Formula 1 - 2022 Season

oh no alonso :( :( :(

but the racing was good

but verstappen, ooooh its so unfair ooooh he crossed the line oooooh
such a baby
 
oh no alonso :( :( :(

but the racing was good

but verstappen, ooooh its so unfair ooooh he crossed the line oooooh
such a baby

My favorite two drivers showing why they are my favorite two drivers. Awesome stuff. Very bad luck for Peres.

Alonso and Ocon gave a nice show, but they could probably better spend that time trying to drive faster while working together, giving each other DRS, slipstream etc.

And as for the line, it is totally a fair point. I hate when that kind of stuff is inconsistent. On the one hand the rule says it is not allowed and then on the other nothing happens if you break the rule. Which, incidentally, is there for good safety reasons.
 
My favorite two drivers showing why they are my favorite two drivers. Awesome stuff. Very bad luck for Peres.

Alonso and Ocon gave a nice show, but they could probably better spend that time trying to drive faster while working together, giving each other DRS, slipstream etc.

And as for the line, it is totally a fair point. I hate when that kind of stuff is inconsistent. On the one hand the rule says it is not allowed and then on the other nothing happens if you break the rule. Which, incidentally, is there for good safety reasons.
but did leclerc actually cross the line? people seemed to be skirting that line a lot with one or two wheels, never 3 or 4
 
And as for the line, it is totally a fair point. I hate when that kind of stuff is inconsistent. On the one hand the rule says it is not allowed and then on the other nothing happens if you break the rule. Which, incidentally, is there for good safety reasons.
I feel like the pit exit line may be more stictly enforced than the entry, but Max mentioned the pit entry line several times and I don’t think the Sky or F1TV post-race shows even mentioned it. Like, show a picture or something and look up the relevant rule so we know what Max is talking about?

I’m also not sure why it took so long for the race director to tell Perez to give the place back to Sainz. Are they not allowed to swap places under the VSC? Do they not have the technology to account for swapping places when it comes to sufficiently slowing down under VSC? Or did it really take them like ten minutes to figure it out?

Also weird that Lewis didn’t know if he could pit while Dan’s car was stranded near pit entry, considering how long he’s been driving, or that Merc didn’t have a standing order to pit under any hint of a VSC. Other cars managed to squeeze by. The timing was marginal, but you’d think you’d only need a second or two to decide.

Edit:
 
Re: Max’s repeated complaining about LeClerc crossing the pit entry line and why his team told him to calm down. You can see Max doing the same thing at 3:07 here in a previous race.

I guess everyone knows we’re going to Vegas, baby! Track looks very rectangular. November 2023. Another night race, but Saturday night (10pm local time).
 
Bizarre quali. So many red flags. LeClerc P1 by a quarter second. Sainz denied a likely top two start because of the untimeliest of red flags (ten meters from the line) and then two bad laps after the restart, so starts P9. Alonso looked set for best of the rest until he crashed because he couldn’t downshift (”lost hydraulics”) enough mid-corner. Verstappen unhappy with car balance, though the RB’s race pace is very close to Ferrari’s.

Not sure we can put Merc’s lack of pace entirely on porpoising as Ferrari bounces, too, though at a seemingly lower frequency. Supposedly no upgrades for Merc this weekend. Still, they got both cars into Q3.

Haas, Alpha and Alfa struggling for (quali) pace this weekend. Bottas breaks a streak of 100+ consecutive Q3s.

Weekend to forget for Aston. Vettel loses power in FP1, misses all of FP2, wrecks almost immediately in FP3, and has time for just one lap in Q1 only thanks to a red flag giving his mechanics the extra time to finish bolting his car together. Stroll’s weekend wasn’t much better. It’s the second time he was oblivious to a Williams passing him and hit it, though this time he may have cost Williams a gearbox.
 
Leclerc cruising to a comfortable win, and that is before the Red Bull drive train goes up in smoke yet again, delicious.

And despite Mercedes' disappointing start to the season, Russell is second in the drivers' championship at this early stage and Mercedes second in the constructors'.
 
can we pretend this race didnt happen? :( at least my boi danny ric got some points but alonso man :(
 
I like how this year’s race directors snuff out on-track BS within a race (i.e., Max’s restart shenanigans).

Horner said Max smelled gas before the engine failed. Another gas delivery issue?! Sounded like his car was suffering from something all weekend, because when Checo asked why Max stopped his engineer said it’s not relevant to his (Checo’s) car.

Sainz may have spun himself out of championship contention and into support status for the year, but it’s a long year.

Albon drove 57 (albeit quite a few behind the SC/VSC) laps on a set of hards. Durability is promising, though no way he’d have been competitive without the SC constantly bunching up the field.

Stroll racing Strolly. Magnussen racing Magnusseny. Alonso racing Alonso-y.

Edit: Vettel racing Vettel-y? He spun on throttle again, though this time he hit a barrier before he could complete a pirouette. Maybe unfair given his lack of running, but this seriously felt like the most cursed weekend I’ve seen for a team as a whole in a weekend. Maybe karma for Stroll complaining about someone impeding him like six minutes into FP1….

