Grand Prix Rejects

I don't think it would be enough, but they would defenitely be closer than the likes of D'Ambriosio or Pic were. Probably being a bit better at set-up, strategy and all those things. They could turn a 14th place into a 12th place probably, in the fashion of what alonso did at Minardi likely.

Well, I suppose it's about time I throw in my own two coppers:

I do of course believe that the notion of "outperforming" is to (or should, usually) be taken metaphorically, but I somehow have the feeling that a genuine belief in some supernatural ability (the kind you'd expect to hear from some of Senna's more rabid fans) has crept into its usage, and there's an implication that a car like the Ferrari F2012 "should" have only finished about where Massa usually finished, and not where Alonso did. The reality, as I see it, is that the benchmark for what a car is capable of should be the driver who finishes in front, not the driver who finishes behind. So, if Alonso can win races and almost a championship with the F2012 then that means that the F2012 "should" be considered a race-winning and potential championship-winning car.

Or can it? Now, both This and dinizintheoven have touched on something with "what if we put Senna in a Life or Vettel in a Caterham?" And, when taken to those extremes I'd have to say that, yes, things wouldn't be much different except maybe a few more Q2 appearances for the Caterham. But what if, keeping with our 2012 discussion, we put Alonso in the Williams FW34? What if we go further and put Vettel in the other FW34?

I suppose another (possibly flawed) question I would pose is this: Take a year where the competition was relatively close, say, 2012. For the sake of this exercise let's throw out the three "new teams", given that even with Alonso or Vettel in the car the best they can hope for are probably a few more Q2 appearances. Now, let's re-arrange the driver lineups so that the "best" drivers are generally in what might understand to be the "worst" cars, and the "worst" drivers are in the "best" cars. Something like this:

Red Bull Racing
1. Narain Karthikeyan
2. Pedro de la Rosa

Vodafone McLaren
3. Bruno Senna
4. Charles Pic

Scuderia Ferrari
5. Karun Chandhok
6. Sakon Yamamoto

Mercedes AMG Petronas
7. Pastor Maldonado
8. Romain Grosjean

Lotus
9. Timo Glock
10. Vitantonio Liuzzi

Sahara Force India
11. Nico Rosberg
12. Daniel Ricciardo

Sauber
14. Kimi Raikkonen
15. Jenson Button

Scuderia Toro Rosso
16. Mark Webber
17. Lewis Hamilton

Williams
18. Fernando Alonso
19. Sebastian Vettel

I won't pretend the above is a perfect arrangement, but I hope you have an idea of what I'm getting at. Now, pretend that the kinds of driver choices hinted at above have always been made by the top teams, with the teams lower down the field generally having the pick of the litter. Karthikeyan has spent his career in serious talks with Ferrari, McLaren and the like, whereas Vettel never really progressed beyond Toro Rosso. Remember though that the drivers in this hypothetical scenario are just as good or bad as we generally perceive them in reality, with only the lineups and prior history perhaps distorting our perception.

So, how do the world championship standings change? Does the Williams - a very capable car on its day in reality - become a title contender in this scenario with "lesser" drivers in the top cars? Or is there really only a very narrow window of performance in the cars and everything turns out more or less the same?

Looks like there are Rejects fans amongst the Autosport staff...

dr-baker wrote:Looks like there are Rejects fans amongst the Autosport staff...

Chance would be a fine thing...

Would anyone with a subscription kindly summarize their main arguments? Not normally keen on Autosport's journalism but this time I'd appreciate a lot!

giraurd wrote:Would anyone with a subscription kindly summarize their main arguments? Not normally keen on Autosport's journalism but this time I'd appreciate a lot!

You WHAT?

I tell ya, if you buy a subscription then you could feed and clothe an Ataxia for at least one whole quarter of an hour. Don't delay, subscribe today.

Ataxia wrote:

giraurd wrote:Would anyone with a subscription kindly summarize their main arguments? Not normally keen on Autosport's journalism but this time I'd appreciate a lot!

You WHAT?

I tell ya, if you buy a subscription then you could feed and clothe an Ataxia for at least one whole quarter of an hour. Don't delay, subscribe today.

Is that meant to be an incentive?

FortiWinks wrote:

Ataxia wrote:

giraurd wrote:Would anyone with a subscription kindly summarize their main arguments? Not normally keen on Autosport's journalism but this time I'd appreciate a lot!

You WHAT?

I tell ya, if you buy a subscription then you could feed and clothe an Ataxia for at least one whole quarter of an hour. Don't delay, subscribe today.

Is that meant to be an incentive?

If you need another one, that article made me feel positive about F1 for the first time in 2 years.

