Australian Grand Prix 2012, Albert Park Circuit - Race 1/20

Added Thursday press conference and pics from F1.com. You can now enlarge them, they were quite small before.


Had to laugh at this bit from the conference -

Q: (Simon Cass - Daily Mail) For the three guys who’ve won the world title up to now. Could you just tell me who your Grand Prix hero is? And Kimi, if you decide you want to say you still haven’t got a hero, then could just tell me who you admired when you were coming up through the ranks?

SV: Kimi to start!

KR: I still don’t have one! Of course, I was hoping for good results for Finns but I didn’t really… it didn’t make any difference who won it then. There wasn’t one guy I hoped for or was looking up to so…

SC: Nice try…

JB: Do you still want ours or not?

SV: Obviously, when I was growing up, and I think similar to a lot of kids at that age in Germany, we were admiring Michael [Schumacher]. He was our hero, he was my hero. I had posters of him on my wall. And when I got a bit older I took them off and put some other posters on the wall, but anyway… So I was looking up to Michael but there have been and there are a lot of great drivers. For sure for me Michael is one of them.

JB: For me, it was a little bit earlier than Michael. For me it was Ayrton [Senna] and Alain [Prost] back in the early ’80s, because that’s when I started watching Formula One, at seven or eight years old. Obviously ‘Our Nige’ [Nigel Mansell] has got to be up there, just for the moustache more than anything else. But yeah, it’s difficult. Those are the guys I watched when I was younger. I suppose you get some inspiration from them and you want to be like them in the future. That’s obviously a lot of our aims.
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I'm going to carefully step around all the bickering, and ask if we know when grid walk is? Saying that just getting up at 5:45 and only watching the race is very tempting.

kd
 
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Clever. Very clever.

Key point in that article is peoples understanding on the rules. As it rightly says, F Ducts are not banned, they have just banned driver movement being used to influence the aero, and stopped any bodywork being able to link the engine cover to the rear wing.

Sounds more like an evolution of ideas that were being thrown around in 2008/09 by people like Toyota using passive slots in the rear wing to try to stall it at high speed. With the lack of any technical diagrams (yet) I'm assuming this is the same sort of thing, but that with the DRS closed the vent is blocked, and when opened the flap moves out of the way and opens it up?

Should be easy to copy though, so hopefully other teams will do that rather than dragging the sport through the mud with a bunch of bitter protests.

Edit: Just having a think about this... it surely means they will get benefit only in DRS zones. At first I though "pff, whats the point in that, having an advantage at just one point around the lap?". And then there was a light bulb moment, Qualifying! It will be interesting to see if Merc come out on top in the speed traps this weekend...
 
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They were pretty good last year in the speed traps from what I remember, it was just round the corners that they had the issues. Will certainly be interesting to see how long it takes for the other teams to implement such a design if it does indeed have the desired effect.
 
Yeah, Red Bull were one of the slowest in a straight line.

But if they can shed a bit more downforce in a straight line using this, then it means they can dial a bit more in over all which would help in the corners.

As always, proof is in the pudding. A Merc on the top 2 rows after Qualifying would suggest things are going in the right direction.
 
Yeah they must be hoping for good performances at China and Malaysia. The other high speed places like Monza and Spa are far to far into the season for them to think they will still be the only people running this wing.

Were in need of a Scarbs diagram, tbh :)
 
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