Scrub Era F1: 1990 - A New Decade Begins

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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Butterfox »

That classified DNF could turn out to be worth gold.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Collieafc »

I am very much hoping Tyrell’s lack of points scoring is due to this being a power track
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Hammercat42 »

Fondmetal had some badluck with the Prequalifying and our setup, but atleast we are within the 1 second of the normal qualify and we will do our best to get a better understanding of the new Formet chassis.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

Auto-piloted EuroBrun would like to run Oscar Larrauri for only the rounds in the Americas.

For the European rounds, they will approach:
1. Gregor Foitek
2. Franco Forini
3. Bruno Giacomelli

For the Japanese and Australian Grands Prix they will approach:
1. Toshio Suzuki
2. Masahiko Kageyama
3. Andrew Gilbert-Scott

In the event that all these drivers turn EuroBrun down, they'll keep Oscar Larrauri for as long as he's willing to stay
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

Aislabie wrote:Auto-piloted EuroBrun would like to run Oscar Larrauri for only the rounds in the Americas.

For the European rounds, they will approach:
1. Gregor Foitek
2. Franco Forini
3. Bruno Giacomelli

For the Japanese and Australian Grands Prix they will approach:
1. Toshio Suzuki
2. Masahiko Kageyama
3. Andrew Gilbert-Scott

In the event that all these drivers turn EuroBrun down, they'll keep Oscar Larrauri for as long as he's willing to stay

In-Season RNGs

Firstly, to Gregor Foitek, who has received an offer of 10 PreQ sessions grands prix
1-70 - It's F1, innit
71-100 - This car looks too slow even for Gregor

83 - Nope.

Next, Franco Forini, His F1 career went so badly that he dropped back down to Italian Formula Three in 1988 and 89.
1-20 - Accepts all of the races, and will delegate driver-management of the F3 team on weekends that it clashes
21-60 - Accepts only the races which don't clash with Italian F3
61-100 - Turns EuroBrun down, preferring to continue in his steady job as a team boss

63 - Also nope.

Their third and final call for European help goes out to the most dominant driver in motorsports history and Ferrari tester Bruno Giacomelli. He used to get podiums.
1-50 - Sure, he'll drive anything
51-100 - Ferrari don't want their test driver putting himself at risk driving that

20 - Giacomelli will take ten Fridays out of his busy testing schedule. RNGesus decrees that he brings in £62,000 pro rata, noticeably less than Larrauri does.

They also want Toshio Suzuki to put in a couple of appearances towards the end of the season. He's never driven in F1, and at 35 already it's not like opportunities will be growing on trees.
1-80 - Sure, why not
81-100 - Almost any other offer would be a better offer

52 - Toshio will be an F1 driver. RNGesus decrees that he is a Tier C driver, bringing in £72,000 pro rata.

With the four-driver limit in effect, this will complete the EuroBrun driver roster.
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1990 Mexican Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report

There are few things more nerve-wracking than a Friday morning pre-qualifying session, especially with 26 cars all jostling for the same pieces of the 2.7-mile Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. The vast pace differential between the fastest and slowest cars involved in the session served to make it especially hazardous.

Of course, that slowest car was the First-Life piloted by David Brabham. After a demoralising session of being out-dragged down the straights and out-turned through the enormous esses section, the Australian motorsport scion looked utterly dejected.

At the other end of the spectrum, three of the prequalifying teams looked especially pacy: the Ferrari-powered pairings at Ligier and Zakspeed, as well as the Footwork Project Four. They monopolised top six places in the same way that the EuroBrun and First teams monopolised the bottom four.

The remaining four places in the main show were extremely hotly contested, with ten cars all within a second of each other. The all-important top ten places went to Ivan Capelli (the leading Minardi driver), Eric Bernard (for Leyton House), Marco Apicella (who got the best out of his Fondmetal) and Enrico Bertaggia (demonstrating that the Monteverdi really is a good car despite its drivers).

The likes of Mauricio Gugelmin, Alain Ferté and both Osella drivers came within mere hundredths of the all-important top 10, showing just how cruel Formula One can sometimes be. Coloni and Rial just couldn’t get their cars up to speed at all, and never really contended.

Main Qualifying Report

The competitive nature of the present pre-qualifying teams was on full display on Saturday afternoon as only one pre-qualifier failed to make the 26-car grid. That one car belonged to Enrico Bertaggia, who couldn’t replicate his surprise pre-qualifying lap. Joining him in the bin at “Row 14” were Gianni Morbidelli (Onyx) and both Lamborghinis who simply couldn’t get their cars to work at high altitude.

On the other hand, the other Italian power unit worked startlingly well: Nelson Piquet managed to put his Ferrari on the front row of the grid, Eric van de Poele started from third place and Bertrand Gachot even put his Ligier on the third row.

However, none of them could quite match McLaren’s Alain Prost; after a surprisingly poor third place at Interlagos, he drove like a man who was desperate to regain his place at the top of the Formula One tree to take pole position with a time of 1:17.629.

Now, I’ve not got around to programming the Q and PreQ outputs yet, so please do feel free to just ask if there’s anything you need to know.

Race Report

Now, remember at the start of the season when Ferrari scrambled to sign engine customers in order that they could make ends meet financially? Well, that sudden rush to increase powerplant production has had a bit of an impact on build quality.

Before the race even started, the Ferrari-powered duo of Thierry Boutsen and Karl Wendlinger both failed to get away and commence their formation laps – both recorded “Did Not Start”s. A little later on, Eric van de Poele, Satoru Nakajima, Philippe Alliot and Nelson Piquet (yes that’s all four Ferrari teams) all suffered mechanical difficulties before the end of the 26th lap, forcing their retirements from the race.

To make things worse, one of only two Ferrari-powered drivers not yet mentioned was also out of the race on Lap 18: Ayrton Senna, Ferrari’s star signing, crashed *hard* into the wall around the Peraltada turn. This certainly raises questions about the bumpy track surface and questionable safety provisions at the track.

All of these eliminations meant that the non-Ferrari cars (and Bertrand Gachot’s Ligier) had plenty of camera time to share amongst them. Over the course of the race, Gerhard Berger became a crowd favourite as his bright orange Tyrrell climbed through the field. Thanks partly to Alain Prost’s preference for winning races in the slowest possible time, Berger climbed up into the podium places, overtook Nigel Mansell, and for a while looked as if he might catch up to the race leader. Of course, Prost had pace in hand, and picked things up a bit once Berger got within ten seconds.

Further down from the main podium places, Stefano Modena and Aguri Suzuki ran line astern for most of the race and provided some vindication for Ron Dennis’ rush job to establish a brand new Formula One team. They took good care of their Yamaha engines to come home safely in fourth and fifth place respectively.
Suzuki had been harried for the entire last stint by the rapid Ligier of Bertrand Gachot. The Belgian Luxembourger finally tried to send it for the overtake, only to make contact with Suzuki and end his own race. It was a galling end to the race for him, although he does end up with a classified result of ninth place. (Note: the spreadsheet does say 68 laps, which would classify him in 5th place, but I don’t feel comfortable manually taking points away from Footwork and Lotus; instead I shall tweak the spreadsheet before the next race).

Luis Perez-Sala took his first World Championship point since Silverstone in 1989 to round out the top six. He had been battling the Minardi of Ivan Capelli, only for the Italian to have an accident and run hard into the wall.
This left Perez-Sala comfortably ahead of Eric Bernard (Leyton House) and Marco Apicella (Fondmetal), but both took results that could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to their teams by the end of the season.

Image

Footwork Project Four Yamaha escape Pre-Qualifying with this result, while Pirelli Onyx Formula One Team drop down into the lower group.

After the podium celebrations had settled down, reports came from RNGesus the local hospital that Ayrton Senna had sustained a broken wrist in his accident and would miss the next two Grands Prix, for which Bruno Giacomelli would be brought in as his replacement. Ivan Capelli suffered no injuries in his accident.


Starting from this Grand Prix, there will be a £10,000 reward to the team manager who updates the results on the wiki page. Should you choose to share the job, the reward money will also be shared.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by dr-baker »

Wow, Geoff Brabham actually beat someone in Pre qualifying? That wasn't supposed to happen!
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1990 United States Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report

When the teams arrived in Phoenix for the United States Grand Prix, there were a couple of changes in the paddock. The first, we all knew about: Ayrton Senna is recuperating from a broken wrist and as a result will be replaced by Ferrari test driver Bruno Giacomelli. The other was only noticed by the team in question late on Thursday night, which led to some very frantic phone calls.

The First-Life Racing Engines squad arrived in Phoenix without one of its two contracted drivers: David Brabham, evidently demoralised by the Mexican Grand Prix, was nowhere to be found. After some negotiations, the FIA agreed that First should be allowed to parachute in a driver for this round, and that this would not count towards their four-driver limit.

