British Grand Prix 2014, Silverstone - Race 9/19

majnu said:
I'm with Lauder on this one. It shouldn't have taken that long to fix a barrier also.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/28186376
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All well and good until someone crashes there again and is seriously injured, or worse, killed. Then the hindsight brigade will come out and ask why they didn't fix the barrier. The barrier is there for a reason...otherwise we may as well get rid of them all where we think they won't be needed.
 
rubberduck said:
To say the barrier didn't need repairing is dumb... The minute you start lowering your standards with regard to safety is the time when stuff that is 'never going to happen' suddenly does happen... I know it seems like a case of 'health and safety gone mad' but I don't think anyone would argue that the decline in deaths associated with F1 is a bad thing. I wonder if Lauda would have been happy to make such a call had he been in the position of responsibility?
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Yes but an hour to repair the barrier was a joke. It should just be a case of unbolting sections of barrier and bolting in new ones. With an organised crew and the proper (power) tools, 15 minutes at most.

An hour was embarrassing and I wouldn't be surprised if commentators in other countries were remarking on our total inefficiency.
 
Vertigo1 said:
Yes but an hour to repair the barrier was a joke. It should just be a case of unbolting sections of barrier and bolting in new ones. With an organised crew and the proper (power) tools, 15 minutes at most.

An hour was embarrassing and I wouldn't be surprised if commentators in other countries were remarking on our total inefficiency.
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You're clearly not an engineer. That barrier was deformed badly by the impact making the removal of the bolts very difficult. That's why it took an hour.
 
Vertigo1 said:
Yes but an hour to repair the barrier was a joke. It should just be a case of unbolting sections of barrier and bolting in new ones. With an organised crew and the proper (power) tools, 15 minutes at most.

An hour was embarrassing and I wouldn't be surprised if commentators in other countries were remarking on our total inefficiency.
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You can't remotely comment until you know what the damage is. A simple nut and bolt which can take 5 seconds to undo with a power tool could turn into a difficult 30 min cutting, repairing, welding job. That is the thing when a car smashes into a barrier at high speeds, it was deformed and makes removal difficult. Removing a pristine piece of barrier is simple, removing one where potentially every bolt/nut is warped/bent out of shape and your power tool becomes useless.

We could presume that the guys who replaced it replace these things all the time, are as good as anyone and generally speaking did it pretty much as fast as possible.
 
Ok well if the barrier was sufficiently damaged as to make repair that difficult then either the barriers need redesigning or they need some temporary repair or patching system they can use to get the race going quickly, then repair the barrier fully later, such as temporary Techpro in front of it or something.

An hour to repair that damage whilst everyone waits around on the grid isn't acceptable.
 
Portable armco on the back of a truck,mto be driven round to any damaged area, set in front of it, and then the section is protected for the duration of the race.
Simple, cheap, cost effective and swift.
Max downtime of ten minutes.
 
Vertigo1 said:
An hour to repair that damage whilst everyone waits around on the grid isn't acceptable.
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Really? am I reading this correctly

bodge it to stop people waiting and risk lives?

This is the pinnacle of motorsport, if somebody smashed into a barrier and writes it of what do you expect them to do? it needs replacing, which will involve not just a simple few 15 mm bolts. It will be bent, out of shape stretched and a pain to remove. Then you have to have something suitable to get it straight again to reattach.

I was in the crowd today and the 45 mins it took were worth waiting for
 
Hikari Kisugi said:
Portable armco on the back of a truck,mto be driven round to any damaged area, set in front of it, and then the section is protected for the duration of the race.
Simple, cheap, cost effective and swift.
Max downtime of ten minutes.
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What makes it portable? Part of the safety feature is that it is incredibly secure and won't break awake.
Another problem is, there is presumably a certain amount of "give" by design. If you came along and put something infront of it that you could be sure wouldn't just fly off when impacted, added to the strength of the pieces behind would it be like letting a car smash into a concrete wall and too dangerous? ultimately these things are a bit more complex than they appear at first.

There are concrete walls and there have been bad hits into them but most exposed ones will be down a straight in which in the majority of circumstances a car will effectively bounce along it, not smash into perpendicularly. The problem with that piece of fence as it was at an angle as the track was narrowing for the bridge I believe at that point. Making it easier for a car to smash into at a worse angle. If that was a straight barrier, as in parallel with the track Kimi wouldn't have hit it nearly as badly and any potential next crash there would also be less bad.

That it happens so infrequently(delays of this length) is a testament to the majority of most tracks being covered well, but ultimately this happens. even with tire walls we've seen some fairly length delays after a crash, because stacking tires is easy but making sure they wouldn't all break away, nor let a car through, so the tires need to stay together and stay in place, took a lot longer.

I think there were saying that in general it was how the barrier deformed, it opened up a gap in which should someone else hit it, a car could get lodged under the middle part which would could turn exceptionally nasty very easily.

I think the bump in the track that no one expected played a part, if that bump wasn't there the chances of Kimi hitting that wall in the first place was almost nil, with the bump there, there was a higher than normal chance of someone hitting that, running wide isn't uncommon but that bump made rejoining the track insanely dangerous.
 
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Regy53 said:
Really? am I reading this correctly

bodge it to stop people waiting and risk lives?
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Where did I say bodge it? Stop putting words in my mouth!

I said some form of temporary barrier or patch, which doesn't mean a bodge.

This is the pinnacle of motorsport
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Exactly, and I think the support services should be able to get a race going again in far less than an hour when someone hits a barrier.

There's a solution here somewhere. I don't claim to know what it is but I'm sure F1, with all its ingenuity, can come up with something better than a bunch of men with spanners and hammers toiling away for an hour whilst the global audience waits.

