The 2024 running motorsports thread

F1 in a nutshell:
Q: Is there a chance one of your cars can win today?
Toto Wolff: That might be too much to ask.

WTF? We know most cars don't have a shot at winning any given race in any series. But if the team itself says it didn't come to win, what's the point?
I remember interviewing Joe Amato once and asked him about winning another championship. He gave some sort of measly answer about it being hard, blah, blah, blah. I asked him flat out that if he wasn't coming to win, what why didn't he just park the car.

 

When I hear quotes like that I know the answer to the question posed by the Sex Pistols in 1978. “Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

 

It's not like Mercedes is some sort of field filler. That would have been different.
The appropriate answer would have been:
"The Red Bulls and McLarens have been really good this year. We've qualified P3, and we have Lewis Hamilton. If we can get him out front, of course we have a chance."

 

Even though it’s in a public park when not used for racing, it was a thrill to drive much of the Gilles Villeneuve circuit in Montreal. Kids were very young and we had a minivan at the time. I parked it in the P1 grid slot and took a picture. Not encouraged by park authorities, but YOLO and all that.

I was shocked to see that writer you speak of being an in-studio expert on one of the local TV stations recently.

 

Meh. That’s naive. The goal of most teams is continual improvement. Some can win from it, some select few get every lucky break and snag a fluke win, but most teams are realistic and just try to build progress one brick at a time so they can eventually put themselves in winning contention. Many never do, but you still can’t put the cart before the horse, especially in a discipline like F1 where you’re not gifted contention by yellow flags, long pit stops, etc.

 

Well, seeing as how it's Mercedes, not Sauber or Alpine, and they did in fact go 1-2, I'll stand by my statement.

 

Lou Holtz never expected to beat Navy either, if you believed his midweek press conferences.

 

I see that Russell is DQed for having thinner skid plates that amounted to a 3.3-pound advantage in post-race weighing.

Wulff shrugged it off as a team mistake, said all the right things, blah yadda blah.

Three+ pounds is quite a bit for those vehicles, right? It's not like Goober and Gomer weren't paying attention putting things together.

 

I wonder when an F1 race winner was DQd. Either this is really petty or really bad that I don't understand.
Do a fine. Do a points reduction. I can't believe there was anything nefarious going on to make sure Russell won. He won because of pit strategy. DQ is a pretty big deal.

 

It was an illegal car. You have to DQ it. Last one was 30 years ago - Schumacher's plank under the car had worn down too much.

The tire degradation explanation makes some sense, I guess, but it's crazy to be cutting it that close. And Toto clearly seemed to know they were in trouble -- they finished with a 1-2 and he looked miserable.

 

So every single F1 winner over the last 30 years was 100% legit, and Mercedes had a secret meeting in the dead of the night to make sure 8th-in-the-points Georgie Russell, who managed two third place finishes all last season, ... his car would be the equivalent of a few pints of fuel light to make sure he got the dub on Sunday by holding off a seven-time world champ on the last lap? Ok.

 

No, they fucked up and ran an underweight car. No one else in the last 30 years ran an underweight car and won, or they would have been DQed too.

There's a long history of cars being DQed. It hasn't happened to a winner in 30 years.

And I have no idea what point you're trying to make.