Formula E

[marsh]

I'll probably watch that on YouTube unless the BBC make an effort with the coverage. Weird as I was expecting ch4 and Coulthards tv company to pick this up.

[ryodi]

The BBC will just show the official coverage which has Dario Franchitti won’t they, I doubt they’ll have their own team covering it.

[Dudley]

Nothing wrong with that, it's pretty good commentary.   

[jonathanhoey]

I'm really looking forward to the 2019 season and I'm thrilled it's all available for free.

 

I just hope they can get out of the habit of saying "usable energy" in every sentence.

 

I do understand that battery management is a major consideration, and I know there's an amount of novelty in having access to the live numbers for every car (as opposed to F1, say, where we don't get to see how much fuel each car has left).

 

But the actual phrase "usable energy" just rubs me up the wrong way somehow. Again to draw the F1 parallel, you don't hear the commentators speculating about how much "usable fuel" a car might have available.

[morcs]

No they just say “turbo hybrid era” as much as possible, and have pointless infographics such as a digital readout of two cars’ speeds

[Wallpaper]

I find BBC's sports coverage unbearable these days, everything has to be a an over produced montage with stupid emojis plastered all over it and they chose guests and hosts based on sporting achievement rather than presenting and analysis ability, so the less coverage they get to make and the more gets supplied ready made the better.

[Nosejam]

I'm interested in watching this. I see it's on at 12:30 on Saturday. Is that qualifying and the race together? How long is a race, not 2 hours like F1 I presume? Also, what teams are good, I'd like to cheer Massa on - is he in a good car?

[jonathanhoey]

In theory all the cars are the same. In practice of course there are differences from team to team but they're much less pronounced than F1.

 

Massa is driving for Venturi, whose best constructor's championship position to date was sixth.

 

Practice, quali and race are all on the same day. Quali and race are about an hour each.

 

The old cars wouldn't go a full race distance so they would run two cars per driver per race. The pit stop literally consisted of driving into the garage, jumping out of car 1 and into car 2 before driving off again.

 

This year is the debut of the mark 2 car which has better batteries, so each driver will use one car per race now.

 

As an aside, I'm a bit annoyed that Formula E makes a fuss of racing in "the world's most progressive cities" and then opens the season in fucking Saudi Arabia.

[Nosejam]

Cheers, really looking forward to this now 

[pastry]

I agree with the sentiments here that they need to stop focusing on talking tech and make it about the racing - that's all it's really about. 

To be perfectly honest I think when it is possible they should merge F1 and FE. F1 should be about whatever is fastest to the finish, not restricting to specific engine types, downforce etc etc.. if that's an electric car then so be it. But all of that is perhaps another topic. And of course I'm putting aside that F1 is owned and run by twats.
 

[morcs]

19 hours ago, pastry said:

To be perfectly honest I think when it is possible they should merge F1 and FE. F1 should be about whatever is fastest to the finish, not restricting to specific engine types, downforce etc etc.. if that's an electric car then so be it.

 

Even now if there were no restrictions the car would be so fast it wouldn't be humanly possible to drive it.

[pastry]

... then it wouldn't make it to the finish = 0 points

But I take your point. Making it possible for a human to control is part of the ongoing challenge to innovate and go faster, I suppose - and always has been. 

[Dudley]

If you don't have restrictions you could put in your own battery pile so it would make it to the finish but yeah it's been a long time since F1 lap speeds were decided by building the fastest car possible and became the regulation writers deciding a target time then working out how to make it difficult to go faster than that.

[ryodi]

This is still on BT Sport even with the new BBC deal and they've just show the first FE support series which is the Jaguar i-Pace eSeries. It wasn't a great race partly because according to the commentators some of the drivers had first driven the cars that day and even with race modifications the cars are still lumbering SUVs. 

 

I caught some of the qualifying on YouTube beforehand and apart from a few shots of the buildings surrounding it the track could be anywhere because with the safety barriers and adverts it just looks like another boring temporary circuit.