One night of frenzied phone calls later, and the team had a second driver: IndyCar part-timer Jeff Wood. Despite never having sat in the car before, he managed to get within five seconds of the cut-off time, although a fairytale chance to make the show was not to be for him or his team.
Image

Several other teams also lost both cars, including new pre-qualifiers Onyx: their best laptime from Gianni Morbidelli fell half a second short of the mark. At the other end of the table, Zakspeed, Ligier and AGS all had excellent days, in addition to the leading Minardi of Ivan Capelli – the Italian slotting it into third on the timesheets.

However, the biggest shock of all came from Olivier Grouillard, who poached the 10th and last spot in main qualifying while the likes of Mike Groff and Michael Schumacher got caught up in traffic once too often.

Main Qualifying Report

Compared to pre-qualifying, the main qualifying session always seems to be more of an ordered affair. The same drivers usually make it to the top spots, like Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell: the two early Championship protagonists locked out the front row, with the Frenchman bagging another pole position.

Behind them, however, came some less fancied faces: the Footwork of Stefano Modena and the Tyrrell of Andrea de Cesaris both prospered on a much less power-sensitive circuit. Even further back, Alesi and Nannini both had shockers, qualifying outside the top ten and therefore behind the likes of Bertrand Gachot.

Watching on from their garages though would be Erik Comas, who escaped prequalifying only to again miss out compared to his older teammate, Hitoshi Ogawa in the second Arrows Lola, Nicola Larini in the Coloni and Olivier Grouillard in the Osella.

Race Report

When the lights went out and the cars pulled away from their grid spaces, there was one machine that stayed resolutely where it was: the Arrows Lola of Johnny Herbert stalled and went absolutely nowhere. Fortunately, the five cars behind him on his side of the grid all negotiated the hazard safely and the Briton lives to race another day.

Having the exact opposite time of things were Alain Prost and Eric van de Poele: the polesitting Frenchman had made a clinical start, while the Ferrari-powered Belgian had powered up into the top three off the line. Indeed, aside from Herbert everybody had an acceptable start: there were no retirements until the first pit window, when Aguri Suzuki was on the wrong end of a very brusque overtake from Nelson Piquet that also caused the Ferrari man to pit for repairs.

Of course, it was also at around this time that the traditional gauntlet of Ferrari reliability presented itself. First, the luckless van de Poele’s Benetton sputtered to a standstill on Lap 20, then Giacomelli’s Ferrari bit the dust (though that was down to the Avon tyres as opposed to the horses in the back), before Satoru Nakajima’s Zakspeed also decided it would rather become an interesting ornament than continue under its own power.

Honestly, reliability was about all that lit up the middle laps of the race – the Phoenix circuit is not designed for entertainment. Indeed, it is not until Lap 55 that I feel the need to comment on anything, for it was at this point that the Lotus of Heinz-Harald Frentzen went straight on at a 90-degree left-hander. Which one, you may ask? bathplug if I know, they all look the same.

Regardless, it was at around this point that the race sprung to life. The Footwork of Stefano Modena, which had jumped Nigel Mansell in the pit lane, was suddenly the fastest car on the circuit as Prost battled gremlins in his McLaren. As the front three closed up, one wondered if we would see a brand new Grand Prix winner.

Alas, it was not to be as the tight and boring Phoenix layout prevented him from even attempting the necessary overtake. Not even Nigel Mansell could get the job done – he ended up last of the trio that crossed the line split by mere seconds.

Further back, the Tyrrell continued to be all but bulletproof as Berger and de Cesaris finished in fourth and fifth place respectively before Luxembourg’s newest racing driver Bertrand Gachot managed to secure Ligier’s first points of the season to drag them out of prequalifying for the time being. Replacing them will be the Scuderia Italia squad, whose horror season continued today as both cars suffered punctures to their Pirelli rubber.

Nelson Piquet also completed a deeply disappointing weekend for Ferrari by trailing home in eighth place, having spent almost the entire race stuck behind Ivan Capelli’s Minardi.

After being checked out by the medical team, Heinz-Harald Frentzen was confirmed to be absolutely fine, while the attempted appeal to the stewards by Footwork against Ferrari proved to be similarly inconsequential.

Image

Ligier escape pre-qualifying.

Scuderia Italia drop down into pre-qualifying.

David Brabham and Geoff Brabham both leave First - the latter resigning because he feels that his brother's withdrawal has made his position untenable.


There continues to be a £10,000 reward to the team manager who updates the tables on the wiki page. Should you choose to share the job, the reward money will also be shared. (Last week, this was taken by HawkAussie who earns some money for his 1991 team.)
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

So, in off-track news there are a few changes in personnel.

Firstly, Fondmetal has returned to autopilot leadership (they are available to anyone who wants a team with limited prospects). The Autopilot's first action is to approach the newly available Image David Brabham to replace Image Roland Ratzenberger in the 30 car.

First-Life have confirmed that their new drivers will be Image Giovanna Amati and Image Jean-Pierre Frey. They're both truly awful drivers who wouldn't ever get a shot at F1 any other way, but we'll still need to RNG how much money they bring in.

RNG results coming in a moment
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Aislabie
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

Aislabie wrote:So, in off-track news there are a few changes in personnel.

Firstly, Fondmetal has returned to autopilot leadership (they are available to anyone who wants a team with limited prospects). The Autopilot's first action is to approach the newly available Image David Brabham to replace Image Roland Ratzenberger in the 30 car.

First-Life have confirmed that their new drivers will be Image Giovanna Amati and Image Jean-Pierre Frey. They're both truly awful drivers who wouldn't ever get a shot at F1 any other way, but we'll still need to RNG how much money they bring in.

RNG results coming in a moment


In-Season RNG, Part Two
Auto-Fondmetal has decided to send Roland Ratzenberger back to touring cars - so long as they can sign up Geoff Brabham. Brabham has had a shite time of things with First though, and this does cast a shadow over his decision:
1-50 - Fondmetal does have a car that has been proven to be able to make the grid - why not?
51-100 - Time to go back to that sweet sweet Nissan IMSA meal ticket

36 - Looks like Brabham and his money will be staying on the grid for the time being.

Next up, how much money will Giovanna Amati bring to First? RNGesus says: £123,000 pro rata.

Finally, Jean-Pierre Frey is bringing some money to First. RNGesus says: £122,000 pro rata.

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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

Scuderia Ferrari has been unimpressed with Nelson Piquet's performances so far this season, and in the event that Bruno Giacomelli finishes in the points before Piquet, the team is strongly considering giving the Italian a full-time seat in lieu of Piquet.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Butterfox »

Ligier is wlling to hire Piquet if he changes his nationality to france, to please the french sponsors.
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1990 San Marino Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report

The European season begins today at Imola, and among the sport’s lesser teams it really is all change: First-Life have an all-new line-up of Giovanna Amati and Jean-Pierre Frey, while their former driver Geoff Brabham has secured himself a seat at Fondmetal in place of the disappointing Roland Ratzenberger. Meanwhile, EuroBrun are rumoured to be phoning around for a Plan B following the shock announcement from Ferrari that Nelson Piquet’s place in the team could be taken by Bruno Giacomelli if the Brazilian fails to improve his performances.

Of course, all of this must be put to one side for F1’s most cut-throat session of competition as thirteen of the smallest teams compete for a shot at the weekend proper. Most successful of those teams was Zakspeed: their powerful Ferrari engine served them very well at the power-sensitive Imola track. Scuderia Italia also prospered with their Lamborghini engines, while Minardi also managed to get both cars through despite Alex Caffi’s best lap being hampered by much slower traffic. He ended up right around the cut-line, along with Bertaggia, Gugelmin and Moreno (who all made it) and Morbidelli, Brabham and Schumacher (who did not).

This week’s teams who registered the dreaded double-DNPQ included Onyx, Fondmetal, Rial, Coloni, EuroBrun and (of course) First-Life. Apart from those last two also-rans though, no team missed out on the show by more than a second which really must be encouraging.

Main Qualifying Report

After a supreme flying lap on Saturday, Benetton’s Belgian rookie may well have earned himself the nickname “Eric van de Pole”. He led one of F1’s most unlikely (and most Ferrari-powered) front rows alongside the Luxembourg Ligier of Bertrand Gachot.

Beyond that most unexpected of front rows, things looked a little more normal: McLaren-Honda locked out the second row, with a duo of Williams-Renaults behind them. Karl Wendlinger also put in an eyebrow-raising qualifying effort to snatch seventh place as the leading survivor of prequalifying.

