Unpopular F1 opinions

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dinizintheoven
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by dinizintheoven »

This wrote:Why not try to go for a somewhat nostalgic sound and make it Toro Rosso-Mugen?

...and why not extend that to other tuners? This was something I was thinking of as part of a new series for the Perry McCarthy forum - an idea I've mentioned before, just not for ages, so I'll do it again. It involved a strange marriage between the old days of F1 (pre-1980s) where independent teams would buy an old chassis from Brabham, McLaren or March, and the "stock block" nature of Formula 5000. So the chassis available would be anything built by Caterham, Marussia or HRT, with a 2-litre turbo engine bought as standard from a regular car dealer bolted in the back, with no tuning restrictions. So the engines would be badged according to the various tuners and tweakers associated with that company - Mugen, Nismo, AMG, Abarth, Alpine, Alpina (or Hartge to avoid confusion), Irmscher, Roush, and a whole handful of others.

Williams-Smart just sounds wrong to me (and what would Manor have done had they still been around?), but Williams-AMG... should be worth half a second a lap for the name alone.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Aislabie »

dinizintheoven wrote:Williams-Smart just sounds wrong to me (and what would Manor have done had they still been around?), but Williams-AMG... should be worth half a second a lap for the name alone.

I confess, I may have been having a dig at Williams' sheer lack of pace
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Ciaran »

*sigh* Why did F5000 have to fail? Maybe it could have been fun in the 80s with 2-litre turbo engines, considering how much of a deal BMW made out of their F1 engines' road-going origins.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by dr-baker »

Regenmeister94 wrote:*sigh* Why did F5000 have to fail? Maybe it could have been fun in the 80s with 2-litre turbo engines, considering how much of a deal BMW made out of their F1 engines' road-going origins.

If it ran with 2-litre turbo engines, surely that would make it F2000?
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Ciaran »

If it doesn't have any bigger naturally-aspirated engines involved, then sure. I was just outlining a lore for a universe where F5000 survived. I blame Polyphony Digital, for introducing the term "Formula GT" way back in GT3 and sticking in my head for years.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Wallio »

Aislabie wrote:I doubt it's a particularly controversial opinion, but I do wish that teams offering customer engines would rebadge them with the names of subsidiary marques. For example, imagine the following 2019 grid:
  • Mercedes
  • Force India-Maybach
  • Williams-Smart
  • Ferrari
  • Haas-Maserati
  • Sauber-Alfa Romeo
  • Renault
  • McLaren-Alpine
  • Red Bull-Honda
  • Toro Rosso-Acura
It'd be fun I think


It has to do with marketing. It's why Haas will never badge their motors. They get so much pres over here based solely on teaming with Ferrari. Nobody knows Maserati here, or Alfa. Fiat is known, but they are considered junk. FCA would have to throw HUGE money at Gene to counter the PR he gets. Only one I could maybe see would be Haas-Chrysler, well Haas-Mopar or Haas-SRT most likely, but that doesn't fit Chrysler's branding at all.

I do wonder if the loss of a "true" customer engine has hurt badging. When the new teams came in back in 2010, Cosworth was selling badging rights for 3.5mil a year. I imagine Tag Huer has paid quite a bit more.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by girry »

Hopefully not unpopular here, but probably elsewhere since I'm seeing a growing number of people talking about some animals in regatds to Hamilton. Which really is a fair discussion by now - but I've got a major issue with the way that discussion tends to take.

If you haven't researched into Nuvolari, Caracciola, Nazzaro et al (not to mention even Fangio and Clark - for some history started with Senna...), you really have no right to be discussing the 'greatest driver of ALL TIME'.

Period.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Bobby Doorknobs »

It's annoying as well when names like Nuvolari or Caracciola are dismissed altogether on the basis of them "not being F1 drivers." That's like discussing the greatest Indycar drivers of all time and ignoring everyone who raced before 1996.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Salamander »

While I generally don't consider pre-F1 drivers when thinking about the greatest driver of all time, because it's hard enough for someone born in 1992 to form a worthwhile opinion on the likes of Fangio and Clark, I do find it pretty asinine when people insist "F1 only".
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Wallio »

giraurd wrote:Hopefully not unpopular here, but probably elsewhere since I'm seeing a growing number of people talking about some animals in regatds to Hamilton. Which really is a fair discussion by now - but I've got a major issue with the way that discussion tends to take.

