Fast forward to Mercedes and their engineers are going to be facing the same problem, only magnified. If they can more efficiently stall the rear wing than anyone else then they are going to have to space their gear ratios wider than anyone else in orde to take advantage of DRS. This means that when they can use DRS they are going to be flying. On high speed tracks in quallifying they should set the world on fire. Problem is, as all the drivers point out, there are no points given out on Saturdays. Instead, Mercedes are going to have to spend Sundays running around in a top gear that is not as strong as it should be because it is optimised for running with a wide open rear wing. I think Mercedes have come up with a very good idea that is going to be of very
Mercedes have a fancy rear wing this year. The basic way of seeing it is that when they open up their rear wing with DRS, they not only create less drag by creating a smaller rear wing contact patch, they also create less drag by opening up a duct to more efficiently stall the rear wing. It's very clever but I don't think that it will be such a great advantage. For lessons on why it won't be so great we only have to look at Lewis Hamilton in Monza last year. Lewis faced a huge problem in Italy because he had a strong car but when he opened the DRS he couldn't use it properly because it would cause the engine to hit the rev limiter. To use DRS properly, McLaren would have had to widen out the gear ratios which would have meant that when he wasn't using DRS Hamilton's engine wouldn't have been reaching it's maximum performance in top gear.
Fast forward to Mercedes and their engineers are going to be facing the same problem, only magnified. If they can more efficiently stall the rear wing than anyone else then they are going to have to space their gear ratios wider than anyone else in orde to take advantage of DRS. This means that when they can use DRS they are going to be flying. On high speed tracks in quallifying they should set the world on fire. Problem is, as all the drivers point out, there are no points given out on Saturdays. Instead, Mercedes are going to have to spend Sundays running around in a top gear that is not as strong as it should be because it is optimised for running with a wide open rear wing. I think Mercedes have come up with a very good idea that is going to be of very
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We're already two damp practice sessions into a new season and I have realised that I have been a little tardy in keeping this site up to date. While it is good to be sitting around before the first quallifying session not having any idea who is going to win this season, it isn't so nice turning up to a circuit not knowing if you are going to see a car. I had intended to have up YouTube videos from every vantage point of the Albert Park Circuit befre we got under way. Now, instead I will concentrate on cleaning up my information for Spa and Circuit Gilles Villeneuve visitors. Hopefully people will be able to find what they are looking for before they dip into their pockets to buy tickets.
After having spent the first half of the first practice session watching text updates online I am also going to be hunting around for a better way to watch the action. I don't watch much tv outside of motor racing and so don't feel like forking out big bucks for Speed tv. The problem is that when the season kicks off I want to see everything; practice sessions, press conferences and practice pitstops. Text updates are terrible. Radio would be better but all I can find is BBC and they won't let me listen while I am in Canada. So, I will keep hunting and I will keep you posted. I sat for four hours in the stands to see the Montreal Grand Prix get done. But, that was nothing compared to the 36 odd hours it took to get the Daytona 500 done and dusted! Thanks to the God of atheists and patron saints of motor racing who saw to it that the race didn't start on Sunday or Monday afternoon when I wouldn't have been able to see a single lap. Instead I was able to rush my way through a mid term exam, rush home and buy a six pack, and fall into the sofa in time to see the green flag drop on the season and Jimmy Johnson buy a chunk of concrete.
I don't know why it took so long, but I have fallen in love with Nascar. You have to admire a grandstand full of fans who hang around untill a Monday night to watch a race and you know they are sticking around for a good reason. Going round in circles for five or six hours might seem long but yeterday I think I could have watched 24 hours of it. I liked the tandem racing last year but the pack racing was just as good this year. I'm still waiting and hoping for Montoya to win one on the circles but he sure managed to provide a lot of entertainment last night. I thought that was going to be the end of the night but instead we had an interesting couple of hours of interviews and Brad Keselowski bringing the social media revolution to racing. Onto Phoenix in less than a weeks time and then a new Formula 1 season gets under way in Melbourne. I used to hate technology. I have spent 15 years hoping that cell phones would disapear and that we would return to writing letters. Unfortunately that never happened and I am starting to cave in. It all started with a university course I took on technology. For that course I made this website which I have kept going. And once I started with this website then I started getting all my photos online. You can check them out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dayattheraces/ Being the off season I found that I couldn't get enough news and I couldn't get it fast enough. So this morning I joined Twitter which you can find at http://www.twitter.com/dayatheraces/ With all the Twitter accounts that you can find over at F1fanatics.com there is as much news as you can handle. All of this I will try and link from the website so that fans can have as many resources available to them as possible. It seems the more you get into technology the more you like it. I even got a cellphone last week
I see that the FIA is reviewing the DRS rules for this year. Unfortunately they won't ask me what they should do. I say unfortunately because, like most fans, I actually have the answer to what they should do.