At the opposite end of the grid, both drivers for Scuderia Italia held their nerve under immense pressure to both qualify: Tarquini with a stunning lap to secure 15th place and Martini with a scruffier lap in traffic to keep hold of 26th and last place on the grid.

He qualified at the expense of Ivan Capelli’s Minardi, Mauricio Gugelmin’s Leyton House, Hitoshi Ogawa’s Arrows and Roberto Moreno’s Osella – all cars either in, or on the fringes of dropping down into pre-qualifying.

Race Report

Despite their outstanding qualifying efforts, the Ferrari customers’ time in the sun lasted only as far as Tosa corner. By that point, Alain Prost had already climbed from fourth to first thanks to an absolutely stellar start from the grid; to compound the problem, his teammate had tucked into his slipstream to follow him past the two defenceless leaders.

The opposite of this was the fate of the Lotus-Isuzu of Heinz-Harald Frentzen: his engine never got up to full power, and after two laps of getting overtaken by all and sundry, he pulled it into the pits to retire the car.

Such is the narrow nature of Imola that any real attempt to overtake does run the risk of contact, and with so many cars in the Formula One field these days many have accepted collisions as “just one of those things”.
Regardless of this, the early collisions that befell both Karl Wendlinger and Nelson Piquet during their early-race battles were thoroughly disappointing, as they robbed both drivers of the potential points that could kick-start their respective seasons.

However, the race was turned upside down on Lap 32 when the race control announced that after careful analysis of countless replays, reigning World Champion Alain Prost was found to have jumped the start. He was shown the black flag, and disqualified from the lead of what would surely have been his third consecutive Grand Prix win.

Instead, that responsibility fell to his teammate: it was imperative that *a* McLaren win, even if it were not *the* McLaren. His hopes of doing so were further aided when Eric van de Poele, now his closest challenger, had an unpleasant accident at Tamburello. He was very obviously out of the race, leaving Alesi’s closest challenges to come from the Williams pairing of Mansell and Nannini.

The Briton continued to drive at and occasionally beyond the limit and with just a couple of laps left, his car decided that it had had enough of pressing the McLaren so closely and suffered a hydraulic failure. Nigel Mansell was out of the race, leading to the unlikely podium of the aforementioned Alesi, Alessandro Nannini and – fresh out of prequalifying – Satoru Nakajima of Marlboro Zakspeed.

The rest of the points were taken by Philippe Alliot of Ligier, rookie Mark Blundell of Lamborghini, and Andrea de Cesaris in the bulletproof Tyrrell. In tenth and last place, Erik Comas brought home the AGS for its first race finish of the season, keeping his nose out of trouble – quite unlike Gabriele Tarquini, who threw away a possible points finish by missing his pit box and thus being disqualified for attempting to reverse back to it, and also unlike Bruno Giacomelli who spun into a gravel trap with no-one else nearby.

Image

This means that Zakspeed escape pre-qualifying and will be replaced there by Arrows, who are still awaiting their first points finish of the season. Despite needing some help getting out of his car, Eric van de Poele passed his MOT from Sid Watkins.

The usual £10,000 reward continues to apply, although HawkAussie keeps taking it.
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1990 Monaco Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report

The Monaco Grand Prix is the crown jewel of the Formula One calendar. It’s not like any other race in the sport: the walls are so close that it seems the fastest cars are almost breathing in to get between them, and one where differences in engine power mean less than anywhere else.

That description was not one that could be applied to the First, EuroBrun or Onyx team though. They went two by two as they failed to make it into Main Qualifying, packing out six of the seven bottom spots on the timesheets. The other driver down there with them was Nicola Larini in the Coloni: his 24th place all the more harrowing given that teammate Fabrizio Giovanardi escaped the session with a lap that trounced his more experienced teammate by almost three seconds. That’s not a good look for Larini.

Two other Italian teams also missed out on the show in heartbreaking fashion: for Fondmetal, their drivers slotted into 11th and 12th on the timesheets, both within two tenths of Monteverdi’s Mike Groff who made it out of the session.

For Minardi, the consequences were more severe: by recording a double DNPQ, they have officially failed to meet their sponsorship goal.

Along with Fab Gio and Mike Groff, the cars that progressed out of prequalifying were: Herbert and Ogawa for Arrows, Tarquini and Martini for Scuderia Italia, Comas and Ferté for AGS, Olivier Grouillard for Osella and Michael Schumacher for Rial. Guenther Schmid was not impressed with Danner continuing to be so much slower than his rookie teammate, and publicly announced that his time with the team was done.

Main Qualifying Report

Monaco’s qualifying is always the most exciting of the year, and 1990 was no different: McLaren’s Alain Prost ultimately came out on top by only 0.144 seconds from Benetton’s Thierry Boutsen for an all-Francophone front row.

A little further back, Sandro Nannini and Gerhard Berger both put in impressive laps to take their places on the second row of the grid, while the Ferrari chassis held Ayrton Senna back from the sort of places he’d usually qualify in the Principality: he found himself all the way back on the fourth row, while teammate Piquet was all the way back on row six.

Erik Comas flew the flag for the pre-qualifying teams by lining up just one place further back, while his teammate was one of four drivers stuck on the non-existent “Row 14”: alongside Ferté were Nakajima (Zakspeed), Giovanardi (Coloni) and Martini (Scuderia Italia). Of the four, Giovanardi was the only one whose teammate also failed to make the grid.

Race Report

Sometimes Monaco races can be a bit processional, but the opening lap was much more accordion than procession: the slow-starting Ligier of Bertrand Gachot was subject to a lunge into the Nouvelle chicane by Aguri Suzuki’s Footwork, only for both of the cars to try to turn onto the same piece of tarmac. That never works, but at Monaco it creates a catastrophe. Gabriele Tarquini’s Dallara also got caught out in the melée, and Mike Groff ARCA-braked his Monteverdi into the pile-up to make it four DNFs from the incident. Ukyo Katayama also managed to get himself involved, but a push start from a marshal got him out of the situation – until he was confirmed to have been disqualified for the manoeuvre despite the fact that the race was promptly red-flagged and restarted.

On the second start, Benetton’s Thierry Boutsen achieved some heroics into Sainte-Dévote to take the lead of the race from the polesitting Prost: as the Frenchman was forced off the racing line and forced to brake, Williams’ Nannini also managed to squeak through and the World Champion had dropped down to third place.

Immediately, Boutsen was the fastest car in the race. He sped off into the distance, leaving Nannini behind him as a roadblock to Prost’s progress. This was a flawless plan for Boutsen, right up until he needed to lap the slow-running Lotus of Luis Perez-Sala. The Spaniard either didn’t know Boutsen was coming or didn’t really stop to think what that meant, with the result that he didn’t get far enough out of the way in the tunnel section of the track. When the Benetton emerged back into the sunlight, its front-left wheel was at a 45-degree angle from the front-right, the utterly luckless start to the season for Benetton compounded by the fact that Eric van de Poele had succumbed to a spin eight laps prior.

All of a sudden, Nannini was in line for his second Grand Prix win if he could keep Prost at bay. The pair of them both pulled away from the now third-placed Berger at a rapid rate, creating a real two-horse race at the front of the field. No matter what he tried, Prost couldn’t get past.

With plenty of room to do so, he pitted onto a fresh set of tyres despite having originally planned to go to the end of the race. Though he was able to get some additional pace out of them, the copious amounts of lapped traffic between him and the now dominant Nannini meant that it was the Italian who took the race win by a comfortable 18 seconds.

The third podium position was inherited by Prost’s teammate Jean Alesi after Gerhard Berger clipped a barrier and damaged his car beyond repair. He was the first of three cars backed into a train by the ultimately DNFing Tyrrell, the other two being Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna.

The final points position fell to one of the sport’s most exciting young drivers, racing for one of its very smallest teams: Erik Comas, claiming the best result of his fledgeling career, and the joint-best result in the AGS team’s history. He held off a faster French car, the Ligier-Lancia of Philippe Alliot for most of the race to make that result happen.

Image

No injury RNGs were necessary, and AGS’ sixth-place finish is not quite enough to escape pre-qualifying yet.

The £10,000 Wiki reward is available as always should anybody feel like stealing it off HawkAussie
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

As alluded to in the previous race report, Rial Racing has lost patience with Christian Danner. For his seat they will be approaching:

  1. Image Bernd Schneider
  2. Image Yannick Dalmas
  3. Image Joachim Winkelhock
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by TomWazzleshaw »

Monteverdi would like to offer Stefan Johansson a seat for the remainder of 1990, at a 5k per race retainer. We would like Mike Groff to step aside to make this happen, but should he do so, he will be guaranteed a 1991 race seat with the team, on the condition he does not withdraw his current funding in the team
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

Williams would like to answer recent compounding rumours that they are approaching Nelson Piquet.

