Be Excellent To Each Other

Should play into Button's tactics if it does.

I do think the Brawn GP car is one of the better looking ones. It's looking very dark out there.

Rainygeddon

Awesome fun thus far!

Looks like it is rained off then. 2/2 for Button.

I want to know what Webber said to Hamilton. Mind you, Webber did have a face like thunder.

EDIT: It would appear it was "Fuck this, cobber, I'm not getting any more wet, let's just say 'no' to racing in the rain, and go chuck another shimp on the barbie, sport"

FFS, if they'd wrapped this up fifty minutes ago I'd be full of breakfast by now!

does this count as a full win, if the drivers are tied on points at the end of the season?

Malc

Yes, just the points are halved because of less than 3/4 distance run.

"It would make for better telly viewing figures if we ran the race at 5pm local time!"
"It'd be shit, it always pisses down at 6-ish"
"Telly viewing figures! Advertising money! Don't worry about rain, it'll never happen!"
"Listen, we live here. It will rain, and be shit."
"Don't believe you!"
<a few months later>
"Rain in Malaysia at 6pm? Who'd ever have thought that!"

Even without stupid rules and stupid stewards and stupid Nazi orgies, they still manage to fuck the races up.

The best bit was Brundle trying to get round the Toyota guys crowded around their diffuser on the lineup. "I'm going to keep doing this, it's fun!"

I'm just wondering how many people will be DQ'd or demoted by Thursday.

Not sure if they scrutineer anything that doesn't go 3/4, though I forget why I think that :/

I'll wager there'll be a thing or two, mind you - it's become part of the fabric of it now

Kimi bascially going "fuck this!" and changing into shorts and tshirt and grabbing an icecream endeared him to me immensely, though. Again.

Bah, these guys could do with growing some balls. Scared of crashing in the rain? Drive slower then, and we'll see the men sorted from the boys.
They used to run across the track at the start of the race, ffs.

I'm still of the opinion there should be at least 2 artificially wet GPs per season, although not as wet as this one just was.

And great fun watching the BBC be so utterly consistently wrong about the rules.

There was no 2hr deadline, while the clock does tick up under red, so does the limit. For a recent example, try the 2007 European GP that was won in a time of 2hrs, 6 mins thanks to a red flag stop.

I'm also smug that I said this would happen, before the race. It's not even so much the pissing down at 6, it's the pissing down at 6 followed by no time for any delays because it'll get dark.

They were driving slowly. Sutil says they were still sliding around at 20kph. Hardly makes for a gripping race.

F1 cars don't have any grip bellow a certain speed.

The safety car would've beaten them!

Malc

You're not showing enough understanding here frankly. GP tyres work within fine tolerances. They were on the extreme wet tyres but they still couldn't displace enough water meaning that the cars were aquaplaning. Just like when you drive down a road and you feel the car lose traction when you go over a deep puddle, they would have had this pretty much all the time. The guys couldn't even keep up with the safety car which was going around at, what, 90 MPH?

A GP car also relies on downforce to achieve grip, but if you can't get the speed up then you have no downforce. That combined with the fact that the tyres cannot displace the water means it's like driving on sheet ice.

The drivers can also see next to nothing. There's no windscreen wipers, no protection. Combined with the lack of grip the risk is that if one car spins, a load of others could go flying into it without even being aware of the fact there had been a crash.

Lots of GP's are run in the wet but the sheer volume of water on the track prohibited them from carrying on. Although Bernie needs to carry the can here as it is known that the area is prone to heavy rain in the late afternoon and sun set was around the time of the race finish.

Well, at least the spectators sliding down the slippery hill were having fun.

On a dry track, with slicks, an F1 car will spin its wheels at anything up to 80mph. Wet track, even with full wet tyres? Bastard things are twitchy enough without having to deal with that.

F1 cars have a narrow window of operation through design and evolution. I'm sure the pedestrian pace caused by the ridiculous rain fall has an effect on the heat and pressure of the tyres - they need heat for best grip, but more importantly there's probably a narrow margin where the heat/tyre pressure drops to effect the ride height of the cars effectively putting them on their floorboards and putting the tyres in an advisory role at best. Basically, if it rains hard enough you may as well be fucking your wife from behind while calling her by her sister's name for all the chance you have of staying on.

