F1 Fanatic round-up: 28/6/2010

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Lots more European Grand Prix analysis and reaction coming up today including all the team-by-team breakdowns and the stats and facts from the race.

Here’s today’s round-up:

Links

Schu Soldiering On (Speed TV)

Ross Brawn says Mercedes considered bring both specifications of car to Valencia to get on top of their tyre problems: “It is very difficult. We did contemplate whether to have one car of each spec here, to judge it. But that also creates issues in terms of the weekend. We’re confident that this is the way we want to go. We have some further steps we want to introduce with this concept. We can only introduce those steps if we persevere and find the solutions that we need.”

Grosjean takes maiden win (Auto GP)

Romain Grosjean won his first race back in a single-seater.

Comment of the day

How can F1 prevent repeats of yesterday’s safety car confusion? SoLiDG urges them to follow NASCAR’s lead:

They should take an example from NASCAR, where stewarding is fast and fair!

Last week during a SC, the leader stopped on track because he fired down his engine to save fuel and couldn’t get it started right away (it was uphill).

He dropped to seventh, got it fired up and went back to the front. Later the stewards deemed that wrong, just called his team to drop back to seventh and done. (the safety car was still out).

This way the error is corrected and the race isn’t over for the driver. Great stewarding, how it should be!
SoLiDG

Tweet of the day

Lots of American fans were unhappy with Fox’s delayed and interrupted coverage of the race. This from Christine Martin in North Carolina:

Not happy at all with Fox’s delayed coverage of F1… and in a can too with multiple laps replaced by too many commercials.

Happy birthday!

We’ve got four birthdays today – happy birthday to Hezla, Stefano, Wanon and Danny D!

On this day in F1

The Brabham team scored their first Formula 1 win on this day in 1964 in the French Grand Prix at Rouen-les-Essarts. However it was not team founder and driver Jack Brabham who gave his team its maiden victory, but his team mate Dan Gurney.

Gurney moved to the front after early leader Jim Clark retired with engine trouble. There was an element of poetic justice to this, Clark having inherited victory from Gurney at Spa-Francorchamps two weeks earlier.

Gurney had a lead of more than a minute over his team mate at this point. Brabham was caught and passed by Graham Hill, who had spun on lap three and lost a lot of time, and the pair spent the rest of the race disputing second place.

By the chequered flag Brabham lost out to Hill by less than a second, but the team which bore his name were Grand Prix winners for the first time.

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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49 comments on “F1 Fanatic round-up: 28/6/2010”

  1. Delayed coverage and race laps replaced with adverts? Sounds like Eurosport…

    1. Or maybe ESPN Star Sports…

    2. Sounds like channel 10.

      Hell we even get the Aus commentators, who do nothing but talk about Webber, and compare the race to Moto GP.

    3. Fox summer showing of the F1 raceing is a joke. I absolutely hate it. First of the race isn’t even live. Then sure the same commentators but they dumb it down to the point I want to just turn of the audio and CONSTANT interuption with commercial at the most horrible times. Makes you feel like the people behind have NO clue about F1 racing and this is supposed to be the same people that runs it on SpeedTV.
      I overslept Sunday and woke up without alarm (forgot to set it for a few minutes before 7am) about 7:10 turn on TV to see it wasn’t on speed and flipped through and found it was shown at 11am on Fox and went back to sleep.
      Next race I will be there in person so don’t care and German GP I will still be in Europe just have to hope wherever I’m at the moment there will be a place to watch the race. Next race after that I will be back home and Fox should have handed over the broadcast to Speed again.

  2. Keith, all of a sudden I keep getting messages that say ‘You are posting too quickly. Slow down.’ Fair enough if they’re within a minute of each other, but I just got one after not posting for several hours!

    1. I’ve been getting this, too.

    2. is there a five-second penalty if you post too quickly?

      1. also having this problemm

      2. No, but there’s a delay. Thankfully, if you time it right, your comment still goes up before the next guy’s.

    3. I get this too, got it for my first comment of the day in fact haha.

      1. Same for me. And now, my comment is too short, so I have to write more (I don’t know why).

    4. Same here, Icthyes.

    5. Sorry about this guys, will look into it. We have had a huge volume of comments in the past 18 hours.

      1. Just out of curiosity, do you come up with the ‘slow done, you move too fast’ and ‘it looks like you’ve already said that’ auto responses, or is that a wordpress thing?

        1. It’s a WordPress thing.

  3. They really picked some annoying times to go to commercial such as immediately before they lined up at the grid after the warm up lap. Plus, considering it was already on a time-delay there was no need to miss any laps at all. Honestly, it’s a mixed blessing getting to watch it on regular TV. On the one hand I’m happy to see such high quality images instead of a torrent file. Or in the case of Canada, getting to ACTUALLY see it live in real time. Yet, the fact that BBC has no commercial breaks makes it tempting to simply be patient and find it online after it’s over.