Swivelling in his chair and clicking a retractable pencil, Patrick Head explains "it's quite simple really. We spread a bunch of rumours that we're hiring Piquet and Sandro gives us a win. Simple carrot and whip. Sandro should just be glad we didn't threaten him with a decent driver like Giacomelli."

Further rumours abound as to Nigel Mansell's possible teammate come 1991. To this, Head says "well we've taken a good look around the paddock. Over next door you've got Senna wasting the best years of his career at Ferrari and we think, well a million dollars is a million dollars, but Senna's no Mike Groff."
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: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

Let's have another in-season RNG!

First up we have Rial losing patience with Christian Danner. Our first choice replacement is Bernd Schneider, who after two fruitless years with Zakspeed to finish the '80s, he must be quite aggrieved to see how the team has progressed without him.

1-90 - Accepts
91-100 - "Maybe Zakspeed will have a touring car gig for me instead?"

46 - He accepts, and brings with him £128,000 (pro rata), which should go some way towards covering what the team is now paying Christian Danner to not drive.

Next, we have a more complex situation as Monteverdi want to sign Stefan Johansson - but at what cost?

Well, they would like him to drive for £5,000 per race for the remaining eleven races. It's rather less than he was originally asking for, but he is currently being paid £0 per race.
1-40 - "I accept, but we renegotiate at the end of the season"
41-80 - "I accept, as long as you commit to paying me £240,000 for the full season next year"
81-100 - "This simply isn't acceptable"

55 - Johansson will be signed for two years, but it'll be a backloaded contract. But who will he replace?

"Mr Groff, would you be able to keep paying us in full even if we bench you? We will guarantee you a seat next year if you do."
1-30 - "No."
31-60 - "No", but in American
61-90 - "Yes, but I expect the money I pay this year to be discounted from the price of next year's seat"
91-100 - :steiner:

28 - "No."

"Sig. Bertaggia, would you be able to keep paying us in full even if we bench you? We will guarantee you a seat next year if you do"
1-35 - "No."
36-70 - "No", but in Italian
71-100 - "Yes, but I expect the money I pay this year to be discounted from the price of next year's seat"

12 - "No."

With those setbacks, the team will fire Bertaggia anyway and turn cap-in-hand to Johansson to see if he can help make up the difference by waiving his salary this year and driving for free
1-30 - "Might as well, it beats not driving at all"
31-60 - "Only if you commit to paying the £80,000 difference on top of my salary next year"
61-100 - "No, £5,000 per race is a fair price"

33 - Thus, Stefan Johansson will drive for Monteverdi for free next year, in return for a £320,000 non-negotiable contract next season. It will be fascinating to see how that works out for the team.

Finally, Javi asked if he could extend Fabrizio Giovanardi's Coloni contract to a two-year deal. This raises an interesting new situation to provide for in the rules thus:
    If you take over a team mid-season and both drivers were signed on one-year deals, you can extend one contract as part of making the team your own.
This seems fair, as he had no part in the autopilot's signing of Fab Gio on just a one-year deal.
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1990 French Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report
Pre-Qualifying seems to be the place we meet most of our mid-season arrivals at present, and the French Grand Prix was no different. Monteverdi welcomed Stefan Johansson into their ranks (he stuck it second on the timesheets, immediately escaping PreQ) and Bernd Schneider arrived at Rial (he came in 13th, six tenths behind teammate Schumacher in 9th).

As always, EuroBrun Subaru and First Life locked out the very bottom of the timesheets, their closest rival this week being AGS’s Alain Ferté, who was considerably slower than his rookie teammate.

The teams that managed to completely escape Friday doom were Arrows-Lola (Herbert 1st, Ogawa 4th), Scuderia Italia (Martini 3rd, Tarquini 10th) and Minardi (Caffi 5th, Capelli 6th). Weidler for Onyx and Giovanardi for Coloni completed the ten escapees; Leyton House, AGS and Osella were all among the teams who missed out entirely.

Main Qualifying Report
After their strong pre-qualifying session, everyone was expecting Arrows’ Lola-Ford car to perform well, but there was considerable surprise at just how well it performed: Johnny Herbert managed to qualify it in 12th place with teammate Ogawa taking the place directly behind him on the grid in 14th. They were the leading two of the seven pre-qualifiers who made the eventual race grid.

In pole position was Alain Prost, ahead of the surprisingly fast Ferrari of Nelson Piquet. It came as a surprise to everyone that were five Ferrari-powered cars in the top eight with Piquet, then Boutsen (3rd), Senna (4th), van de Poele (6th), and Gachot (8th) – a really impressive showing from the most powerful (and one of the most explosive) engines on the grid.

At the other end of the grid, some teams who are usually towards the front did struggle, including Footwork Project Four (who will start 22nd and 25th) and the very unfortunate Dallara-Lamborghinis as Tarquini and Martini locked out the non-existent “Row 14”.

Race Report
The race started with a dramatic collision between this year’s McLaren chassis in the hands of Jean Alesi and last year’s McLaren chassis in the hands of Aguri Suzuki. The Japanese driver found his strong start to the race to cause him more harm than good; Alesi had run wide at La Bretelle, and attempted to rejoin at S de l’École only to drive straight into Suzuki’s Footwork-Yamaha. Both drivers were able to do no more than limp their cars back to the garage.

This was in stark contrast to Alesi’s teammate Alain Prost, who comfortably kept Boutsen, Senna and the slow-starting Piquet behind him through the early squiggly bit, then disappeared comfortably into the distance in his first stint.

As for those cars I’ve just listed, they all encountered Ferrari-themed disaster. Boutsen was the first, as he suffered an engine failure of biblical proportions on the Mistral straight; Senna suffered a carbon copy of it an hour later and he also had to park it and climb out. Finally, Nelson Piquet ended up spinning off at Signes. He also blamed the car, although there are those who would suggest that he’s just kind of spent.

He was by no means the only person to lose it on the ageing track surface though: Blundell, Berger and Wendlinger all also suffered race-ending spins, while Alessandro Nannini also lost his Williams in definitively race-ending fashion (injury RNG to follow).

All the while, Johnny Herbert was flying the flag for the PreQ teams in fifth place, only for his transmission to fail just five cruel laps from the end. It ultimately only cost his team one point, thanks to the nerveless Hitoshi Ogawa keeping Perez-Sala and Andrea de Cesaris behind him to claim the sixth and last points paying place.

Ahead of him were Philippe Alliot (5th) and Nakajima (4th) who fought all the way to the line, 90MANSELL (3rd) who had a very lonely race, but the most interesting battle of all happened at the very front.

While Alain Prost had run away during the first stint, he was not the fastest car on track after that. Although Boutsen, Senna and then Piquet had all retired in turn from second place on the road, Eric van de Poele managed to make use of the resulting clean air to mount a wonderful charge to challenge for the race victory in the last few laps. Prost managed to push a tiny bit of extra pace out of his McLaren to make it home for the win, but van de Poele managed a superb maiden classified finish in second place, making him the immediate leader for Rookie of the Year.

Image

Alessandro Nannini was happily able to get out of his car without injury, which is excellent news. Arrows very nearly escaped pre-qualifying, but Luis Perez-Sala's P7 was just enough to keep Lotus in the top 10 of the WDC for now.

The 10k bonus for updating the Wiki applies as usual to anyone who wants it.
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1990 Canadian Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report
There are never not shenanigans when the sport’s smallest teams emerge from their garages to contest pre-qualifying, and this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix was no exception. On this occasion, the surprise was that one of the team garages failed to open and, on further inspection, was completely unoccupied.

That team was the struggling First Life Racing Engines outfit, whose failure to arrive would later be chalked up to “difficulties finding sufficient transport from Italy to Canada”, which is something of a surprise given that the other eight Italian teams on the grid all arrived successfully in Montreal. One suspects that the subtext may be that the team had difficulties *paying for* sufficient transport.

Thus, the unfortunate EuroBrun pairing were left on their own at the foot of the PreQ timesheets, with Paolo Barilla marginally outqualifying recent Ferrari substitute Giacomelli for PNotLast.

Other strugglers included Fontmetal, AGS, Rial and Coloni; clearly the Judd engine was not supplying sufficient power for the long straights of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Out of the eight drivers for those teams, only one – Fabrizio Giovanardi – managed to escape pre-qualifying, coming in P10 exactly one thirtieth of a second ahead of Gabriele Tarquini’s Dallara. Hitoshi Ogawa also had a shocker to miss out on the show by another couple of hundredths.

