F1

All F1 cars wallpapers

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  • #133156
    pH
    Participant

    The short Story:
    What: All (almost) F1 cars, sorted by seasons and ordered by their standings in the Constructor’s cup.
    How: A series of wallpapers. A nice idea is to use them as a screensaver (slideshow mode). Or you can print them out and plaster around your place :-).
    Where: http://math.feld.cvut.cz/habala/misc/WP/F1.zip
    Why: The famous “All F1 cars poster”, the giant jpeg, had some serious omissions, I had to add some 130 cars to make the “All” nearer to truth. I started in 2010, finally it is done (hooray!).

    Comments/advice are welcome.

    There is also a long story and some stats, but only if you are interested, don’t want to impose.

    #236695
    Polishboy808
    Participant

    Wow, thats amazing. I’ve been wanting to do something like this but never found the drive to really do it, and you’ve gone out and made it beautiful. It really looks fantastic, thanks!

    By the way, share away with the story and stats.

    #236696
    plushpile
    Participant

    With the (almost) what cars are you missing?

    #236697
    Nick
    Participant

    Awesome stuff! I liked the original All F1 Cars poster, but the file was huge, this is much easier to navigate.

    It really shows how cars changed radically in sudden years.

    #236698
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Brilliant, @ph!
    While we’re on the subject, I had collected and arranged the Ferrari cars from those wallpapers into a single image which I’ve just updated with the F138:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/filibertogeoni/8746754241/in/photostream

    #236699
    Force Maikel
    Participant
    #236700
    pH
    Participant

    What cars are you missing?

    Majority of cars from the 1950’s :-). However, it should be noted that a typical missing car ran in only one GP, typically Indy, often not even finishing. One could call them “one-miss wonders”. Then it gets much better and the wallpapers are complete as of late 1970’s.
    I wanted a single object that I could look at and see the flow, appreciate the development of Formula 1 through the years. A truly complete set would just hide the important trees in a forest of incompetent, so to speak. This actually brings me to the long story. Soon after getting the original jpeg I found a site where somebody arranged individual pictures by teams (http://www.fijen.net/f1/teams/index.html) and I liked it, then I decided to do the same but arrange cars by seasons and add some more information (drivers, results) to offer the substance of F1 at a glance. It got a bit out of hand, as I decided to also include links to pictures (a side view does not really give you a proper idea of a car’s shape), and once I was at it, I decided to include picture of a car with every (notable) driver for every season, which helps to explain why it took so long. I started to see this as a sort of test: How good is Internet really as a source of photos? And the answer is that not all that good.
    I went chronologically, so naturally the first cars that I found missing in the jpeg were those I did not care for very much anyway. However, the omissions grew more serious. Eventually I found 26 cars missing that finished their season in top 6 in the standings, including 6 cars that won (or helped to win) a championship (1970: Lotus 49C, 1976: McLaren M23, 1981: Williams FW07C, 1985: McLaren MP4/2B, 1987: Williams FW11B, 1990: McLaren MP4/5B). By now I was too deep into the whole idea to give up and I decided to fill in the missing cars, hoping that an Internet search would be enough. But first I had to decide where to draw the line. I knew I did not really want all cars, but do I need to see, say, a Trojan? In the end I decided to include all teams/constructors that contested at least one full season. As with every rule, there were exceptions, some cars seemed too interesting/important to leave out even though they drove less than a full season. Once I decided, I could make a list of cars that were missing in the above sense. Some stats on the original jpeg:
    Cars to fill in: about 120.
    The teams with most missing cars: McLaren (9, 6 of which were in top 3), Williams (8, 5 in top 3), Tyrrell and Lotus (7), Ferrari (5).
    Big name/traditional team with least missing cars: Brabham (1)
    Year with most missing cars: 1974 and 1980 (9), 1975 (8), 1981 (7)
    Best represented decade: 1960’s (only 8 cars missing).
    The poster was nearly complete from 1997 on.

    So I hit the Internet and as you would expect, things got a bit more complicated. I found usable pictures for only a third of the cars. For half of the cars I found pictures that needed some work, or a decent side photo that could be used as a basis for a picture. Here you can see what I mean by a moderate work.
    This left me with some 20 cars where I would have to draw a picture from scratch, sometimes reconstructing the shape from some oblique-angle photographs. I was scared, since I am not a painter nor a computer graphics guy, but I am sort of familiar with Photoshop so I dived in. After some false starts I found the right groove and things worked better than expected, I am quite happy with the outcome (see e.g. Era G (1953), RAM02 (1984), or Rials of 1984/5). In the end I even did some cars there were in the original jpeg but I would be ashamed to use them (e.g. March CG911 of 1992), bringing the total of new pictures to about 130. I was sorely tempted to tinker with even more cars (and I did with some from the 2009 season), but by this time I was getting tired of the whole business so I gave up. I learned a lot, but I am glad it is over :-).
    Now I just need to finish the web page.

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