When Raikkonen speaks up, it’s important – Whiting

F1 Fanatic Round-up

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In the round-up: FIA race director Charlie Whiting says Kimi Raikkonen’s reticence is why he is taken seriously when he does speak up.

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Whiting: In F1, no one day is like another (GP Update)

"You know if Kimi (Raikkonen) says something it's important, because he never says anything. But if he feels strongly enough about it, he will say something, so you need to listen to what he says, because he actually means it."

Popularity nothing to do with Raikkonen's new deal - Ferrari (Motorsport)

"He was renewed because when you are putting together a young team, you need to find a balance. I consider Kimi a champion, who works very well with Sebastian (Vettel) and gives a big contribution to the growth of the team."

Audi boss Ullrich laughs off continual F1 rumors (NBC)

"This is a discussion I’ve lived with for 20 years, and we never did it. So I would be surprised if we did it tomorrow."

E la Grecia ci crede (ancora): resta in piedi il sogno della Formula 1 a Drapetsona (F1 Web - Italian)

Work continues on the proposal for an F1 circuit in Greece, with the promoters hoping to announce a deal with Bernie Ecclestone in October.

A big day for Moto GP (F1 Broadcasting)

"Dorna say that the operation consists of 19 Ultra HD cameras, 'including a High Speed, Super Slow Motion Camera and the world´s first live wireless 4K cameras', which compares to 141 HD cameras that Dorna normally take to each round."

Return To V6 (sic) Engines Could Double F1's Fanbase Says Rising Racing Star (Forbes)

Bernie Ecclestone: "The product (F1's engines) is not fit for the purpose. If we were trying to name what we wanted we wouldn’t have had that."

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Comment of the day

This weekend’s Caption Competition was won by @Eggry:

“Look, Felipe is faster than you…”
@Eggry

Thanks to everyone who joined in this weekend, and special thanks to @philipgb, @andae23, @constructf1, @jethro and Baconisgood2me who also made some excellent suggestions.

From the forum

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On this day in F1

The 1980 championship fight closed up as Nelson Piquet won the Dutch Grand Prix 35 years ago today while points leader Alan Jones damaged his car’s ground effect-generating bodywork by running over a kerb.

Derek Daly had a fortunate escape when his Tyrrell cleared a barrier in this crash:

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54 comments on “When Raikkonen speaks up, it’s important – Whiting”

  1. The caption is absolutely perfect.

    1. If you want to tease Fernando it is perfect but as funny caption is not funny at all. Or perhaps I didn’t get the joke. One thing it certain this past couple seasons Massa has been “faster” than Fernando.

      1. ColdFly F1 (@)
        31st August 2015, 8:17

        ???? or should I say “????”

      2. It is an allusion to the 2010 German Grand Prix where Massa was told the opposite.

      3. @peartree DEU 2010: “……Fernando is fastrer than you….”

        1. @saints @davidnotcoulthard So it’s just because of that. That’s bullying. I don’t think bullying is funny. That said I couldn’t care less for either drivers, thank god they are out of Ferrari.

          1. @peartree Calling it “Bullying” is so overdramatical that it is ridiculous, nonsensical. Think before you post, and make sure you understand the words you’re using.

          2. Bullying? Seriously?

    2. And yet, I feel like it is just low hanging fruit.

      1. That’s the best kind

    3. Yes it is! :-D

  2. https://vimeo.com/137422184
    belgian gp onboard highlights. including maldonado messing up his race by hitting a kerb too hard.

    1. @sato113 It wasn’t the kurb, It was the raised painted strips behind the kurbs.

      Those same strips did this to a GP3 car during practice-
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezskGCwF7Pg

    2. Honestly in Pastor’s defence, he did the perfect run-up, slowing before eau rouge getting a great exit. He went a little wider than most but I don’t think anyone would expect to have the car shutting down for a mere 17g impact. Had that not been the case he would have easily taken the car in front, and perhaps threaten the next one.

      1. “Threaten” is the right word for it :)

  3. Audi and BMW need to enter/return to F1. The German F1 scene is incredibly weak, which is weird considering it’s a nation known for its mechanical engineers and auto makers.
    The good thing of Mercedes domination is that is putting a question mark on them. When it qas Ferrari and RBR dominating, they had little reason to care. But now it’s their direct competitor the one making headlines (and getting an aporx. 1bn+ in marketing revenue).
    Of course, the stupid rules for PU development, rule making, strategy group, revenue share etc etc ruins it everything.

    When you think about it, it’s really impressive how F1 managed to create the worst set of rules for every possible escenario.