Indeed, the strongest team across both its cars was the Monteverdi outfit: Mike Groff managed to pre-qualify in third place with Stefan Johansson in sixth to progress both of their cars. Only Minardi managed to progress both cars alongside them, with Caffi in seventh and Capelli in ninth. Martini (Dallara), Herbert (Arrows), Weidler (Onyx), Moreno (Osella), Bernard (Leyton House) and the aforementioned Giovanardi also made it through.

Main Qualifying Report
Qualifying on Saturday was a close affair, with the top five places on the grid decided by under half a second. On his customary pole position (this year at least) was Alain Prost, who proved that in his hands the McLaren is still the fastest car on the grid. In Alesi’s hands, less so – the young French prospect managed to qualify only eighth.

Alongside Prost would be the Belgian Saturday specialist Eric van de Poele; the Benetton rookie continues to impress with his raw pace in a nimble and powerful car. Behind them, Nelson Piquet found form, again managing to outqualify his Ferrari teammate and putting himself on the second row alongside Thierry Boutsen.

A stellar lap from Pierluigi Martini put his Dallara-Lamborghini on the sixth row, sharing it with fellow prequalifier Stefan Johansson - officially the front half of the grid. At the other end of the grid, Satoru Nakajima ended up all the way back on Row 12, just not able to get to grips with his Zakspeed at Montreal.

It could have been worse though – Roberto Moreno (Osella), Mike Groff (Monteverdi), Eric Bernard (Leyton House) and Volker Weidler (Onyx) all missed out on Sunday.

Race Report
The Ferrari engine has long had a problem with its reliability, and the first six laps of the Canadian Grand Prix will do absolutely nothing to dispel that notion. First, the Lancia-badged engine in the Ligier would not start when it was told to, and Luxembourg’s Bertrand Gachot was unable to take his fifth grid spot. On lap five and six, bad became worse as the second Ligier and then Satoru Nakajima’s Zakspeed both expired due to engine failures.

At the opposite end of the grid, four teams stood out in terms of their pace: McLaren, Benetton, Williams (apart from Nannini, whose poor qualifying got him caught up behind the Johansson-Berger incident) and Ferrari. They put considerable amounts of time into the rest of the field, running very much in a race of their own.

Fastest of them all was Benetton’s Thierry Boutsen: boosted by an early pit stop ahead of a huge accident for Lamborghini’s Mark Blundell heading down – and ultimately off - the straight to L’Epingle, Boutsen and others were able to take advantage of being well away from a terrifying incident where several drivers had to slow down to avoid marshals that ran onto the track to extricate Mark Blundell from his ruined Lamborghini. The incident renewed calls for the introduction of a safety car to Formula One races, with Murray Walker on commentary calling the “obvious danger” “entirely unacceptable”.

Nearing the halfway point, when the order was straightened out and everyone had taken their pit stops, the running order was Boutsen, Prost, Senna, Piquet, Mansell and Eric van de Poele. Senna, as always preoccupied by overtaking his arch nemesis, lit up the rear tyres and spun out of the race instead of passing the Frenchman. This promoted his teammate into a podium position, and Jean Alesi up into the final points position.

The remaining laps were all about the Piquet train, as the Ferrari driver attempted to keep as many drivers behind him as he could and therefore to hold onto third position. He ultimately failed as Williams’ Nigel Mansell paced past him to pursue Prost, but EvdP and Alesi remained stuck until the very end of the race.

And speaking of holding onto position until the end of the race, Thierry Boutsen stayed absolutely out of reach for the remainder of the race to record his third Grand Prix win, which was also the third for the Benetton team. Prost had to content himself with second place, but will be satisfied by extending his Championship league and his enviable reliability record.

Image

There are no changes to pre-qualifying teams, and after getting good medical attention Mark Blundell was confirmed to be only shaken and bruised - and declared fit to race the British Grand Prix.

The 10k reward is available as always to whomever updates the wiki tables - the Amati and Frey will both go down as "DNA"
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Special Event: The Safety Car

Post by Aislabie »

Following the dramatic events of the Canadian Grand Prix, the FIA has chosen to consult with the teams on how it should proceed on the issue of introducing a Safety Car in Formula One.

They are gathering feedback from Team Principals on the issue, although they stress that at the present moment any advice from this feedback will be non-binding.
(^^^ THIS TEXT IS A LINK ^^^)

Thank you all for your time.
Last edited by Aislabie on 09 Jan 2022, 23:10, edited 1 time in total.
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Special Event: Nelson Piquet

Post by Aislabie »

After delivering his first points of the 1990 season, Nelson Piquet has decided it is time to raise the issue of payment.

If he does not receive the outstanding £300,000 owed on his salary, he says he refuses to drive for the team. Ferrari have three main options:

1. Refuse to pay the rest of his salary, and name a replacement driver.
    1a) Take him to Italian court for breach of contract
    1b) Let him go peacefully and take the L

2. Pay up the rest of his contract with money they don't strictly have, and keep him on as a driver

3. Take their chances by suggesting something creative

I'm sure we all look forward to seeing what the bigwigs at Maranello can come up with.
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Re: Special Event: Nelson Piquet

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

Aislabie wrote:After delivering his first points of the 1990 season, Nelson Piquet has decided it is time to raise the issue of payment.

If he does not receive the outstanding £300,000 owed on his salary, he says he refuses to drive for the team. Ferrari have three main options:

1. Refuse to pay the rest of his salary, and name a replacement driver.
    1a) Take him to Italian court for breach of contract
    1b) Let him go peacefully and take the L

2. Pay up the rest of his contract with money they don't strictly have, and keep him on as a driver

3. Take their chances by suggesting something creative

I'm sure we all look forward to seeing what the bigwigs at Maranello can come up with.


Scuderia Ferrari shall go with Option 1A.
In addition, test driver Bruno Giacomelli shall be fielded by the team in place of Piquet for the remainder of the season.
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: Special Event: Nelson Piquet

Post by Aislabie »

Frogfoot9013 wrote:In addition, test driver Bruno Giacomelli shall be fielded by the team in place of Piquet for the remainder of the season.

In that case, EuroBrun shall apply to the FIA for a dispensation to use a fifth driver, citing force majeure.

If the FIA approves, their choices are as follows:
  1. Image Jullian Bailey
  2. Image Joachim Winkelhock
  3. Image Jan Lammers

If the FIA refuses, they will turn to:
  1. Image Oscar Larrauri
  2. Image Toshio Suzuki

Speaking of Oscar Larrauri, I forgot to swap him in for Giacomelli at Montreal. I have edited the Wiki table to reflect this, as ultimately it makes no tangible difference. This constitutes the most minor retcon to the Canadian Grand Prix: Oscar Larrauri takes P24 (last) in pre-qualifying.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

1990 In-Season RNG Part... whatever we're up to now

This will I'm sure be a nice, peaceful one.

Scuderia Ferrari has parted ways with driver Nelson Piquet over unpaid wages amounting to £300,000. They have taken their former driver to court over breach of contract: they argue that Piquet was due to be paid his full salary upon the completion of a full season; Piquet argues that he was contracted to drive for £1,000,000 and Ferrari's refusal to pay this in a timely fashion amounts to constructed dismissal or whatever Italians called that in the '90s.
1-50 - The court finds in favour of Ferrari - They need only pay Piquet for the seven races he has contested (£437,500)
51-100 - The court finds in favour of Nelson Piquet - Ferrari owe Piquet his full salary, and Piquet is not obliged to return to drive for them

97 - Ferrari have ended up out of a driver and out of pocket. This will useful tool that will help us later.

Ferrari therefore sign Bruno Giacomelli for the rest of the season. This leaves EuroBrun out of a driver. They have applied to the FIA for special dispensation to run more than the usual limit of four drivers.
1-50 - "Oui, could've happened to anyone."
51-100 - "Non, we didn't make you commit to signing Toshio Suzuki ahead of time"

85 - The FIA is having absolutely none of it. Thus, EuroBrun have to go back to the well marked "Oscar Larrauri"

Will Larrauri accept an offer to drive a bunch more events for EuroBrun?
1-80 - Sure, everything's forgiven
81-100 - Still isn't over the fact that he was binned off to make room for Giacomelli

76 - After several days of sweating next to the telephone, Walter Brun finally stops holding his breath.

Finally (for now), Coloni have also had enough of Nicola Larini being dreadful. They have chosen to replace him with the probably more dreadful (but also wealthier) Enrico Bertaggia. He really likes being an F1 driver, and accepts without RNG
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

Patrick Head and Frank Williams sit in their office, debating the topics of the day. Both of them being advocates of increased safety in Formula 1 since as long as I made that up, they have made their comments known already about the rapid need for a safety car in the sport. They have been somewhat bemused, however, by the timing of this decision by the FIA, because by insisting on the safety car principle, Williams would need to boycott the British Grand Prix - something that simply isn't going to happen. However, they are open to the idea of boycotting the German Grand Prix as a delayed response.

