F1 2008 Megathread

ITV coverage is waaaay better that Speed. Matchet(SP) is the only one that know what he is talking about, the rest need to be replaced with guys like Martin Brundle.

Bram
Well I'm glad we have this little thing called the Internet and Torrents.

Well, at least it has now been said on Prime too. How is it that a kid can be so boring and yet somehow earns a flattering title of "Iceman"? Whenever he talks I think that someone must have stollen his stapler.
:biggrin:
 
Well, at least it has now been said on Prime too. How is it that a kid can be so boring and yet somehow earns a flattering title of "Iceman"? Whenever he talks I think that someone must have stollen his stapler.

He is called the iceman for his action on the track not off the track
 
Re: Normally cool under pressure

He is called the iceman for his action on the track
No argument here, I'd much rather watch him :cool: drive than talk but he definitely looked hot :frown: and bothered :redface: last weekend.
 
Re: Normally cool under pressure

No argument here, I'd much rather watch him :cool: drive than talk but he definitely looked hot :frown: and bothered :redface: last weekend.


Yea, but maybe they are referring to how quickly he was willing to go off track? Maybe, "the Icepatch"?


Oh, and thanks for the heads up 'cause I had no idea why they really called him the Iceman. :rolleyes:
 
2 Days, 16 Hours, 21 Minutes And 17 Seconds Before The Malaysian Gp


...and ITV lost the rights for F1 coverage next year. Their coverage and commentary was awesome.
 
2 Days, 16 Hours, 21 Minutes And 17 Seconds Before The Malaysian Gp


...and ITV lost the rights for F1 coverage next year. Their coverage and commentary was awesome.

BBC has the broadcast rights next year. 5 yr deal with FIA. Full broadcast with no ads or interruptions FTMFW!
bowdown.gif
 
Re: To obfuscate the obvious rumor

I'm betting that someone, in true Wag the Dog style skullduggery, wants us to forget the Alonzo to Ferrari rumor. :wink:
Felipe Massa on Thursday hit out at rumours that Ferrari is looking to replace him for 2009 with rising German youngster Sebastian Vettel.

A correspondent for the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport in Malaysia asked Massa, the 26-year-old Brazilian, if he had heard paddock gossip that his seat may be under threat beyond the end of this season.

Some other commentators suggest that the recent departure from Ferrari of Jean Todt weakens Massa's position at the team, as he is managed by the Frenchman's son Nicolas..........

Paddock talk probably paid some junior reporter to ask the question. This crap is almost more fun than watching Kimi spin out on his own !!:tongue:
 
Re: Hey, wake up

Jensen 4th in practice. :eek: The jungle drums should be pounding !! The slience here is deafening. :confused:

I haven't watched the practice session yet as I'm actually trying to work and shit, so maybe there's something I'm missing? :redface: maybe a UFO is involved?
 
dude, if Jenson actually gets 4th in quali, I'm buying a plane ticket tonight and flying to Sepang.

It's not that I'm not pounding the drums, more like waiting for the other shoe to drop. :redface:
 
dude, if Jenson actually gets 4th in quali, I'm buying a plane ticket tonight and flying to Sepang.

If you need someone to happily carry your luggage and shine your shoes for an extra ticket, count me in. :tongue: :biggrin:
 
If you need someone to happily carry your luggage and shine your shoes for an extra ticket, count me in. :tongue: :biggrin:

and if you need someone to happily go get your beers/drinks/food for another extra ticket, count me in as well.:wink:
 
Boring.Only fun was watching Hamilton strugle.Button I guess felt like 10'th was too good so he drove on the lawn to make 13th:frown: I think the drivers had to have gotten a stern talking to from F1 about turn 1 aggresion.Clean start.
 
Re: Boring? Not to me

Only fun was watching Hamilton strugle
I got a kick out of watching Massa blow it and think he may be shown the door after this season. I'm not jumping to any conclusions because Kimi looked like a wanker last week, but I think we're seeing some leveling of the field and driver skill, judgement and cool will be much more of a factor than previous years. Glad to see a good mix of teams (and Trulli) at the front for a change. :smile:

What was Reubens' problems? :frown:
 
I tuned in around lap 20 on the rebroadcast Sunday morning, pacific time, and was surprised to not see Hamilton leading the race. Jarno Trulli in the Toyota in 4th, wow!
 
Re: McLaren mistakes

surprised to not see Hamilton leading the race
He seemed to have some brake issues and a screw up on a pit stop made it worse. But the kicker was being penalized 5 grid spots for safety/potential obstruction; both he and Heikki were on the racing line but crawling around on a "cool down" lap in the Q session while others, namely Kubica were still on a flyer and had not seen the checkers. :eek: At least the other slow cars were off the racing line. Somebody was not doing a very good job of spotting.

I'm sure we'll see some sort of minimum speed rule for cool down laps.
 
Re: McLaren mistakes

He seemed to have some brake issues and a screw up on a pit stop made it worse. But the kicker was being penalized 5 grid spots for safety/potential obstruction; both he and Heikki were on the racing line but crawling around on a "cool down" lap in the Q session while others, namely Kubica were still on a flyer and had not seen the checkers. :eek: At least the other slow cars were off the racing line. Somebody was not doing a very good job of spotting.

I'm sure we'll see some sort of minimum speed rule for cool down laps.

I just remembered, he was like 20 seconds in the pit.
 
