Motorsport Off Topic Thread

Don't forget it's the Race of Champions this weekend, more details here.

It's on Motors TV (will probably be online too I'd imagine like previous years);

Saturday 4pm Nations Cup (will clash with Formula e I think :o :()

Sunday 4pm for what I imagine is the individual racing (there's a replay of the Nations cup before it at 12:55pm too)
 
McLaren MP4-30 just passed its structural crash tests (source mclaren official Twitter)


That's very early! Hopefully they won't sauander the head start they clearly have.
 
That is very early indeed! Most don't pass until just before the tests, and that's only been the last couple of years. Before that it was usually March before they passed the crash tests!
 
It's no earlier than the 2014 cars. Sauber passed the crash test on 11th December 2013 and Caterham a few days after that.
 
Clearly towards the tail-end of last season they were overloading new aero pieces on the car, which suggests the core chassis was likely to remain similar to 2014, but to be honest the chassis itself changes little year on year (remember that up until recently (last 4 year or so?) Force India were generally accepted to be running a modified Jordan (yes, Jordan) chassis), which had gone through several major rule and safety changes.

It's what you bolt onto the chassis which matters most, and that's where McLaren have fallen short in recent times, and why Peter Prodromou has been brought in to lead the aero department.

Passing the test suggests the crash structures and basic cooling systems are established and they're happy with what they've presented, but given they were willing to run a development Honda plant at Silverstone and Abu Dhabi, clearly they've known the basic numbers for some time. It's not a major coup, but it's better to have passed those tests early.
 
I'd expect the majority of the front running teams to be further ahead on development then usual because none of them really had anything to fight for from about mid-season onwards and will probably have switched more resources to next years cars earlier than normal.
 
I'm not sure that's entirely true though, because if you took that approach every year then you'd never progress because you'd always be stopping at mid-season. Williams and Ferrari had an important battle, as did McLaren and Force India. Sauber and Caterham did too, to try and overhaul Marussia for the prize money.

Mercedes are the only team that could really afford to switch to next year at any point, perhaps followed by Red Bull.
 
I'll be supporting Ferrari next year which, as a Vettle supporter, I'm finding quite strange as they've been Red Bull's main rivals over the 5 years I've been watching F1.
 
I wonder what bernie is up to now.

Mercedes will win the championship next year which is not really the sort of thing we are looking for
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Never said that when rb won it for 4 years. And there was no racing up front what so ever.


have been proposing and am going to propose that we go back to a normally aspirated engine with some hybrid bits built into it
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Back to a twin turbo V6? why not just go back to the V8 as it will be cheaper.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2...s-handed-power-to-top-teams-for-40-million/2/
 
deuse said:
I wonder what bernie is up to now.



Never said that when rb won it for 4 years. And there was no racing up front what so ever.




Back to a twin turbo V6? why not just go back to the V8 as it will be cheaper.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2...s-handed-power-to-top-teams-for-40-million/2/
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Its a good job he doesn't have any say on the rules then, isn't it.

Edit: ****, he does now.

That whole transcript reads like the disjointed drivel of an old man. "Fantastic pieces of engineering" that he wants to throw in the bin, the idea that the V8 production lines are just sitting there doing nothing and can be turned on with zero cost, and that somehow throwing the hundreds of millions if $ spent developing the V6s down the drain results in going backwards being cheaper? It might (although I expected won't be) a bit cheaper for the customer teams, but will result in massive losses for the manufacturers and factory teams. Mercedes, Honda and Renault will also walk away. F1 will die, and be a laughing stock while it does it.

Rather than cripling a sport to pander to the dinosaurs, perhaps they should let the dinosaurs go extinct and focus on the future.
 
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Skeeter said:
Its a good job he doesn't have any say on the rules then, isn't it.

Edit: ****, he does now.
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He has always had a say. The thing is if you want a car with this hybrid tech then it's going to cost you 1,000,000 +

Ford may run out of V8 petrol\diesel engines next year. They sold 800,000 F1 trucks last year and more next year.

Now if F1 would have spent the £1bn on getting the V8 more economical, that would have helped the world.

I'm fed up of fart sounding cars :(
 
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