scarface_au

+1

I was on the edge of my seat hoping for exactly that! Then they said they were low on fuel, right to the last corner I was praying they would chug to a stop while Webber swept past for the win that was rightfully his!

PR from Red Bull: Car 6 MARK WEBBER, Finish Position: 3rd, Start Position: 1st “Sebastian had a bit of a top speed advantage, he went down the inside and we were side by side. I was surprised when he came right suddenly, as I was holding my racing line. It happened very, very fast and it’s a shame for the team. Not an ideal day. The McLarens were solid and it was a good race between all four of us up at the front until then, neither of us wanted to make contact with each other. It’s obviously not ideal, but it happened. There was a long way to still go in the race, but that was an interesting few metres on the track between both of us. In the end it wasn’t the result that either of us wanted. We’ve got great character in our team and two fast drivers at the front – we’re not dicing for 15th and 16th – we’re going for victories so there’s clearly a lot at stake. I’ll have a chat with Sebastian about it, we might have a difference of opinion but we’ll be adults about it and press on.” Car 5 SEBASTIAN VETTEL, Finish Position: DNF Start Position: 3rd “If you watch it on the TV, you can see what happened. I’m not in the happiest of moods. I was on the inside going into the corner. I was there, I was ahead and focusing on the braking point and then we touched. Mark’s car hit my rear right wheel and I went off – there’s not much more to say. We were all on the same pace during the race, I think I was a bit quicker than Mark for two or three laps, I was catching him and thought I could get him on the back straight. I was very close and passed him on the left, that’s the story. This is something that happens, no one needs it, but there’s not much you can do now.” CHRISTIAN HORNER, Team Principal: “It’s disappointing for the team to have got into that position today. The one thing I always ask the drivers is that, yes, they can race each other, but give each other room, and that’s exactly what didn’t happen. They were too far over on the left, Sebastian got a run on the inside of Mark, but then came across too early. They didn’t give each other room; it’s as simple as that. It was a massively close race between us and the McLarens up until that point. We managed to get ourselves ahead with a better pit-stop and a better strategy for Sebastian and were first and second. Sebastian was a bit happier on the prime tyre than Mark and was looking quicker at that point in the race. He got a run on Mark up the inside and we saw what happened. It’s massively disappointing and the situation shouldn’t have occurred. To give McLaren 28 points on a plate is very frustrating for everyone in the team – especially after so much har d work. We’ve lost a lot of points today with what’s happened. We need to learn from it, so we don’t find ourselves in this position again.”

Hmm. I'm tempted to give you a history lesson here but I'll just say one word: Suzuka. Not the first one, the year after. And people (myself included) used to blast Schumacher's bully-boy tactics ...

Exactly. The guy just likes being different so he gets attention. I bet when he was a driver he would have ripped Vettel's throat out for that stunt.

QFT

My first spotted! Saw you going past me earlier.

Maybe Schumi found something in the sand trap ...

OneHD isn't showing it until 10:30 in Melb

Hi guys, here is my pre-Skyline car that I would like to sell. This is what I've said in the ad online. ***PRICE REDUCED*** This is a great car that I'm sorry to be selling, but can't afford to keep as I've upgraded to a more powerful car. This car has low kilometres for its age, even cars newer than this have more k's on them. I've only had it for a few months after buying it from a dealer, who installed a new timing belt and new front brake discs before I bought it. Since then I've had a new radiator and reconditioned air conditioning compressor put in, as well as an iPod compatible stereo head unit and four new speakers. Regrettably there are some cosmetic issues. The paintwork in places is faded, the rear window tinting is rippled and there is a dent in the left rear corner that I've been quoted $450 to fix. The electric window control on the driver's side is loose, but it could probably be fixed with a bit of glue. The good news is that this car is fantastic under the skin. You can literally drive it all day and still feel fresh at the end. I drove it 1700 km in a weekend once, including a non-stop five hour stint, and it was wonderfully comfortable the whole way. It's fun to drive around town too, the 2.6L V6 sounds great. As far as fuel goes, well it's no Prius, but I usually get about 11.5L/100 km around town and 8.5L/100 km on the highway running 95 octane fuel (which is the only fuel I've put in it). It had no manual when I bought it so I've had one sent over from the US. The stereo system, which I've spent over $700 on, is very good. This is a great cheap coupé that will last you very well. If you need a town runaround that's more interesting than a Corolla, or if you need a highway driver that's got more power than ... a Corolla, you'll be very happy with this car. Offers will be considered. *** The car has been involved in a low-speed accident since listing. The damage from that accident (slightly chipped paint and so on) will be repaired prior to sale or the cost of repair will be deducted. *** PM me for further info or a link to the carsales.com.au ad