    Besides, it feels like every five seconds they’re explaining the same couple dozen facts about F1 for an American audience unfamiliar with the sport. Something I don’t have to put up with on the BBC.

    1. I think they do tend to dumb down the commentary on FOX vs. SPEED, for the non F1 fans who might happen to catch the race, which definitely gets annoying. Not nearly as bad when it’s on SPEED. Valencia was actually an improvement over Canada (where they started on the formation lap), in that they actually did a small amount of pre-race coverage. It was still nowhere near the standard 1/2 hour they do on SPEED, and the post race coverage was abysmal. They cut straight from the checkered flag to the press conference, where they didn’t even show the first question but rather cut in starting with Vettel’s answer to that question and ended the broadcast immediately after that one question. Had to go online and read the transcript for the rest of the press conference. I don’t mind SPEED’s standard coverage, and while I would pay extra to see it commercial free if given the option, I realize that they have to show some ads. FOX’s coverage is just embarrassing.

  4. Latin Americans have it though with the coverage too. And it’s FOX too. Every 6 laps or so, there’s a LOOOONG advert… and you often miss the only interesting bit of the race…

  5. I had exactly the same thing happen.

    1. That was meant to be a reply to Katy.

  6. “How can F1 prevent repeats of yesterday’s safety car confusion?”

    Simple.

    Don’t have a safety car.

    Have a full course speed limit with no overtaking instead.

    If all the cars are slowed down to the pit lane speed limit (for example), then it will be safe for marshalls to retrieve debris; the gaps drivers have worked to build up won’t be taken away – the race positions won’t be artificially changed; cars can still pit in the normal way without requiring a stop light at the end of the pits; the cars won’t be bunched up ready to create another accident.

    A full course speed limit is easy to implement with the current technology. Stop-go penalties for drivers who breach it are easy to apply in the same way they are for pit-lane infringements.

    I don’t understand why they don’t do this.

    1. Mark Hitchcock
      28th June 2010, 4:17

      “Have a full course speed limit with no overtaking instead.”

      Isn’t that essentially what they’ve tried to achieve with the current rules on lap-deltas when catching up with the Safety Car? And look how that worked out today…

      The fact that so many drivers broke the safety car rules today kind of goes to show they can’t really be trusted to stifle their competitive urges when safety is the priority.

      Plus, the Safety Car is dynamic. It can slow the pack down as much as necessary for each individual incident. That would be more difficult to do if you just left it up to the drivers.

      1. It’s the dynamic nature that is the problem. If you give driver’s a hard speed limit rather than a lap-delta you will see a different result. Almost no one is caught speeding in the pit lane any more.

    2. The Safety Car is required to bunch up the field so that the marshalls have a clear minute-or-so long window during which they can clean up debris / attend to a driver in case he is in need of attention.

      1. Except that the debris seems to have been cleared before the cars are in a neat line in 90% of cases. And with people pitting, their is nearly always a driver racing back to the tail of the snake, so there often isn’t a clear minute.

        The idea is to make it safe for the Marshals to do their job. If everyone were doing the pit lane speed limit it would be safe. Remember there would also be double waved yellows on the corner where the actual incident has taken place. Additionally, race control could inform drivers by radio how to pass the wreckage, i.e. “Incident in Turn 13, keep left on approach.”

  7. I watched both the BBC version live and the tape delayed Fox coverage.

    The pure ugly truth is that the Fox coverage is a detriment to the sports expansion in the states. Even with two or three hours to edit, the tape delayed events are simply not presented in an interesting or compelling way. On tape delay, with an additional 20 minutes to the already numerous commercial breaks the announcers are even more clueless than normal. Strategy nuances or even simple explanations can’t even be approached because the next ad break is coming in six minutes.

    Showing Valencia (the track with nearly no overtakes in 2 years) against the NASCAR race and Sunday baseball is just moronic. While this race was better than the last two on the Spanish shore, to edit it so badly when the race was surrounded by infomercials and taped skateboarding coverage from May is just ridiculous.

    While Speed has done great work providing more coverage access to American fans, it is really time for a change. The Speed and Fox contract has slowly gone downhill and I really think the only way to spark some new interest and get some fresh blood announcing is to move to a new network. I’m sure Versus, Comcast Sports or the ESPN family can make the contracts with FOM work without having to sabotage themselves with nonstop commercials, using announcers in a stateside studio, and providing almost childlike commentary. I’m even ready to do a ppv deal through satellite or cable to get all the coverage other countries are afforded.

    1. I believe there’s a BBC America. Mayhaps it would make sense to give it to them?

      1. the bbc has paid for the uk broadcast only, so to show it here they would have to outbid fox. yeah, that will go over well i’m sure :)

        bbc america is terribad to be honest, but sports would be a big draw for them. there’s millions of indians here that find it nearly impossible to watch cricket, as just one example.

  8. The SPEED and Fox coverage here in the States is atrocious. They immediately went to a commercial break during Vettel’s radio transmission after he passed the chequered flag. They had two hours after the live transmission–how could they knowingly do that?!

