F1 2009 Season discussion/development thread

JRS said:
Of course they won't.

Which is a shame, as a part of me would absolutely love seeing it happen! :o
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Me too, shame it's not on ITV anymore. I'd love to see them switch focus from Lewis and his dad to sucking round jenson again after the race for interviews.

I really like the testing ban, it's more focus on the actual race drivers to bring the car along rather than test team.

Again it blows out of the water all the crap spouted about one driver or another being better at car developement.
 
Duke said:
Testing Analysis - http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/73781
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Interesting analysis, really shows up the advantage some of the teams are getting from their different interpretation of the diffuser rules. One way or the other, I can't see Brawn, Williams and Toyota keeping their advantage from that (either it'll be banned and they'll be brought down in line with the other cars; or the the others will start running similar designs).

Even with that advantage though, it looks Brawn are quite genuinely faster than the other teams.

It'll be interesting to see what difference KERS makes to it all, word is that the Brawn car would need a fundamental redesign to fit it whilst many of the other teams have hedged their bets over it. Could it be that an early decision to forgo KERS is behind Brawn's advantage?
 
wolvers69 said:
What's crap about that statement exactly?
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Driver feedback is minimal. Jenson and then Rubens failed to anything to bring the honda up the grid. In fact they slowly went backwards when rubens came to the team.

Now they look like being front row. Toyota looks to have made leaps.

It's a team of gifted engineers and designers that pull these cars up the grid, not a driver with his feedback of car behaviour through corners.

Too many people bang on like MS is the one responsible for improving the ferrari year on year. It's pretty bloody clear already looking at Brawns first car who the real genius was/is.
 
dannyjo22 said:
Driver feedback is minimal. Jenson and then Rubens failed to anything to bring the honda up the grid. In fact they slowly went backwards when rubens came to the team.

Now they look like being front row. Toyota looks to have made leaps.

It's a team of gifted engineers and designers that pull these cars up the grid, not a driver with his feedback of car behaviour through corners.

Too many people bang on like MS is the one responsible for improving the ferrari year on year. It's pretty bloody clear already looking at Brawns first car who the real genius was/is.
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If the cars fundamentally flawed, like the Honda was becasue they couldn't get any heat into the front tyres, there aint much a driver is going to do when the cars been desgiend over the previous season. They don't have another season to bring it back from the dead sadly, but a drivers experience can be the difference between a setup for 1st place or a setup for last due to how they like to drive and to keep tyre wear to a minimum. Beyond that it all falls down to strategy. No denying, the engineers behind the chassis and aero are the clever ones behind it all, but that's what F1 is about, or at least what it's grown to be when it comes to leading technology and science.

It's interesting the Brawn car is not designed for KERS whatsoever, considering the design started whe nthe team was Honda, who are very big on this kind of eco friendly technology.
 
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dannyjo22 said:
Driver feedback is minimal. Jenson and then Rubens failed to anything to bring the honda up the grid. In fact they slowly went backwards when rubens came to the team.
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Um....the first year with Rubens, the team won a race....Alright, Jenson was driving. But to say that they went "slowly went backwards" isn't quite right - they rocketed backwards over the '06-'07 winter and then stopped there due to giving up and concentrating on the upcoming regulation change.

Driver development is really important. Take McLaren - they went backwards after James Hunt won his title in '76 in part because Hunt hated testing. The team admitted years later that they should have hired a dedicated test driver and just strapped Hunt into the car on race weekends.
 
dannyjo22 said:
It's a team of gifted engineers and designers that pull these cars up the grid, not a driver with his feedback of car behaviour through corners.

Too many people bang on like MS is the one responsible for improving the ferrari year on year. It's pretty bloody clear already looking at Brawns first car who the real genius was/is.
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Your making the exact same mistake you're deriding. To be effective a team needs to have good people in every role; gifted engineers and designers, effective strategists, and top class drivers who can give good feedback.
 
I've worked with lots of different drivers and I can assure you that some are much better at helping the team to develop the car in the right direction than others.
 
JRS said:
Um....the first year with Rubens, the team won a race....Alright, Jenson was driving. But to say that they went "slowly went backwards" isn't quite right - they rocketed backwards over the '06-'07 winter and then stopped there due to giving up and concentrating on the upcoming regulation change..
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Yeah they won a race when rubens joined the team but then he had nothing to do with the developement of that car prior to it's build.

Mr Jack said:
Your making the exact same mistake you're deriding. To be effective a team needs to have good people in every role; gifted engineers and designers, effective strategists, and top class drivers who can give good feedback.
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No I'm not I'm saying the drivers get far more credit than they should. A good point would be mika, have you ever heard him talk about the car and give feedback. Yet he drove probably the best two mclarens of the last 15-20 years.
 
Mr Jack said:
Obviously, we can but speculate - but the fact that wasn't any similar speed increase from the Williams implies that the McLaren has gone forward rather than there having been a simple increase in performance, don't you think?

I concede other explainations are possible. We won't really know until the race weekend.
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Well, it looks like Williams have substantially increased their speed today and gone faster than the McLaren.

The point I'm trying to make is that the time of McLaren alone means nothing. To compare, we need to see what the BrawnGP can do, today, in the current conditions.

The McLaren car has consistently been slow throughout testing (especially when they added the 2009 rear wing) and they apparently sped up when the faster cars stopped testing. I believe that they havent really sped up that much, but the conditions have simply improved.

But anyway, like you stated, until race weekend now (no more testing), we wont know for sure.

Providing BrawnGP are permitted to race in their pre-season testing configuration, I can't see how anyone will beat them, though I do believe Ferrari will get close.
 
sunama said:
The McLaren car has consistently been slow throughout testing (especially when they added the 2009 rear wing) and they apparently sped up when the faster cars stopped testing. I believe that they havent really sped up that much, but the conditions have simply improved.
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Perhaps, but compare the Brawn times from the 15th to the 17th; a second improvement in a couple of days testing is not exactly radically unlikely. I think we've seen a genuine speed improvement from McLaren as there stage of development has caught up to the rest of the teams. Still, as you point out, the Williams are going faster, so they're not exactly showing race leading form.
 
Testing Times - Day 5 - Circuit-de-Jerez

jerezday5.jpg
 
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