If you haven't researched into Nuvolari, Caracciola, Nazzaro et al (not to mention even Fangio and Clark - for some history started with Senna...), you really have no right to be discussing the 'greatest driver of ALL TIME'.

Period.


Amen. Since IMO Tazio is the greatest.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Turbogirl »

Wallio wrote:
giraurd wrote:Hopefully not unpopular here, but probably elsewhere since I'm seeing a growing number of people talking about some animals in regatds to Hamilton. Which really is a fair discussion by now - but I've got a major issue with the way that discussion tends to take.

If you haven't researched into Nuvolari, Caracciola, Nazzaro et al (not to mention even Fangio and Clark - for some history started with Senna...), you really have no right to be discussing the 'greatest driver of ALL TIME'.

Period.

Amen. Since IMO Tazio is the greatest.

I believe Sir Frank Williams put it best: "The greatest driver of all time is probably riding a bicycle somewhere in China. Unfortunately, we don't know who he is, and he has no idea that Formula 1 even exists."
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by UncreativeUsername37 »

Turbogirl wrote:I believe Sir Frank Williams put it best: "The greatest driver of all time is probably riding a bicycle somewhere in China. Unfortunately, we don't know who he is, and he has no idea that Formula 1 even exists."

Yep, the Einsteins in sweatshops thing applies to sport just as much as anything else. I try not to think about it because it's too sad.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by mario »

Wallio wrote:
giraurd wrote:Hopefully not unpopular here, but probably elsewhere since I'm seeing a growing number of people talking about some animals in regatds to Hamilton. Which really is a fair discussion by now - but I've got a major issue with the way that discussion tends to take.

If you haven't researched into Nuvolari, Caracciola, Nazzaro et al (not to mention even Fangio and Clark - for some history started with Senna...), you really have no right to be discussing the 'greatest driver of ALL TIME'.

Period.


Amen. Since IMO Tazio is the greatest.

That was the firm belief of Enzo Ferrari too, who once described Tazio as "the greatest driver of the past, the present and the future".

However, I would say that is as much a symptom of the age bias of the fan base, which is mostly skewed towards those who would have begun watching the sport in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That was right in Senna's most successful period, and why often most people seem to look to him - that, coupled with the fact that period was when mass media communications were able to make him a global figure in the way that earlier drivers weren't, makes him loom large in the memories of so many people.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Wallio »

Turbogirl wrote:I believe Sir Frank Williams put it best: "The greatest driver of all time is probably riding a bicycle somewhere in China. Unfortunately, we don't know who he is, and he has no idea that Formula 1 even exists."



I can easily believe this. Its unreal the hidden talents people have, that often times never surface until its too late.

I generally prefer the "Mount Rushmore argument". You pick 4 (or nowadays it seems to be 5) GOATS.

Mine would probably be (at least as of now):

Tazio
Clark
Fangio
Senna
Schumacher
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Turbogirl »

Wallio wrote:
Turbogirl wrote:I believe Sir Frank Williams put it best: "The greatest driver of all time is probably riding a bicycle somewhere in China. Unfortunately, we don't know who he is, and he has no idea that Formula 1 even exists."



I can easily believe this. Its unreal the hidden talents people have, that often times never surface until its too late.

I generally prefer the "Mount Rushmore argument". You pick 4 (or nowadays it seems to be 5) GOATS.

Mine would probably be (at least as of now):

Tazio
Clark
Fangio
Senna
Schumacher

Cute list, but how do you rate these drivers? I mean, at all? That's what rubs me the wrong way about these so-called best-of-all-time lists. I'm all for best driver of the 90's or whatever decade you prefer, because then you actually have points or aspects to compare. But all-time is simply bogus, unless you really want to tell me that you can rate talent.