People often say that the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix was the first use of the safety car. This is often refuted by voting the controversial use of the safety car in the 1973 Canadian GP. But why do people forget its use in the 1993 Brazilian and British Grands Prix? (I only found out about its use in these races having recently watched the 1993 season review DVD.)

Does anyone know if the category "Formula 5" exists?

A bit random I know.

The Chicane wrote:Does anyone know if the category "Formula 5" exists?

A bit random I know.

It is actually a thing! It’s a secondary category in Danish F4 and are modified Formula Ford cars

The Chicane wrote:Does anyone know if the category "Formula 5" exists?

A bit random I know.

@Simtek

Rob Dylan wrote:

The Chicane wrote:Does anyone know if the category "Formula 5" exists?

A bit random I know.

@Simtek

Why, yes, they're racing in Marrakesh next weekend...

Simtek wrote:

Rob Dylan wrote:

The Chicane wrote:Does anyone know if the category "Formula 5" exists?

A bit random I know.

@Simtek

Why, yes, they're racing in Marrakesh next weekend...

E is the fifth letter of the alphabet.

It checks out, alright.

Formula 5000 was cool back in the day. Better than F3000.

dr-baker wrote:Formula 5000 was cool back in the day. Better than F3000.

Very different intent as well. Formula 3000 was a stepping stone formula whereas Formula 5000 was intended as an alternative series to Formula 1.

I like the big car numbers. At first I didn't like that it took away the teams' freedom to have small numbers if they thought it worked better with their livery, but it's helped me with driver identification a few times, and despite what I said back then, I like that. And nothing ugly has actually come of it.

Why is Artyom spelled Artem so much? And why is Vitaliy spelled Vitaly? Who else am I being lied to about? Is Kvyat related to Michal Kwiatkowski?

Why is Bottas bad at Singapore? It really should suit him, shouldn't it?

Vettel seems to have three oddly specific performance levels he achieves across a season, as this chart opines, and you can kind of feel it. I don't know if that means anything.

The first Indianapolis 500 was won by driving at a steady pace to conserve the tyres. I can't be the only one who thinks that's really funny.

Has a good layout ever been a direct reason for F1 having a race at a track? The 1959 German GP was held at AVUS because you could close the area and charge for admission, unlike the Nürburgring. It can't be a total coincidence that F1 has (mostly) all the best tracks... a race's prestige does usually grow out of the challenge it provides, and the historical roots of F1 didn't grow at random. Or maybe I just like what I'm used to.

If Leclerc beats Vettel, how many people will say that invalidates his championships even though they were several years ago and our only good point of reference for how good Leclerc is is Vettel himself? In 2014, Vettel was beaten by an unknown quantity and people made a big deal of it, then next year he was the best driver and everyone accepted it was just a bad year for him. And, you know, I guess we kind of still don't know how good Ricciardo is. But that's a known problem with evaluating drivers of the Red Bull family, they never go up against anyone else. For the second year running, the battle against Hülkenberg will bring us some much-needed non-intra-Red-Bull information.

UncreativeUsername37 wrote:Why is Artyom spelled Artem so much? And why is Vitaliy spelled Vitaly? Who else am I being lied to about? Is Kvyat related to Michal Kwiatkowski?

Mikhail Gorbachev might be able to shed some light on the first of those, given that much the same has happened to his surname.

Look at the Russian Wikipedia pages for any F1 season and you'll see how it works in reverse - the software for this forum doesn't accept Cyrillic characters (or any Unicode, for that matter), but if they're transliterated back from the Cyrillic to Roman, the current World Champion is L'yuis Khemilton, his main title rival should be Sebast'yan Fettel', Sharl' Lekler might get his first win this season, and Dzhordzh Rassel should at least score his first point. Devid Kultkhard and Mark Uebber provide the commentary.

Auch fragt Daniil Kwjat auf Deutsch, "wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof, bitte?"

The great Russian film Andrei Rublev is sometimes transliterated as Andrey Rublyov. Its director, the great Andrei Tarkovsky, similarly has his name rendered as "Andrey Tarkovsky", like in my copy of his book Sculpting in Time, or "Andrei Tarkovskii", like in my college library's copy of the book The Cinema of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Then you have one of his frequent collaborators, the composer Eduard Artemiev/Artemyev; Natalia/Natalya Bondarchuk, star actress of Solaris/Solyaris and so on.

Needless to say, keeping consistent spelling was a minor hassle when I was writing my dissertation...

