https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.mercedes-retain-bottas-alongside-hamilton.LSNMCDW5zVT4brPY4pOEY.html

So Ocon to Renault and Hulkenberg to Haas seem to be the general consensus.

And the pressure’s off Albon (a bit) for his first race with RedBull – engine change means loadsapenalties which puts him at the back of the grid.

So Albon and Kvyat (also with an engine penalty) have to start behind Gasly, who is fighting for his career and in no mood to let them past.

Ocon confirmed at renault in 2020

Just read news about a horrendous crash at Spa on the exit of Eau Rouge in the F2 race. Race has been cancelled. Hope those involved are ok, but it looks bad.

:’-(

https://www.racefans.net/2019/08/31/fia-confirms-f2-driver-anthoine-hubert-was-killed-in-spa-crash/

Seriously horrible. Met the guy a couple of times around the factory and he seemed a genuinely nice and driven guy. Lots of my colleagues know him a fair bit better as have engineered him a few times, Motorsport is great when all is good but can seriously suck when this happens. RIP Anthonie.

That’s such a shame. RIP.

The last F1 driver to be killed was Jules Bianchi who was like a brother to Charles Leclerc. Now Anthoine Hubert who is a fellow countryman and another close friend of Leclerc apparently.

With Charles on pole I hope he gets his first victory today.

Awful, awful crash yesterday. Am saddened that a promising talent lost his life on the track like that.

+1 for Leclerc today, I would love to see him bring that Ferrari home in first place.

I saw that youtube clip linked above. I wish I hadn’t.

another good day for lewis, congrats Leclerc big thanks to his number 2 🙂

Does that mean Monaco has the most F1 winners per capita now, on account of them only having a tiny population? (Edit, yeah, by miles, they were already smashing the podiums per capita…)

Reckon he’s a shoe in for Monza, should be some epic celebrations then.

1 Lewis Hamilton GBR Mercedes 268
2 Valtteri Bottas FIN Mercedes 203
3 Max Verstappen NED Red Bull Racing Honda 181
4 Sebastian Vettel GER Ferrari 169
5 Charles Leclerc MON Ferrari 157

F1 is in grave danger of becoming enjoyable. 🙂

The battle for 2nd is pretty close at this stage of the season!

can’t see max holding his position, he’s got engine penalties looming (he’s on his last ICE and going by the other honda runners it doesn’t look favourable)

Superb win for Leclerc, am very relieved to see him finally nail a win after this awful weekend at Spa.

Poor Lando Norris has held a well deserved fifth place on merit until his engine let go on the last lap.

this early probably means another engine later too

McLaren’s run of good fortune about to end.

How can Vettell get away with making this statement unchallenged, after the hissy fits he threw when penalised for unsafe driving. He really is an arrogant entitled asshole.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/49599387

Vettel is an annoying dick, but I don’t think he’s a deliberately unsafe driver. He did lose his shit with Hamilton a couple of years ago, but that was because he thought Hamilton had brake-checked him. The unsafe rejoining the track thing looks to me to be the sort of mistake that people make under pressure, not deliberate. Not saying that Vettel wasn’t clearly in the wrong in those incidents and deserved penalties, but compared with Schumacher’s and Senna’s worst moments of deliberately taking out other drivers, I don’t think Vettel is dirty or dangerous.

The unsafe rejoining the track thing looks to me to be the sort of mistake that people make under pressure, not deliberate.

I would say a lot of his mistakes are driven by anger, that is more dangerous than calculated actions.

It is his reaction to being penalised for his mistakes that I was pointing out, it makes hum a complete hypocrite.

No good saying this today, after someone has died, when just a few weeks ago he was throwing his toys out of the pram when punished for unsafe driving (unless admitting he was wrong then). He is a senior driver, 4 time world champion, and basically he doesn’t believe the safety rules should apply to him they are for everyone else.

He was “penalised for unsafe driving”, but that’s not the same as driving dangerously: it was the way in which the rule is written that snared him. I don’t believe he did anything dangerous, and the majority view—certainly among drivers—seemed to be broadly the same. His wheel-banging behaviour in Baku was far more worthy of punishment, but even then that wasn’t anywhere near mortally dangerous.

