F1 Fanatic round-up: 21/10/2010

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Practice for the Korean Grand Prix starts tomorrow so don’t forget to get your race predictions in as soon as possible.

Here’s today’s round-up:

Links

Ecclestone happy with F1 preparation (The Hindu)

"I will come back if necessary. I don’t think it will be necessary before October. These people are quite capable, and I don’t see any problem."

Koreans slam F1 preparations ‘shameful’ amidst poor ticket sales (Crash)

“‘The track should have been built months ago,’ added Lee Phil-Soon, who owns a restaurant in nearby city Mokpo. ‘We believe there has been no full government support because the race is being held in this region. If it were held in another region such as Busan, the situation would have been different. Look at the track – construction is still underway with only days to go before the race. It’s shameful, as foreigners think we are not prepared well.'”

India’s Armaan Ebrahim hopes to secure GP2 series drive (DNA)

“If I perform well in the series it will be a good opportunity for me to get noticed by the Formula One teams. The goal at the moment is to secure a GP2 drive. Hopefully, my performance in Formula Two will help me to pull in sponsors for my GP2 foray.”

Brawn: Mercedes too conservative (Autosport)

“When the time came to design the 2010 car, our design office wasn’t well organised. What came out of it is a scarcely ambitious car, in fact too conservative. But we couldn’t do otherwise, because resources were not sufficient. For 2011 we have a group of young engineers who want to show their worth, so we are ambitious again.”

Comment of the day

I’m always intrigued when someone unearths an old article and comments on it. Robert offers his view on “Ten worst… F1 circuits” which was published three years ago (which is why Valencia isn’t on there):

Zolder was actually quite a decent track. Back when F1 ran there, several of the corners were banked, and you had three, good, high-speed stretches to work with. It also had that steep hill, which made a few of those turns very daunting.

Aida was short, but it had three good flat-out stretches into reasonable braking zones, a number of quick corners, and plenty of elevation changes. Also, that turn leading onto the back stretch was something quite unique to that track.
Robert

From the forum

BasCB asks are HRT the new Minardi?

Happy birthday!

No F1 Fanatic birthdays today. If you want a birthday shout-out tell us when yours is by emailling me, using Twitter or adding to the list here.

On this day in F1

Ayrton Senna won the 1990 world championship 20 years ago today in notorious circumstances. He rammed rival Alain Prost out of the race as they headed into the first corner.

Read more: 20 years since Senna took out Prost at Suzuka: 1990 Japanese Grand Prix flashback

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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33 comments on “F1 Fanatic round-up: 21/10/2010”

  1. Yeah it’s good to see people still commenting on these articles ages after they were published. If there are any ways of letting us know when the debate gets going again somehow then that would be great.

    I don’t know all that much about Zolder, but I’ve always assumed that it’s unpopular for two main reasons: it’s where an F1 great lost his life, and because it lives in the shadow of its great neighbour Spa

    1. If there are any ways of letting us know when the debate gets going again somehow then that would be great.

      What debate?

    2. HounslowBusGarage
      21st October 2010, 8:38

      Zolder is worthy of attention because of its designer – Hans Hugenholtz – who also designed Suzuka and the stadium section of Hockenheim amongst other places.
      It’s quite a quick track, but at only 4 kms, it’s too short and too fast for F1 – track record is about 1m 15s in an Indy car.

      1. Indy cars never raced at Zolder. track record is hold by Bourdais with a champ car.
        Lap record 1:14.089 (Sebastian Bourdais, Newman-Haas Racing, 2007)

        1. HounslowBusGarage
          21st October 2010, 11:20

          Yes, you’re right. Sorry. I can never remember the difference between them!

    3. You can get an RSS feed for each article, so just subscribe to them all! Though maybe wait a week because the constant updates on the recent ones might get annoying.

  2. Just read the South Korea article on Crash… very interesting how badly run the event seems to be, but the line that got my attention was at the end…

    “Whilst the forecast was initially for a dry weekend, it now appears precipitation could be in the air, with cool, cloudy and breezy conditions threatening showers on Saturday and the proximity of the destructive super-typhoon ‘Megi'”

    I’m thinking perhaps: Oily surface + Super typhoon = Exciting race! Or perhaps a cancelled race, but fingers crossed it won’t come to that…

    1. BOAT RACE FTW! :D

      or just do what Nico proposed! Every driver driving the Safety car to arrange the grid

    2. Well, my weather widget for Mokpo shows rain Sunday, but a quick search for Mokpo’s weather shows that it’ll be clear as a bell Sunday afternoon, so who knows.