Anyway, onto the important topic of the day. Patrick Head is ruffling through the Daily Scrub and reads:
The Daily Scrub wrote:FERRARI TEAM ON VERGE OF BANKRUPTCY AFTER STAR BRAZILIAN LEAVES IN FURY

Thinking that Aryton Senna is now a free agent, Patrick is disappointed to discover that it is in fact Nelson Piquet who has left the team after finally showing up for one race. Patrick says to Frank,

"Remember you had that dream a few weeks ago where Nannini was in a helicopter crash and lost his arm and he couldn't race for us at the final two races of the season - remember that?"

"Yes," says Patrick."

"Well, if Piquet is minted and a free man, why don't we get him to work with us? He was with Mansell a few years back and that worked out really well." The two men pause while canned laughter plays for around 10 seconds.

"You might be onto something there Patrick," says Frank. "Piquet won't need paying, and we can frame it to him like his glorious career-" at this Frank choked on the biscuit he had just recovered from his teacup "-would end in a glorious way at our team. Give him a ring."

So Patrick Head gets on the phone to Nelson Piquet to ask if he wants to be Williams' primary reserve driver. Williams won't pay him, as he already has a million dollars straight out of his Ferrari contract. I await the RNG.
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.
Felipe Nasr - the least forgettable F1 driver!
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Aislabie »

Rob Dylan wrote:So Patrick Head gets on the phone to Nelson Piquet to ask if he wants to be Williams' primary reserve driver. Williams won't pay him, as he already has a million dollars straight out of his Ferrari contract. I await the RNG.


No RNG necessary

Instead, Nelson says that Williams (or indeed any other team) should come back to him when they've got a race seat to offer. Emphasis on race seat. None of this PreQ nonsense. If a race seat does in fact come up though, he will be open to it

Also if he's going to race for anyone in 1991, he wants people to be aware that they'll have to pay him for that.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

Patrick Head comes back from the toilet and sees Frank on the phone.

"-and you've just made an enemy for life!" Frank Williams says before slamming it down.

"No Piquet?" Patrick asks.

"No Piquet," Frank says.

Canned laughter plays and both men look directly at the camera.
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.
Felipe Nasr - the least forgettable F1 driver!
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by dr-baker »

The First Life team are offering the use of their cars for use as the safety car, as it will guarantee that the speed of the whole field will be slowed down behind their cars, and will gain more publicity for the perennial plucky underdogs. They are also hoping that the FIA will pay for every lap that the First Life Cars complete as safety cars to boost the coffers of the struggling team.
watka wrote:I find it amusing that whilst you're one of the more openly Christian guys here, you are still first and foremost associated with an eye for the ladies!
dinizintheoven wrote:GOOD CHRISTIANS do not go to jail. EVERYONE ON FORMULA ONE REJECTS should be in jail.
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

The Williams team are willing to fund to make this Life Safety Car lark happen.
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.
Felipe Nasr - the least forgettable F1 driver!
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by dr-baker »

Rob Dylan wrote:The Williams team are willing to fund to make this Life Safety Car lark happen.

Thank you for helping to bring this idea to Life.
watka wrote:I find it amusing that whilst you're one of the more openly Christian guys here, you are still first and foremost associated with an eye for the ladies!
dinizintheoven wrote:GOOD CHRISTIANS do not go to jail. EVERYONE ON FORMULA ONE REJECTS should be in jail.
MCard LOLA
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

dr-baker wrote:
Rob Dylan wrote:The Williams team are willing to fund to make this Life Safety Car lark happen.

Thank you for helping to bring this idea to Life.
I'll do it if it takes a Lifetime.
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.
Felipe Nasr - the least forgettable F1 driver!
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Scrub Era Safety Car Survey

Post by Aislabie »

It's been a while, longer than I intended, but it's time to look at the results of the Scrub Era Safety Car Survey.

From the 23 teams, the FIA has received 19 responses (only one of which was oddly filled in) as well as one team confirming that they cba to respond.

The teams have come out overwhelmingly in favour of introducing a safety car:
  • 16 teams are in favour
  • 2 teams are against
  • 1 team abstained (plus Onyx who verbally declinde to offer feedback)
Of those 16 teams, 11 favoured the immediate introduction of a safety car. and of those 11 teams, three stated that they would boycott the British Grand Prix if a safety car was not present:
  • Rial
  • Ligier
  • EuroBrun
Additionally, Williams also said that they would not be boycotting the British Grand Prix, but would boycott the German Grand Prix if a safety car was still not present

There was also an offer from First Life Racing Engines to provide their machines as safety cars, for a small fee - to which the FIA politely declined, on the grounds that they are looking for a safety car, not an unsafety car.
Image

However, as we have mentioned already - this survey is strictly non-binding and the FIA's decision on this matter will be made via RNG(s).

First RNG - Will a safety car be mandated ahead of the 1991 season?
1-50 - A safety car will be mandated at all events in the 1991 Championship
51-75 - All events will be allowed to provide a safety car, but it will be in the hands of the event promoters (further RNGs)
76-100 - The policy on safety cars will be unchanged

EuroBrun, Ligier and Rial will therefore miss the British Grand Prix, and Williams have pledged to miss the German Grand Prix.

Arrows-Lola will thus be exempt from pre-qualifying for the next two races.
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1990 British Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report
Friday mornings have increasingly been a dramatic time for Formula One this season, and Silverstone was the most dramatic yet: there were notable absences in the paddock. All three of Equipe Ligier, EuroBrun Subaru and Rial Racing had announced that they would be boycotting the British Grand Prix, and their absence on Friday morning confirmed that fact. Thus, Arrows-Lola – the 11th placed team in the World Constructors Championship – effectively received a bye to be two of the 20 guaranteed main-qualifying cars.

This also meant that pre-qualifying was in some ways more competitive than usual, with two teams (Arrows and Rial) who might be expected to progress, not fighting to do so. Only two teams managed to take both of their cars through to the show: Gabriele Tarquini (1st) and Pierluigi Martini (5th) both got through with their Dallaras, and Roberto Moreno (6th) and Olivier Grouillard (7th) shockingly progressed both of their Osellas.

The remaining teams all saw decisive disparities between both of their drivers: Leyton House were pleased with Mauricio Gugelmin (3rd), but mechanical difficulties consigned a blameless Eric Bernard to 17th of 20 cars, nearly two seconds down from his teammate.

Otherwise, the difference between coming in 4th and DNPQing was less than a second, which really put the responsibility for making the cut in the hands of the driver: Stefan Johansson (Monteverdi), Volker Weidler (Onyx), Fabrizio Giovanardi (Coloni), Alex Caffi (Minardi) and Geoff Brabham (Fondmetal) were the plucky pilots who progressed.

At the other end of things, Giovanna Amati came in more than five seconds off the pace in her First-Life, while Jean-Pierre Frey failed to set any time at all after slamming into the barriers on the outside of Abbey Curve; an injury RNG will follow, but his car was totalled.

AGS also had an awful time as their car just refused to work at Silverstone. Comas (16th) and Ferté (18th) secured the team's third straight double-DNPQ.

Main Qualifying Report
As is always the case on this super-fast Silverstone layout, horsepower is king. This led to two Ferrari engines on the front two rows – Thierry Boutsen’s Benetton on pole, and Karl Wendlinger’s temperamental Zakspeed having one of its good days as he put it in fourth. The leading works Ferrari was Ayrton Senna in sixth… which makes Bruno Giacomelli’s P20 (seven places behind Satoru Nakajima in the next-worst Ferrari-powered car) raise serious questions about whether he is an adequate solution for the rest of Ferrari’s season.

Lamborghini-powered cars also flourished: Stefan Johansson put in a freakish lap to secure P7, Gabriele Tarquini’s Dallara-Lambo in P11 and Mark Blundell’s works Lambo in a suboptimal but non-awful P17.

The unfortunate four cars consigned to “Row 14” were Alex Caffi (Minardi), Johnny Herbert (Arrows-Lola), Geoff Brabham (Fondmetal) and Fabrizio Giovanardi (Coloni), who all fell behind a stellar pair of laps from the two Osella drivers, who managed to haul their creaking FA1Ms to a Row 13 lock-out.

Race Report
So often, there has been chaos on Lap 1 this year and the British Grand Prix was no different. The 90-degree sweeper at Copse is an easy place to be forced off of the circuit, and that was exactly what Thierry Boutsen discovered when he found himself on the outside of the fast-starting Alain Prost. He next found himself on the outside of the run-off and sat in a crumpled car in the tyre barrier, but was able to make the short walk back to the Benetton garage.