When Tazio raced, the pole position wasn't even invented. Senna died too soon, so we'll never know what his final career would have looked like. Clark's the same. I'm not against people trying to put together an all time best list, but I really can't take that serious, because you're trying to cover almost 100 years of Grand Prix racing, if you start at 1925, when even 10 years are hard to do.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Bleu »

I don't know if it's really good time to say this but it's somewhat timely as it's now quarter of century since Imola 1994 weekend.

Often we've heard that Ratzenberger's death is often forgotten as Senna died next day. But I feel it's somewhat other way around - because Senna died, Ratzenberger's name is often mentioned too.

A driver like Riccardo Paletti is much more forgotten when it comes to F1 deaths. Of course the era was different and in the early 1990s the sport was felt safer that it was when someone died almost every year, but still.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Bobby Doorknobs »

An F1 fan doesn't forget Roland, no, but the general population who otherwise might be familiar with Senna and that he died tragically in 1994 will almost certainly not have even heard of him. Imola '94 is a bit of a JFK moment in my family - who, apart from myself and my brother, don't really care one way or the other about F1 or motor racing in general - but the name Ratzenberger means nothing to them.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Rob Dylan »

https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/144925/video-the-rivalry-that-can-surpass-hamiltonvettel

Perhaps not particularly unpopular, but I don't think the Vettel-Hamilton 'rivalry' has never even come about. Leclerc and Vettel already seem to have more chemistry and general on-track action than the aforementioned pair have had since 2015. The two world champions have been hyped up for ages by the commentators and media, whilst imo the Rosberg-Hamilton and the Vettel-Alonso rivalries were way way more interesting and exciting.

IMO the Vettel-Hamilton rivalry is possibly the most disappointing rivalry of recent memory, since Alonso and Raikkonen were teammates.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Bobby Doorknobs »

Mystery Science Theater F1 was shite.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Rob Dylan »

That's a hot take. I mean, it wasn't god-awful, but it very very very quickly ran out of steam. The idea of having satirical commentary over an F1 race is a great idea to me, but in that specific way it just didn't work. Some in-jokes were pretty good, like the dramatic Spanish music over Alonso's actions, the theme tunes whenever certain drivers won races, and of course Kurbelwellenlager.

But yeah, even the creator ran out of steam and just stopped uploading after a while. And by that time I'd stopped watching anyway.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Bobby Doorknobs »

Rob Dylan wrote:That's a hot take. I mean, it wasn't god-awful, but it very very very quickly ran out of steam. The idea of having satirical commentary over an F1 race is a great idea to me, but in that specific way it just didn't work. Some in-jokes were pretty good, like the dramatic Spanish music over Alonso's actions, the theme tunes whenever certain drivers won races, and of course Kurbelwellenlager.

But yeah, even the creator ran out of steam and just stopped uploading after a while. And by that time I'd stopped watching anyway.

It was a fun concept that definitely could have been done a lot better. To his credit, Matt did come up with some funny stuff, but his line delivery and editing rarely did it justice (and to be fair, comedic editing is almost an artform in itself).
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by AdrianBelmonte_ »

To be fair, i got to him by complete fluke when i was looking for something related to Long Beach, then i binge-watched his videos and, some of them were bad, not god-awful, but bad, and some of them were really good, for example the Winkelrock was pure gold, his content was very hit and miss, but i mostly enjoyed it, the sad thing is that (according to some brazilian bloke from Jimmy Broadbent's Discord who apparently talked to Matt) he won't come back to MSTF1 again
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Aislabie »

I think the issue with MSTF1 was that it was just too much (bold for effect), both for the audience and for Matt the creator.

I like the idea of an alternate take on F1 races, tongue in cheek commentary, jingles and theme tunes for certain drivers. And of course, no-one can beat the Winkelrock. But at the same time the race ought to sort of shine through.

