All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

Two weeks until Austria. When I started getting back into F1 last year, I'm not sure I thought I'd ever be this excited for a race. I'm bummed Singapore (one of my favorite circuits) is among the three races that were recently canceled, but I'm really looking forward to Austria and moving off the simulators and onto the tracks.

 

Have I mentioned I had tickets to both the Dutch and Spanish Grand Prix? Yeah... didn't exactly work out.

Looking forward to Austria. I'm hoping they can agree to do something slightly different with the second race -- the reverse grid sprint race for qualifying, or something -- because otherwise race two on the same track a week later is going to be a snoozefest.

I'm hoping the succeed in adding some unused tracks this year, since the promoter fee isn't going to be a thing. Rumor is they're adding Mugello after Monza, and Algarve in Portugal some time later in the season.

 

Wow, that's brutal. Sorry to hear you're missing out on them. I've never been to a race, but I'd love to attend Austin, Monaco and/or Singapore (Monaco would be my top choice).

Austria in consecutive weeks is obviously not ideal, but so much can happen, I won't automatically assume a snooze fest.

The reverse grid sprint race qualifier is a fun idea. It would be interesting to see if some of the lesser teams could do better if they started at the front. I don't love it because they are rewarded for failure and penalized for success, but it's very different and interesting.

If F1 wanted to get really bold (crazy?) it would have been insanely cool to run the race backwards the second week, but that's obviously more of a video game idea than anything.

 

The shoey is underrated, too.

 

I wouldn't want to see them do anything with a reverse grid in most years. This one's already going to be a gong show from the start, so I hope they mix it up.

It sounds like they're going to run a different configuration of the track for the second Bahrain race, which could be kind of cool. There's a layout that just uses the outer perimeter of the track. It's like a square. It'll either be awesome or brutally dull, but at least it would be something different.

 

wow, the motorsports gods are out to get Alex Zanardi...

Zanardi undergoes surgery for severe head injury after handbike crash

 

How many people are put into medically induced comas twice?

I don’t use this word a lot, but the way he came back after the first wreck (hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years) was inspirational.

 

Two TBI's that severe? That's a lot to recover from. Granted that the recovery varies widely from person to person, but that sort of brain injury leaves lasting damage.

 

Two more days until FP1 in Austria.

I hadn't seen this article a couple weeks back when we were talking about reverse grid qualifying, but Toto Wolff made a good point as to why MB blocked the idea.

"Number two, I know it from touring car racing, that strategies become a very useful tool when one race result is basically making up the grid for the next one. Just imagine one of the drivers not running well on the Sunday race of the first Spielberg weekend, you decide to DNF the car and that becomes the car that starts on pole for the qualy race on the second weekend. And if that car starts on pole for the qualy race, among midfielders, then he'll certainly be on pole for Sunday and win the race. There will be cars in the middle that will defend and block as much as they can and, therefore, for the cars coming from behind, there will be more risk for a DNF and that could influence the championship."

The three reasons Mercedes blocked reverse grids

 

Yeah... ultimately I think it's a giant flaw in the F1 system that teams have veto power to changes like this.

Mercedes has no reason to support reverse grids. They expect to be on pole and win every race. Anything that might spice up the racing is pretty much by definition bad for Mercedes. It annoys me that they could block it but I totally understand.

It's incredibly hard to change anything if you require consensus of the teams.

 

I'll be interested to see how the Indianapolis Motor Speedway handles the logistics of hosting two road couse races on Saturday and an oval on Sunday with three series and no fans. It's definitely not as simple as it seems, because not only does that require different safety barriers to be moved, different locations for emergency equipment and staff, but the ICS folks have to vacate before the Cup teams can set up. And IndyCars run methanol while NASCAR uses racing gasoline.

Playthrough, do you know if ICS will use the F1 garages rather than Gasoline Alley? I'm assuming the Xfininity teams will just use their haulers.

 

A quibble: IndyCars run E85, and NASCAR uses green-dyed E15.