Formula One - 2016 Season

[wev]

So Bernie/Todt has been playing the elimination more from PGR?

[kiroquai]

It's a bit mad. Having initially been completely miffed I am willing to give it a go to see how it turns out, but it does baffle me that they have taken one of the few aspects of the sport no-one has been complaining about and mucked around with it first. Baffling.

 

Meanwhile, Mercedes are apparently trying a new nose tomorrow, having added a new floor today. Will be interesting - maybe it's got an S-Duct.

[McCoy]

The Quali changes do look slightly baffling but I Qualifying has become slightly boring the past few years.  Mainly due to the fact you can predict which cars will go out in which sessions but a shake up may not be a bad thing.  Of course, making the sport more competitive in general is probably more important. 

[mexos]

It will be a ball ache to follow as a viewer and even worse for the commentators to keep track of. Doesn't seem like it's been thought through properly. I expect it to be dropped.

 

[MrPogo]

Sounds like it will be putting a lot more pressure on the engines/cars as a whole too, especially for the faster teams who won't get knocked out early on. I assume there won't an increase in engine allowances etc to compensate for them suddenly doing an extra 30 high speed laps each race. I wonder if you'll get midfield teams dropping out early to save the miles? The cars tend to revert to their "natural order" more or less during the race, so  getting from 15th to 8th doesn't seem to be much more difficult than starting 8th and keeping it, so it may be seen as beneficial to qualify worse and save ten laps of engine wear.

[Sidewaysbob]

I guess they're after an hour long qualifying race without actually calling it a race... 

 

I think it might be interesting ... maybe

[SeanR]

are there any laps longer than 90 seconds in the calendar?

[Sidewaysbob]

spa is around 2 minutes depending on the weather.

[Sidewaysbob]

looking it up ..

 

singapore 1.48

Spa 1.45

Sotchi 1.40

COTA 1.39

and those are current lap records

[merman]

That's just about killed any interest in the sport for me.

What a ludicrous change FOR NO GOOD REASON.

[wev]

We're getting wider cars with fatter tyres next season, which will mosty certainly make passing much, much easier*

 

 

*not really

[Dudley]

Qualifying will remain as a one-hour session, split into three segments, but drivers will set their best lap in the first 2 minutes and then circulate pointlessly till the end on rapidly more ruined tyres".

 

Fixed that for them.

[mexos]

Lots of coke.

[kiroquai]

No-one asked for it, but you're going to get it anyway - here's the first six teams in my 'It's Friday evening, I have consumed some alcohol, I am bored and YEAH F1!' runners and riders guide!

 

Mercedes AMG Petronas

 

 

I remember them. All of them. What? Those years I had a silver car from Brackley as my avatar, was a diehard fanboy on the forum and then watched as my number one team… well, sucked a bit. So bad were they that the announcement of Lewis Hamilton as a 2013 Mercedes driver led to much outpouring of national grief amongst fans of the Hamster himself. I distinctly remember Captain LeChuck, during an F1 2012 practice session on our Xbox 360s that very afternoon, weeping continuously for over an hour about it. Probably.

 

Fast-forward three years and the success that followed that move has now left my choice of favourite team decidedly less cool, quirky and prone to mockery. Hamilton himself has upped his game beyond any level he managed at McLaren with two titles, countless wins and a fair few appalling fashion choices. Expect a strong title challenge at the very least this season. Meanwhile, team mate Nico Rosberg might win the ‘slightly less of a douche at times’ competition, but he’s just not got that consistent extra capacity to take Hamilton to the wire on merit. Still, on his day he provides a challenge as stern as any Hamilton has dealt with in his career, and you can only hope for our own sanity that he can do so more often this year if the W07 proves to be as far ahead as it looks it might be.

 

Scuderia Ferrari

 

 

Ferrari upped their game so much last season that at times you had to sit back and remember that the team challenging for victories and pole positions were the same one who gave Fernando Alonso a car that looked like it had been made of Lego in 2012. With their new personnel being fully involved in a Ferrari for the first proper time since inception, things look good for another strong year.

 

Sebastian Vettel surprised me last year. His final year at Red Bull led me - and many others - to suspect his previous successes had slightly inflated his worth as a driver, but there were hints of a certain other multiple World Champion German in the way he galvanised the team right from the word go. The sport would really benefit from him having a decent crack at Mercedes throughout the whole year, not just on the odd weekend. Meanwhile, Kimi Raikkonen had a pretty average season forgetting the race he almost won in Bahrain, and although he is looking as if his best years are now behind him I wouldn’t rule out a Raikkonen win or two, followed by a mumbling interview on the podium laced with accidental curse words.