Lauda was right about one thing - F1 is already struggling with declining audiences this year - how many people got fed up and turned off during that hour? Especially with the Wimbledon men's final on the other channel.
 
rubberduck said:
Perhaps you could knock up some CAD drawings of an improved barrier design so we can have a look over them?
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Good grief :rolleyes:

I never claimed I could design a better system, merely that I'm pretty sure one exists and, if the collective minds in F1 put their heads together, they could come up with something.
 
Ferrari recording an impact force of 47g when Kimi hit the barrier, the amount of damage done to it was a lot more than was shown on camera, including the need to replace at least one of the upright supports, which is in no way a simple case of bolting a new one in place. It is quite likely that the horizontal beams could have been replaced in a relatively short time, however, replacing the vertical support took longer, after all, it is the vertical support that has to be able to withstand the impact force.

Much of the first half hour or so of the red flag period was involved in clearing away the wreckage of Kimi's car, and establishing what damage had been done and what was needed to fix it.

The idea of a portable barrier to 'patch' the damaged area is laughable. I do not know of any portable barrier that can properly withstand the forces that would have been involved in that wreck, the barriers that they use at Monoco only work because they are designed to soften an impact across a large distance, whereas the arnco is designed to contain and deflect and impact in a very short distance. It just wouldn't work.
 
I can't believe how fixated this forum has become on 2 dnf for one and another driver needs another to even it up. Since when has that been a criteria? Never on here until this year. I can't believe how hard done by people are coming across, F1 has never been fair. It's a team sport not about an individual.

In 2012 people where not crying foul for Alonso as he had one more DNF than Vettel. You just know if Rosberg beats Lewis by less points than a clear win that's all we will hear about for the next 10 years. I hope they both keep failing and Ricardo nicks it.

Oh and when Rosberg fails again, it won't be fair if Hamilton wins because for one of his retirements Rosberg came 2nd. ;)
 
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dannyjo22 said:
I can't believe how fixated this forum has become on 2 dnf for one and another driver needs another to even it up. Since when has that been a criteria? Never on here until this year. I can't believe how hard done by people are coming across, F1 has never been fair. It's a team sport not about an individual.

In 2012 people where not crying foul for Alonso as he had one more DNF than Vettel. You just know if Rosberg beats Lewis by less points than a clear win that's all we will hear about for the next 10 years. I hope they both keep failing and Ricardo nicks it.

Oh and when Rosberg fails again, it won't be fair if Hamilton wins because for one of his retirements Rosberg came 2nd. ;)
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Sounds like a Hammy hater has just had a bad day. :rolleyes:
 
dannyjo22 said:
I can't believe how fixated this forum has become on 2 dnf for one and another driver needs another to even it up. Since when has that been a criteria? Never on here until this year. I can't believe how hard done by people are coming across, F1 has never been fair. It's a team sport not about an individual.

In 2012 people where not crying foul for Alonso as he had one more DNF than Vettel. You just know if Rosberg beats Lewis by less points than a clear win that's all we will hear about for the next 10 years. I hope they both keep failing and Ricardo nicks it.

Oh and when Rosberg fails again, it won't be fair if Hamilton wins because for one of his retirements Rosberg came 2nd. ;)
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People like to see the better more entertaining driver WHO HAS WON MORE win the championship. If Rosberg, who has been pretty comprehensively beaten on track by Hamilton unless DNF, except at one track where no one can ever over take AND he cheated to get pole position.... wins the title despite winning less races yes, an injustice will have occurred and it's not surprising that people want it to be a relatively fair fight.

If Hamilton was genuinely crap and Rosberg had won 5 races and Hamilton 3 races... it simply wouldn't be the case. While I'd like Hamilton to win, it's not a necessity, I enjoyed Hamilton driving and fighting regardless of where he is in the title race. Alonso was fantastic to watch today and he has zero chance at the title... though he also got a fair boost from his advanced grid position... I don't care all that much about the going out wide thing myself.

He's fun to watch, good, Rosberg gets beaten in every wheel to wheel with Hamilton... so I'd prefer Hamilton to win over Rosberg as the season has currently played out. If Rosberg wins the next 10 races I wouldn't want Hamilton to win the title, he wouldn't deserve it. But all other things being equal if Hamilton wins significantly more races than Rosberg and loses the title on luck of reliability alone(even ignoring Rosberg's cheating) then I'd feel a little cheated, but that is about it.

Before this race Rosberg had finished and scored points in 33% more races than Hamilton.... due to exactly no fault of Hamilton's and he was barely behind. After the first failure Hamilton owned him for four races, Rosberg cheated and the luck turned against Hamilton even more.

Is it shocking to want the title winner to be the best combination of driver/car, and not the best car, the second best driver purely because the other driver got all the bad luck?

It's the same in any sport, a football team who misses a title because of umpteen terrible decisions going against them, or umpteen terrible decisions going for the title win but who didn't really deserve it... a runner who wins because someone else trips the leader and leaves it wide open, the boxer who loses a title due to crap judges.
 
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Sliver said:
Sounds like a Hammy hater has just had a bad day. :rolleyes:
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Oh jog on.

This forum is always the same, unless you are 100% behind a driver you are hater, there's no middle ground. Yet the constant butthurt against Rosberg this year is perfectly acceptable. I said at the start of the year I'd be happy for either to win, although I would prefer Alonso.

Even if both driver had not DNf'd this year I have found Hamiltons performance relative to Rosberg disappointing, with a car this good I didn't think Rosberg would trouble him much.
 
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