However, if his day sounded bad it was nothing compared to the horror show experienced by Ron Dennis’ Footwork Project Four team. In synchronised incidents, Stefano Modena and Aguri Suzuki each tried and failed to go side-by-side through Becketts: first, Modena was spun out as Sandro Nannini attempted to get back to where his car ought to be, then futher back Suzuki tried to get past Hitoshi Ogawa only to drive into his compatriot’s sidepod and break a wishbone. One of these incidents laid down the debris that would later puncture one of Pierluigi Martini’s Avons, but we really have no way of knowing which. What we do know is that this puncture could have been avoided if the race director had been able to deploy a safety car for marshals to pick up the debris.

As we’ve already established, Silverstone is a power circuit; this can take its toll on fragile machinery, such as Ferrari engines. A spectacular blowout from Satoru Nakajima on Lap 9 was the first of multiple such occurrences: it would be followed by mechanical DNFs for Senna on Lap 22, van de Poele on Lap 32 and the sluggish Giacomelli on Lap 39, all of which left Karl Wendlinger as the only remaining Ferrari-powered runner in the race – but he was running very well indeed.

After falling behind both Mansell and Senna at the start, he had consolidated the fifth place that would absolutely have secured his first Formula One points. When Senna retired, that became fourth, putting him in prime position to capitalise if one of the podium-running trio of Prost, Alesi and Mansell had difficulties. On Lap 45, it happened: the gearbox on Prost’s McLaren gave up the ghost and he had to trundle back to the pits. Wendlinger was up into the podium positions.

On the following lap, things got a lot weirder. First, Nigel Mansell suffered a similar transmission failure, causing him to immediately lose pace. Wendlinger inherited second place, with Sandro Nannini to inherit third place. At least, he would have done, if not for being unsighted when he came across his teammate’s car. As it coasted back to the pits firmly on the racing line, it struggled to put the power down out of Club, Nannini was unsighted and had to take late evasive action to avoid making contact with his crawling teammate.

Nannini spun off into the gravel, and a startled Mansell pulled off the track on the opposite side of the tarmac, creating the bizarre sight of a stricken Williams on either side of the straight leading to Abbey. Their respective drivers each climbed out of the car and headed in opposite directions.

The principal beneficiary of this lunacy was Andrea de Cesaris; the Italian who qualified his Tyrrell in P12 continued a season where he has kept his nose uncharacteristically clean to finish all but one race, and inherited enough positions to climb from sixth to third in the space of two laps as the last car on the lead lap at that point in the race. His teammate Gerhard Berger also stepped up into the points behind Blundell’s Lambo in a career-best fourth place, and Frentzen’s Lotus in fifth.

But of course, the runaway winner – indeed, the only driver of a top car still running to take the chequered flag – was the exciting Jean Alesi, who claimed his first ever British Grand Prix. Although he missed out on the podium, Blundell did at least collect the Hawthorn Memorial Trophy as the leading Commonwealth driver in the race.

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There are no changes to the pre-qualifying teams, but if your team wishes to join Williams in boycotting the German Grand Prix if there is no safety car then please do announce it. One would suggest that such a protest from Sir Frank might be a little bit more telling

Jean-Pierre Frey seemed to be limping heavily in the wrong direction to get to the medical centre, but once he was helped to find it he was passed fit to drive again if his team so wished. Not that it matters because First-Life have run out of spare parts and must downsize to a one-car team for the forseeable future (have agreed this with Baker).

The usual 10k reward still applies if anyone wants it.
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Rob Dylan
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Rob Dylan »

Frank and Patrick are a little annoyed at the lack of teams showing backbone over the safety car decision, but they are equally annoyed at the FIA for the handling of these petitions behind closed doors. While the petitions have spoken, the Williams team would like to petition the FIA for all future decisions to be done publicly and with the full view of other teams and the public.

While they won't save face over it, they will also cancel their planned boycott of the 1990 German Grand Prix, seeing as nobody else is joining them. It wouldn't make sense to pointlessly boycott over an issue the governing body refuses to deal with, nor rival teams who refuse to take real action over.

The Williams Team only hope that their public stand in this regard will be held up when looking back on this moment.
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.
Felipe Nasr - the least forgettable F1 driver!
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dr-baker
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Re: Scrub Era Safety Car Survey

Post by dr-baker »

Aislabie wrote:
There was also an offer from First Life Racing Engines to provide their machines as safety cars, for a small fee - to which the FIA politely declined, on the grounds that they are looking for a safety car, not an unsafety car.
Image


:lol: :D

Fair point, given what happened to one of our drivers at this event!
watka wrote:I find it amusing that whilst you're one of the more openly Christian guys here, you are still first and foremost associated with an eye for the ladies!
dinizintheoven wrote:GOOD CHRISTIANS do not go to jail. EVERYONE ON FORMULA ONE REJECTS should be in jail.
MCard LOLA
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Re: Scrub-Era F1: 1990 - A new decade begins

Post by Butterfox »

Guy Ligier wrote:Oh yeah 'we don't need safety cars' Just look at all the debris and the resulting accidents on this ridiculously fast track!

Bertrand Gachot wrote:And you know, when Guy has a poiint, you've done things lads...

Guy Ligier wrote:Oh, shut up Bertrand
I don't know what i want and i want it now!
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Aislabie
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1990 German Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report
Coming into the race, there were protestations that if there were to be no safety car implemented for the German Grand Prix a Williams-led group of teams would boycott the event. This ultimately did not come to be, as Williams walked back their earlier statement while adorably citing the spinelessness of others. Indeed, only one car was missing: the second FIRST-Life, which was totalled by Jean-Pierre Frey at Silverstone.

Prequalifying had an interesting sub-plot this week as some teams who were confident of progressing through to the show ran their engines at a slightly lower setting to make sure they wouldn’t explode. This led to curious anomalies like Stefan Johansson only managing to put his Monteverdi-Lamborghini into 10th place, marginally behind the out-of-place Arrows cars and a couple of seconds shy of Gabriele Tarquini’s pace-setting Dallara-Lamborghini.

Scuderia Italia (Tarquini 1st, Martini 6th) were one of four teams to progress both of their cars from pre-qualifying, including Rial (Schumacher 2nd, Schneider 4th), Monteverdi (Groff 3rd, Johansson 10th), and Arrows-Lola (Herbert 8th, Ogawa 9th). The two remaining spots went one each to Minardi (Capelli 5th) and AGS (Comas 7th), both of whom comfortably outpaced their teammates.

At the bottom end of the standings, it was mostly Judds and weird engines like Subarus and Lifes. As we all already knew, the two key things at Hockenheim will be horsepower and the courage to not touch the brakes unless absolutely necessary.

Main Qualifying Report
The front rows were always going to be full of the most powerful engines, and word in the paddock is that the two most powerful contraptions are the Ferrari 036 and Renault RS2, with the Honda and possibly the Isuzu close behind. Thus it was a surprise to nobody to see Nigel Mansell (Renault power) storm to his first pole position of the season ahead of Boutsen (Ferrari power), Prost (Honda power), Senna (Ferrari power) and Nakajima (Ferrari power).

The biggest surprise in the top 10 qualifiers was most definitely Pierluigi Martini, who managed to put his moderately-powered Dallara on the fifth row alongside Frentzen’s Lotus-Isuzu. Curiously, both Jean Alesi and Bruno Giacomelli were well off the pace in 13th and 17th place respectively; it remains to be seen whether they can regain ground in the race.

Those who will be watching the race from “Row 14” are several of the usual suspects; Bernd Schneider and Erik Comas were always going to struggle to make the grid with Judd power, while Capelli and Mike Groff also narrowly missed out.

Race Report
Yet again – as we have seen so many times this season – the race started with a huge incident. On this occasion, it was Sandro Nannini who was challenging Satoru Nakajima for fifth position into the first Bremskurve. At this particularly narrow point on the track, two cars do not fit side by side as the two drivers demonstrated. Their races were over almost before they had began, and behind them it was a lottery whether or not certain drivers would make it through. Giacomelli, Blundell and Schumacher were the unlucky ones caught out, although certain other cars which had sustained damage were able to get it repaired during the lengthy red flag period that was needed to clear the track of broken cars.

On the second start, pole-sitter Mansell got bogged down and fell down to fifth behind Boutsen, Senna, Prost and (briefly) Bertrand Gachot, though he immediately bullied his way back past the Ligier-Lancia with minimal fuss.

This race was notable for the fact that the Ferrari power unit suffered far fewer failures than usual, despite the circuit’s reputation as an engine killer. Indeed, the only Ferrari-powered driver to suffer a mechanical retirement was Philippe Alliot, and even that may have been due to unnoticed damage from an earlier on-track collision with Benetton’s Eric van de Poele. All of the other Ferrari-powered retirements were due to some sort of driver error or misfortune: Giacomelli we have already mentioned, Gachot and Wendlinger spun out in consecutive laps early on, van de Poele came off second-best in that Alliot collision.