 

Martini Williams

 

 

Still probably everyone’s second favourite team, Williams had a weird year in 2015 in that they didn’t really move forward or backward, but with a budget that isn’t a touch on Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull or McLaren a solid third in the constructors championship is still a pretty great achievement. A win or two might have been nice, mind, and you have to wonder if another year of almosts will be enough to satisfy and whether the window of competitiveness they found themselves in is now closed.

 

Judging Valtteri Bottas is kind of like trying to expound on the qualities of a potato - yes, it might be a superbly versatile vegetable, but more often than not it’s just there as an accompaniment to the main interest of any given meal. Bottas is there, he is very talented, he does a good job, he sometimes comes third… he, much more than his team mate, needs this year’s Williams to give him a chance to do more than simply slot in behind the Mercs and Ferraris and bring home the points. Anything Felipe Massa can grab at this stage in his career is bonus material, but I for one like the guy immensely and am pleased to see him doing well with the career refresher Williams gave him after his Ferrari career basically went down the drain.

 

Red Bull Racing

 

 

Look, I am not going to lie here - seeing the Red Bull brass spit out their dummies in public at Renault last year kind of confirmed to me certain things about the powers that be within the team, and I did take some kind of perverse pleasure seeing Christian Horner and Helmut Marko wriggle around in interviews when presented with comments they’d made themselves only hours or days before on why Renault were so cack and why not winning meant F1 was suddenly rubbish to them all of a sudden.

 

The problem is, it was almost impossible for me not to feel bad for their number one driver whilst this was all happening. Daniel Ricciardo is pretty ace both as a driver and as a man, to the point where he makes an almost completely unlikeable team pretty likeable all by himself. The start of the season promises to be pretty difficult for him and Danil Kvyat (who actually had a decent year last season despite a few lapses) and will probably involve a lot of scrappy races in the middle of the field, but I wouldn’t put it past the squad to bring something to the table that boosts them back towards Williams as the season wears on. Still, at least you’ll always notice the RB12’s wherever they are with that funky livery!

 

McLaren Honda

 

 

I’ve just bought a Honda road car. The reason? The V-Tec is, arguably, the finest petrol engine money can buy in terms of reliability and refinement. The salesman who sold me the car said there has never been a recorded failure of one in the entire world. Not one! The parallels between my car and a Honda F1 engine end there, though, because I certainly haven’t ever considered it to have a GP2 engine, and I have never parked it in a cloud of smoke before walking up a small grass hill and sunbathing on a deckchair for half an hour in front of a worldwide TV audience.

 

So ridiculous did it get that at one point I considered inventing the most cost-effective drinking game of all time whereby I took a shot each time a McLaren made it past three-quarters of the way through a Grand Prix. These weren’t cars driven by novices, either - Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso both may be in the same club as Raikkonen when it comes to their best days being a handful of years ago now, but give them a Mercedes and they’d win more than the odd Grand Prix. Last year’s chassis wasn’t quite as innocent in the whole shambles as the team would like you to believe, but despite progress 2016 will likely still see them struggling with reliability, even if performances should be a little more impressive.

 

Sahara Force India

 

 

This lot were supposed to be Aston Martin branded this year, but that’s been delayed whilst major shareholders Sahara desperately try to sell their stake in the team. You could argue that it’s an odd time for them to want to get out, what with last year’s car turning into a very competitive one indeed and with a Mercedes engine in the back for another year this season. Still, a cloud of financial issues hover over the team so it’ll be worth noting how much development this year’s car gets as the year unfolds.

 

The two drivers had curious years in 2015; Nico Hulkenberg started strongly and then didn’t get on with the B-Spec chassis introduced at Silverstone, whilst his team mate Sergio ‘Checo’ Perez came from relative obscurity to reel off a pretty superb run of results as the year drew to a close. Given that this year’s car is pretty much last season’s again with a few bits smoothed out here and there you’d be tempted to think Perez might have the upper hand in the battle, but Hulkenberg is the kind of guy you should never write off. Should be a close duel, this one.

 

Rest of it at some point tomorrow I'd imagine

[mexos]

Great stuff Kiro.

[mexos]

It will be fascinating to see what will happen at Merc this year. They will still win everything I am certain of that. Next year though?

 

If I was Hamilton I'd be thinking about 2017. 2016 is the fourth title unless goldie locks ups his game. But 2017...? No one stays at the top forever. I really do think he'll tap up Sergio for that seat alongside Vettel. Finish off the career in red. Boom.

 

After 3 in a row (if it happens) he'll want a new challenge. And with Ferrari building back up it could be the perfect time.

[p1nseeker]

Reading that the new qualifying format will not be introduced until Spain?! ffs what a mess

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/35677549

[mexos]

Yep, it's a mess at the moment.

[Dudley]

Thing is, there are only 2 ways this can work.

 

"They are required to stay out there the whole session" is the phrase.

