005, where the road course included one of the banked curves - IIRC, the only banked curve on any F1 circuit at the time (or since) - and the tires Michelin supplied to seven of the ten teams couldn’t handle it.
Another advantage of oval tracks: they let the spectators see most, if not all, of the course at once.
Grojean made it 50 laps on the softs, I suspect Hammilton’s reported problems were somewhat overstated. Being Monaco, nothing short of Hamilton’s tires delaminating was going to cause him to lose, and Pirelli hasn’t had a tire that will let that happen since that Silverstone race a few years ago.
There was something about Bottas’s pit stops that confuses me. The first four cars had a good gap on the rest of the field when the safety car was sent out. When that happens, the racers are supposed to slow down and the safety car lets the drivers go past until the leader of the race is behind the SC, and the other cars queue up in order behind him.
The top four all pitted, Bottas and Verstappen made contact in the pits, Bottas had to come in again a lap later, and he was still able to rejoin the race in fourth place. By the time of his second pit stop, how had the field not closed up enough that he lost some places with the second stop?
Not quite. The Monza circuit used to have a road course and a banked oval sharing the same front straight. For a few years in the early-'60s, I think, the Italian Grand Prix was run on a combination of the two circuits. (Watch the movie Grand Prix to get a sense of what it looked like.) The inside of the Karussell at the Nürburgring had about one lane of banking. And I used to have a video game based on the 1967 Formula One season, and I would swear one of the tracks had a banked turn 1. I thought it was Zandvoort, but haven’t been able to confirm that.
They also used the Avus Ring in Germany a couple of times in the 1960s. It was basically 2 parallel autobahns connected by a couple of banked 180 degree turns at each end.
And technically, the Indy 500 was a part of the F1 World Championship back in the 1950s. There was virtually no crossover between the cars or drivers (a couple of Europeans had a casual look), and it is conveniently forgotten now.
The Avus Ring was used in Germany a couple of times in the 1960s. It was basically two parallel autobahns linked by a couple of 180-degree banked turns.
And technically, the Indy 500 was a part of the F1 World Championship back in the 1950s. There was basically no crossover of cars or drivers (a couple of Europeans had a peek, but nothing serious), and it’s all conveniently forgotten now.
I think, (though I can’t find a press release for it) that a new rule means a physical safety car triggers the same situation as a virtual safety car, i.e. that all the cars hold station with the relative gaps intact. That might explain why Bottas was able to do that.
It was noted in the post-race reports that the medium ended up being no more resilient than the softs.
I have to say I don’t think Hamilton was crying wolf (Wolff?) as he was taking sub-optimal lines around the tighter turns for reason I can think of other than simply not having the grip.
If memory serves that happened because the tyres were fitted the wrong way around.
Canadian GP coming up Sunday…Hamilton favored to win, as usual. If I put money on anyone else, it’s likely to be Verstappen, based on how well he did at Monaco and there’s a possibility, though remote, of a fluke handing him the win and resulting in a huge payoff from a small wagr.
I think the stewards have money on Hamilton. :rolleyes:
Somehow, the race started earlier than the coverage on my network. I turned it when it was supposed to start, and it was already 13 laps in. :mad:
3 laps to go, and I don’t give a fuck anymore.