Uhm, you’re replying to a post that was made 3 years ago. It’s highly unlikely that movingfinger will be thinking about checking back into this thread for any replies to him.
Mark Martin! I had a poster of him when I was a kid. It was really badass and had a wolf howling at the moon or something in the background.
I grew up with Steve Kinser’s son Kraig and had a mad crush on his sister.
I’ll bet it was a zombie, and not a wolf.
Given the recent news update regarding this thread topic, I see no harm in letting it rise from the dead. Reopened.
(realizes this is a zombie thread) Oh yeah, sorry.
(realizes this is a pit thread) On second thought, screw you Shayna! (kidding)
It will be interesting to see what effect the rule change will have on Danica.
Will she remain someone is on the cusp of winning a race or will she fall further in the pack?
You will also see some Champ Car boys coming over to IRL this year, so the competition should be a little tougher, even with Sea Bass going to F1.
That fat bastard Paul Tracy must like the rule if he is racing this season.
Erik Kuselias was filling in for Greeny on Mike & Mike this week. He also is (or was) the host of ESPN’s NASCAR show, so he’s basically a racing guy.
Amazingly enough, Erik was against this rule change. His argument was that since Danica – the “Anna Kournikova of IndyCar” (their words) – was going to be hurt by the rule, that makes it a bad idea. She’s the most marketable one, so any advantage they give her is smart. I’m sitting there listening to that thinking he lost his mind; what happened to the concept of fairness in sport? I didn’t see him arguing that spygate should be ignored because the Patriots undefeated season was a good story.
I got the impression Erik would like it if Danica were given a few laps head start each race. Y’know, so the helpless woman would have a chance against the guys. Golic was putting all the super-basic questions to him on this, while Erik was doing the lawyer dance trying to avoid them in every way he could.
“Does NASCAR weigh the drivers?”
“Danica is the biggest draw; this will hurt the sport!”
“Are the drivers weighed in NASCAR?”
“They’re penalizing Danica Patrick, which is insane.”
“Do the drivers get weighed in NASCAR?”
“They don’t lower the baskets for the shorter baskeball players.”
“BUT IN NASCAR, DO THEY WEIGH THE DRIVERS?”
“Well, yes, but…”
I think that people really lost sight of what equality is. Arguing that women should get the advantages of an unequal playing field is sexist against women. Women aren’t fragile, dainty creatures that need to be coddled lest they break.
This isn’t all about Danica, either. If she left for NASCAR tomorrow, I’d still be glad for the IRL guys because they no longer have to go anorexic to be competitive in their sport. There was never a good reason for that to begin with.
On the other hand, driving a race car is extremely physically demanding. So people who are stronger have an advantage. By the same rationale you’re using to handicap lighter people for their weight advantage, shouldn’t you handicap the stronger drivers? Before there was a natural handicap in that more muscle meant more weight to haul around. Now there’s no drawback to being a bigger driver.
Ultimately, though, the rules in sport are arbitrary, and each league is allowed to make whatever rules they want. And the public is free to watch it or not. Just don’t confuse this with something that is based on inexorable logic or ‘fairness’.
Well, you can’t be too big, or you won’t fit in the tub. I think having a strong neck is pretty important, especially in F1 where you are pulling a bunch of Gs in different directions. But F1 drivers are pretty small, so I think the marginal advantage of a stronger neck is pretty low after a certain point.
(Although the Williams team was preparing to introduce G suits like MIG pilots wear before active suspension was banned in the early 90s)
There is no law of physics that says that a stronger driver makes the car faster. There is, however, a law of physics that a lighter driver makes the car faster. That is the inexorable logic behind the fairness of weighing the cars as raced.
Also note that the two advantages you mention are apples an oranges. One advantage makes it easier for a driver to drive. The other advantage makes the car faster. They aren’t even remotely the same thing, and drawing a parallel between the two is disingenuous at best.
It’s like having better shoes to run a marathon versus getting to start the marathon a mile in.
It’s a man thing, it’s spelled EGO, no more no less !!!
No. It’s spelled REASONABLE. As has been stated, Formula 1, the premier racing series of the world, bar none, has been weighing car and driver since Jesus was a freshman. It’s amazing the IRL had not been doing things this way.
I’m beginning to think a lot of people in this thread who are screaming sexism have never even seen an open wheel racecar.
How ridiculous. Well, if weight is such a problem, just throw a 20 lb weight in her car. Or better yet do it for everyone and make it something like 200 lbs. The driver plus extra weights must be 200 lbs. Then everyone is perfectly even.
Bar none? Please. It’s great if you’re a Ferrari or Williams fan, but even then it’s like watching parade laps at high speed. If nobody makes an egregious error the race ends the same way it started. F1 is boring as sin.
I’m not talking about entertainment value per se; hell I once caught a school bus demolition derby from Canada on TV that was awesome. I mean F1 is considered top of the pack; the F1 champ is called “World Champion” for a reason. There isn’t anything on 4 wheels that can make it around the track faster than an F1 car, and if slick tires, active suspension, and ground effects were still allowed, wow, look out. The budgets in F1, and the fact that teams actually build the cars and motors as opposed to buying them off the shelf makes it the worlds premier series, but not necessarily the most exiting.
There are laws of reality which put short people at certain disadvantages in basketball (not unsurpassably so, but then, neither is weight difference an unsurpassable difference in racing, or else racing competitions would be equivalent to forgetting the track and cars entirely and just weighing the drivers), and yet, that sport does not impose any special “equalizing” rules to counter this. Why not? Well, it certainly could, perhaps the way, say, wrestling is segregated by weight class. The people involved with basketball have decided (actively or passively) that the game is more fun, entertaining, whatever, the way it is. But there’s nothing logically necessary about it, any moreso than American rules football could be more “logical” than Canadian rules football. Sam Stone is right, the rules in sport are arbitrary, not based on some defensibly rigid mathematical notion of fairness; they are organically grown around what people find more enjoyable, the end result being full of all kinds of unpredictable historical contingencies and caprice. Nothing “inexorably logical” about it.
So? What is it about the law of physics that makes it unfair? How is this law of physics relevant?
Honest question: Are you a fan of motor racing? If so, what series?