That's what makes Guerilla Cricket so good - it's all of those things, and yet it is still at its heart a commentary on the cricket.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by LadyMarussia295 »

Not F1 but still open wheel: I don't get why Sophia Florsch should be considered a better exemple for girls than other female racing drivers.
Ok she doesn't need to race with other girls to have a seat as some are doing (anyway I don't think that for a girl it has to be a shame the gender of others competitors), but that's called sponsorship. Also, I don't see what makes her palmares so great: only a few podiums without win in F4, last year was second lastest in EuroF3... she could have potential, but I don't see how she's proving she's the only female driver to follow.
Also she writes a lot of bad comments towards other female racers, the better exemple she could give to girls is how to criticize each others. :D
To make it more easy to understand: she could be a good exemple if her best hobby out of the car wasn't glorify herself.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

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LadyMarussia295 wrote:Not F1 but still open wheel: I don't get why Sophia Florsch should be considered a better exemple for girls than other female racing drivers.
Ok she doesn't need to race with other girls to have a seat as some are doing (anyway I don't think that for a girl it has to be a shame the gender of others competitors), but that's called sponsorship. Also, I don't see what makes her palmares so great: only a few podiums without win in F4, last year was second lastest in EuroF3... she could have potential, but I don't see how she's proving she's the only female driver to follow.
Also she writes a lot of bad comments towards other female racers, the better exemple she could give to girls is how to criticize each others. :D
To make it more easy to understand: she could be a good exemple if her best hobby out of the car wasn't glorify herself.

I agree with you. She reminds me of Pippa Mann in that sense. They have that kind of aura that suggests that "well, if I managed to get this far on my own, I don't see why any other women should get any more opportunities, therefore they must be bad".

Not to mention her taking pictures of her dashboard while driving on a busy motorway, while also ostensibly being an ambassador for safe road driving...

All I'm saying is, if you're going to put your support behind a super promising and talented young female Formula 3 driver, Jamie Chadwick is Right There.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Londoner »

Given I became a lifelong fan of her since she did Ginetta Juniors in 2015, if I see any more anti Sophia Floersch posts on here the banhammer's coming out. :pantano:
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

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I think that we have to recognise that a lot of the Pippa Mann, Sophia Florsch output to social media, and in response to media questioning is really just a part of the kind of self promotion they need to keep themselves racing. Or its a response to the kind of media questioning that seeks to 'differentiate' and create a story.

And in all this self-promotion you do have to differentiate yourself, make yourself look good, try to attract sympathy , or whatever your strategy is. So some of it can come out a bit 'unpalatable' to some of us, but I don't doubt that it may be effective in helping them do what they like to do - race.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by LadyMarussia295 »

East Londoner wrote:Given I became a lifelong fan of her since she did Ginetta Juniors in 2015, if I see any more anti Sophia Floersch posts on here the banhammer's coming out. :pantano:

I'm not "anti Sophia Florsch". I just don't like some ways she behave sometimes.

Also, I read the rules of the forum and I don't recall having read stuff like "it's forbidden to criticize even in a respectful way the drivers liked by the moderators of the forum, after aknowledging who their favourite drivers are with a huge imagination work". Can you explain better what's my violation... ;)
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by LadyMarussia295 »

yannicksamlad wrote:I think that we have to recognise that a lot of the Pippa Mann, Sophia Florsch output to social media, and in response to media questioning is really just a part of the kind of self promotion they need to keep themselves racing. Or its a response to the kind of media questioning that seeks to 'differentiate' and create a story.

And in all this self-promotion you do have to differentiate yourself, make yourself look good, try to attract sympathy , or whatever your strategy is. So some of it can come out a bit 'unpalatable' to some of us, but I don't doubt that it may be effective in helping them do what they like to do - race.

Well, I don't recall Mann behaving in the same way Florsch does sometimes. If you're talking about their attitude towards W Series, yeah I agree, but the huge difference, in my point of view, is that Mann doesn't seem to bash the W Series *drivers*. She's quite friendly with a couple of the W Series drivers at least, I think.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by yannicksamlad »

[quote="LadyMarussia295" If you're talking about their attitude towards W Series, yeah I agree, but the huge difference, in my point of view, is that Mann doesn't seem to bash the W Series *drivers*. She's quite friendly with a couple of the W Series drivers at least, I think.[/quote]
Yes I was talking about the negativity to W Series
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Wallio »

I have been waiting for GPR to be back up and running all season just so I can post this, so here goes:

