Grand Prix 2018 United States Grand Prix Practice, Qualifying & Race Discussion

I could have totally borrowed C_A_T’s last years’s writeup as it’s completely applicable to this year’s race. I would but I don’t as I have a ton of respect for our moderator and I owe to the site something new, even if I’m nursing a 40-degrees cold and I’m nursing a hernia. Sorry for the brevity of my article and I hope the race more than make up for it.

America the land of opportunity and excess is the next stop the the F1 circus this year. With a shinny new Justice Kavanaugh in charge of waving the checkered flags (sorry he probably won’t), the few f1 fans left in the room cheer and wait in expectation to see if a nearly crowned leader Lewis Hamilton bagged the title (he probably has already). This put him ahead of Frenchman Alain Prost and tie in number of titles with Argentinean Juan Manuel Fangio. Quite the achievement. Mercedes a class on his field, even if he Ferrari is at least as fast, will see Bottas victorious as soon as the the title is settle. Vettel has singlehandedly managed to derail his own path to a 5th title by making a little too many mistakes.

Let’s hope for a real old fashion show and a mano-a-mano between the 2 4-title champions rather than an anticlimactic “Bottas, Lewis is faster than you” affair like last race.

Gentlemen, start your engines and Make Racing Great Again!

 

[Il_leone]

Izumi No one kicked up a fuss because Red Bull were not big players except for when it came to voting you got two votes instead of one to the favoured side and always at the detriment of the B team

Williams and Force India have managed to argue that Toro Rosso must produce its own chassis which is as far as it got in terms of parity

Haas come along and say we'l just buy off Ferrari everything and are at the midfield with suspicion its an old ferrari chassis under the cover according to the conspiracy theorists

The biggest issue is the money side am afraid Ferrari are allowed $50m in royalty payments which is more than some teams get in constructors money ! Then you have this situation where the constructors money can only be paid out if the team manages to complete the full season after that to avoid money laundering

 

[Galahad]

I was interested to read, after Austin, that Kimi is only the seventh different driver to win a GP in the hybrid era - a period that now stretches to 97 races.

This made me wonder how this compares with previous periods of F1 history. The below chart shows the trend of how many different winners there have been in the previous 100 races (a rolling 100 races; not including the Indy 500s of 1950-60):

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, we are in the midst of the period with the fewest different winners. Prior to Austin, there had been only six in the previous 100 races: Hamilton, Rosberg, Vettel, Ricciardo, Verstappen and Bottas.

Prior to 2014, and for most of the 2000s, there were between 10-15 different winners. The previous low point came in the early 1990s, with fewer than 10 for a period in 1991-93, including a sequence of eight races in 1992 when there were only eight: Piquet, Senna, Prost, Mansell, Berger, Boutsen, Nannini and Patrese.

The record came in the mid-1970s - no surprise. When James Hunt won the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, he was the 25th different driver to have won in the preceding 100 events. It is worth noting that with fewer races per season back then, that covered a period of eight years rather than the current five. The twenty-five were: Surtees, Clark, G. Hill, McLaren, Stewart, Ickx, Siffert, Hulme, Rindt, Brabham, Rodriguez, Regazzoni, Fittipaldi, Andretti, Gethin, Cevert, Beltoise, Peterson, Revson, Reutemann, Lauda, Scheckter, Pace, Mass and Hunt.

 

[Mezzer]

Well, I am not an accountant, but I have run businesses.....so this does not seem that much of a challenge to me. You may have to require all budget to go through a single account that can be monitored by FIA, you may have to have rules about paying and evaluating the value for outside contractors, and so forth, but you only talking about oversight of 10 teams. There is enough personnel movement than any egregious violations will be quickly discovered...and it is going to take a significant financial violation to gain an advantage.

What about a "donation" of equipment or services from a sponsor in relation to advertizing on the car? You say they're intelligent enough to follow rules, I agree, but a lot of the things they are paid is to think outside of the rules ...

 

[Il_leone]

Ruslan Its called money laundering

Big teams with more resources will always find a way to get around this

Red Bull being a marketing company can call either their resources from taking it away from Toro Rosso and/or additional sales of their drinks

 

[FB]

That chart from Galahad further reinforces my belief that all the hype about records being broken for wins, poles, fastest laps etc is just that, hype. It is the least competitive period in F1 and worse from a fan perspective than the Schumacher/Ferrari era.

 

[The Artist.....]

That chart from Galahad further reinforces my belief that all the hype about records being broken for wins, poles, fastest laps etc is just that, hype. It is the least competitive period in F1 and worse from a fan perspective than the Schumacher/Ferrari era.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment of this post, I question whether it has ever really been that different. What may have changed in recent years is that “winning” teams stick with the same drivers for long periods, and individual teams keep competitive for long periods, and fluke wins have more or less been eliminated due to bullet proof reliability. If you think of “competitiveness” being measured as number of different teams capable of winning, there were only, at any given time, three teams capable of winning races...

1991-1993 - McLaren, Williams, Benetton
1994-1996 - Williams, Benetton, Ferrari ( Ligier won one race)
1997 - McLaren, Williams, Ferrari
1998-1999 - Ferrari, McLaren, Jordan (Stewart won a fluke)

 

[FB]

My F1 experience goes back before the 90's

 

[gethinceri]

My F1 experience goes back before the 90's

 

[The Artist.....]

My F1 experience goes back before the 90's

And mine, but it is worth thinking about why we have the current lack of variability... even in the 1980s, there were many seasons when there were very few cars capable of winning... much of the 1980s was characterised by seasons where 3 or 4 cars were capable of winning; these varied between McLaren, Ferrari, Williams, Lotus, Brabham, Benetton and Ligier.