 

1 - They aren't allowed to come back into the pits.  The best times are all set on lap 1 before the tyres die.  Cars continue circulating pointlessly for up to 20 minutes doing nothing, probably driving slowly to save fuel having put in as little as possible.  People will run out, especially people who unexpectedly get a stage further than they expected.  For instance last year, the Manors would not ever have put in enough for more than 2 stages, expecting to go out in the first.  2 breakdowns and suddenly that's not true anymore.

 

2 - They are allowed pit stops.  Absolutely madness ensues as people get as far as they think they can on their first set of tyres. Possibly 20 cars will try to pit at once.  This is the version I think Bernie is going for, it will certainly shuffle grids.

[kiroquai]

I don't know what's worse - the fact the new rules are a bit of a mess, or that - yet again - the people making these rules seem to be faffing around uncertainly with implementing them. It's all a bit of a farce.

 

What isn't a farce, however, is this: part two of my runners and riders guide! (actually, in some places it is slightly farcical to be fair).

 

Renault

 

 

This is going to be a really, really tough year for Renault. This year’s car was developed in an atmosphere where most people within the team weren’t getting paid and didn’t even think they’d be on the grid for 2016, and the engine is very obviously down on power compared to Ferrari and especially Mercedes. Things should probably be respectable but not spectacular, even if their car blatantly rips off the livery of the 1988 Tyrrell.

 

Actually, there is a firm link to the 1988 Tyrrell in that Doctor Jonathan ‘Bland Commentary’ Palmer, who drove that very shitbox, is the father of new Renault prospect Jolyon Palmer. Problem is, I don’t think Jolyon is all that special really (my Mac’s autocorrect keeps insisting his first name is Jolson to boot, poor guy) - we’re not talking Max Chilton levels of out-of-his-depth here, but I’d put him with Haryanto on the final row of the F1 talent grid, let’s put it that way. Team mate Kevin Magnussen is a bit unproven, but is immediately more popular due to a) replacing Pastor Maldonado and b) having a Dad so badass that he basically got sacked from his F1 career because he didn’t listen to Jackie Stewart, who happened to be his boss at the time.

 

Toro Rosso

 

 

If the move to Ferrari engines had been inked a few months earlier and the team been using 2016 rather than 2015 spec Italian motors, I’d be far more excited about Toro Rosso’s chance of making a leap forward this year. Shoehorning an engine into a chassis that wasn’t designed for it worked at Brawn in 2009, but that was with a chassis over a year in development, and with an engine that was arguably the best on the grid at the time. As such, they might still find themselves duking it out in the midst of the middle runners for another season yet.

 

What I am excited about, however, is the way this duking out will take place. Max Verstappen is younger than some of the CD’s in my collection, yet last year he took to F1 like a future champion in waiting, bad-assing his way around and also - a bit under the radar - showing an uncanny touch of mechanical sympathy and tyre conservation with two very fine drives in Hungary and America. This took a little of the shine off team-mate Carlos Sainz Jr and in all reality he is probably the Rosberg to Verstappen’s Hamilton, but he too put in some excellent performances in 2015 and wouldn’t seem out of place challenging the big boys at the front now and again.

 

Sauber (2016 car pending)

 

 

Ugh, Sauber. It’s just gone midnight here whilst writing this and I am really struggling to think of something nice to say about by far the best Swiss team on the F1 grid. Oh - there you go, that was something nice! Look, you have to admire Peter Sauber for sticking around and for saving a whole lot of jobs by buying the team back from BMW when that particular crap hit the fan at the end of 2009, but these days they’re no more than grid fillers tottering around for occasional points. This year looks likely to bring more of the same.

 

Felipe Nasr is decent enough as a driver, although nothing he did save for a very nice drive in Melbourne really stood out as anything special. Then again, Sauber pretty much spent 50p on developing last year’s car whilst still trying to find money to pay Nico Hulkenberg’s 2013 salary and Guido van der Gaarde’s legal bills, so that didn’t help. Never been a bit fan of Marcus Erikkson although he showed up pretty well when compared directly to his then-teammate ‘Jolson’ Palmer in GP2 about four years ago, so… oh, wait, that’s probably not a great indicator of form at all, is it?

 

Haas F1

 

 

Ah, now this is an interesting one. First of the two Banbury F1 teams and confusingly located in the old factory of the other one, Haas look like a proper outfit that should slot nicely into the middle of the pack this season. The car is tidy, the livery is… well, the livery is there, there’s a decent amount of information and tech coming from Ferrari and Gene Haas is the kind of guy who you want to believe can get a good job done with his new team. I’d actually suggest they’ll be scoring points sooner than Sauber, McLaren or Renault this year.

