seen it before, still laughed

loton is a great track, i used to go to spectate there when i lived in wrexham, still remember nick manns turbo v8 morris minor. anyone else ever see it or read the article in autocar where they put it up against a ferrari whilst on atandard wheels (before he flared the arches) and it was still quicker up to 100 (and road legal ) ?

i also remember wondering why anyone would bother turning up with a standard alfasud 1.5 ti, bolt on slicks and get slaughtered by all the modified cars in his class. of course as i ceased to be a teenager i realised it was about the fun not winning

congrats on dragging this back on topic

i saw somewhere the difference for someone like kubica is that with kers he has less than 10 kilo of ballast to play with which gives a lot less scope for tuning weight distribution compared to the non kers cars which can have up to 50 kilos to play with. or to give an example of how kers puts the preassure on drives weight, anthony davidson plus a mercedes kers system weighs the same as rubens barrichello without kers.

the other problem of course with kers is that the weight is in one or a few fairly fixed shape pieces rather than being able to shape it into as many pieces and different shapes as you require. some teams have mounted it below the fuel tank which reduces capacity or raises wieght distribution, BMW have split it to fit each side of the fuel tank in the side pods but are encountering packaging compramises and have suffered from the effect of its raised position.

when the power produced is raised over the next few seasons it will become pretty well impossible not to use it and be competative which means they will have to establish a weight limit that doesn't penalise drives excessively for being larger than others though of course it's only relatively recently that the weight limit has included the driver, prost certainly always used to point out to team owners that he bought a substantial weight saving compared to drivers like mansel, at times as much as 30 kilos !

it must be said that one area of this regs that have worked perfectly is the kers power limit, it has been set at a level that overall there is very little advantage in using it which allows teams not too whilst at the same time encourages some teams to use it and gain experience with it before the power is increased. it will be interesting if the teams that are using it can put that experience to use when the power level increases (providing they are still in F1 )

trouble is the budget cap is too low, hell even force india will have to reduce its budget by aprox 50% to meet it and virgin estimate that they could net over £85 million by selling off sponsorship space on the brawns. none of the teams want two differing sets of rules plus of course the question is if anyone could actually afford to develope anything to take advantage of the slack regs and still stay under the budget

got to love the fact that only 1.1 secs between 1st and 15th

ferrari do it again when will they learn that they are not dominant and need to do late runs ?

oh hell motor mouth jordan's back again

anyone hear the comment yesterday about how the weight of anthony davidson + the KERS system = the weight of rubens barrachello ?

i assume after today's update that the reset ban is now operational for class C and above ?

i was wondering how much difference the unlimited revs will make to the teams as the current engines have now been optimised for 18,000 rpm or at best 19,000 rpm. additionally they'll still have the same restrictions on number of engines plus the extra heat of higher revs can make a large difference to the aero, mercedes engines in particular have found they can go a lot smaller on radiators since they dropped to 18,000 rpm. obviously any engine supplier might be able to find a way of producing a higher rev engine and still stay under the cost cap for supplying engines but i suspect the FIA will soon be investigating if they think they're being supplied at a loss.


what i still havent seen is an explanation of what will happen if the "free reg" cars become too fast, how will they work out how to slow them down and then reduce the speed of the big budget cars by the same amount

most of the above plus NCIS which has to be one of the most underated in the uk

why not call for the stuff on the way home ?

actually the fatty on the checkout sounds like a so called supervisor in our place (somerfield) he just cant be arsed.

actually most of our staff are ok apart from the ones they put on the fag / lottery kiosk who are bewildered by anything more modern than an abacus, guess thats why they put them on the lottery

oh and in case your wondering i work night shift so don't deal with customers, apart from an old dear who phoned up at 1am to complain her tv had packed up and would we replace it, turned out she'd bought it from the shop when it was a kwik save 6 years earlier

has anyone else bothered to go back to the first few pages of this thread? quite funny to see how we all said it wouldn't work

Quote from ILovedThisForum :

Heh, I'm ex military intelligence, your island would stand no chance, our warheads would hit their targets, at least one. We have amazing technology, you actually think one of your warheads would make it back into the atmosphere? Hah...so much you dunno.

well we'd guessed your ex intelligence as obviously you had to hand yours back to them when you left

what people seem to do is get the role of sr and ir mixed up. the sr decided your licence level so where as the ir refers to how strong a racer you are based on how you place in races and how strong the field is. in this case winning would increase your ir and get you into stronger field races if a scheduled session has enough entries for more than 1 race whilst the 1000 incident points would mean that your sr crashed through the floor and youd probably end up with a rookie licence again and restricted to those cars

in past seasons due to a lack of racing time etc i've concentrated on sr to the detriment of my ir. now im up to b class im intending to enjoy my races more , aslong as my sr stays high enough to keep my licence that will do me

Last edited by tinvek, Sat, 2 May 2009 18:38.