I believe this solves the question of how much the replacement will cost, 15k sounds pretty low for replacing a lot of expensive equipment.

That depends. Is Tilke involved? If so, can we lace his corn-flakes with LSD this time?

Austin 3:16. Why? I don't bloody know! I agree with the other post that the US has several worthy tracks already. Why they're building a brand-new road course in SOUTHERN America (NASCAR country) is beyond me. This will probably flop. I hope to be proven wrong, but all I can say is I'm glad it's not my money. I do have to say, though, several of the US's top tracks would need more than a small investment to run F1. Watkins Glen and Laguna Seca, for example, would need extensive works to make FIA safety standards. There are a couple of sections of both where run-off is a major issue. Then again, they run at tracks like Monaco and Albert Park, which are as bad or worse.

Webber going to Ferrari could be the biggest mistake of his career. RBR are on the rise, they could be the team to beat for the next few years. Ferrari, on the other hand, haven't looked that competitive. These things can change dramatically from year to year, but if I were Webber I'd stay with RBR for the rest of my career. I, obviously, am not Mark Webber. But if I were that's what I'd do :-)

Sounds like good news. I guess I don't need to re-mortgage the house to buy a lifetime supply of Sougi now :-)

It's not so much a question of not listening as much as it is of interpretation. Often the problem with these debates is how you define terms. It's fine until people start getting narky and throwing insults at each other. That's when people stop listening.

And you seem to have misunderstood my understanding of your position. I never meant to say that you thought parts came directly off F1 cars. I may have overstated my position. I recognise now that there is some influence, but I maintain that it is distant and tenuous. The applications are, I still say, too different to have more than a minimal degree of commonality. If F1 disappeared tomorrow (something I sincerely hope never happens), I don't think the production of road cars would be affected. There are plenty of technical innovations being produced by companies that have no participation in F1. On the other hand, a lot of the technology in F1 will never see the light of day on a road car.

1. What's NASA got to do with anything? We're talking about F1. 2. You're sure? Name them. Don't just guess. 3. "My reasoning"? I'm not arguing against F1 racing at all. That's not my point. I certainly don't think we should get rid of F1 and just run production car racing, how boring would that be? All I'm saying is that implying that F1 is a test-bed for road-car technology of the future is stretching things a lot. I love my F1, but I love it because of what the cars do, not because it's a proving ground for technology.

Valid points, but the point I am trying to make is that the link between road cars and F1, and indeed almost all motorsport these days, is fairly distant. Certain concepts may flow on but it's always modified, modified, and modified again, probably numerous times, and by then they're almost unrecognizable except in a general sense. As far as tyres go I was specifically talking about slicks, which are what F1 cars run on 95% of the time. Wet tyres may have some road car benefits, but in all honesty I'm not sure how much effort tyre companies put into wet tyre technology, given that they're not used a lot and give less performance gain per R&D dollar than slicks. To put it another way, spending money on slicks will deliver more tangible racing benefits more of the time than spending it on wets. In the wet the weather has more influence over grip than the tyre does, with the track constantly getting wetter and drier. Maybe an engineer could see the similarities between F1 and road cars, but as a layman I can't. Some of the technologies you've referred to only appear on million-dollar hypercars that your average mortal won't ever drive, such as carbon chassis. Maybe slightly off-topic, but I think any technological trickle-down, such as there is, will almost completely die off in the next decade. The loss of technical freedom means the teams have almost no scope to develop new concepts, they're restricted to developing what they have. Anything that makes the car faster is almost instantly banned, I'm surprised the F-duct hasn't been banned already. Colin Chapman would have been run out of town as a dangerous hooligan if he tried doing stuff like he did now. Maybe my focus is too short-term. Some of the concepts you mentioned have some F1 influence, but it's all stuff from the 80s and 90s. Has there been anything in the last 10-15 years that is likely to make its way onto road cars in some form? I can't think of anything, but maybe you can. You have convinced me to relax my position a bit, but I haven't completely converted :-)