I don't get George Russell. Like at all. Don't understand the hype, don't get the memes, can't understand why everyone wants to replace Lewis with him (and as y'all know, I'm no Lewis fan). So yeah, flame away, I know I'm the only person on earth that doesn't like him. :P :P :P :P :P
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Salamander »

Wallio wrote:I have been waiting for GPR to be back up and running all season just so I can post this, so here goes:

I don't get George Russell. Like at all. Don't understand the hype, don't get the memes, can't understand why everyone wants to replace Lewis with him (and as y'all know, I'm no Lewis fan). So yeah, flame away, I know I'm the only person on earth that doesn't like him. :P :P :P :P :P


You don't understand the hype? After he totally showed Bottas up despite having next to no time at all in the Mercedes Bottas had been driving all year? Yeah, Bottas is no Hamilton, but he's still a good driver.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Wallio »

Salamander wrote:
Wallio wrote:I have been waiting for GPR to be back up and running all season just so I can post this, so here goes:

I don't get George Russell. Like at all. Don't understand the hype, don't get the memes, can't understand why everyone wants to replace Lewis with him (and as y'all know, I'm no Lewis fan). So yeah, flame away, I know I'm the only person on earth that doesn't like him. :P :P :P :P :P


You don't understand the hype? After he totally showed Bottas up despite having next to no time at all in the Mercedes Bottas had been driving all year? Yeah, Bottas is no Hamilton, but he's still a good driver.


I'm afraid I don't. I don't view beating Bottas as all that impressive (he is the Finnish Rubino afterall) and old Georgie-porgy finished below Kubica in the WDC in 2019 and was sitting in P21, plumb last in the WDC this year before his Merc drive, behind Latifi who is....well Latifi. Now I'm not saying Russell is the worst guy on the grid or anything, but I don't get why everyone thinks he's going to win 8,9,10 titles. He's another Trulli, fantastic qualifier, and really pretty meh on Sundays.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Rob Dylan »

His main problem has definitely been Sundays. He's among many drivers with obvious potential for good results, but who consistently throws them away, Imola being the biggest example in 2020. He's there on Saturdays, but not there when it matters.

I guess he's similar to Hulkenberg. Hype and potential, but unless he starts delivering the goods that hype will wane.

ALSO he's British, and so he gets more natural hype from the Sky team than others. Remember how it was "oh poor George, what a shame, it's a mistake anyone could make" when he crashed under the safety car in the dry. Any non-Brit would have been lambasted completely. He needs to start delivering on these free passes.

BUT Sakhir was not his fault, and had Mercedes not decided to completely commit seppuku he wouldn't be a reject anymore!
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Rob Dylan »

I miss Max Mosley - not necessarily the man himself, but the way F1 was run during the 1990s and the 2000s which conveniently disappeared the moment he did. The FiA often took controversial decisions and were an overlooking referee which were always seen to be in charge and with the final word on any decision.

These days the FiA is... barely even there? Especially when it comes to in-race decisions, there hasn't been an in-race DSQ since probably 2007 or 2008 or something, and there have been PLENTY of incidents that have warranted that kind of action*. There doesn't appear to be any kind of leadership from Todt at all, I have no real idea who's in charge of F1 these days or what kind of direction they want to take the sport in. Liberty Media certainly have some idea and plans from the commercial standpoint, but from a rules and a week-in week-out perspective, the FiA seems to have disappeared as a governing body in the last decade. There doesn't appear to be a figurehead of any kind.

Most depressingly, it feels like the teams and the drivers have been able to run free and do what they want for a long time. Ignoring Verstappen, plenty of drivers have been playing with the rules and safety before and after the Dutchman, while the biggest presences on the grid are Wolff and Horner. There hasn't been any kind of figurehead to steer the ship, although I had originally hoped Ross Brawn would try his best.

And I honestly think I would prefer a controversial dictator who actually commands the sport rather than this stagnating swamp of a democracy F1 has been for the last ten years. A good figurehead can be a good show to the sport and its fans of where F1 is going and what it wants to be. This current faceless bureaucracy was shown for what it was regarding #weraceasone, which just showed that the sport has no idea how to promote even a simple positive message and take action accordingly.