[wev]

I know this is going to be in BBC Red Button, does that mean it'll be on iPlayer? I'm out for most of today so won't get to watch it live

[ryodi]

It’s being streamed live on YouTube so if it’s not on the iPlayer you will be able to watch it on YouTube.

[grounded_dreams]

Here is the whole race on their official YouTube channel:

 

 

[kiroquai]

Thought it was pretty entertaining. Definitely a few bugs they need to iron out, but the new car is leaps and bounds better than the old one. It actually looks quick now.

[wev]

Totally agree. Technically it was rather messy, especially the stuff about using too much power because of wheels spinning over bumps. There's lots of confusing stuff going on and not even the teams and drivers get it all

 

glad Vergne got second, liked him ever since he ran an Alesi helmet when he was in F1 (think he had a Cevert one too). That Vergne and Lotterer line up looks strong

[wev]

And I really think they need to find a way to mask that whining noise, I like that you can hear the rest of the car working but that electric whining noise is almost as bad as when my tinnitus is at its worst! Even playing out fake engine noises would be better

[ryodi]

2 hours ago, kiroquai said:

Thought it was pretty entertaining. Definitely a few bugs they need to iron out, but the new car is leaps and bounds better than the old one. It actually looks quick now.

 

I agree. It was an interesting race and I was glad to see the they managed to avoid the usual turn 1 pileup at the start.

 

 

Attack Mode didn't work on that circuit for me. It was so far off the racing line that the level of excitement you'd expect from it by watching the explainer video was non existent. I'm also not sure about the new NASCAR style rule were the race director can purposely make the driver in the lead the de facto safety car to force them all to bunch up when an incident only needs a full course yellow. I don't like it when it's so blatantly artificial like that.

[layten]

https://www.motorsport.com/formula-e/news/massa-fanboost-infringement-penalties/4313607/

 

I see they are still persisting with the Fanboost horseshit.

[kiroquai]

Yeah, not a fan of the Fan Boost stuff. The Attack Mode is fine, but it needs a lot of work. It wasn't helped today by the director staring at the piece of track it was set up at whilst no-one was going through it, only to then miss the majority of times when a car did use it.

[GwiDan]

Have they added item boxes yet?

[Danster]

Rockets... missiles and cannon....  

[carred]

On 15/12/2018 at 17:59, wev said:

And I really think they need to find a way to mask that whining noise, I like that you can hear the rest of the car working but that electric whining noise is almost as bad as when my tinnitus is at its worst! Even playing out fake engine noises would be better

Agree with this - even if just muting the sound when they switch to the onboard camera, when it is most annoying

[wev]

@carred

 

Definely, you can mostly blank it out when it's the external shots as there's so much other noise going on, but it's really loud when onboard.

[Dudley]

Watching this having missed it at the weekend.

 

Needlessly tight featureless tracks, able to bang wheels, random people going into the wall, no-one having the slightest clue about yellow flags.

 

It's the indoor karting of professional motorsport.

 

I love it.

[Sidewaysbob]

I though the new era started off on the right foot, stumbled, almost fell, avoided the side swipe and jogged across the line just in front of the charging Frenchman. 

 

Great stuff, loved the cars running for the whole race not stopping to change cars, loved the "halo" lighting up for the 4 minute hot laps, loved the look of the cars.  Vandoorne is clearly rubbish, even Massa made him look rubbish.  Loved the number of cars there, and they all looked pretty competitive (accept Vandoorne obvs)

 

That "charging point" thing has to change though. That was in entirely the wrong spot, everytime the camera cut to it, nothing happened!  shame it was on yet another mickey mouse circuit. But they would look slow and awful on a regular track, So i'll accept them for the time being as the series grows. 

[morcs]

I'm guessing the whine is actually transmission whine and not necessarily because they're electric. It sounds a lot like straight cut gears in a fossil fuel car:

 

 

They might be able to mitigate it by using helical gears, for a performance/weight penalty.