maybe they'll make it so if you make a pit stop you have to use both compounds but you can go the whole race without stopping if you so wish. given the wear rates on full fuel tanks it would be a very brave driver / team to risk being on completly shot tyres at the end of the race. on the other hand it will make ofr exciting races, i remember the days when most races were run without pit stops and you would have drivers pushing hard at the start to build a race and others taking it relatively easy for the first 12 or so laps and then closing at 3 seconds a lap at the end which made it very exciting and probably did murry walker's blood preasure no good at all.

well i'd been looking forward to a day of enjoyable racing but thanks to teacher training and a son who's decided he wants to be a large green lumpy thing on warcraft i've not managed to get near the desktop pc all day

oil preassure lights don't always come on in time as they only tell if the preassure is below a fixed point or not, with a guage you can tell when it is lower than normal and be aware of any possible problems that may be starting, you may not actually have to read the figures, just the fact that the finger is not in its usual possition may be enough to alert you (this of course assumes you look at your guages, depsite what they think most drivers dont really look so always have a good bright oil warning light as well ).

re electric or mechanical, i'd go for an electrical one as i've seen a few mechanical (is that really the word? surely hydraulic would be better? ) ones fail either at the guage or in the pipe and apart from having to retrim a granada ghia years ago when it all became rather oil covered inside, i've also had the delights of having hot engine oil squirted from a failed pipe onto my leg when in the outside lane of the motorway.

which ever way your mate goes make sure everything is tidy, secure and with good connections and insulation through bulkheads etc. and beware of heat from the exhaust if the oilway tap is near it.

Quote from jwardy :

i saw one a few days ago , i agree its is one good looking car

there's one down the road from me, trouble is it's owned by a woman in her 60s !!!!! presumable this is not the demographic VW were aiming for

Quote from tristancliffe :

Hurrah!

Other than the regulations that stop that you mean?

havent seen them tris and i'd rather assumed there would be regs to prevent this sort of thing but it does make you wonder how well they will be able to police "creative accounting" with costs being differed, spread over accounting periods and possible even involving "subcontractors" who happen to run at a considerable loss whilst providing their services.

one thought that has struck me is that ever since i started watching F1 the rule makers have spent all their time trying to slow the cars down, so what will they do if the lower budget teams start to achieve speeds and cornering forces which are considered "unsafe" ? if they restrict the cars to slow them down they'll end up in a battle to balance the regs as they have to slow down the uncapped cars as well. also i'm not a lover of the movable wing idea, movable aero devices were banned for a very good reason, they fail ! and can have very serious consequences when they do fail. obviously modern tech is more reliable than late 60's tech but it would only take one serious accident resulting from a wing failure and they'll be rewritting the rules again

knowing webbers luck he'll be leading the race by 2 mins with 1 lap to go when he gets killed by the flu

also if you cant spell, isnt swine flu the posh past tense of flying pigs ?

no idea about it being intentional or not but as i recall the fix was a cobbled together solution involving carbon fibre strips being bonded onto the wing structures. given the nature of the repair i would have thought it would have had a detrimental effect on the aero efficiency so it may well be that the loss of performance was due to the fix rather than from any gained advantage whilst the flex was present

either im missing something or there's nothing to stop mclaren or ferrari signing up for this in 2010 and then spending £600 million this year on developing everything they need for next season, dominate in 2010, sign for the unlimited budget in 2011 and develope their 2012 car with unlimited costs and then sign up for the extra freedom and dominate again in 2012

Quote from tristancliffe :

There is a certain person hanging around the Renault garage who is likely to win races in the future by the name of Romain Grosjean. He'll be the Renault second driver by the end of the year. Not because Piquet is 'slow' but because he's not quite fast enough.

it's important to make that distinction, non of these guys are slow, it's just that some aren't as fast as the others, any of them could leave almost everyone behind in everyday driving. the biggest difference between the top guys and the rest is the amount of spare capacity they have whilst driving at this level, the "fast" guys have time to think and analyse, schumacher used to bombard his team over the radio for all sorts of information when he was in a comfortable lead just to occupy himself, to the extent of asking how irving was doing after he went to jaguar. the lower guys are close to being fully occupied just with driving the car.( extreme example but remember how relaxed hamilton was in the reasonably priced car on top gear? then think about the concentration on the faces of the celeb drivers on top gear even jkay and cowell )

to be fair to dario it was do that or go straight into the back of the car in front, typical racing incident, car in front slowed far more than dario was expecting and he realised he wouldn't slow in time.

on balance probably fair though i expected a fine as well.

the problem the fia had was that bernie had in the past blatently lied on a few occasions regarding the primary functions of some features on his cars and max could well have been described as bringing the sport into disrepute last year. add in the fact that after the mcalren/ ferrari spying row they found themselves faced with renault having similar charges against them and let them off lightly compared to mclaren and this may have been a decision to redress the balance slightly now ron dennis is less likely to be a thorn in max's side.

i can see a lot of racers racing down in the SRF till we get leagues, just a pity they'll be on the rookie tracks and rookie length unless they keep throwing 24hrs of fun races with it at us