 

Romain Grosjean has developed into a seriously good F1 driver now he’s shaken his dodgy crash-filled stage out of himself and should be the team leader from the off. Esteban Gutierrez had two very average years with plain ol’ Sauber and has a voice that makes him sound like he’s being dubbed by a Muppets voice actor in interviews, but a season spent listening in to Vettel, Raikkonen and Ferrari engineers might just be enough to unlock some of the speed his younger career suggested he had. Time will tell.

 

Manor F1

 

 

In 1994, a little Formula One team set up shop in a small factory in Banbury and went motor racing. Sadly, amidst some tough, gritty performances, it was the death of one of their drivers during a Grand Prix weekend that they will probably be most remembered for. That team was Simtek, and I don’t imagine many would have guessed that such awful events would strike a similarly small team working out of the very same factory just over twenty years later.

 

In all likelihood (unless Honda have massively screwed up or Renault struggle to get going early doors) Manor will be rounding off the grid. They do have 2016 spec Mercedes engines, transmissions from Williams and a tidy - if a little chunky-looking - chassis, but it’ll be a big leap for them to haul themselves off the back on merit. Should be a little more competitive though, and I have a genuine soft spot for this lot given what they’ve been through.

 

Rio Haryanto isn’t up to much and probably the least talented guy on the grid, but Pascal Werlhein is - I am reliably informed - made of much better stock and could be about to make his first steps in a career that might land him in a Mercedes some day. Those days are a long way off - as you suspect the Manor will be this year - but I’ll be keeping a keen eye on him to see any signs of the kind of talent the sadly-missed Jules Bianchi was able to show so obviously in this team during his short career.

 

Each race weekend I will be doing the Bob Schedule - preview on Thursday night, race review on Sunday evening. I'll be linking to Jonny's fantasy site with reminders to take part, and I'll probably look at throwing in those random Friday F1 quizzes themed for each race in the previews too - those will just be for a bit of fun, though

[Dudley]

I think I'd be willing to bet on Pascal being quicker on merit than the Saubers to be honest.

[myoozikk]

Great reads Kiro. Nice one.

[kiroquai]

I know this is an Indian Formula Student entry, but... if you can watch the whole thing without either a) facepalming or b) laughing you're a better man than me.

 

(It gets amusing at the 1.00 mark or so)

 

 

[Shimmyhill]

I thought it was this years McLaren for a moment..

[mexos]

Fuuuuu...

 

Shit got real yo.

 

 

DO NOT WANT

[MrPogo]

Can they actually see anything past that?!

[mexos]

F1 Is open wheel, open cockpit. You need to be able to SEE the drivers. I'm 100% convinced it's one of many key factors in F1's appeal. Cover up the drivers and you as a fan lose some of the 'connection' to them. 

 

When you can see your driver, actually see them at work from the trackside it makes them seem almost superhuman. You can see them at work doing something pretty amazing the rest of us could never do.

 

When you cover them up you lose all of that. It's now just a car on a track. This protection program and where it will head will only accelerate the downturn in F1 as more people switch off. 

 

TLDR. F1 should be open cockpit. If the drivers don't like it fine, go any race WEC. There will be plenty of others that will step up.

[carred]

39 minutes ago, MrPogo said:

Can they actually see anything past that?!

Possibly not it seems ( From the bbc site

 

 

Quote

 

Many who saw the new device on Raikkonen’s car on Thursday expressed a view that it must affect visibility. 

But this is not the case, I’m told. The drivers’s eyeline is below the structure and the central strut disappears from view because of a human’s binocular vision. There have been some questions raised about whether it will impede drivers’ views of the starting lights, however.”

 

 

[Dudley]

1 hour ago, MrPogo said:

Can they actually see anything past that?!

 

The thing about racing is, you almost never need to see what's directly in front of you. It won't affect anything he needs to see at all.

 

59 minutes ago, mexos said:

TLDR. F1 should be open cockpit. If the drivers don't like it fine, go any race WEC. There will be plenty of others that will step up.

 

"F1 shouldn't have seatbelts, if they don't like it let them go play football".  Or any number of safety enhancements since about 1930, literally all of which were greeted by something like this.

 

If you're offering me "Halos" vs "Losing another Jules, another Justin, another Henry" then I'm taking the halos, which really don't affect it being "open cockpit" in any serious way.

[mexos]

So where do you draw the line? The question is how much do you change in the name of safety before you end up changing the fundamentals of the sport. 

 

Open wheel is clearly more dangerous than closed, so let's sort that out too. Racing itself is pretty dangerous, cars could collide so let's just have a time trial instead. But that could be pretty dangerous too so let's just run a simulation of what would happen and create a 3D render of the time trial and put it online.

 

At which point do you draw the line - at which point does it stop being F1?

 

Should we be trying to make the sport as safe as possible? Of course. Should we have a definition of what the sport is and isn't? I think so. It protects against the bollocks I wrote above. You make it as safe as it can be within the definition of what it is and isn't.