Lewis said he had to back off toward the end of the race because he was managing engine overheating. Ocon also had to pause his attack on IIRC Stroll for a few laps for the same reason. Air temp was only like 70°F. I’d like to know if this is because the new cars allow for pushing harder, longer (Albon said his last 30 laps were like quali laps), or if this is just new car kinks.

I’d also like to know why Lewis was able to re-pass Checo in the first stint. Presumably it was because tires, but did Checo suffer from graining (Alonso lasted only like ten laps on a set of mediums near the end of the race before they grained and had to pit for another set, and I think Verstappen’s front left showed the same at one point) or just wear?

Edit edit: Mark Hughes’ typically excellent race recap has the tire answer:
Maybe Ferrari would have been the fastest car in the place regardless, but the Red Bull was not in its balance sweet spot. The way the track had evolved from Friday caught it out. Then, Red Bull was seeing rear graining on the medium tyre. So it adjusted accordingly and went several steps in that direction – within variations between Verstappen’s car and that of Sergio Perez – and by the time it was realised the rubbering of the track had fundamentally changed the tyre challenge, it was too late in the era of parc ferme.

Front graining was very much the general problem, but particularly for Red Bull from Saturday onwards. Part of the set-up response to Friday’s rear graining was to run a little more rear wing flap. Its end-of-straight speed advantage was not as big as usual, albeit still there.
 
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Still some cool aero analysis (from B Sport) going on despite the seeming pittance of updates so far. Under four minutes, worth a watch. Highlights are Ferrari using a Guerney flap under the rear wing to reduce downforce (to help with bouncing or just cheaper than making a slightly lower downforce rear wing?), a comparison shot of both RB's and Merc's floors, and a slotted metal fin under RB's floor toward the outer rear (metal because it's scraping the ground? slotted for anti-bounce?).

Some interesting comments, too:
Ms Zee Zed
4 days ago (edited)
Seeing these floors, reminded me I heard a theory on the BBC coverage of Melbourne FP1 today. These photos verify the basic detail that the Mercedes is exposing a larger area of the upper floor with its slim side-pods, but Mercedes can’t prevent the edges of this larger unsupported floor area from flexing down at high speed and triggering porpoising. This means they have to run their car at a higher ground clearance than they want to, losing them about 0.5 sec per 70 sec lap. There is a logic to this, but does it make sense in aerodynamic development? It seems to me this flexing could be seen in a wind tunnel or CFD simulation even if the porpoising effect isn’t? Are Mercedes using models made of other materials for their wind-tunnel tests (like McLaren) rather than a full-scale carbon-fibre floor car?

Forza Gary

4 days ago
Wind-tunnel models are built much stiffer so it might not be visible. On CFD I cannot comment much, but I would imagine with the limited simulations they run a lot of steady simulations which will dampen out oscillations like you would get in porpoising. Also fluid, structure coupling is an expensive and difficult subject in simulation work, when it comes to time unsteady behaviour

B Sport
4 days ago
Exactly, windtunnel models are too stiff to show this effect. CFD models stay rigid too. You can only investigate if you know the problem beforehand and that wasn't the case before the season started.And yes, Red Bull can hide some reinforcement underneath their large sidepods, whereas Mercedes can't.
https://accounts.google.com/Service...p&hl=en&next=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9_vu4YUe890&hl=en
Ms Zee Zed
4 days ago
@B Sport This suggests that they can’t fully resolve this away from the track as suggested. It may be the Mercedes design fundamentally prevents them from accessing the speed the wind-tunnel says is there, due to the weight penalty for building the car more stiffly. This new design set, with track time & cost caps is fascinating.

RuyLopezQB6
4 days agoIt seems to me that [Ferrari] running a gurney flap under the wing is much more elegant than Merc cutting their wing. Is the underside gurney flap producing a milder effect than just cutting it back? It seems quite drastic by Merc, because once you've cut it, you can't undo it.

B Sport
4 days ago
True, but you can have a couple of them with you. Producing multiple flaps of the same kind is not that expensive because the moulds are already there and there is no extra development work.The Gurney on the underside does give you a drag penalty when DRS is active, the chopped off wing has a clean flow around it.
 
Mark Hughes has a piece at Formula1.com on porpoising which includes a box plot measuring said problem in every car. Ferrari, Haas, and Mercedes have the biggest bounce (in descending order). Everyone else also bounces, but to a lesser extent and in a much more controlled manner. There's a lot to unpack.

A related video by The Race includes a graph (at 4:03) that, if accurate, indicates that Ferrari's bouncing starts at a higher speed (thus it stops before corner entry, whereas Merc continues bouncing into high speed corners). It also suggests they bounce at a higher frequency than Merc. There's clips of Haas bouncing into a corner (at 1:50).
 
Legends say, they are still debating whether to enable DRS in the super exciting Emilia Romagna GP.

Anyway, Miami here we come baby!
 
Shame that Russel couldn’t recreate practice setup properly … and nice save by Hamilton.

Will be interesting to see if Ferrari upped their tyre management, if they lose their 1+2 to Red Bull that would probably be the main reason …
 
ferrari needs more vmax

i think the porpoising makes all the 2022 cars look silly and amateurish
 
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