    1. Fox is probably the worst of the major US networks at showing sporting events.

      I had to put today’s race on the DVR, and got through the whole thing in about 45 minutes by fast-forwarding the commercials.

  9. “Lots more Canadian Grand Prix analysis and reaction coming up today including all the team-by-team breakdowns and the stats and facts from the race.”

    Canadian GP analyisis?

    1. Sorry, European of course!

      1. Sorry Keith I wasn’t meaning to be picky! I just got confused, not that it takes much on a Monday morning. I was hunting around for today’s thinking i’d clicked on one from last week :p

        1. No problem. Last thing I wrote at the end of a long weekend!

  10. While I watch the race live on BBC, I also record it on our local commercial channel RTL7 after much lamenting in the earlier years, they now have short commercials triggered by the commenter when he feels it is best – and then they show a dual picture of race on the left, commercial on the right. If he got it wrong, they replay parts. Pretty well done. And he sometimes sees things Brundle misses too!

    By the way, did anyone see this article: http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns22390.html – a rather level headed attempt at an analysis what actually happened, also including the viewpoint of race control.

    1. That sums up what happened nicely and undersandably.

      It was a shame the SC had to come out as it stopped the fight for the lead. And it was very unfortunate for both Ferrari drivers as it ruined their race.

      But if Alonso thinks back about earliere occasions this year where he benefitted from the SC he should not be too upset.

  11. Bummer, I thought that race was exciting enough to get me comment of the day, oh well, maybe next time.

  12. I just remembered something! Recently pitting under SC was disallowed, but that was often unfair because some drivers had to take the penalty otherwise they would have ran out of fuel, but now with no refueling that is no longer an issue! So disallow pitting under SC, have a big red light before the pit entry line and time the announcement of the safety car so no car ‘accentually’ pits and we will have no problems!

    1. I was wondering about this myself.

      1. That’s very true, but there could always be a situation where a driver needs to change tires that are teetering on the brink of puncture.

        1. I don’t think there could be ever a problem with tyre wear, because there is a big difference between massive performance drop (when teams would definitely change them) and tyres going ‘bang’, and following the safety car tyres are not exactly punished. But there could be a problem with cars involved in the incident, they could have a puncture and/or front wing damage, witch would demand additions to this rule – no pit stops under SC.
          I think if a car has a front wing damage let them pit and only change the front wing, if there also is a puncture – let them also change the tyres with a set of equivalent compound used in previous sessions – That would mean that a car involved in an incident would not benefit performance or strategy wise. Also make them rejoin at the back of the SC queue(with red light at the end of pit lane), so they don’t get lucky with where and when the SC comes out in relation to where the rest of the cars are.
          I think that would cover all the major issues, and there would not be this lottery, also it would keep the cars who where in the incident at the back of the pack(which would mean some good racing) and not give them any benefits.

          1. Suppose the driver starts on super softs and pulls out a 20 second lead in the first 10 laps. Then he needs to change tyres and the safety car comes out …

            If the pit lane would have been closed, all the cars who started on the harder tyres would been put in front of the supersoft starters.

            The whole race order could have been flipped backwards.

            Perhaps it would have been fun to see Kobayashi lead the race up until the last few laps, but I cannot see how this is more fair than the current rules.

            Now 2 guys got a bad deal. When the pitlane would have closed at least the 10 drivers in Q3 would have had a bad deal. That’s a lot more drivers.

            It would have been slightly better if the safety car had waited till Massa had passed.

  13. Also try to make sure the lead cars know exactly where the SC is in relation to where they are, so they can adjust their speed appropriately without causing accidents amongst themselves, or run into the back of the SC!

  14. What was so good about this race. The SC ruined what we had going. After that no more overtaking apart from Kobayashi in the last lap.

  15. I’m in the states and as far as the delayed broadcast went, I just avoided online stuff or the tube where I might be informed of the race. But I was tempted to peek at the results around 11:00am EDT…;)

  16. Sorry if this was already covered and I didn’t find it.

    From Formula1.com: “Jenson Button, Rubens Barrichello, Nico Hulkenberg, Robert Kubica, Vitaly Petrov, Adrian Sutil, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Sebastien Buemi and Pedro de la Rosa have all received penalties from the Valencia stewards for safety-car rule infringements.

    All nine men will have five seconds added to their final race time for speeding under the safety car during their in-laps prior to pitting following Mark Webber’s dramatic crash in the early stages of the European Grand Prix.”

    Only thing this appears to change is that Alonso and Buemi trade 8th/9th positions. Maybe Fred will be happier with a couple more points.

      1. Yes, figured you had it somewhere, I just couldn’t find it. Very little gets past you, Keith, one of the things I like about this place :)

        1. Actually the problem is some stories disappear off the home page too quickly! Need to get this redesign done so I can keep stuff on the home page longer.

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