Seems like almost every language has a different way of transliterating Russian. Nikita Khrushchev is a good example: I think I was doing a school project on him but struggled to find any non-Finnish sources because I used the spelling I was familiar with: Hruštšev (an older spelling of the now-official Hruštšov). Turns out we're one of the very few countries using a non-Kh or Ch version of his name. In German he's Chruschtschow (nice one Germans, nice one..), in French Khrouchtchev and in Swedish Chrusjtjov.

Oh, and according to a Russian transliteration service it's actually closer to Hrushhjov. Go figure...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/46816256
Andreas Seidl joining McLaren.

UncreativeUsername37 wrote:Why is Artyom spelled Artem so much?

Russian has a letter that's an e with two dots, ë, which is pronounced "yo" (in English spelling). Therefore it is sometimes transliterated "yo". I prefer to use "ë". But even in Russian, people often leave out the dots, which is why it often ends up back in the Latin alphabet as "e".

As for the other Russian names, well, when writing Russian names in the Latin alphabet, you can choose to either transcribe them (render the sound in the letters of your target language) or transliterate them (replacing each letter one by one), and sometimes people use a system that's a mix of both, which leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory spellings, and then there's nonsense like the "y" in "Vitaly"...

Lucky we don't have any Ukrainian or Belarusian drivers because they have languages that differ slightly from Russian, but not that much. Hence both languages, naturally, have their own spelling systems that can also be used to spell all "Russian" names, and each spelling system is - naturally - transliterated a little bit differently in every Latin alphabet-using language as well. And even after the mess, it varies from person to person which system they prefer to use - sometimes people choose to **** all the guidelines and officially preferring some Western-bastardised version of the name, so the spelling stays consistent in all languages.

One good example would be the Soviet-born footballer "Artyom Milevsky" (in English), who would later be spelled "Artsyom Milewski" (in English) in the native language of his home country Belarus. But he decided to switch national teams at junior age and represent Ukraine - hence the "right" spelling of his name is now "Artem Milevskiy" (in English)....

....buuuttttt to add some more to the confusion, often footballers from the Russosphere prefer to acknowledge that English is not the only Western script language and may adopt to the Latinization of the first abroad country they go to. Well, the first Latin-script club abroad he went to was Hajduk Split, located in Croatia. In Croatian, the name would be spelled "Milevski".

Well at least, given how in Croatia they are used to transliterating between Serbian and Croatian and what not - you would think that they would have nailed the spelling there and Artyom would stuck to that one Western spelling for good. Wouldn't you?

For those interested, this week's Autosport magazine has a feature on the 2012 HRT car.

I hear it's pretty good

Ataxia wrote:For those interested, this week's Autosport magazine has a feature on the 2012 HRT car.

I hear it's pretty good

The feature or the car?

Faustus wrote:

Ataxia wrote:For those interested, this week's Autosport magazine has a feature on the 2012 HRT car.

I hear it's pretty good

The feature or the car?

We all know how good the car was...

Faustus wrote:

dr-baker wrote:Formula 5000 was cool back in the day. Better than F3000.

Very different intent as well. Formula 3000 was a stepping stone formula whereas Formula 5000 was intended as an alternative series to Formula 1.

Speaking of alternatives to F1, I often wonder why one didn't spring up during Japan's 80s boom. Was the competition from Group C too strong?

Regenmeister94 wrote:

Faustus wrote:

dr-baker wrote:Formula 5000 was cool back in the day. Better than F3000.

Very different intent as well. Formula 3000 was a stepping stone formula whereas Formula 5000 was intended as an alternative series to Formula 1.

Speaking of alternatives to F1, I often wonder why one didn't spring up during Japan's 80s boom. Was the competition from Group C too strong?

Formula Nippon (iirc was F3000 cars with upgrades) attracted upcoming European drivers (Eddie Irvine, Heinz Harald Frentzen, Roland Ratzenberger etc....)

WeirdKerr wrote:

Regenmeister94 wrote:Speaking of alternatives to F1, I often wonder why one didn't spring up during Japan's 80s boom. Was the competition from Group C too strong?

Formula Nippon (iirc was F3000 cars with upgrades) attracted upcoming European drivers (Eddie Irvine, Heinz Harald Frentzen, Roland Ratzenberger etc....)

If anything, though, that was an alternative to European F3000 (it was even called Japanese F3000 until 1995), although it can probably be said that the growth of Japan's economy did attract greater foreign interest than it did during the F2 years.

I suppose the All-Japan Sports Prototype Championship can be looked at as an alternative to F1 in that period (for those shooting for it, at least), although I think most of the foreign drivers that raced there were also doing the World Championship anyway.

Paddy Lowe on 'gardening leave'.

