Pelican

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  • #246576
    Pelican
    Participant

    1. Sebastian Vettel
    2. Michael Schumacher
    3. Fernando Alonso
    4. Lewis Hamilton
    5. Kimi Raikonnen
    6. Robert Kubica
    7. Jenson Button
    8. Nico Rosberg
    9. Felipe Massa
    10. Mark Webber

    #245705
    Pelican
    Participant

    Sergio Perez at Force India? Haven’t heard that one before, but why not. Sutil at Sauber isn’t the worst idea, he’s not great, but he’s not bad either, (Force India wouldn’t have kept him around so long if he was useless) and he has a lot of set-up experience. They’d probably rather not run two rookies again.
    And yeah, Lotus’s situation is looking bad. If Maldonado keeps them alive, hallelujah. Hulkenburg will probably be better off at force India anyway: Lotus can’t have spent a penny on next year’s car, most likely theirs will be a dud.

    #243951
    Pelican
    Participant

    I’m pessimistic about next year – the new engines might shake up the order, but limiting fuel will kill the racing even more: drivers won’t be able to fight for position if it costs them too much fuel, or will have to bring the pace down at the end of the race–a driver running on fumes, falling backwards in the closing laps might count for a lot of “passes” but it sure isn’t exciting, any more than a DRS breeze-by pass. The short-lived tires are just dreary, too. I think I liked the ones that lasted the whole race better. Seriously – what on earth is the point of perfecting a race car that is aerodynamically perfect, then hobbling it every which way? Who’s grand idea is it that fans want to see tire- and fuel-saving races?
    There are so many things to like about F1 right now, a lot of seriously talented drivers and fairly even teams (red bull excepted), but it’s all for nothing if they can’t race against each other.

    #230656
    Pelican
    Participant

    Aish Heydrich – if you check out that globe you told dedischado to look at, you’ll notice that despite being in Asia, New Delhi is considerably closer to Bahrain and Abu Dhabi than it is to the East Asian races, so geographically it would make more sense to lump it in with the middle east. Sheesh yourself.

    #230651
    Pelican
    Participant

    Bahrain and Abu Dhabi probably compete with each other too. Also, it would be hard to find a time of year where the weather’s not too hot in Texas or too cold in Montreal to put those races back-to-back. If you held the canadian grand prix a few weeks before Brazil, in late october or early november, Pirelli might need to make snow tires.

    #229070
    Pelican
    Participant

    I think Webber could win with one of Newey’s Red Bulls, if he didn’t have to beat Vettel to do it. I don’t see that happening and he’ll probably retire before Vettel leaves. Massa probably won’t come as close as he did again, Sutil, Maldonado, and the Toro Rosso boys will probably never be picked up by a fast enough team, I’m not sure di Resta is fast enough or Grosjean clean enough to win consistently, Hulkenberg is solid but only occasionally brilliant, and given the funding constraints winnowing out lower-level drivers, I doubt the next generation will be as good as the one we’ve got.
    Rosberg could do it if a good enough car came to him: he might not be the fastest, but he’s consistant, he won’t throw away points. As long as he keeps up with Hamilton this year it’s a possiblity, so he’s on my list. Perez is already in a front-running team, so he’s in contention a few years down the road, (if he doesn’t screw up too badly this year), he’s still a little flukey but he’s not bad. For my third, Kubica. He’s apparently been wicked fast in every car he’s tested this winter, he’s had no shortage of offers in other series, and he still wants to do F1. I bet in a year or two, someone will build him a car he can drive (one-handed if necessary) and he’ll be back.