    1. I’m disappointed with the way this ‘token’ system is implemented. Honda haven’t been given the same treatment as the other three manufacturers in their first year so what kind of message is this sending to other potential entrants?

      1. I assume you mean because the rules were weakened specifically to allow Honda to run more PUs than the original rules which applied, and because the grid penalty rules were also made easily specifically so that Honda could run even more PUs and still get less of a penalty than the original rules?

        I’d say the message it’s sending out is that if you screw up badly enough F1 will change its rules to make it easier for you?

        1. I agree, Honda had an extra year to look at everybody else’s engine (and for McLaren to tell us how great it was going to be) have tokens in their first year when the others had none, and now have been given extra engines and the rules changed so that they don’t have to take all the penalties given to them …. Seems like a bit of favourites to me

    2. WEC is for technology, GT3 is sales and DTM is marketing, showing their models, that is how Audi sees it and there is no room for F1.

      1. I would say that all three series are for marketing purposes only given there is very little evidence for ‘trickle down’ technology from the WEC.

        After all, whilst Audi boasts about its hybrid technology at Le Mans, their road division is taking a hammering in certain major markets due to their lack of hybrid models: one of the reasons why Piech fell out with Winterkorn over Audi’s current marketing and development strategies was the fact that Audi won’t introduce any hybrid models until 2017 at the earliest, which is costing them sales in the US (sales for the VW Group have dropped 17% in the US) and also in China.

        Even then, the hybrid technology that Audi would be introducing is completely different to the system they use in the WEC, since the R18 uses proprietary systems developed by third parties that they do not have the IP rights to. In that area, racing in the WEC has no beneficial impact in terms of technological development: however, it would suit their marketing drive to spin the usual “from the track to your car” marketing line by creating an association between their success in the WEC and their road cars.

  4. If toto is saying we might reach 365 kph/ 227mph at monza, what is the highest ever top speed recorded by an F1 car in an official F1 session? (fp1,2, qualy, race)

    1. @sato113 I read it was Raikkonen in 2005 with 370 km/h, also in Monza.

    2. Montoya recorded 231.523 mph at Monza in 2005.

    3. struggling to find a definite answer here. I found Antonio Pizzonia with BMW Williams at monza: 369.9 km/h (229.8 mph) given as the record in an official session… link

    4. It wasn’t strictly an F1 car, and not an F1 event, but
      Honda have the “fastest F1 car ever”:
      http://jalopnik.com/this-honda-is-the-fastest-formula-one-car-ever-made-1658080684

      They left with a record average of 397.360kph (246.908mph) in the mile and 397.481kph (246.983mph) in the flying kilometer.

    5. I remember Ricciardo hit 362kph last year (DRS, ERS, slipstream). If a Williams or maybe a Lotus can get those three things who knows what could happen.

    6. @sato113 @beneboy I remember reading Rosemayer doing 400+ Km/h moments before he died in a european Championship car…

      Not an F1 car, but surely close enough?

  5. Sadly I didn’t get chance to see the 4K Moto GP broadcast today, so can’t comment specifically, but I don’t think 4K TV will catch on in the consumer market. Also, in the pro market 8K is only a year or two down the line. I got chance to watch an 8K test broadcast at the World Cup last year (for NHK, Japan) and the detail was amazing – you could see every face in the crowd. Great for cinema, but I’m not interested in that for home.

    For me, I hope this technology will help provide better replays, allowing for extreme zoomed close ups that still provide HD quality footage. The day that they condense a 4K or 8K camera into a front / rear wing or roll bar will be impressive.

    1. The new iPhones will have 4K capability, and I think Go Pro’s have 4K capability so physical size isn’t the issue. I think the issue is the digital size of 4K, it seems for some reason that the FOM have embarrassingly low capabilities for streaming video from the cars, even in 2015 apparently they only have access to live streams from a couple of cars at a time – hence why no one definitively know why Kimi and Fernando crashed in Austria. If they can’t handle more than a few 1080p streams (the onboard footage is fairly low quality so it may even be upscaled from a lower resolution) then it will be many years before we see 4K cameras on board the cars. The FOM needs to invest more in the presentation of the sport, I’d love to have a live view from both cars involved in a fight side by side, it would be great viewing. There’s also a safety aspect as I referred to earlier with the crash in Austria, what if something fails on a car in the future that the drivers miss? And is it possible that if Vettel was not in a battle in Belgium, but far away from others on his own, and the FOM choose instead streams from other cars instead, that we would have missed the rear view of his tyre showing very clearly what happened to it, providing valuable technical information to Pirelli on the circumstances of the blow out. There were no cameras with a good view of the blow out, so there would have been a dearth of actual live evidence for analysis, and Pirelli would have been left with driver feedback (unreliable as demonstrated with his language) and post mortem analysis. Purely for the safety aspect it seems like it is worth the investment by the FOM, let alone the viewing improvements for the fans.