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*Hamilton's antics in 2011 (Monaco crashing into everyone, Hungary doing the world's least safe rejoin), as well as his politics and t-shirts etc. Hard to believe it took until Monza for them to come to a decision about whether he should be allowed to wear his own t-shirts or not.
*Vettel's antics in Monza rejoining, as well as his deliberate crashes into Hamilton at Baku
*Verstappen's comments about Lance Stroll
Murray Walker at the 1997 Austrian Grand Prix wrote:The other [Stewart] driver, who nobody's been paying attention to, because he's disappointing, is Jan Magnussen.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

I wouldn't exactly call this an unpopular opinion. I think a lot of people, not just us forumites, miss the days of the FIA putting the fear of god into the teams (albeit with the exception of Ferrari) and dishing out harsh penalties like BAR being thrown out for two races or McLaren being stripped of their constructors' points, or even as you point out, actually making use of the black flag where it's called for. But by this point, I don't think any prospective FIA Presidential candidate running on a ticket of a more Mosleyish approach to leadership would stand a particularly good chance of being elected.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by mario »

Wallio wrote:
Salamander wrote:
Wallio wrote:I have been waiting for GPR to be back up and running all season just so I can post this, so here goes:

I don't get George Russell. Like at all. Don't understand the hype, don't get the memes, can't understand why everyone wants to replace Lewis with him (and as y'all know, I'm no Lewis fan). So yeah, flame away, I know I'm the only person on earth that doesn't like him. :P :P :P :P :P


You don't understand the hype? After he totally showed Bottas up despite having next to no time at all in the Mercedes Bottas had been driving all year? Yeah, Bottas is no Hamilton, but he's still a good driver.

I'm afraid I don't. I don't view beating Bottas as all that impressive (he is the Finnish Rubino afterall) and old Georgie-porgy finished below Kubica in the WDC in 2019 and was sitting in P21, plumb last in the WDC this year before his Merc drive, behind Latifi who is....well Latifi. Now I'm not saying Russell is the worst guy on the grid or anything, but I don't get why everyone thinks he's going to win 8,9,10 titles. He's another Trulli, fantastic qualifier, and really pretty meh on Sundays.

In at least some quarters, the lobbying to have Russell replace Hamilton seems to be motivated more by a desire to get rid of Hamilton than a belief in Russell...

With regards to Russell's wider performances and that one off race for Mercedes, I do agree that there is some element of caution that could be taken with his performances.

It is worth noting that Russell has taken part in quite a lot of tests for Mercedes over the years - I believe that he is estimated to have done about 5,000km of testing for Mercedes over the years - so he already has a fairly well established presence in Mercedes's operations and, as Mercedes's designs over the past few years have been iterative, experience of cars such as the late season W10 would potentially have already set him up in relatively good shape to drive the W11.

He also has undertaken simulator work for Mercedes in the past, and talked about knowing what components Mercedes were developing for the W11, including the DAS system that Mercedes had on their car in 2020 - so, in terms of a simulated experience, Russell will likely have already had some knowledge of how the W11 worked. The commonality of the power unit between the Mercedes works team and Williams, as their customer, would also have worked to his advantage.

As a comparison, consider how easily Hulkenberg slotted back in to the Racing Point team and managed to get up to pace so rapidly - he hadn't driven for them since 2016, but both he and the team found it pretty easy to work together and for Hulkenberg to adjust to the car, and that was with the disadvantage of having not driven an F1 car for 8 months.

On the other side of the coin, there is the question of how well Bottas performed and whether his performance was entirely representative either. The press as a whole were pretty aggressive towards Bottas throughout that weekend, and I do think that Bottas let that get to him - he was noticeably more agitated and erratic than usual, such that there is the question of whether it was a case of Bottas underperforming rather than Russell overperforming.

As you note, there was also a mismatch between his heroics on a Saturday and performances on a Sunday, notably when compared to Latifi. In terms of the time gap between the two, Latifi was often able to keep up a fairly decent pace relative to Russell and finished within a respectable distance more often than not - now, some of that will be a reflection of the necessities to manage aspects of the car, such as the tyres, fuel load etc., and I do think that Latifi isn't quite as poor as he is often portrayed (you'd think that he could barely drive at all from the way that some have portrayed him), but it is a little overlooked that the gap there isn't quite as large as you might expect.