    3. I would imagine that if it rains the potentially oily surface that everyone is talking about will be less of an issue than if it is dry.

  3. haha love the little bit of opinion there:

    “which is why Valencia isn’t on there”

    1. I spotted that, too.

      A question for Keith (and this is born mostly out of curiosity): if you had to re-write that article on the ten worst circuits and you included Valencia in the list, which of the original ten would be dropped?

      I’d be hard-pressed to make that decision … given Roland’s defence of Zolder, it’s the most likely one to get prmoted off the list – but if they did something about Argentina by cutting out that fiddly section in the second half and just running around the perimeter, it would easily win its way out of being an embarrassing footnote.

      1. the track would be too short. Really short.

        That final section was alright, when F1 cars from the 70’s went more than half the lap flat out (round the big loop and the two long straights), so it was a bit of a challenge, the same way they slow Monza a bit with Ascari, or the old Hockenheim with the Stadium bit.

        what’s sad tho, is they modified one of the best tracks in the world (the old number 15 layout) with this “….”

        1. Formula 1 needs more short, fast circuits. Like this: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4116051

          I’m sick of every circuit being 5.5km long. We need more variety – the rules allow for everything from 3.5km to 7km, so let’s get a range in there. Of course, for this to work, I’m kind of assuming that the midfield section is going to be a cross between Silverstone and Interlagos … but I can’t help shake the feeling that I’ve done nothing for a glorified go-kart circuit. Maybe if we just drained the reservoir a bit and did this instead:

          http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4116058

  4. Armaan Ebrahim? Isn’t he that former Bollywod actor who drove in Formula 2 this season and couldn’t even beat Plamen Kralev? Or am I thinking of someone else?

    1. You are thinking about someone else, he is a good driver from India probably the best I have seen of his class.He represented India in the A1 GP & racing F2 now.

    2. I think you mean Ajith Kumar. Not to nitpick, but he acts in south Indian films, not Bollywood (the Hindi film industry).

      Armaan is the son of one of India’s first F3 drivers, Akbar Ebrahim. So he’s got some racing pedigree and from what I hear he’s been doing a decent job.

  5. ” For 2011 we have a group of young engineers who want to show their worth, so we are ambitious again.”

    & Schumacher to help to have the best car on the grid, fingers crossed.

    1. Will he make that much of a difference due to testing limitations though?

      1. @ Skett
        May be as Schumi is experience so that will definitely helped them & as he is an old friend of Brawn so I didn’t see why why it won’t work. This season it was a late call for Schumi to join the team & by the time the car was ready he couldn’t put too many input to the car.

    2. I wonder why didn’t they rehire the guys who designed the 2009 car?

      1. Where does it say they didn’t? The problem with Mercedes is that Brawn GP didn’t have much money, and so they had to concentrate on winning the 2009 titles when everyone else could split their resources between the 2009 campaign and the 2010 car. As a result, they didn’t have much time or money to go about developing the car that became the W01. If anybody from the team that designed the RA109/BGP-001 left, it was probably because they were lured away by the bigger teams. There was one engineer on the team whose identity Brawn went to extraordinary lengths to protect because he was supposedly responsible for the car’s diffuser and if the other teams found out who he was, they’d move heaven and earth to recruit him. Apparently they did find out his name, but I’ve heard he was actually a phantom, a non-existent person created by Ross Brawn to attract the other teams’ attention while the actual minds behind the BGP-001’s brilliance could continue working unmolested, in the hopes that by the time everyone worked out the Unnamed Junior Aerodynamicist was a fabrication, those who were actually responsible for the car would already be under contract with Brawn/Mercedes.

        1. He’s a smart man the Ross Brawn.

        2. If that’s true that’s both hilarious and brilliant. Serves the other teams right.

          1. It’s exactly what I’d do in his position.

  6. UneedAFinn2Win
    21st October 2010, 9:56

    Has this been posted already :
    http://www.formula1unitedstates.com/masterPlan.html

    It’s the “masterplan” for the Austin track

    1. Posted a few weeks ago, actually.

      1. UneedAFinn2Win
        21st October 2010, 13:58

        My bad, got september 21 confused with october 21.

  7. Kimi Raikkonen won his WC this day in 2007, how on earth this is missed!

    1. I don’t write out every single noteworthy occurrence for every single day. That way I have the option of continuing the feature in future without it becoming overly repetitive.

      1. Good call. 3 years since a random world champion, or 20 since one of the biggest controversies in F1? You’ve picked well.

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