      1. @williamstuart Its not just an FOM issue, No racing category is able to have live feeds from every car because there simply isn’t the bandwidth. FOM currently have 9 live in-car feeds & thats more than what a lot of other categories can manage.

        When I worked the Indycar race at Barber we had cameras on 9 cars but could only have 7 active.

        he new iPhones will have 4K capability, and I think Go Pro’s have 4K capability so physical size isn’t the issue.

        Neither are broadcast capable cameras though. You couldn’t use the sort of camera thats on a phone for an in-car camera system because the camera on an iphone is designed for an iphone, You couldn’t rip the camera off the board & hook it upto an in-car camera system… It simply wouldn’t work. Its the same with a GoPro.

        You also need to take into account the forces & temperatures that in-car cameras have to withstand. In-car cameras are designed with all these things in mind & they need to fit within existing camera housings which were designed with input from teams to ensure there as aero-neutral as possible.

        Live broadcast capable 4k cameras small enough to fit on an open wheel car are a long way off.

        1. @gt-racer, @williamstuart

          In cycle racing they have many bike-mounted cameras but they are not capable of broadcasting (I’m no expert, but I suspect the difficulties of streaming on a 200km point-to-point race are even more complex than on a closed circuit!). However, the footage is recorded and is used in highlights once it is obtained from the cameras which means that there is often footage of any given incident available post-race.

          I wonder why FOM don’t do that with all in-car footage – I guess the storage would have to be both sufficiently large and also robust enough to cope with extremes of F1 (and survive crashes) but with F1 engineering surely that’s possible? It may even be possible to take a quick download of each camera’s data at a pitstop so that footage would become available before the end of a race if not actually live.

        2. Go pro’s are often used for broadcast footage in sports like motor racing, cycling, sailing, aviation, etc. they have wireless modules available for live streaming too. Have a look at some vids.
          http://gopro.com/news/gopro-behind-the-scenes-of-furious-7

          1. The wireless modules are not suitable for live professional broadcasts, they are barely up to the task of the purpose they were designed for, which is recording your bike ride onto your phone live. Trying to hook one of those into a blackmagic desk would be a nightmare and it would disconnect itself everytime the wind changed. Literally.

        3. Yeah thanks for the insight, fair enough if the FOM is at the forefront. What’s the development been like, how long have they been at 9 streams? With the rate of development in other sectors (such as phones, which only really started to get 1080p video about four or five years ago) I want to see the technology trickle down and show up in F1, I don’t see any reason why its not directly transferrable.
          Also, has there been any progress with the high speed onboard cameras they talked about a few weeks ago, like when they are going to start being used and how they will be used?

    2. @eurobrun

      For me, I hope this technology will help provide better replays, allowing for extreme zoomed close ups that still provide HD quality footage.

      Which is what FOM are already doing in F1.

      FOM have a few 4k cameras & if you look at some of the super slow motion shots the past 2 years you see they pause & zoom in further on those shots sometimes without losing quality because its a 4k camera.

      9:45 in this clip for example-
      https://vimeo.com/102950959

    3. Ron Brooks (@)
      31st August 2015, 7:10

      The comments address the problems viewing 4K at the track. But streaming and cable/satellite use compression to minimize delivery system bandwidth requirements. That’s why you see big blocks when the scene changes, for example. 4K will simply exacerbate these problems, particularly on fast moving objects. Not saying it can’t be done. Am saying I expect it will a take a while.

  6. What’s the definition of a ‘moveable aerodynamic device’? There’s a little winglet attached to the Force India just under the brake duct that moves relative to the steering angle of the car. It’s fairly vertical so it’s not directing flow to the brake duct to aid cooling, but it does seem designed to direct flow around the side pods to improve rear downforce. Since it is vertical i can’t really see what else it does, so Im assuming they’re trying to get some aero benefit from it, therefore isn’t it the definition of a moveable aero device?

    1. The regulations effectively define a moveable aerodynamic device as a device that is not rigidly attached to another body, primarily the chassis of the car – in other words, it is designed in such a way that the aerodynamic device can rotate, flex or otherwise not behave like a rigid body when a load is applied to the device.