I'm well aware of all this, you condescending buggers. They are still a bunch of pussies.

At Silverstone last year they couldn't keep up with the safety car, so that's what they all need! An AMG SL63 each in case it rains. BRILLIANT!

If only there was a racing series with cars like that...

MrsA, halfway through the race:

"Why does that car look different to all the others?"

DINGDINGDING!

In conditions where there's an amount of standing water they float off. All the tyre and skill in the world won't help you.

That said, the reason to red flag was really it was too dark, as of course it will be when it rains in the late evening. Bernie.

Brilliant
You should have told her it was a revolutionary new aero package. And look, it's winning!

I said something along those lines. yes. . Can't wait for the motoGP....

"SHIT! He's cheating!" he's got 4 wheels!"

It just occurred to me, I've sat in the forerunner to the Brawn car. I should get that scanned in.

They should switch the engine off and just run on the 80HP electric motor then

They need to change the icon for the KERS. Every time I see it my brain starts screaming MOBILE PHONE at me.

The KERS is doing exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to, of course - being used to prevent slower cars being overtaken out of corners. If they all get it, they'll just take a tenth out of the longest straight without a single change of position that wouldn't have happened without. Or continue using it to correct for a fucked corner entry.

WELL DONE THERE, THE FIA.

Hmm, I'm not sure it's that bad. If one driver is having to use it all the time to correct for slow cornering, he'll use his 6 seconds up just doing that, and someone else who's saved it up can then nitro past him on the straight anyway.

Early days anyway.

For those who bitch that F1 cars are easy to drive yadda yadda, watch this:

I don't get the 6 second limit; surely the weight and tendency to explode (or at least stop working) of batteries are fine and dandy barriers*. I suppose they have to get it reliable and ubiquitous first. I do like that they get essentially free increased, if unbalanced, braking with it as well. As I like the idea; it's something every production manufacturer should be looking at. I'm just not sure it's anything but a gimmick in F1.

* Or to go straight on, ripping a chunk of the car away with it, of increasingly large/faster flywheels.

Who said that?

Well, for the element of strategy as mentioned, really.

And unless they limit it there'd be nothing (except cost) to stop one team getting creative and and having perma-boost, making them untouchable..

Of course, that might actually help demonstrate and develop a technology, and F1 clearly isn't the place for that

But that's what I mean - if it's kinetic energy recovery, you'd have to be on personal terms with God to get anywhere near permaboost and remain competitive in handling, v-max, acceleration and deceleration.

That merely demonstrates that Hammond is rubbish, let me have a go.

Random thought, I wonder how long it will be before there's a rule change that says F1 cars must be driven fully by electric motors rather than engines.

Waiting 16 hours for them to recharge will be annoying, though. We'll have 60 lap races that last for three days.

Plus the sound of them would be rubbish

Spare batteries, innit?

Or fuel cells, maybe. I think it's bound to happen at some point in the not too distant future. It would be quite nice for F1 to be a testing ground for new technologies again.

Robert Llewellyn does an amazing rant about hydrogen-powered cars on his 'Wet Liberal' podcast.

Electric racers use fast-swap batteries, which can be changed just as quickly as tyres and such.

They'd have to sort out the car aerodynamics though, I believe at the moment the general principle is to turn most of the engine output into unnecessary downforce to stop them going too fast on the straights. You've got far less to waste when it's battery powered.

Not going to happen with F1 though, it's too set in it's ways and too focussed on making money for the organisers.

in other news: TTXGP ANNNOUNCES Line Up for the World’s Zero Carbon eGrandPrix

Unnecessary? Surely the downforce is the thing that keeps them on the corners.

A lot of the time is spent going flat out on straight bits (when it's unnecessary), or going into / coming out of slow corners where it helps very little.
On fast corners, yes, it allows them to go fast and stay stuck.