F1 2011 season news / pre-season updates

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Well surely the advantage is obvious, more support and they'll attract better sponsors named Team Lotus than they will as 1Malaysia.

I can't imagine they'd have half the fans on here that they do now if they'd been named 1Malaysia last season, everyone would have just seen them as 'some malaysian team'.
 
Kenai said:
Well surely the advantage is obvious, more support and they'll attract better sponsors named Team Lotus than they will as 1Malaysia.
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Okay, so the fight for the name is down to possible increase in sponsorship money.

I understand.

I do find it strange that so many people on here talk about "Lotus". The Lotus I remember in the early 90's was a bit of joke of a team. I used to see them get lapped very quickly and it was quite normal to see their cars break down. They were slow AND unreliable. Ultimately, I assume they ran out of financial backing (because they really were "that" bad) and disappeared. I'm struggling to see how their "2nd coming" will be any different - they will be at the back of the grid and without SERIOUS manufacturer support, they will once again be at the back of the grid.

Does one of the Lotus teams have Renault backing (or similar)? I remember reading a while back that Renault wanted to pump money into a Lotus team, but I wasn't sure if that came to fruition.

I understand that Lotus were pretty decent in the 70s, but those days are long gone.

My own take on it is that it is best to concentrate on creating a strong car/team. By going through law courts, it takes away the focus of the team on building the best car possible. Ultimately, winning races is what is going to score you the big sponsorship deals. The Lotus name may help sell your brand for a year (or 2), but if you consistently get lapped and perform poorly, sponsors will lose patience and will not be prepared to continuously be associated with a losing team. If you start winning, attracting better staff/drivers and acquiring lucrative sponsorship deals will be a lot easier.
 
I think the court battle is more because someone has paid a lot of money for the rights to using a certain name and now another group have come along, with vastly more capital behind them and have decided all to themselves that they actually own that name and are going to bludgeon such an action through court regardless of cost.
 
sunama said:
I do find it strange that so many people on here talk about "Lotus". The Lotus I remember in the early 90's was a bit of joke of a team. I used to see them get lapped very quickly and it was quite normal to see their cars break down.
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Because people have memories that go back further than that, and have a good knowledge of the sport they love.

sunama said:
I understand that Lotus were pretty decent in the 70s
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Are you for real sunama? For someone who comes across as a dyed in the wool F1 fan you astound me sometimes with your flippant and slightly ignorant attitude when it comes to the history of the sport you love. To say Lotus were "pretty decent" in the 70's is like saying Liverpool were "pretty decent" at football in the 70's
 
Lopéz said:
Are you for real sunama? For someone who comes across as a dyed in the wool F1 fan you astound me sometimes with your flippant and slightly ignorant attitude when it comes to the history of the sport you love. To say Lotus were "pretty decent" in the 70's is like saying Liverpool were "pretty decent" at football in the 70's
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As I understand it, yes, Lotus were pretty decent in the 70's.
And yes, Liverpool FC were also pretty decent in the 70's.
 
I believe the main reason for the name is the position on the grid and the money from FOM. If you recall Honda pulled out of F1 after the season ended in 2008, renamed BrawnGP and they started at the end of the pit lane, same for Sauber and Virgin in 2010. So 1Malaysia would actually be in the same position as brawn and im not sure if they are ellegible to collect the TV money because of the name change.
 
Lopéz said:
Are you for real sunama?
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Sometimes, I think he is. And that worries me intensely. Which is why he's now on my ignore list on here so I only get his posts inflicted on me if someone else quotes them. Much better for the forum as a whole that way, I feel. Some of you (read: most of you, I guess) were getting so hacked off with him and I going back and forth that I decided to end my participation in whatever the **** was going on with us.

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway. Team Lotus, as anyone who would claim to know something about F1 really ought to know, started out quite some time ago as far as GP racing is concerned. As a constructor, Lotus won a GP first with Stirling Moss driving a Rob Walker entered car at Monaco in 1960 (Team Lotus took their first 'works' win a year later at the USGP with Innes Ireland driving).

They brought in many innovations over the years. Fully-stressed monocoque car construction? A Lotus first. The Cossie DFV (a mainstay of F1 over the years)? First appeared in the '67 Lotus 49 at the Dutch GP. Wings? Chaparral had used them in sports car racing before but Lotus were certainly one of the first teams to apply them in GP racing. Ground effects? Very much a Lotus first, with the 78 and then the utterly gorgeous 79, followed by everyone else scrambling to try and catch up. Active suspension? So many people think that this was a Williams innovation. They never remember that Lotus introduced a car featuring it in 1987, the 99T.

And that's leaving aside cars like the Lotus 72 - a car that didn't necessarily introduce anything Earth-shatteringly new (certainly not on the level of ground effect, or active ride), but was so far ahead of the competition in pretty much every respect that it could survive long enough to win three constructors titles in four years and still score points (and a podium place!) in its sixth year of racing.

