Safety Car Restarts

I think people are making too much of this optimum temperature thing they have the parade lap they do pitstops and on both these occasion the breaks and the tyres loose temperature the drivers just need to drive with what they have, the temps will come back to them within a lap, and anyway why should a safety car give a driver an opportunity to overtake when he did not necessarily have one before it was deployed? That just smacks of the American Ideal of racing...
 
Not necessarily.

It is possible to overheat tyres and brakes by accelerating and decelerating.
Remember Kobayashis's brakes on the grid at Spa smoking heavily?

Driving at a low constant speed behind the safety car will never do that.
 
It would be the same thing for everybody though, and it would also highlight sheer talent
That's one of the things Senna was so brilliant at. On cold tyres he would instinctively assess grip levels from the off.
 
Changing the rule so the drivers can only floor it once they reach the safety car line might work (perhaps in conjunction with applying some sort of restrictions in sector three). It would also make the restarts less exciting, however. Personally I don't think there's much of a problem, I quite like the game of cat and mouse as it stands. As for last weekend, Button misjudged what Vettel was doing but managed to avoid crashing in to him. I don't subscribe to the theory that Vettel hampered him deliberate, nor that anyone should be receiving any sort of penalty.

The one thing I would like to see changed about Safety Car restarts, which I mentioned during the race, is the allowing lapped cars to pass rule since as it currently stands it seems to make the safety car periods several laps longer. I think it would be quicker to make the lapped cars pull to one side, let everyone else overtake them, and then reset how many laps behind they are to zero in the timing system.
 
Button is most definitely the worst at restarts. He has the whole pack spilling out of the white lines trying not to pass/crash into each other all the way down the grid. Trying to make as many opponents take each other out as possible.
 
He's not the best at them anyway, Alonso had him at Australia in 2006 pretty sharpish from the restart
 
Why do F1 drivers have to have their tyres are the optimum opperating temperature at all time? Drivers in lesser forumlas do not have that luxury. In GP2 (the F1 feeder series) the drivers do not even have tyre warmers to have warm tyres when they pit.

This is supposed to be the pinnacle of motor racing but apparently our boys can't be trusted to race on anything less than hot tyres and brakes.

I think what we have to do is to chalk this one up to a racing (almost) incident and move on. Like many have said, there are too many knee jerk reactions these days. There always seems to be a scape goat for anything that happens and punishment needs to be handed out.

If there are rules in place then they should be enforced by the stewards if they feel the incident was worthy of that action. If there are no rules for it, then maybe that is for a good reason.

Lets play the hand that we are dealt and move on. Here's hoping that Suzuka serves up a cracker! It'll be fun to listen to all the discussion about Lewis and Sergio's moves and how that will change the face of F1.
 
As I understand it, the problem with the current tyres is once they are outside the operating window it is very difficult to get them back to the optimum temperature range and as a result the tyres wear prematurely.

As others have pointed out, this is standard practice for most (all?) drivers when they are leading the pack behind the SC, although some are worse than others and take it to extremes.
 
Westy To be fair the tyres Pirelli supply to GP2 and GP3 are completely different to the F1 tyres and don't require as much research as the F1 tyres to understand plus they're all driving the same car so it's all relatively equal. Last year only flexi-front winged cars of Red Bull and McLaren had the downforce to properly get enough heat into the tyres when running the hard compound, which was why we had races like Spain where the Red Bull and McLaren cars were the only 4 cars to finish the race on the lead lap.

Also, remember Raikkonen losing loads of places at the end of the Chinese GP all because he ran wide, lost tyre temp and resultingly lost pace. So tyre temp is clearly pretty important.

Anyway, as you said, Singapore was just a racing (almost) incident and time to move on.
 
I've been catching up on a lot of WTCC (thank you Speed2.com membership) and what if F1 went to that style of restart? Everyone is lined up, single file of course, going the same speed towards the start/finish line with the red light on, when the light turns green, they go. It's so simple and it works great on getting the cars close together, ect. I like it.
 
Perhaps the green light could come on at some point, determined by Charlie Whiting, around the circuit after the SC has pulled in so that the idea of the lead driver becoming the defacto safety car is irrelevant. They just have to tour round at the delta speed until they see the green light. Could add an extra dimension...
 
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