Re: The good and the great

And Massa is having a difficult time adjusting to racing w/o traction control.
I'm only a casual observer, but that seems to be the consensus amongst others I've talked to. And since Wag the Dog is my favorite movie, when I see stuff like this
A Ferrari spokesman has plainly dismissed rumours that a deal is already in place to put Fernando Alonso alongside Kimi Raikkonen at the Italian team in 2009.

"There is no arrangement at all with Fernando and Ferrari," he is quoted as saying by The Times.
I think to myself; what he said under his breath 2 seconds later was "YET". :tongue:

Massa appears to not have the reflexes under pressure? He has time to make a recovery, but he definitely has to figure out how to correct that deficiency.

Did anyone see this article on what makes great drivers?

The Gift
Quick in His Seat
By TOMMY CRAGGS
Published: March 2, 2008
Tony Stewart doesn’t look like your idea of an elite athlete, unless you’re thinking of a professional bowler. Doughy and unimposing, Stewart, 36, is nevertheless one of the finest racers of his generation. A two-time Nascar series champ, Stewart is the only driver to have won titles in stock cars and Indy cars, as well as midget, sprint and Silver Crown cars, and he is now routinely placed alongside his hero, A. J. Foyt, racing’s most protean driver. Stewart’s former crew chief Scott Diehl says, “I believe Tony Stewart could make a bicycle fast.” What is it, then, that makes a good driver great?

For starters, Stewart has superb eyesight — 20/13 in one eye, 20/15 in the other — but it’s not visual acuity that matters so much as a driver’s ability to process everything that drifts into his periphery while he travels at 200 m.p.h. “A driver has to know what’s unfolding in front of him at a rate of a football field a second,” says Dr. Stephen Olvey, a founding fellow of the F.I.A. Institute for Motor Sport Safety. Stewart evidently has a knack for coping with multiple inputs: last year, only two drivers were faster in “traffic” (when an opponent was less than a car length away). Greg Zipadelli, Stewart’s crew chief, says his driver hones his talent with a popular
training tool: PlayStation.

TIME OUT OF MIND

The governing trait of any driver is the speed of his mind, something Dr. Jacques Dallaire likens to a computer’s central processing unit. “The faster the C.P.U., the more powerful the computer,” says Dallaire, an occupational performance consultant who has studied hundreds of racecar drivers. “They have exceptionally fast C.P.U.’s. Their concentration skills are very good. Memory skills are very good. Anticipatory timing skills are all quite good.” Drivers’ brains relay information to their muscles more quickly. Olvey once conducted an informal study of drivers’ reaction times and compared them with those of the general public; the drivers were about 33 percent faster. In a racing machine like Stewart, the mind, more than anything, is the engine.

KING OF THE CORNERS

Stewart spent his formative racing years rooster-tailing sprint cars around Midwestern dirt tracks, which taught him how to bring a slipping car to heel. “You learn car control that way,” Stewart says. “How to slide the car around without sliding off the racetrack, how to manipulate the car and make it do what you want it to do.” Stewart distinguishes himself in the corners, where control is most crucial. He was Nascar’s second-fastest driver in turns last season, a result that Chris Cook, a driving instructor and road-course specialist, attributes in part to his former pupil’s exceptional touch on the brakes. “With road racing, you’ve got such diverse approaches to different corners,” Cook says. “You’ve got 15 to 20 different corners requiring 15 to 20 different brake pressures,” not to mention both right and left turns. As a student, Cook recalls, Stewart “attacked” the corners: “He never overslowed the car. He always used the right brake pressures.” Moreover, in corners, a smart driver uses his brakes to control the weight balance of the car, effectively “steering” it. “You race just as much with your brake pedal as with the gas pedal,” Scott Diehl says. Going faster, in other words, means learning to go slower.

THE FEEL FOR SPEED

“That seat-of-the-pants feeling is the biggest thing you have to have,” Stewart says. “As the car moves around, you feel it through both your hands and through your core — if the car is tight or if it’s loose.” This skill also likely stems from his early days on dirt, where the surface changes from lap to lap. A driver has to determine, based on the car’s handling, just where the track is running fastest at that particular moment, thus honing what Dallaire calls a “kinesthetic feel” for the vehicle. “Most drivers will tell you that their three most important parts are their eyes, their fingers and their butts,” Dallaire says. “It’s a complex interaction between the eyes, the vestibular system in the inner ear and even some joint receptors that allows us to judge our physical position in space.” And Stewart has a “phenomenal feel for the car,” says Lorin Ranier, the driver development coordinator for Chip Ganassi Racing and one of the men responsible for Stewart’s move to stock cars. “For him, driving a racecar is like you and me chewing gum.”
 
Re: Let's all pile on Flippy

Amid rumours that his seat for 2009 may not be safe, Ferrari officials said they would check whether any aspect of the car could be blamed for what appeared to be the Brazilian's second major driving error in a one week period, leaving his points tally so far at zero.

Asked by the German magazine Sport Bild if a defect had caused Massa to spin into the gravel at Sepang, the spokesman is quoted as saying: "No. The car was okay."

Massa's former boss Peter Sauber, though, was not surprised when he observed the driver's error from the BMW-Sauber garage in Malaysia. "If things are not running well for him, Felipe loses concentration quickly," the Swiss said.
:eek:
 
Back
Top