|
|
On July 12 2020 00:53 Zaros wrote: Hamilton is back, 1.2s on 2nd more than 2nd-10th. Brilliant lap. Race should be interesting tomorrow.
Wonder how Bottas is feeling being beaten by 1.5s in the same car.
Rain maximizes skill differences, and Hamilton and max are the two best rain drivers of this generation.
|
Bottas apparently suffered pretty bad brake problems in qualifying that they couldn't fix so he had to drive much more tentatively than Hamilton. That probably explains part of the gap. Then again, sometimes there are qualifying sessions where Hamilton's basically untouchable.
Hope Lando's okay. He's apparently been suffering from a bunch of pain in his back when cornering this weekend.
|
Lando!!! What a race from the Brit!
|
On July 12 2020 23:50 fLyiNgDroNe wrote: Lando!!! What a race from the Brit!
Very exciting last round. But man was the rest of the race a chore. Don't remember ever having this boring of a race in Austria before
|
28057 Posts
Compared to last week this was definitely a snoozer. Luckily Max gave us something interesting towards the end, and the last lap from Norris was awesome. I believe we have Stroll to thank for that though
edit: also nice to see some team play from Sainz. To be honest I'm just going to pretend Mercedez doesn't exist this season. Lewis wasn't even close to pushing his car and he was still lapping the mid-fielders.
|
yeah this is 2014-2016 levels of Mercedes performance advantage. They're fast enough most of the time such that they're in their own league again. Verstappen is basically the only thing stopping Mercedes from being 30 seconds to a minute ahead of the entire field.
Lando was great yet again. Albon was weirdly disappointing. Not sure what was up with his pace. It was way off his pace last week. I know he was having big problems in qualifying with something that went wrong with his setup so it could be that. His car was apparently unstable and oversteering a lot.
I'll be honest, I was watching the race on DVR and I fast-forwarded through like half of it. It was pretty dull. The start and the end were good but there was basically 40 laps of nothing. Given next week is Hungary, we'll probably see something pretty similar again there unless something unexpected happens.
|
highlight of the race for sure. Incredible
|
28057 Posts
So Perez went to Italy during his week off and tested positive for Covid. We're only a month into the season, why can't these dumbasses just be safe and stick around the F1 bubble for a bit...
|
On July 31 2020 05:28 TheEmulator wrote: So Perez went to Italy during his week off and tested positive for Covid. We're only a month into the season, why can't these dumbasses just be safe and stick around the F1 bubble for a bit...
OOOh boy that's spicy.
Hulkenberg is a potential replacement for Perez.
If the Hulk gets a podium in a tracing point.......
|
28057 Posts
I'm hearing a few names being thrown out. Seeing Hulkenberg back in a car again would be cool.
Also apparently Sergio tested before coming back to the track so we don't have to worry about him spreading it to everyone in F1 (season saved).
|
Standard Hulk. Hasn't driven a current F1 car, drops into a car for a team he hasn't raced for since 2016, immediately gets up to speed and ends both practices in the top 10 while on less than 5 hours of sleep.
It's a real shame he didn't end up with a seat this year. I still think Renault partly regretted letting him go (especially now that Ricciardo's leaving. An Ocon/Alonso line-up will certainly be dramatic, and probably not in a good way). They even said they would have potentially done things differently had they known Nico wouldn't have a seat.
edit: Also, the F1 media people continue to be exhausting. The Sky people spent a good chunk of FP2 talking about whether Red Bull are going to replace Albon. Again. It's annoying to listen to at this point. It's not just Sky though. Tons of F1 media does this kind of stuff. They all pick a driver and just dump on them for weeks on end needlessly. They did the same thing to Hulkenberg and Gasly last year and did the same thing to Vettel for the first two races and all of the break this year. Most F1 media is around tabloid-level quality. It's all either click-bait garbage or cynical takes on everything designed to get rage-clicks. And that's not even getting into the non-trivial number of publications who are willing to put out articles that are not just badly sourced (and almost always wrong), but in some cases completely unsourced and probably made up.
|
Have they just gotten completely rid of the virtual safety car this season?
|
So fucking dumb of Verstappen to pit there. They knew Hamilton's tires were gone. Wtf were they thinking?
|
On August 02 2020 23:42 Excludos wrote: So fucking dumb of Verstappen to pit there. They knew Hamilton's tires were gone. Wtf were they thinking? Verstappen's front left was apparently also in pretty bad shape. Horner said there was a giant groove worn in it and it had some cuts in the tread (similar to the others that eventually blew up). Their logic was that it was better to guarantee second than gamble and possibly win or end up with nothing should that tire puncture. They also had no guarantee that Hamilton's tires would go when they made the stop since he was still lapping fine. Their logic makes sense to me.
