It’ll be nice to see the big #1 on Ferrari again. Hamilton is no longer a rookie, so who cares what he does! What can Fred do in his new/old car?
I’m sure this will be a short thread.
It does matter how Hamilton does.
Just like it matters how Woods or Federer does, even though they’re not rookies either.
Apart from watching genius, I’m not that interested. :eek:
Instead of the richest organisations buying up the best drivers, why don’t they have every driver drive every car inturn. then we could see which who was the best driver AND which was the best car.
I used to be a Ferrari fan back when Schumi was driving, but I just can’t get too excited over Raikkonen. Massa is a good driver, but he seems to have gotten stuck in the Barrichello role of supporting the #1 driver and isn’t allowed to take on Raikkonen directly. A real championship fight between the two Ferrari drivers would be something to see.
Hamilton should be Kimi’s main rival for the driver’s championship, assuming the McLaren holds up. There could be some good intra-team competition between Hamilton & Kovaleinen; they’re both very good drivers, and should be equally matched car-wise, so there could be some fireworks.
Alonso has his work cut out for him with the Renault – its performance doesn’t seem to be equal to Ferrari or McLaren, and he doesn’t have Schumi’s ability to get the best out of a car. If, as rumored, Alonso goes to Ferrari next year, partnering with Raikkonen, the sparks should fly – neither will willingly take the #2 role, so things on track could get very interesting.
I’m also looking forward to seeing what BMW Sauber and Red Bull can do; I suspect they may be able to pull off a win or two. I’m also looking forward to Sebastian Bourdais at STR – I’ve watched him in Champ Car the last couple of years, and I suspect he could really clean up in F1 if he had the right car. Unfortunately, he’s stuck with a 2nd string team and a car that just can’t get the job done; having said that, he could still make things interesting mid-pack.
Given past F1 threads, I think there are about 5 people on this board who care enough to post about it.
With the recent passing of the my beloved Sick Man of Open Wheel Racing (the Champ Car series) I’m even more hopeful that Bourdais impresses in the STR. Hopefully the speed the team showed at the end of last year wasn’t a one-time fluky everyone else had given up development for the '07 season thing. I’m also looking forward to see if Alonso & Renault can keep up with Ferrari and McLaren, and if they can’t, does Alonso continue the slow self-destruct of his career that he initiated last year.
I’ve only gotten through 45 minutes of the practice Speed showed on my DVR so no spoilers for me please. 
It’s going to wake me in the morning and the race receives a large government handout. Other that no… except that it’s clear that lad Hamilton is the real deal.
I’ll be following it closely, as I do every year. I just hope we can ditch all the drama this year. I want all the talk to be about the damn racing and nothing else.
I’m hoping Hamilton does well, of course, but I also want to see if Red Bull and Honda (or whatever they’re called now) have improved. I would love to see Coulthard on the podium at least once this year, however unlikely that would be.
Hopefully their latest round of changes will make the races more exciting. At the very least it should tip the scale a little more towards genuine driver ability and away from the mechanics of the car.
I’m full of hope, hope just waiting to be dashed.
It was pretty fun watching practice without TC last night. Qualifying should be intresting. Only an hour away…
I’ll add my name to the list of F1 fans here. I’ll be following Hamilton, of course, and Bourdais, since I was a fan of Champ Car in its heyday (although it hadn’t held my interest much in recent years).
It will be interesting to see how everyone does without TC.
There used to be more, but the Americans (well, this one anyway) have been giving Bernie the ol’ Fuck You Right Back ever since the Indy cockup.
Have fun, lads. I’ll be trying to embrace NASCAR instead, *really * I’ll try.
An excellent start to what may be the most exciting season in a long time. Only 7 cars finished the race!
Although there were 3 safety cars I don’t think losing traction control was the cause of the worst. It definitely looks like driver skill is going to be more important.
Did Raikkonen fall asleep after that first lap? And I don’t think it was lack of TC.
A brilliant race, sheer excitement from start to finish. And I think Bordais may tempt a few Americans back.
I didn’t get to see the race, but looking at the results it looks like it was a meatgrinder.
Eighth place getting points without even finishing? When was the last time that happened?
I like the idea of F1, and I absolutely eat up all the shows about the technology that goes into the cars, but once the race starts it’s hard to stay interested. Especially since the one team I follow (for work reasons, we do some of their advertising) keeps turning in such crap performances. Oh well, we still charge the same.
That’d be Honda? Poor old Jensen barely got off the starting grid.
I’ve just watched the second showing on UK TV. (Well, most of it - I appear to have misplaced 90 minutes or so of my life.)
I enjoy watching F1. I find drama in the evolution of a battle between two struggling teams. Single dramatic moments are great (watching Alonso and Kovalainen trade places twice, for example, but I am most interested when two drivers are struggling with each other over a long period. (I derive the same sort of enjoyment from NFL games and Test cricket.)
Hamilton’s win was satisfying, but I didn’t see much of him because the cameras tended to follow the immediate action (with reason, in some cases - witness the sudden cut from an interview to watching David Coulthard’s car sliding gracelessly across the track with one wheel attached to the car by the tethering cable).
Some comments on the rules changes I learned about from today’s coverage.
I like the idea of a common electronic control module; it’s a step in the direction of all drivers driving the same car with the same tyres. That may be an ideal, and impracticable (since part of the competition in F1 is to find the ideal technical solution to the physics and engineering problems) but it eliminates one area - that of competition in designing the best control software. And after previous seasons seeing accusations that one team had a traction control system on a hidden menu option (never proven, iirc) a common module is probably the only way to enforce a ban.
The rule I don’t like is the one that bans cars from pitting for a while after the safety car is deployed. As soon as I heard the rule mentioned by the commentators, I thought “What if someone is due to pit that lap?Is it fair to them to forbid it just because someone else has screwed up?”
The answer, as can be seen from the race of Reubens Barrichello, is no. He was forced into a choice between running out of fuel or pitting illegally, a choice that, fundamentally, the rules should not force people to make. How long before that nonsense decides a race? (It cost Kovalainen a clear shot at a podium in this race, as well.)
If the rule was instituted to reduce the chaos in the pitlane when the safety car is deployed, it won’t. All it will do is defer it until the pitlane opens. It’s a poorly thought out rule imo, and should be dumped.
Other than a decent season for Toyota in 2005 and Honda in 2006, none of the Japanese teams have done all that well in the past few years.
I disagree: why can’t the teams be sufficiently sensible to keep a lap or two of fuel in reserve?
Because pushing things like that to the margins is what the sport is all about.
Another closet F1 fan here, although nowhere near as rabid as i used to be.
A great drive from Hamilton in the McLaren, and if the car holds together i think he’ll be hard to beat this year. The kid is frighteningly good.
If Australia is anything to go by though, there’s gonna be some serious battles over the course of this season. I’d say there’s a good 5 or 6 drivers out there with the realistic potential to win races.
They may well do so. But if the pit lane is closed through no fault of their own at the time the pit stop is scheduled, then they are being punished for another driver’s problem - and that is a fundamentally flawed rule. Punishing Team A for something which is the fault of a member of Team B, or even no-one’s fault at all, is simply bad rulemaking.
Agreed.
I don’t watch anymore (tough to do in the states, anyway) but I still follow the results.
F1 drivers have always done well in Indycar/Champ Car/CART/IRL, but drivers from those series haven’t generally done well going in the other direction. The top US open-wheel drivers are usually middle-of-the-pack types in F1 - see Michael Andretti, Alex Zanardi, Jacques Villeneuve (other than one year when he was clearly in the best car), and so forth…