Ouch, people had been saying that he might take the fall and resign, but I didn't expect it to be so soon - before the season has even begun. This really is dire news for Williams, in a season where they need to start bouncing back a bit after last year. 2011, '13, and '18 were bad years, but they were singular. Two terrible years in a row scares me that it could sink them.

Rob Dylan wrote:Ouch, people had been saying that he might take the fall and resign, but I didn't expect it to be so soon - before the season has even begun. This really is dire news for Williams, in a season where they need to start bouncing back a bit after last year. 2011, '13, and '18 were bad years, but they were singular. Two terrible years in a row scares me that it could sink them.

Frank Williams still owns more than half the holding company , and the accounts didnt look too bad for the last period on file. I think financially they may not be too badly off. They also have in the group the non-F1 tech business - a separate company - which looks quite promising. So maybe its not so bad. But then - if they sold the non-F1 company, and relied on the F1 company to generate its own money, they could really struggle to have the money to catch up...(if they fell behind). And what happens if Frank dies...

Anyone thinking about the proposed 'point-for-fastest-lap' idea ?
I think its a terrible idea and a stupid gimmick. But it happened in the 50s, and apparently Massa would have been 2008 World Champion if they'd been dishing out such points then ( I havent checked this 2008 thing at all - could be wrong)
If its anything like last year , the last of the big 3 teams runners will have a pitstop window advantage over the first Renault/Sauber-Alfa/McLaren etc and so will routinely stop on lap 54 and pick up an easy point....Or am I wrong ?

yannicksamlad wrote:If its anything like last year , the last of the big 3 teams runners will have a pitstop window advantage over the first Renault/Sauber-Alfa/McLaren etc and so will routinely stop on lap 54 and pick up an easy point....Or am I wrong ?

Lap 54 might be impossible at Spa, and would be a bit early in Monaco, but I get your drift...

I have heard that it would only be awarded to people finishing in the top-ten, which might be galling if you get a puncture on the last lap. But I imagine it will more often than not get awarded to someone from Red Bull, Ferrari, or Mercedes.

EDIT: Looking forward to a repeat of fastest lap for 1954 British Grand Prix.

Talking of which, looking at the entry list for that race, can anybody tell me anything about Rodney Nuckey or Eric Brandon?

As far as I remember, if fastest lap had awarded point, Räikkönen would have been champion in 2008

It never seemed like a valuable method of determining championship position in any series to me, and I'd be a bit disappointed to see it brought back to the World Championship. That said, the 2016 Formula E finale was one of the funniest races I've ever seen thanks to the way the fastest lap rule worked at the time (anyone could get it, top ten finish or not). Seeing it happen once was enough though.

dr-baker wrote: Looking forward to a repeat of fastest lap for 1954 British Grand Prix.

Talking of which, looking at the entry list for that race, can anybody tell me anything about Rodney Nuckey or Eric Brandon?

Nuckey's a man I know little about, but his name appears quite frequently in F2 and F3 entry lists of the period at home and abroad, usually in a Cooper of some description. He was pretty successful as well.

Brandon I can offer more about: He was actually a close friend of John Cooper and built some early 500cc cars with him and Charles Cooper just after the war. Very competitive in the early days of F3 and even won the first British F3 championsip in 1951. He was also one of the first three customers for Cooper's first F2 car, the T23 (the others were Alan Brown and Leslie Hawthorn for his son Mike).

Well, perhaps if the fastest lap was actually worth more than just a semi-pointless statistic, it could lead to more people aiming for that? Even if it's just one point.

Simtek wrote:

dr-baker wrote: Looking forward to a repeat of fastest lap for 1954 British Grand Prix.

Talking of which, looking at the entry list for that race, can anybody tell me anything about Rodney Nuckey or Eric Brandon?

Nuckey's a man I know little about, but his name appears quite frequently in F2 and F3 entry lists of the period at home and abroad, usually in a Cooper of some description. He was pretty successful as well.

Brandon I can offer more about: He was actually a close friend of John Cooper and built some early 500cc cars with him and Charles Cooper just after the war. Very competitive in the early days of F3 and even won the first British F3 championsip in 1951. He was also one of the first three customers for Cooper's first F2 car, the T23 (the others were Alan Brown and Leslie Hawthorn for his son Mike).

Thank you. Rodney Nuckey was a name I can't recall coming across before, but seems like the kind of reject of the sport that we ought to be celebrating. He had more of an F1 career than many of us will ever have.

Back to the fastest lap situation, I wonder if the awarding of the fastest lap at the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix would have been corrected from Hasemi to Laffite sooner if it actually counted for points?

I know the fuel limit has been increased to 110kg, but given the fuel flow limit is the same, how much fuel will drivers realistically carry at the start of the race?