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WEC has BOP (balance of performance) and teams moan about a lot about that. No system is perfect but leave gimmicks out of F1. Want to win then sort your team out, the races are won back at HQ and in the windtunnel.
Want to win then sort your team out, the races are won back at HQ and in the windtunnel.
Which is not hugely different to non-powered / technology driven sports - sure they're all fast but the ones that win are the ones that work hardest and most effectively in the offseason with access to the best coaches and 'programmes' (read into that what you want)
F1's not a drivers race, it's the whole package, including on the day strategists. Admittedly when one car is so much better than the others then the rest is (to some extent) irrelevant, but there's the rub.
I stopped watching F1 5 years ago. Not missed it.
Sure it's boring and over-hyped but for motorsport nerds it's catnip.
Needs an update for the budget cap era, but still does a very good job of rounding up current F1
Just a way to make races closer and worth watching with reduced (but not eliminated) predicability.
But the folks who love watching F1 will watch regardless. Yesterday Verstappen pranced off into the distance and the cameras didn't bother picking him up until the last lap. But there was so much other racing going on, and cars breaking and safety cars and accidents and overtakes and strategy complications and risks and Hamilton going from 18th to 8th, Alonso putting in ridiculous fast laps at the end and Norris running a chancy one stop, and Perez and LeClerc fighting for position for a 1/3 or a lap, and the crowd cheering every time Zhou went round (and every time the Stake team got the tyre change right) It was great.
Didn't need weight penalties.
I grew up on a diet of motor racing (F1/Sportscars/Trucks/Club racing) as my Dad was obsessed...
F1 is so out of touch with what is a real sport, it's not worth even wasting thought about. Uber-corporate. The drivers are just corporate dummies. Cars are so much easier to drive nowadays it's boring.
Ecclestone et al. along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ and it's utterly dreadful.
In the bin.
mikertroid
I grew up on a diet of motor racing (F1/Sportscars/Trucks/Club racing) as my Dad was obsessed…F1 is so out of touch with what is a real sport, it’s not worth even wasting thought about. Uber-corporate. The drivers are just corporate dummies. Cars are so easy to drive nowadays it’s boring
Ecclestone et al. along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ and it’s utterly dreadful.
In the bin.
Yet here you are posting utter bollocks about it 🤷♂️
Picked at random – British GP result from 1982. Only ten finishers and 10th place was 3 laps down. Rose tinted specs are very popular!..
The only go I’ve ever been to. Boring as ****. The best bit was the Xjs following the cars round on the first lap.
Cars are so much easier to drive nowadays it’s boring.
LOL. Ask Danny Ricciardo how easy the McLaren was to drive, or Lewis Hamilton about the ground effect Mercs, or nearly all of Verstappen's teammates about the Red Bulls with skittery rear ends. If it was easy, everyone would win.
Yet here you are posting utter bollocks about it 🤷♂️
Well, as I said, motorsport is in my blood and it saddens me that folk perceive F1 to have any relevance in that sporting area....the thread title got me.
But yes, I don't spare any thought over it anymore, other than to say it's cr@p now!
than to say it’s cr@p now
This seems to be a common theme, but people who espouse it rarely say when they thought it was good and why that's the case. I've been following F1 (and other motorsports) for over 5 decades, back to the days when all we got about F1 was a short highlights program tucked away on BBC2 in the middle of the night. We got more coverage of the rac rally than any f1 race back then.
When I first started following F1 most people ran the Ford DFV but even then reliability was woeful, car advantages were still a massive factor, the organisation of races was chaotic, politics was everywhere (JM Balestre, FISA/FOCA), and people were injured or killed far too often. Are those the good old days? Really?
I hear you, but you still can have epic racing with the safety improvements available today.
Balestre....he was a disaster for motorsport, wasn't he?!
I'd describe it as a corporate penis pump.
Each to their own and all that.
@thepurist totally agree with that assessment, there seems to be a mythical time when F1 was great but no one ever knows when it was.
Been watching since the early 90's and it's easy to forget how staggeringly boring and one sided the races were, F1 has always been been about periods of one team finding the right ingredients to dominate with occasional interruptions by a rules change or generational talent like Schumacher managing to keep a season interesting (or indeed the second half of the 90's). Every so often it all culminates into a season where it's genuinely incredible sporting theatre, 94, 97, 08, 21 are the ones that spring to mind from my time watching. It's not that different to the Premier League really, periods of one team running away and then you get a super close year like this one of something weird happens, like Leicester. That's sport, you watch because of what might happen.
The big issue for me with F1 is over saturation, I can't get the time to watch 24 races (plus sprints) this year and China was the first full one I've had a chance to see. With so many races and the inevitable domination by Verstappen I don't feel I need to watch all the races now, there will be another in 7 days or so for most of the season.
And if you don't like F1 then the beauty of motorsport is that there is a version for everyone, prefer tin tops with performance levelling systems then the BTCC is your thing, WEC for sportscars with BoP, World GT Series for sprint and endurance races with GT cars, Indycar for "almost anyone of 12 drivers could win this weekend" fast open wheeler racing. That's not even getting into WRC, MOTOGP etc...
mikertroid
I hear you, but you still can have epic racing with the safety improvements available today.
Like we had in 2021 you mean, just three years ago? It was an absolutely epic year, the best year of *any* motorsport I can remember since the early 90s.
I mean just go and watch Socchi, Bahrain, Hungary, Monza, Brazil, Paul Ricard & Emilia Romagna from 2021. Just brilliant. And the season went right down to the wire with some drama & controversy right to the end. Fantastic.
From memory there were only two duds that season, Monaco and Belgium (rain too heavy, should have been cancelled early doors).
It's unfortunate that Red Bull have aced the new regs since then but unless you add weights to hobble the leading cars like in touring cars and WEC, that will always be the case sometimes.
The big issue for me with F1 is over saturation
My uncle recently died, and he made a massive collection of Autosport and Motorsport going back to the late 50's it was a proper treasure trove, in one there's an article criticising the F1 drivers for doing things like F2 or Trans Am or sports cars, becasue the editorial suggested [paraphrasing] Too much exposure or racing that they do will weaken the appeal of headline F1 races like Monaco and Nuremberg Ring. Another edition was complaining about rules changes to make the racing closer and stopping Lotus from dominating everything they entered. Another was complaining about the increasing weight of cars with additional safety equipment (on-board fire extinguishers)
Only the names have changed really
‘. . . along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ . . .’
And the good news is they’re now going to spoil Moto GP too!
‘. . . along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ . . .’
TBF to Liberty, I think the teams are in a much stronger financial position due to Liberty. Of the 10 teams on the grid, I think only Ferrari haven't had a period of severe financial problems in the last 20 years.