Anyone who looks at the Team Lotus legacy from the POV of their last few seasons is completely missing the point. And hell - in their penultimate season as an entrant they finished sixth in the constructors championship. Hardly an awful result especially given that this was 1993, at the end of the era where I'm reliably (!) informed that the sport was dominated by money (something that Lotus really didn't have at that stage)....
 
Flibster said:
1983 - Lotus 92 driven by Nigel Mansell initially at the United States West GP ;)
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That thought was nagging at me last night. I knew that they'd experimented with it before '87, but I couldn't recall when and for how long. The Lotus 92 didn't race a great deal in '83, did it? Think that was the year that Lotus ended up running three different chassis designs (92, 93T, and Gérard Ducourage's 94T).
 
Oh how Hispania do make me laugh :D

Their 2011 car will not be ready until Bahrain! CLICKY..

However.. this part had me in stitches

"Our new car won't be ready for the first three tests in Spain where I will drive the 2010 car," Karthikeyan told The Times of India.


"We are not likely to use the KERS. But adjustable wings will hopefully add to our potency," he said.
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Potency!?! Hispania..? Potency!? :p
 
sunama said:
Does one of the Lotus teams have Renault backing (or similar)? I remember reading a while back that Renault wanted to pump money into a Lotus team, but I wasn't sure if that came to fruition.
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Without sounding rude where have you been living for the last 6 or 7 months? The almighty font of F1 knowledge seems to have dried up given some of the things you have posted recently.

Team Lotus, Lotus Racing of last season are being powered by Renault engines in combination with a gearbox & hydraulics deal with Red Bull. The engines are being supplied by Renault Sport.

Renault GP are now being sponsored by Group Lotus under the full ownership of Genii Capital, its still a Renault chassis & engine. The only difference is that they are now running under a British licence rather than French. Group Lotus currently have no stake in the team.

*edit*
Hispania Racing, have a LOL from me.
 
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Duke said:
Hmm HRT themselves say they will make the last test at Bahrain - http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/89071
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I think some people (myself included!) were reading far too much into the initial statement they made about the readiness of their 2011 car. I thought it sounded as if they wouldn't have the car ready until the GP weekend in Bahrain. But the car will apparently make the final test in Bahrain, it's just got no chance of making any of the Spain-based test sessions.

I guess they'll treat the Bahrain test session as a shakedown run, make sure that there are no show-stopping bugs in the car, then do their main setup work in the GP weekend test sessions. And with a bit of luck, they won't make the 107% cut-off and save us from having a pair of mobile chicanes on the track for the race....
 
JRS said:
And with a bit of luck, they won't make the 107% cut-off and save us from having a pair of mobile chicanes on the track for the race....
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In fairness, this applies to all the new teams.

I'm a great believer that the new teams must be allowed to circulate on the track and at least attempt to improve. I'm not a great believer in this 107% rule.

If a team gets bogged down and is unable to start any of the GPs due to the 107% rule, eventually their sponsors will dessert them, leaving them with a near impossible task of moving up the grid. F1 is all about money (as the Lotus saga is proving to us) and without money a new team can't ever hope to move up the grid.

It seems that the only chance a new team has of moving forward is by getting taken over by a manufacturer (which is ultimately what happened with the BrawnGP team).

Red Bull are a very rare success story of an independent manufacturer able to take on and beat the big boys. And even then, they needed to have Newey on top form. Without him, I wonder if they would've been able to produce such a good car in '09 and '10.

If the FIA persist in making it nigh on impossible for a new team to succeed (and move up the grid), they should perhaps permit them unlimited testing. They could also be given permission to run an unlimited number of laps during the practise sessions on GP weekends. This way, even if they don't make the 107% cut-off, they will at least have had a chance to do many laps of the circuit, which may satisfy sponsors.

Am I right in thinking that testing starts next week?
 
JRS said:
I think some people (myself included!) were reading far too much into the initial statement they made about the readiness of their 2011 car. I thought it sounded as if they wouldn't have the car ready until the GP weekend in Bahrain. But the car will apparently make the final test in Bahrain, it's just got no chance of making any of the Spain-based test sessions.

I guess they'll treat the Bahrain test session as a shakedown run, make sure that there are no show-stopping bugs in the car, then do their main setup work in the GP weekend test sessions. And with a bit of luck, they won't make the 107% cut-off and save us from having a pair of mobile chicanes on the track for the race....
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Yep at least they are making one, to get the basics checked but as said before, they really need two to make some sort of progress.

How well the new three teams do this season is almost as interesting as who will be up at the front :p
 
The new teams are very interesting, Lotus have a new gearbox from RBR and engine from Renault, HRT have a new gearbox from Williams and Virgin have Core i7 2600's building there car.
 
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