Mansell never quite looked like catching up with the front-running trio of Boutsen, Senna and Prost. Unusually, Senna seemed more focussed on attempting to win the race than on inconveniencing the arch nemesis in his mirrors, and after a round of pit stops he set about hounding Boutsen to try to pressure him into a mistake. On Lap 35, it happened: with his mirrors full of Senna’s Ferrari, Boutsen braked too late and too hard into the Agip-kurve; he lost the car and spun off into the gravel. His incident spooked Senna behind, and he too ran wide but managed to keep the car going through the hazard and to rejoin behind new leader Prost – a couple of seconds ahead of Mansell, but with dirty and flat-spotted tyres.

The Briton and the Brazilian did battle for the remaining ten minutes of the race, but ultimately it was the Ferrari man who managed to secure second place as the podium comprised the three driving giants of the late-80s.
In a shocking fourth place was the Scuderia Italia of Pierluigi Martini; in a race punctuated by incidents, he managed to be consistently in the right place at the right time and avoid all of the chaos. Behind him came Heinz-Harald Frentzen and the bizarrely reliable Andrea de Cesaris, continuing his career-best race finishing streak with a sixth place for Tyrrell.

There are three more incidents that I have yet to mention, and they were the three severe crashes for Gabriele Tarquini on Lap 21, Johnny Herbert on Lap 28 and Stefan Johansson, who will be classified 14th and last after crashing out on Lap 42.

Image

Tarquini suffered severe injuries and will be ruled out for two months of recovery time, while Herbert was diagnosed with a concussion and misses the Hungarian Grand Prix. Johansson escaped without serious injury.

With these three big accidents (as well as the huge incident on Lap 1) in mind, the FIA has finally reconsidered its position on safety cars. From the start of 1991, there will be a safety car in use at all Grand Prix weekends.

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Aislabie
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1990 Hungarian Grand Prix

Post by Aislabie »

Pre-Qualifying Report
Right in the middle of this long stretch of power circuits comes this rarest of beasts: a tight, twisty, chassis-dependent venue in the form of the Hungaroring. As ever, there are a couple of changes to the driver line-up and both are enforced: with both Johnny Herbert and Gabriele Tarquini both out injured, Martin Donnelly and Nicola Larini have been selected to take their respective places.

Donnelly was one half of a dominant Arrows-Lola 1-2 in pre-qualifying, with Ogawa and Donnelly the only two cars to break into the 1:19s. The Dallaras did similarly well with Pierluigi Martini being shown up somewhat by his interloping teammate as Larini put it in PreQ P4. Fondmetal too had a strong performance; this one came as quite the surprise, as it was the first time all season that both cars had managed to escape pre-qualifying.

At the other end of the field, several individual drivers had very bad days. While Roberto Moreno comfortably escaped pre-qualifying, his teammate Grouillard managed to end up classified behind a EuroBrun in a real show of weakness. Bertaggia and Morbidelli also managed to come in below Barilla’s EuroBrun, but they at least were in cars that were never going to threaten the PreQ threshold here.

The narrowest margin between two teammates came between the Minardi pairing: Alex Caffi came in a tiny 0.012 seconds ahead of teammate Capelli, but due to the cruel mistress that is pre-qualifying, that was the difference between making the show and going for a weekend city break in Budapest. Leyton House also straddled the line, with Eric Bernard making it through in fifth place but Mauricio Gugelmin missing out in 13th.

Main Qualifying Report
At a track like the Hungaroring that has hardly straights worth mentioning, engine power was a definite secondary consideration compared to chassis performance. That was expected to bring the Footwork Project Four team into contention, but changeable conditions meant that more than anything else being the last car to set a time in qualifying was the absolute goal.

This meant quite the jumbled grid (at least, behind the Prost-Mansell front row) as Gerhard Berger and – staggeringly – Pierluigi Martini lined up in P3 and P4. The latter had only managed the eighth-best time in prequalifying, but made smart set-up decisions and timed his qualifying lap well to upset the apple cart.
Several cars ended up completely out of position in this wild qualifying, with Boutsen (12th), Alesi (14th), Nannini (17th), van de Poele (18th) and Suzuki (24th) all looking at huge climbs through the field if they wanted to be anywhere near where their machinery belonged.

Most disappointingly, Martin Donnelly was among the many cars caught out in the mad scramble to set a last-minute lap. Along with Brabham, Moreno and Caffi, he failed to qualify for the Hungarian Grand Prix, even though his pre-qualifying laptime would have put him comfortably on the grid. A very weird session indeed.

Race Report
There’s nowhere better to be at the start of a race than pole position, and Alain Prost has had plenty of practice from there this season. Today, his run into Turn 1 was his best all season, and he sailed through the first sector essentially unopposed. Behind him, the field was very well behaved with only the Ligier of Gachot getting into difficulty – ironically while trying to overtake his teammate Alliot.

It did not take long for Prost to stretch out an extremely secure advantage at the head of the race with only Mansell’s red five even in the same postcode. The rest of the field was bottlenecked behind the battling foursome of Gerhard Berger, Philippe Alliot, Karl Wendlinger, and the fast-starting Andrea de Cesaris. They spent a few laps so close that it seemed inevitable that their battle would end in contact, and so it did: Karl Wendlinger found Andrea de Cesaris on his inside at turn six. That is never a good place to be, and Wendlinger found himself blamelessly retiring from damage while the Italian carried on.

As the race approached half-distance, Nigel Mansell was gaining on Prost’s McLaren: the British driver was quite comfortably the fastest person on the track, and everything was shaping up for a grandstand finish. At the same time, Jean Alesi – already stuck a long way down the field – suffered a gearbox failure. As the Frenchman lost the top two gears, he had no choice but to make his way towards the pits to retire his car. Very slowly. So slowly that the charging Mansell caught up to lap him. But for the second time in three races, Mansell failed to avoid a slower car and suffered race-ending damage.

This moment of controversial madness most definitely benefited Alesi’s teammate Prost, as the French World Champion elect was then left to peacefully drive well within himself for an unchallenged victory.
The battle for the rest of the podium positions was far more interesting: Gerhard Berger and Philippe Alliot swapped second and third place between them a couple of times, but Andrea de Cesaris fell backwards.
Eventually the Italian pulled into his pit box to retire from the Grand Prix; his team cited mechanical issues, although one wonders if they arose from the incident earlier on in the race with Bertrand Gachot. Stefano Modena never quite caught up with the three podium finishers but he did retain his place on the lead lap as the Footwork again scored strong points on a slower-speed circuit.

In the final portion of the race, several runners who had been challenging for the bottom half of the points ran into race-ending difficulties. Satoru Nakajima and Thierry Boutsen both suffered big accidents and had to be taken to the medical centre, while Senna, Nannini and Larini all spun out in medium-speed corners. This deluge of difficulties left both Pierluigi Martini and Eric van de Poele alone, and they finished the race in fifth and sixth place respectively.

Stefan Johansson also finished his first race for Monteverdi, but there ultimately wasn’t enough attrition for him to steal a point.

Image

These two successive strong results are just enough for Scuderia Italia to escape prequalifying at the expense of Lotus-Isuzu: both teams have five points, but the fourth place at Hockenheim is enough for Dallara to sneak into 10th place in the WCC on countback.

Nakajima and Boutsen both emerged from the medical centre without serious injuries, although Boutsen did describe himself as “very sore”.
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Aislabie
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Special Event: Engine Development

Post by Aislabie »

The time has come for works teams to decide the direction of their engine development.

To do so, you must fill in the following form:

    Engine - (Self-explanatory)

    High Priority - (Power / Driveability / Reliability)
    Medium Priority - (Power / Driveability / Reliability)
    Low Priority - (Power / Driveability / Reliability)
The High Priority attribute has the greatest chance of improving, while the Low Priority attribute has the highest chance of deteriorating. This process will be of no cost to your team in the 1990 season.

Ferrari and Lamborghini
As the only works teams that currently make their engines in-house, you must complete this phase.

EuroBrun (Subaru), Lotus (Isuzu), McLaren (Honda), and Williams (Renault)
As teams who have works engine suppliers, you can request a certain development direction. This would also be considered as a binding commitment to continue your works deal into the 1991 season. You can also choose to leave engine development in the hands of the manufacturer, which would leave your options open for 1991.

Footwork (Yamaha) and Tyrrell (Ford)
Exactly the same thing, but if you're going to make demands then your engine manufacturers would like you to pay the outstanding money that you owe them (160k to Yamaha, 275k to Ford).

Everyone else
You have customer engine deals at present, and you can ignore this.
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