    #220797
    Pelican
    Participant

    Rob lomas – not exactly. I don’t know where the NFL is going with the Wembley games, but I don’t think they’re doing any harm.
    The national hockey league took teams away from stagnant cities in Canada and the Midwest and moved them down to growing cities in the southern US. The teams that landed in smaller cities like Columbus and San Jose became legitimately popular because they were the only major league team. In big cities people bought tickets for a year or two while it was something new, but attendance quickly dropped and some of the teams went bankrupt.
    The root of the problem is that the south has no hockey culture: in the northern half of the continent, kids learn how to skate and play pick-up hockey games in second-hand gear on outdoor municipal rinks, flooded back yards, and frozen ponds. Down south, no one learns to play hockey: the winters are too warm, indoor rink time and new equipment are too expensive, and there’s other things to do. So the sport was a hard sell (like the NFL in London) because no one grew up caring about it and everyone followed other sports. The Atlanta team moved to Winnipeg last year , and the league has trying to sell the team in Phoenix for 3 years. Winnipeg has 1/7th the population of Atlanta but all of them love hockey; there’s a line of willing and able buyers in Canada for the Phoenix team, but the league seems to want to keep the team in Arizona where no one can figure out how to make it break even.

    #220793
    Pelican
    Participant

    Prisoner Monkeys – why is it elitism to put races where there are fans to buy the tickets? A race track should seat 200,000 people, is that the attendance the asian races are getting? I agree F1 should try to expand its audience, but plunking down grands prix in places where they’re just expensive novelties isn’t a very good way. (The NHL tried that, too: it doesn’t work. You can build it, but why should they come?)

    #214927
    Pelican
    Participant

    Romain Grosjean? What? How?

    #216365
    Pelican
    Participant

    Oh, and morning, Journeyer! (she says, while making dinner) Nice work with the running tallies and analysis.

    #216364
    Pelican
    Participant

    Volga – I didn’t name Hakkanin because I’ve never seen him race, I wasn’t watching F1 at the beginning of the century. Unfair, yes, but I didn’t want to rank him on solely on reputation, or watch all the races I missed from 2000 to 2006ish.

    #216730
    Pelican
    Participant

    1. Fernando Alonso raced the wheels off the car all season.
    2. Sebastian Vettel proved he could climb up from the back of the field as well as win from pole.
    3. Kimi Raikonnen made no mistakes, but could maybe have gotten a few more places out of his car.
    4. Lewis Hamilton
    5. Jenson Button
    6. Mark Webber
    7. Nico Rosberg won his first race!
    8. Felipe Massa finally showed us why he’s driving for Ferrari in the last few races of the season.
    9. Michael Schumacher wasn’t bad for a mid-field driver.
    10. Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado are both seriously fast. Maldonado toned down his bone-headedness but didn’t match his win in Barcelona, Grosjean stayed racy but kept crashing. His seems to have a lack of spacial awareness, it might be the bigger problem
    12. Nico Hulkenburg is the fastest driver in the field at Interlagos in the damp. Only.
    13. Sergio Perez started the season promisingly, then faded off.
    14. Kamui Kobayashi is daring enough to try passes no one else would and skilled enough to pull them off, but he just isn’t fast enough around the racecourse.
    15. Paul di Resta
    16-24. no opinion

    #216311
    Pelican
    Participant

    1. Alonso
    2. Schumacher
    3. Vettel
    4. Hamilton
    5. Raikonnen
    6. Kubica
    7. Button
    8. Massa
    9. Webber
    10. Kovalainen
    I know I’m missing and underrating drivers from the early ’00s before I started watching F1.

    #210881
    Pelican
    Participant

    My german’s crap too, but that’s pretty fabulous. King on four wheels (Koenig auf vier reifen) is the title, and the chorus is something like,
    You are the Master forever,
    King on four tires,
    No one else can compare,
    No others will achieve that,
    No one can achieve it (not sure about these 2 lines)
    You’re the king on four wheels

    #216160
    Pelican
    Participant

    Yeah, it’s definately an unfair advantage to Red Bull to have the free passes from Toro Rosso. But I don’t know how a rule against it would be enforced, since a midfield driver might want to let a front-runner breeze rather than lose time delaying the inevitable. Of course, the way Vergne parked his car in the yellow flag video is something else entirely… THe best way to stop it is to ban any one person or entity from owning to teams, so Toro Rosso would have to be sold to an independent owner–but who wants to buy a middling F1 team in this economy?

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 30 total)