Frogfoot9013 wrote:I wouldn't exactly call this an unpopular opinion. I think a lot of people, not just us forumites, miss the days of the FIA putting the fear of god into the teams (albeit with the exception of Ferrari) and dishing out harsh penalties like BAR being thrown out for two races or McLaren being stripped of their constructors' points, or even as you point out, actually making use of the black flag where it's called for. But by this point, I don't think any prospective FIA Presidential candidate running on a ticket of a more Mosleyish approach to leadership would stand a particularly good chance of being elected.

I would say that opinions seem to have shifted on that point, because there was definitely a sense at the start of the shift from Mosely to Todt that people welcomed the idea of a less interventionist and less combative FIA, and I would say that it did include people on this forum too. I wonder whether a Mosely style figure might initially be thought of in a positive way, but then might be considered as a return to "the bad old days" over time.

I do wonder, though, how the investigation into Ferrari's 2019 spec engine would have gone if we had seen the FIA acting in the way it did under Mosely.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

mario wrote:
Frogfoot9013 wrote:I wouldn't exactly call this an unpopular opinion. I think a lot of people, not just us forumites, miss the days of the FIA putting the fear of god into the teams (albeit with the exception of Ferrari) and dishing out harsh penalties like BAR being thrown out for two races or McLaren being stripped of their constructors' points, or even as you point out, actually making use of the black flag where it's called for. But by this point, I don't think any prospective FIA Presidential candidate running on a ticket of a more Mosleyish approach to leadership would stand a particularly good chance of being elected.

I would say that opinions seem to have shifted on that point, because there was definitely a sense at the start of the shift from Mosely to Todt that people welcomed the idea of a less interventionist and less combative FIA, and I would say that it did include people on this forum too. I wonder whether a Mosely style figure might initially be thought of in a positive way, but then might be considered as a return to "the bad old days" over time.

I do wonder, though, how the investigation into Ferrari's 2019 spec engine would have gone if we had seen the FIA acting in the way it did under Mosely.


I do indeed recall that many in the F1 world (including the likes of which would be on this forum) welcomed Mosley's demise, but with hindsight I think attitudes on that have shifted as the negative consequences of a less interventionist FIA have become more evident over the years.
As far as how Ferrari's 2019-spec engine would've been punished under a Mosleyish figure, I'd assume that that would depend on if the FIA would still be as Ferrari International Assistance as they were under him. If they were, they'd likely have gotten some punishment like what they actually got. Otherwise, quite possibly they'd have been dealt with rather draconianly, though this could take a variety of different forms.
James Hunt, commentating on the 1991 German Grand Prix wrote:The Benettons looking very smart together on the track, mostly because they're both going so slowly.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Butterfox »

I do no tthink people really had a problem with his interventionist style, but more with the fact that he would not compromise if one of his ideas was stupid. When he made good decisions that just went largely unnoticed.
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Re: Unpopular F1 opinions

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

Butterfox wrote:I do no tthink people really had a problem with his interventionist style, but more with the fact that he would not compromise if one of his ideas was stupid. When he made good decisions that just went largely unnoticed.


This is probably more accurate tbh
I don't recall there being much criticism of how the FIA punished the likes of BAR and McLaren in 2005 and 2007 respectively (though IIRC with BAR, Mosley wanted to throw the team out of the championship full-stop and I think they got lucky by dint of getting caught early in the year versus getting caught later on in the year). Likewise, when McLaren got that $100m fine and being thrown out of the constructor's championship, there was little opposition to that. However, the FIA's lunacy in 2005 at Indianapolis was pretty universally disliked for obvious reasons.

However, I do think a lot of us took that sort of interventionism for granted at the time, not realising that in spite of all that was wrong with the way the FIA was run then, we'd never get it that good again.
James Hunt, commentating on the 1991 German Grand Prix wrote:The Benettons looking very smart together on the track, mostly because they're both going so slowly.
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