The 2013 Season

teabagyokel in a team that supposedly harps about equal opportunities and makes some decision to demote Mark to No 2 just because Seb's wing failed by bad luck without consulting him

If you're referring to Brazil 2012 apparently that was one of them but other times Webber did not pass him when given the order like he should have in Silverstone 2011.

- there was outrage then because Webber clearly was the quicker driver and could have passed Vettel before given the order to back off

Malaysia
- there was outrage because Vettel made a bungled tyre stop decision coming in early and Webber inherit the lead for making a better decision to pit. The team tell Webber to slow and ditto Vettel but Seb had other ideas for his opportunistic moment

Like I said that is the different the more honourable vs ruthless drivers




Going back to Senna - he did think he was invincible and the whole world was against him in 1990 with apparently Balestre involved in moving the pole side from left to the right . That does not excuse him for what he did though. Having said the previous year Senna was dubiously disqualified and on the replay it showed Prost deliberately drove into him
 
Josh I guess Vettel decided to play politics expecting the team to do as he said - double standards considered what happened in Sepang this year

When that was broadcasted on TV everyone was disappointed it happened because clearly Webber was the faster driver that day

When you've been shafted two years in a row at the same place despite being assured of equal opportunities then who can blame him for that
 
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Vettel was clearly the faster driver in Bahrain. I know this because I saw him overtake Webber and then Webber not able to come back at him at all.

Can't have it both ways I'm afraid.

I'm pretty sure if you'd put Alonso, Hamilton, Kimi or even Hulkenberg in that position they'd have done the same. I'm also pretty sure if you'd put either of those 4 in Webber's place they'd have fought back a lot more.

Can we move on though? You hate Vettel. We get it
 
The core essence of F1 since basically the start has been you make your own car.

Leave the production line of chassis to IndyCar, its been like that since that series started.
 
LifeW12
That's really not true! In the 1950s and 60s many teams would be running customer cars; lotus sold chassis, as did March and others! In fact, Tyrrell's first world championship came with a customer Matra! It's only been in the last 3 decades that teams have had to independently build their own chassis!
 
Let us not forget that you also get quite a disparity of results in single-make formulae, where some teams are better able to unlock the potential of a chassis/driver combination than others, and throw up the possibility of an upset to the normal order - witness Russian Time and Sam Bird in GP2 this year, for example.

I like the idea of a backmarker team running year-old customer cars, frankly (or even up-to-date ones). What I don't want to see is 3-car teams run by the big 4 - that would too likely gobble up all the points-paying positions, and effectively eliminate the midfielders.
 
There in lies the problem. If team could run the previous years model then rule changes would be a bugger. If teams could buy customer cars for next year what would they do? This years cars won't work with the new rules for next year. Alternatively, let's look at the 2012 season. If teams could buy previous year models everyone would have bought the 2011 Red Bull with its EBD as it was the best car that year and still faster than the 2012 cars without the EBD technology.

Customer cars are not the solution to the cost cutting issue. I believe that limiting the aero dependencies on the cars would help reduce costs as huge lumps of money are chunked at this throughout each season. Other things like KERS are hugely expensive as well. Surely the Williams fly wheel technology would have been more cost effective and efficient. These are just thoughts, for extra cost cutting, but customer cars aren't going to be a sustainable solution.
 
We seem to be at one of those crossover points - looking ahead to the 2014 season and the future of F1. A lot of the issues raised in this thread (and others) about what has been missing in, or wrong with F1 2013, have been very thought provoking and illuminating. It would be nice to think that the F1 luminaries would have the same level of imagination and reflection. Unfortunately, on the evidence before us in the 2014 Technical and sporting reg's they don't.

The changes for next season will at best be a temporary injection of interest on the technical side but once the teams have had a couple of seasons to bed in the new power units it will be as a stifled as ever. What F1 needs is an opening up of the engine (sorry power unit) and running gear rules and tweak the reg's to reign in the over reliance on aero'. I think I'm right in saying that there is a general consensus on Clip that no-one wants F1 to become a spec' series. Unfortunately the currently narrow approach of F1's hierarchy means that it is almost inevitable that that is what we will get.

The two areas of greatest complaint in recent years have been due to the over-reliance on aero' and messing with the tyres. If driving in the wake of another car continues to be such a problem without attending to the root causes then DRS and dirisible tyres will remain with us for the foreseeable future. Mechanical grip and ground effect are the two keys to unlocking the aero' problem. No-one really wants to see a retrograde F1 with car design simply going back forty years. Wings and aerodynamic body shapes are here to stay but the wings at least can be restricted. But you can't take away the wings without some other way to keep the cars stuck to the track.

F1 needs to take a leaf out of endurance racing's book and allow much more experimentation with regard to the kinds of power units that teams can bring to the sport. Imagine having different "V" configurations and different types of hybrid unit. With room to think outside of the box there could even be scope to bring in new suspension and braking technologies. To date suspension has been derived from spring/damper units and torsion bars. How about pneumatics and allowing variable stiffness and ride height. Exploring those areas will enable enhancement of ground effect and improvements in mechanical grip. The other key to mechanical grip is in the tyre, but let's have sticky tyres that last a decent number of laps yet don't break into chunky marbles that make the "racing line" the only clean line on the track.

Finally (for this post anyway), wouldn't it be nice to see a circuit where overtaking can be tried almost anywhere because a driver can use his/her car on any line they choose? I'd lay money on Kimi and Fernando showing us some more of their classy round the outside moves. I doubt we will see much of that in 2014 other than where the opponents tyres are screwed and DRS enables positional advantage.

Of course everything I said above could just be a load of old bollocks and I'm in dreamland.:thinking:

Edit: I got carried away there and forgot what I originally meant to writ about which was the question of customer cars! I think they could be a good thing if - and I hate to say it - the concept is regulated. What I mean by that is that the "big" teams could be encouraged to supply customer cars to increase the grid but with a limit on how many teams they can supply with defined levels of back up service that he team must provide but not exceed. Building and selling customer cars could be an earner for the middle of the grid teams and there might be possibilities for filtering financial gains down the grid. I wonder just how much work and thought F1's leadership will be giving it and suspect that they will look at it purely from a numbers game point of view. It seems to me that it is something of another opportunity.
 
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F1 management seems absolutely schizophrenic with all their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about reducing the cost of racing but continually enacting rules that increase it. In many cases, needlessly. The ban on customer cars certainly increases it (how is it customer engines are good but customer chassis are bad?). The 2014-spec hybrid engine is the single greatest increase in TR-mandated expense in the sport's history.

Every racing league needs its backmarkers. A point I have made in this forum before, in the era when it routinely supported the most teams, F1 had teams who knew that, barring a string of miraculous results leading to unexpected sponsorships, they only had the funding enough for the single season. But they came anyway, if only for the opportunity to briefly breathe F1's rarefied air.

How much poorer would this sport's history have been absent the likes of Life and Hesketh and Vanwall? They themselves might not have been that successful, but they invariably brought with them fresh drivers and fresh personnel and fresh ideas. Many of those people proved their worth and remained in the sport on other teams, and some of the wacky ideas that the ephemeral teams couldn't make work, the other teams saw promise in, took up and developed and made their own. Banning the kooks from the sport only makes the cars and the competition all the more one-dimensional.
 

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