So I think he’s got every right to say what he said. It’s an abstract point about whether the spectacle as it stands excuses death, I think, because there’s no simple correlation between entertainment and mortality. I’m guessing he just disagrees with the view of some, that mortal danger is an inherent part of the appeal to the spectator.

The fact of the matter is that the human body is only robust up to about 20mph impacts, so where you’re doing ten times that speed, carrying a hundred times the energy, you’ve got your work cut out to reduce risk of injury and death. You achieve it by engineering the cars, the tracks, the rules and other control systems—each of which affects the nature of the on-track action—because fundamentally when you put racing drivers alongside each other in a racing car they have one aim: to win. I forget who it was that said that if you give a racing driver the choice of a car that can be crashed without consequence, or a car that will kill him in a crash but is a second a lap faster, he will choose the latter every time.

They’re compelled—psychologically and financially—to push to the very limits of the equipment, the tracks and the rules. It’s in their interest to have equipment, tracks and rules which, even when pushed to their limits, don’t punish basic mistakes or mechanical failures with death.

But, again: they’re doing 200mph. The probability of a fatal incident is never going to be zero.

A lot of the time it comes down to the toss of the dice….it’s a series of unfortunate circumstances that lead to someone losing their life.
If the driver in front had braked 1m sooner or had been 6″ further across the track & the following driver’s tyres had been 3 laps fresher etc. etc. then death would be averted & people would talk about a bad accident, rather than a fatal one.

There was that crash with Alonso a few yrs ago (was it Australia?) where he flew through the air and slammed into the barriers.
Looking at a replay & you can imagine that a bit more speed, a bit more contact, flipping a bit earlier/later etc. could all have resulted in death. Small margins….

(F3, but still)

**** me!

Driver and Marshalls ok, Kerb has now been removed…

Holy ****. What was with that kerb anyway?

To stop drivers running wide to get a faster run on to the straight for the next lap. Now they are just deleting lap times of the lap you are on and the subsequent lap to stop them doing it

Well, that was a farce…

Well what a farce that was, while the racing has had somewhat of a renascence over the past couple of months, they then go and shoot themselves in the foot with that ludicrous qualifying display.

All involved in that debacle should be sent to the back of the grid for bringing the sport into disrepute – forget if any technical regulations have been breached or not. No excuses from any of them, utterly gormless.

Another video of the Peroni crash with a different angle at the end (with random audio!), has to be said that without the Halo we could well have had another fatality this weekend.

It’s lucky that Leclerc was in P1 when the flag dropped. Can you imagine the tifosi if that had happened with a Mercedes on pole? (Which nearly happened; supposedly Hamilton had to lift on his lap when Raikkonen went off.)

that ludicrous qualifying display

“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”
“The thing about Ferrari is, they always try and walk it in.”
etc

I think leclerc actually made the line in time. Sky commentators thought he hadn’t but there was no flag next to his name on the timing board, but there was for Vettel who was just behind him. There was just no point going for a quick lap though as Sainz was never going to knock 1.6 secs off he previous time, with no tow.

Would love it if all the drivers who didn’t make the line were sent to the back though…

Hope Leclerc wins tomorrow. He has become my sons favourite driver. I can see championship battles between him and Verstappen over the coming years. Verstappen has amazing talent but I cant warm to his arrogance. The sea of orange at the Dutch GP at Zandvoort next year will be a sight to behold though.

All 4 of Vettel’s wheels were over the white line a parabolica on his timed lap, but it was allowed to Stan because… well, you know… Ferrari, Monza, Tifosi etc.

Vettel was very lucky!

The stewards decided he was just within track limits on his first hot lap and from certain angles it looked like he was actually outside the limit which would of meant the lap would of been wiped

Then missing out on the 2nd hot lap due to the tow debacle would of meant that he wouldn’t have done a timed lap and would of been P9!

I found the back and forth between lando and max i this quite funny. Drivers away from the PR machine can be funny.

Christ Vettel’s driving like a granny in a Micra down Tesco’s car park

Bottas is not great in close racing