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

My first thought when I heard about the double points thing was "Gee, if you're going to really screw things up, why not go all the way and copy NASCAR's playoff system?" Then I read the powers-that-be were apparently looking at double points over the last four races. Egads, what a disaster.
I believe I saw Vettel say something like he wants to keep the purity of the F1 points system. If that's the case, I say go back to only giving points to the top six finishers.

 

Bringing this thread back from the dead, now that F1 and IndyCar are both in full swing.
In F1, it's amazing to me how superior Mercedes is to everyone right now. I mean, no one else is close at this point. Even when Hamilton and Rosberg were duking it out, they were still pulling away from the field with ease. That was some fantastic racing they engaged in.
Bahrain was a good race for refugees. Massa had a brilliant start, while Perez had a strong podium.
On the other hand, Ferrari being so far off the pace in all aspects is stunning.
In IndyCar, Will Power's restart in St. Pete looked pretty bad but he certainly had the winning car. I thought Chevy might have the clear advantage in the opener, both because Honda debuted a new engine and because Ganassi joined the Chevy ranks. But Sato led a lot of laps in his Honda and RHR got a strong second, so maybe it's equal. I guess we'll know more soon.

 

Really was a fantastic race. You hardly ever see drivers fighting for the lead like that, let alone teammates.

High point for me may have been the team orders for Vettel to move over and let Ricciardo through. That was sweet.

I've come around to the conclusion that this is just what Ferrari is -- a big spending mediocre team, and the Schumacher years were the anomaly, not the current situation. The Schumacher years were a remarkable confluence of great driver, great engineers and managers, and a tire company making tires to the specifications of a single driver (which I think gets overlooked when assessing that era). Ferrari is back to what they were pre-Schumacher, which isn't much.

 

That is so right about the tires. Ferrari had 10 employees stationed in Japan at the Bridgestone facility to insure that the tires were designed and manufactured to optimize the Ferrari's performance, which drove Ron Dennis crazy. That is why all the top teams switched to Michelin when they came in. Then when Michelin tires were better than Bridgestone's Ferrari tried to get them ruled illegal. With their revenue advantage Ferrari should be at the front every year. Now that they missed on the powertrain engineering they want the rules changed ASAP to catch Mercedes. Bunch of whiners.

 

Gene Haas was granted an F1 entry for next season... Hopefully, this works out better than the last time there was an American entry in F1.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/113401

 

I'd love to see this work, but I have a very hard time seeing it happen.

There are very good reasons why all the teams are based in Europe, and all but one of the competitive teams are clustered in one area of England.

 

They need to get Peter Windsor on-board. He kicked some serious ass for the last American F1 effort.

 

It was 20 years ago today my favorite F1 driver ever (and second favorite racer overall) was killed at Imola. RIP Ayrton Senna. :'(
What a crappy weekend that was for F1: an awful but fortunately not serious crash Friday, a promising young driver who finally reached F1 killed on Saturday (first such death in the sport in 12 years), then arguably the greatest of all time dying Sunday.
I came across this fascinating read today:
http://8w.forix.com/senna1994.html

Also, I thought Sky Sports did a great job with this video:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1royvq_senna-the-last-teammate_auto

One thing I particularly like about the video is the amount of focus on Roland, who usually gets mere passing mention in light of Senna dying the next day.

 

It's really pretty mind-boggling that there hasn't been a fatality since then. (With all due respect to Maria de Villota, I don't think her passing fits.) The safety improvements have been amazing, but a lot of that has to come down to dumb luck.

I remember following F1 in the mid to late 70s as a kid, when the only way I could find out the results of a race was to listen to the half-hourly sports update on the news radio station in L.A. Their last item would frequently be a 5-second mention of the race. Far too often it was something like "Niki Lauda won today's Italian Grand Prix. Driver Ronnie Peterson of Sweden was killed in a first-lap accident."

 

It certainly is mind-boggling. Much like the lack of fatalities in NASCAR since Earnhardt. I was reading a story last night in which either Jackie Stewart or Niki Lauda (I'm pretty sure it was Stewart) was talking about none of today's drivers were racing in 1994 and thus don't have the same respect for what could happen. It made absolute sense. Back in those days, several drivers a year were being killed. I think it was Emmo I saw in a video once talking about how he would look around the room at a driver's meeting at the start of a season and know three or four of those drivers would be killed by the end of that season.
By the same token, Senna and a lot of his contemporaries in 1994 were probably the same way as today's drivers. I'd have to see the names, but I'm not sure any drivers from Imola 1994 were in F1 the last time a fatality had happened. Prost had just retired, Mansell was in America.

 

I think Elio de Angelis died in the mid 80s in a racing accident. So by 1994, drivers had become somewhat inured against the threat of death.

Robert Kubica and Felipe Massa came perilously close to death in the last decade or so. If Kubica's tub turned the other way at Montreal ... he'd have been a goner.

 

That Kubica wreck is the last one where I remember thinking I'd just watched someone die. Not only did he survive, but he wanted to race a week later. He was held out at Indy because of a concussion, as I recall.

Massa was a tribute to the improvements in helmets over the years. No way he survives that wearing a helmet from the 90s.

My first F1 race was Long Beach in 1976. The podium was Clay Regazzoni, Niki Lauda and Patrick Depailler. By 1980 one was dead, one was paralyzed, and one was disfigured. Of the 20 drivers in the race, 5 were dead by 1980. (To be fair, though, one was cancer and another was a plane crash. But still...)