DRS had an interesting introduction in 2011. Sometimes it worked fantastically. China was actually a great race this year for those who remember although this probably had as much to do with failing to understand tyres as it did with the use of DRS. Jenson would never have been in the position to take the lead on the last lap had he not had the benefit of DRS down the back straight. But of course sometimes it failed miserably. Sometimes it didn't help. Melbourne and Valencia weren't affected by DRS. DRS in Turkey made passing ridiculously easy. Barcelona actually had a lot of passing but this was all in the infield and had 0 to do with DRS. And, who can forget Lewis in Monza opening up the rear wing and getting stuck on the rev limiter lap after lap. My problem with DRS is where they decide to use it. Although we are quick to forget it, some tracks actually used to have passing without DRS. Given a little bit of tyre wear difference it was always possible to pass people down the back straight in Montreal or outbraking them into the first corner in Brazil. So when you bring DRS to these tracks why does the FIA insist on putting the DRS zones in places where overtaking was always possible. Instead of putting two DRS zones on the two longest straights in Montreal why not put it right in the middle of turns three, four and five. Let's see who has got the balls to open up the rear wing while following someone through some flat corners. Let's make overtaking opportunities out of sections of track that were never opportunities before. Screw opening up the wing heading down the pit straight in Monaco. Open it up on the way up the hill. Let's see people considering taking a dive down the inside coming into Casino. Forget a DRS zone down Kemmel, put one right bang in the middle of Blanchimont. That I would love to see. The way DRS was used in 2011 and doubtless how it will be used in 2012 is to create more passing. What I would prefer would be for the FIA to use DRS to create more areas on a track where passing is possible. Last year I wrote about the toughness of off seasons for us racing fans, so I won't bring up another blog about the tough times we are going through right now. Instead I will write about what I hope happens to this website in the future. I started off making this website because making a website was a requirement for a course that I was taking in University. The reason I chose this particular subject was because I, as a motorsport fan, always wished that there was a good resource to turn to where people could share their experiences of going to different races around the world. I love going to races and especially Formula one races. The problem with going to races overseas is that often you will only go once and you want to avoid as many mistakes as you possible can. When organising trips to overseas races, like I did for Belgium last year, there is tons of information that you can find all over the web. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a website devoted to helping fans have the best time that they possibly can at different races. That is what I am trying to build here. Hopefully I find plenty of time to get around the world doing research to build up the content but everyone elses contributions would also be welcome. So I hope everyone finds this website helpful and if you feel like adding your own two cents worth then feel free!
Kimi's back!
I know there were rumours but there are always rumours and most of them turn into nothing. But, this one has turned into something and in 2012 Kimi is going to join the list of Finns to drive for Lotus. The funny thing is that Mika, Heikki, and Kimi are all going to have driven for Lotus and every one of them will have driven for a different Lotus. I am happy that Kimi is back. Maybe I was the only one that liked his post race press conferences, especially in the early days when he would sit there playing with the microphone and sending a rubbing noise out to the tv. His short nervous answers made him sound like the most human one there. And once he found his confidence and kept giving short boring answers, you could forgive him because the questions that reporters tend to pose are generally boring and poorly thought out anyway. Of todays drivers Kimi seems to be the truist of racers along with Montoya. They don't care if it's F1, they just want to race something fast. I love that Kimi will give anything a go. Rally, Nascar, trucks, ski mobiles... Lots of other drivers would be worried about their image trying out racing unfamiliar cars against lesser drivers with better experience. But Kimi clearly isn't in it for the glory, the money, the fame, the sponsors, maybe not even the fans. Kimi is in racing for the racing and that is why I am glad that he will be back next year. The first lot of snow is falling in Montreal this morning which signals an end to the motor racing season for 2011. If I was feeling particulary poetic I would make some comparison between the snow and a chequered flag. Luckily for you I am not feeling poetic in the slightest.