      In practise, given that nothing is infinitely rigid, the FIA effectively regulates moveable devices through the use of deflection tests and requirements for connections that are designed to restrict the amount of movement of an aerodynamic device.

      In the case of the winglet on the brake duct, the loophole that Force India are exploiting there is that, as per the regulations, the winglet is rigidly fixed to the brake duct. Although the wheel hub that the winglet is attached to does move, the winglet itself is not moving in relation to the wheel hub and therefore is not classed as a moveable aerodynamic device.

      1. Yeah, love the ingenuity in the Force India team.

    2. The definition of a “movable aerodynamic device” is “any device which offends the FIA, but isn’t covered specifically by any other regulation”.

      “Movable” applies not to how air flows over the device, but how the FIA applies regulations to the device.

  7. On the other news, Indy hasn’t learned their lessons from F1 and Montoya has just lost the title because of a double points race. Such a shame.

    1. @corix That happened after the round-up went up, of course. It’ll be in the Weekend Racing Wrap later today.

    2. @corix Didn’t Montoya already win a double points race?

      1. @jerseyf1 The indy 500 been double points makes sense because its more than twice the length of your average Indycar race on top of been the biggest race of the Indycar season.

        Sonoma was a 150 mile race on a crap, pretty unpopular track so that been double points was ridiculous & simply made zero sense. It was a pure gimmick done for no other reason than to spice up the championship for purely artificial reasons.

        What they have basically said this year is that Sonoma is just as big an event & just a good a track as Indy & that winning at Sonoma is just as big a deal as winning Indy…. This is pure BS.

  8. @Eggry Congrats . I did not even bother to attempt one since I thought this was the perfect one there !!!! In fact to be honest I did not even bother to read the rest after I saw your caption !!!!

  9. Return To V6 (sic) Engines Could Double F1’s Fanbase Says Rising Racing Star (Forbes)

    Forbes failing at the most basic fact-checking again. Aren’t they supposed to be a quality magazine? Or is this kind of sloppiness fully in line with Bernie’s preference for old men with no clue, but strong opinions?

    1. Thank you, thank you, That sort of misprint drives me crazy! I read it 4 times to make sure. If you get the headline wrong you have lost all credibility in the story.

  10. Oh, and congrats @Eggry. Like @tmax said: You nailed it.

  11. Thanks all!

  12. I do find the moaning about the noise completely weird. Mitch Evans liked having to use earplugs, so that he could listen to – muffled engine noise.

    1. Yeah I just cannot believe more noise would affect viewership to that degree. It implies viewership dramatically fell off once people heard the new pu’s, whereas it would seem anecdotally that just as many people have enjoyed not needing earplugs, and being able to bring smaller children to the races, as are bemoaning the change.

      I admit I (and I’ll assume everyone) only appreciated the noise once I was at a race in person (Montreal). So until you have gone to a race you really can’t appreciate it anyway. The vast majority of the audience on each weekend are not at the race in person.

      I certainly do get the concept of the previous noise in it’s immensity being quite impressive, but I think there are many who can appreciate the beauty in quieter engines that use so much less fuel producing just as much HP.

      It won’t bother me if in the near future the engines get louder, but at this point I think that will seem like a gadgety add-on, now that we know how quiet they can be. And really, I’m just not seeing the headlines this year about how badly the lack of scream is harming viewership as well as attendance at the races. I think last year some people just leapt to the conclusion upon hearing the noise, that it was a disaster. I hear no outcry this year, so there must be no factual evidence that the lack of scream is adversely affecting the product. Bad tires, incessant conservation, DRS, and processions nonetheless, are F1’s biggest enemies.

      1. @robbie
        My inner child misses the old engines and the noise they produced, although the V12 was far, far better than the V10 or V8 engines (which I never grew to love).
        The engineering and racing fan in me doesn’t miss the noise at all, it’s just a load of wasted energy that encourages people who live near to circuits complain about F1.
        Personally I can’t wait for the day the ICE is consigned to the history books, and events such as Goodwood, while racing cars and bikes are able to race with electric, hydrogen, or some other alternative power source that’s as quiet as a Formula-E car or TT Zero bike.

  13. Greece should use the circuit in “Constantinople”. That would save Istanbul Park from being a car dealership and save Greeks from themselves (spending more money when they have no money). :P They could do the promotion for Istanbul Park, instead of spending the hundreds of millions they borrowed from someone else. Then again, I’m not sure they would “bother”. Building a circuit seems easier than operating and promoting. They would have to keep “working”.

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