Yes but correct me if I'm wrong (I'm sure someone will) I think KERS-style energy recovery pre-dates F1. The flywheel system that someone (Williams?) had was different, but the system you're talking about was on road cars before F1 I think.

Roy, I'm not seeing your point unless you can give some sort of example. I mean, tyres, seriously? What do 13-inch F1 slicks designed to last 100 km have in common with road tyres, besides being made of rubber? The compounds aren't remotely similar, the tyre construction is nothing alike, slicks don't even have tread patterns, which road tyres are required to have. Crash design of cockpits? If I was driving a single-seat car with a carbon chassis it might be relevant, but a metal chassis road car reacts completely differently in a crash to an F1 car. The "energy dissipation" you refer to, as I understand it, is when the force of an impact is channeled into a part being ripped off the car. This just doesn't happen in road cars. Road cars use a mix of crumple zones and strong points to absorb energy and channel it around a safety zone, i.e. the passenger area. BTW, some examples of "F1 technology" for you: ABS - first invented in 1929 for aircraft. Modern electronic ABS first appeared on a road car (a Chrysler Imperial) in 1971 Traction control - developed in 1971 by Buick for GM Active suspension - developed by Lotus F1 in the 1980s (I'm including this to be fair). However, its first road-car use, the 1987 Mitsubishi Galant, probably didn't derive any technical data from Lotus. Mitsubishi in all probability developed their system from scratch, although Lotus may have given them the idea. And turbos, of course, were around for a long time before F1 began using them.

Yes but the aerodynamics on a road car are completely different. If you took the rear wing off a R35 and put it on an F1 car it would drive like there was no wing there at all. F1 wings need quite high speeds to work, below 160 km/h or so they don't do much. When they do work, though, they generate a lot more downforce, which is why an F1 car can take 130R at Suzuka flat. Road cars don't need nearly so much downforce since they don't drive as fast. Granted an R35 is more race car than road car, but even tin-top racers don't generate a fraction of an F1 car's downforce. They do, however, come into effect at lower speeds. The links between F1 and road car technology are so tenuous as to be irrelevant. General concepts may come from F1 but in a practical sense the parts are nothing alike. The applications are simply too different. BTW F1 weren't the only ones to develop aero, you also need to give credit to Indycar, Can-Am, sports car racing, and nearly every open-wheeler category since the seventies.

Bugger all I think. When you think about it the applications between F1 and road cars are nothing alike. F1 engines are 2.4 litre V8s revving to 17,500 that only have to do 300 kms at a time. Road car engines are much bigger, have much bigger cylinders and only rev to half the rpm of an F1 engine. Same principle follows for nearly every other component. Car manufacturers tend to talk about their cars being "F1-inspired", which as far as I can tell means the engineers have F1 posters on the walls of their offices. Put it this way, I'd want to hear specific examples before I drew any parallels between a road car and an F1 program.

I was at the Melb one and the screens were tiny, not to mention you couldn't hear a damn thing most of the time. Who wants to watch a dyno run without sound? I glanced at the tv's a couple of times then gave up, there didn't seem to be much going on there either. I agree that it was a bit boring waiting so long between dyno runs, but I suppose you've got to do it right or not at all.

I'll believe it when I see it. I don't remember the exact figure but I believe the prototype cost millions to build. Even with a decent production run I would say its retail will be well north of $1m.