I managed to watch the final race of the 2011 Nascar season held at Homestead over the weekend. What a race! For some reason I have really got into Nascar this season. A championship battle down to the last lap certainly doesn't hurt keeping the interest. Tony Stewart had to fight back from a broken front grill that dropped him to the back and early pit stops for damage. Carl Edwards had to watch two other Ford powered cars pull into garages with blown engines. And the two of them still managed to fight it out at the front, pull away from the field and finish the championship tied on points. Nascar even had the decency to throw in a couple of red flags for rain so that I could get some stuff done around the house. On the other side of the motorracing ocean the Formula 1 season will be wrapping up in Brazil this weekend. Unlike Nascar there doesn't seem to be much of a chance of a season ending tie. I don't know why but this doesn't bother me in the slightest. I think it just goes to show that Formula 1 is really made up of a whole heap of indiviual races and not that a whole heap of races make up the Formula 1 season. The championship is just a bit of icing to go on top of a collection of trophies. Here I was just sitting around thinking that I had June 2013 all sorted out and planned for when Bernie goes ahead and throws all my plans out the window by giving me another Grand Prix to go to. Damn you Bernie! Now I am going to spend months and months learning a series of streets in New Jersey by heart from Google maps. I am going to have to work out how the New York subway works and whether to get a hotel in New York or in New Jersey. Bernie is forcing me to spend countless hours on the net looking for plane tickets, train tickets, car rental prices, hotels, hostels and bed and breakfasts. More time wasted trying to imagine what the views from Grandstands will be without the benefit of having seen a race at the track. God damn it Bernie! Now I am going to have to figure out whether to get expensive Grandstand tickets or take my chances with General admission. If the Thursday pitwalk is at 2pm will I be able to make it to the track with a morning flight from Montreal. Are there overnight buses. All these things I didn't have to worry about last week.
You know I don't really mean it. Thanks Bernie. Help yourself to my bank account. I can't wait. A new race in a country that cares about the sport. Travelling to a race without leaving the continent. Back to back race weekends. Bernie has destroyed my life in the nicest possible way Dan Wheldon died tragically this weekend in the final round of the Indy car series at Las Vegas. It seems pointless to pass on my condolences to his family since I am fairly certain that they don't read my blog, but needless to say it is terrible news and news that I can't imagine having to recieve.
There seem to be two extremees of what to do about death in motorsport. No matter what we do there will always be the risk of people getting killed racing cars. When it comes down to it, motor racing is about doing fairly unwise things in machines that are designed to be as fast as possible, not as safe as possible. That being said there are people that believe that death should be present in motor racing in order to give some sort of assurance that what drivers are doing is not only bloody skillful but also bloody brave. Hemingway said "there are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." And I get his point. These drivers we watch every week are bloody brave because they could get killed in some pretty frightening ways. I think that I am not exagerating when I say that there is also a lot of hero worship that goes on surrounding drivers that died on the track. Would Gilles Villeneuve be so well remembered if he didn't die on the track but instead went on to never win a world title. I don't mean to sound insulting to Villeneuve, I am just questioning the mentality of us fans. No doubt he was good, but do we give him more credit simply because he died. Most people wouldn't hesitate to say that Senna was better than Prost but both drivers won a title when they had each other as team mates and people are much quicker to ermember the dirty antics of living Schumacher than the dead Senna. Again, I think that we quick to want to create a hero out of people for dying while racing. The other end of the arguement of course is that any death in motorsport is a terrible thing. I happen to like most of the drivers in Formula 1 at the moment and I don't particularly want to see any of them die in front of me. It has only happened a couple of times that I thought a driver wasn't going to come out of a wreck with the heart still pumping. Robert Kubica in Montreal and Luciano Burti in Spa in 2001. Tony Stewart said it best when asked by a reporter if he thought that Nascar should be more dangerous. I suggest you look it up on YouTube because I can't say it as well as him. What he said in effect (in a way that only Tony Stewart can) was that maybe they should cut the legs of the reporters chairs so that they could fall off and cause some entertainment for everyone. In other words, how the hell would you like it if your job was made intentionally dangerous in order to give everyone a kick. As fans we need to remember that these drivers we watch are brave on the one hand, but on the other they are humans not heroes. They are humans with families and friends. The more that can be done to make sure they get home safe to their families and friends the better. |
TonyI am a race fan. I cannot claim to be an expert on anything, but as a fan I am apparently the most important part of the sport. So I assume everyone wants to hear what I have to say. Archives
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