Motorsports (NASCAR, F1, etc) Discussion Thread • Page 53

Technically yes but realistically it would be very hard. Obviously I’m not hugely privy to that side of things but all teams are working on upgrades and revisions at all times.

I did say our car would be a tad warm lol.

 

Genuinely gutted about McLaren. I thought this was their chance to do what Ferrari have done.

 

I don't watch motorsports, but i randomly remembered the other day the time I met Rusty Wallace as a kid at a car show my parents took me to and got to shake his hand. That might have been one of the cooler moments of my childhood.

 

Interesting.

apparently other teams suffered with fuel pump issues in quali.

 

Horner was talking to Sky afterwards and he said that Gasly's issue was not the same as what Max and Perez had. Also, his car just completely powered off, so maybe something under the bodywork was on fire before it just all died?

Interested to see how these new cars go as the season develops. They really do seem to be able to hunt each other down in them. The slipstream, coupled with DRS when Max was chasing Leclerc, was unreal. Better yet was that Leclerc could then power out of the next corner and take it back. We've not often seen cars able to do that in recent years.

Max sounded incredibly flustered with it all today. Some of his radio messages were absolute gibberish.

Anyone else notice that, despite an awful lot of criticism before he even turned a wheel, Zhou managed to bring his car home for points on his debut?

Also, wtf have Mclaren and Aston done...

 

To be fair to Max, he had some amount of problems in that race haha. Can understand him being so angry after the second pit stop fucked up his steering.

Zhou impressed me too. On the other hand Schumacher didn’t. But he seemed to have some damage.

 

Zhou was really good today, but he’s also a good driver, not as bad as the general talk around him suggests. I think people hate “pay” drivers (newsflash: they are ALL pay drivers) and i think there is an anti-Chinese sentiment too.

My boy Albono was great too. Worst car on the grid and he was mixing with better cars. Hope he keeps it up. Seems they struggle in low speed corners so maybe KSA is better.

 

I was really hoping Williams wouldn’t be the worst car on the grid.

 

It just seemed a little uncharacteristic. I mean, he's had years at Reb Bull where the power unit was an absolute basket case and he didn't react like that. Yesterday he was getting worked up about how much he could hit the tyres after pit stops, which was long before his car started to fail him.

I'm not entirely sure how he managed to do a fastest sector at one point with a bent track rod.

 

Could be one of those moments where he went into the race thinking he had a chance at the win and could feel it slipping away from the first moment. Must have been very frustrating coming off the back of a title win and feel like everything is going wrong in the first race

 

On another note, I'm curious as to whether the tyres being less heated at pit stops is going to impact strategy much. It was noticeable yesterday that a car fresh out of the pits was really slow for around half a lap and then they'd start really getting the performance back the lap after. Unsure if it will be as pronounced everywhere else as Bahrain, but it's surely going to have teams questioning strategies where you only just manage to clear the pits in front of your rival. If the car on track is already up to speed, it looks really difficult to defend initially.

 

On the plus side, if these tyres struggled at Bahrain, and ended in 3 stops being used, next week should be crazy lol. Four stops maybe?

I think Red Bull will he VERY strong next week, Merc will struggle and Williams will be better.

 

I think McLaren might improve next week.

 

God I hope so

 

Sigh

Danny feels so cursed. Him leaving Red Bull still feels like such an awful decision. I get you wanted to be the #1 somewhere… but going to Renault then McLaren isn’t going very well lol

 

Given how narrow and fast Jeddah is, coupled with new cars which seem like they can get a bit wayward (as well as follow each other closely), the next race could be absolute chaos. I mean, it was pretty chaotic last time, in cars the drivers were very familiar with. Could be a nightmare for cars which still haven't solved the porpoising.

Norris said after the race yesterday that their car suited Barca (which is a faster circuit) far better, so maybe Mclaren will jump up the standings a bit. They were so bad yesterday though that it's hard to imagine them being that much better.

 

I think from what I know, they couldn’t fix the brakes normally, and so had to make a change that impacted the points of downforce they could have on the car. I don’t fully understand it but Norris said something about it, and it meant they had no grip.

bahrain has four/five huge braking points whereas Jeddah doesn’t, so i can see them being good next week tbf.

 

Fingers crossed that Haas will have further success this weekend! We love to see it.

 

This is so funny. This is a Spanish sports media channel who are HUGELY over dramatic especially when Real Madrid loses a game of football. And here they are discovering live that Alonso has blocked them.

 

*Dramatic music and shock*

 

Part of me feels like Vettel really just didn’t want to race in Saudi lol

 

part of me feels like Vettel just doesn't want to race in that AM car

 

Little bit of both haha