|
On August 03 2020 03:22 Ben... wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2020 23:42 Excludos wrote: So fucking dumb of Verstappen to pit there. They knew Hamilton's tires were gone. Wtf were they thinking? Verstappen's front left was apparently also in pretty bad shape. Horner said there was a giant groove worn in it and it had some cuts in the tread (similar to the others that eventually blew up). Their logic was that it was better to guarantee second than gamble and possibly win or end up with nothing should that tire puncture. They also had no guarantee that Hamilton's tires would go when they made the stop since he was still lapping fine. Their logic makes sense to me.
yeah it was a very good example of low risk - low gain approach, a safer bet. When Bottas fell back enough, they understood they can pit and secure 2nd + extra point for the fastest lap rather than risk it and go for a potential 1st (they didn't know for sure Ham's tire will blow up) hoping their own tire lasts enough
|
Pretty entertaining finish, next week is going to be tense with softer tyres and higher temperatures. Might be going back to the early pirelli era of 3 stop races.
|
28057 Posts
Boring race until the last two laps. Feels like the standard of this season so far lmao
Unfortunate to see Max get a bit unlucky there although I don't disagree with the decision to pit. I'm happy to see Norris still finishing well (fucking sad about sainz this week tho).
|
Northern Ireland20712 Posts
I used to be rather into F1 back in the day, watched with my old man. Kind of drifted out as other things like girls and Starcraft took my interest.
Just curious as an outsider, and I get that part of the sport has always been pushing engineering excellence but in recent years it seems every other season it’s Mercedes miles in front and Lewis Hamilton vs a slightly inferior teammate for the title.
Does this lack of competition actually impact the sport much because it does seem rather common? Could the sport do a better job in balancing this in your collective opinion or should it let excellence prevail?
Also as an aside why are there so many races this season in the same country? Is it part of this anniversary?
When I last dipped my toes in I was a bit irked by the phasing out of some classic European circuits in favour of places like Azerbaijan or Qatar, but it seems a lot of them are back!
Cheers for entertaining my noob questions.
|
28057 Posts
On August 03 2020 08:44 Wombat_NI wrote: I used to be rather into F1 back in the day, watched with my old man. Kind of drifted out as other things like girls and Starcraft took my interest.
Just curious as an outsider, and I get that part of the sport has always been pushing engineering excellence but in recent years it seems every other season it’s Mercedes miles in front and Lewis Hamilton vs a slightly inferior teammate for the title.
Does this lack of competition actually impact the sport much because it does seem rather common? Could the sport do a better job in balancing this in your collective opinion or should it let excellence prevail?
When I last dipped my toes in I was a bit irked by the phasing out of some classic European circuits in favour of places like Azerbaijan or Qatar, but it seems a lot of them are back!
Cheers for entertaining my noob questions. People probably have differing opinions on what Mercedes dominance does to the sport. As someone that's fairly new to F1 I personally find the dominance a bit boring, although with that being said it's still fun to focus on the mid-field matchups that are a bit closer. I'm not sure how to solve this dominance as I don't necessarily want to see Mercedes engineers too limited. The sport pushing forward is part of why F1 is so awesome.
Also as an aside why are there so many races this season in the same country? Is it part of this anniversary? This is strictly due to covid from what I understand, and also having a late start to the season. There's only a select number of tracks they have been authorized to use this year, and in order to boost the number of races they can schedule they are choosing to use certain tracks more than once.
|
On August 03 2020 08:44 Wombat_NI wrote: I used to be rather into F1 back in the day, watched with my old man. Kind of drifted out as other things like girls and Starcraft took my interest.
Just curious as an outsider, and I get that part of the sport has always been pushing engineering excellence but in recent years it seems every other season it’s Mercedes miles in front and Lewis Hamilton vs a slightly inferior teammate for the title.
Does this lack of competition actually impact the sport much because it does seem rather common? Could the sport do a better job in balancing this in your collective opinion or should it let excellence prevail?
Also as an aside why are there so many races this season in the same country? Is it part of this anniversary?
When I last dipped my toes in I was a bit irked by the phasing out of some classic European circuits in favour of places like Azerbaijan or Qatar, but it seems a lot of them are back!
Cheers for entertaining my noob questions.
When places like Baku was signed up F1 was run by Bernie Ecclestone, now Liberty media have taken over and sacked Bernie. They have brough back a couple of European races like the Dutch Grand prix but most of the classics coming back this year are because of Covid.
I doubt Imola, Portugal, Mugello, Nurbugring will be there next year, they are just in reasonably safe countries without far to travel for the teams.
Regarding the dominance I think they generally have gone the right direction, just Mercedes is the best F1 team that has ever existed with one of the best drivers ever. Liberty have agreed a budget cap though so maybe in 2022 with big rule changes even if Red Bull and Ferrari are still messing up it could be possible for McLaren, Renault, Aston Martin to challenge.
|
|
|
|