perfect timing, mine lapsed on monday, would have renewed but i'm in middle of changing cards and am waiting for new one, i'd have been gutted if i'd renewed and then they'd made the offer, as it is it's perfect

as i said on the iracing forum, they could have solved all the row about reliability by just saying exhausts starting at the british GP must exit behind the rear diffuser as they will have to for next year, then it would be up to the teams if they wanted to blow or not as it wouldn't effect downforce

Quote from TexasLTU :

Red Bull was using 45% beforehand, and the maximum is 50%? That harms only Lotus Renault itself, who were using 90% ot these cold blows. FIA failed... again.

redbull will still loose out as they can't hot blow which is where all the real grip comes form.

exactly tris, i don't remember anyone complaining about the 1.5 v6 turbo's in the 80's and they weren't getting close to the peak revs the new ones will be.

yep once you get your head round it, it's fairly simple

if you want to get promoted, concentrate on SR and ignore IR

if you want to get in faster splits, concentrate on IR and ignore SR (unless it falls so low you get demoted)

mostly it's a mix of the two

Quote from boothy :

Come join us, we have cookies err setups (Mikko ate the cookies)

if you're a celt, we have whisky aswell

someone summed it up nicely on the iracing forums, with the OTM it was hard to get anywhere close to the limit on the ovals, now with the NTM it's a lot easier to get to about 90% of the limit before getting progresively harder to extract the last few % which is far closer to real life.

i'm looking forward to trying it on a proper road car though, especially since the current example of the NTM is designed to mimic the real life NASCAR tyres property of being very grippy when cold and rapidly loosing some grip as they warm up over 1 lap (i assume in real life a lot of this is due to the need for the cars to be safe going straight onto an oval from cold ) but so far it's very impressive, the weaving steering business is strange though, i've got a very slight vibration but none of the shaking some people are complaining of.

Quote from -NightFly- :

I absolutely hate phone ringing sound, everyone are using it...I was using it, but i don't anymore because i kept grabbing my phone after every five seconds at crowded places. Everytime i hear a regular phone ring now i feel the need to strangle someone.

thats' the biggest advantage of music ringtones, if you pick something obscure chances are you won;t hear it on anyone else's phone.

can;t be bothered reading through everything but i've got a blackberry torch and an iphone 4 on contract. the torch is used by the ex (we're still good friends, her last boyfriend screwed her credit rating hence why it's on my contract). always avoided iphones as i couldn't see my need for one but got this one as a free upgrade after an argument with orange about how much they wanted to charge for a smasung s when my contract was due to renew (go figure, they wanted £149 for the samsung when it was free on a cheaper contract but gave an iphone for free rather than £259 as an apolagy ) so i'll do a quick comparison

build quality

torch - feels solid and a bit special, can't really describe how but it feels expensive.*

iphone - feels solid but whilst better than most android phones and equal to any i've held it doesn't feel as quality as the torch

camera

torch - adequate, no more no less

iphone - adequate for stills (but see apps comment), good quality video even on 32" TV

Apps

torch - very restricted selection

iphone - huge selection, lots of dross but plenty of good ones, i've got a few games, kindle app to give me something to read (the apple book readers not bad and does PDFs) and there are good camera apps which make a huge difference to the camera's capabilities over as it leaves the factory. apart from a couple, all the ones i use were free.

useability

torch - brilliant for tests and emails, twitter, facebook which is what you'd expect, signal strength can be a bit erratic at times, combination of touch and keyboard works well for ex though i find keys too small for my clumsy fingers. the OS feels slightly counter intuitive but you get used to it but itcan be a bit glitchy, needs a hard reset ( i.e. pull the battery) fairly often and can eat up its memory untill it's reset, twice has had problems with it's database indexing requiring delective data deletion to cure. in other words it feels like it's not quite finished/ tidied up, plenty of help on net as they're all common faults. the screen is ok for quality

iphone - unbelievably smooth to use, wasn't sure about the whole itunes install needed on pc but it's no where near as intrusive / overpowering as some "haters" make out and makes adding podcasts music etc very easy, touch screen is as responsive as its reputation suggests, signal strength is generally good though that antenna can cause the odd issue unless you have a case / bumper. face book etc is dependent on app quality, pretty good though the odd upgrade can cause problems, email isn't as good as blackberry but that may change soon. occasional glitch with camera not responding (one of the apps i assume is behind this) but a simple power off / on will cure it and it feels a bit better thought out than a battery pull. the screen is simply amazing, no matter how close you hold it you can not see pixels, if you like watching films / videos on your phone then it's a no brainer.

in summary to me the torch and iphone feel like a bizarre smart phone cross between a windows PC and a Mac.

the blackberry is like a Mac, specialised, ultra quality feel with a small selection of programs but with the bugs of a poor windows OS,

the iphone's like a fairly up market PC with multiple free / cheap programs available and with an OS that's as easy to use and reliable as a Mac's

* had to add this, despite prefering my iphone, i really can't stress how, everytime i use her torch it feels so special, forget other phones with sliding sections where there's always a bit of movement and sticktion, the torch feels like a precision, oiled bit of equipment.

EDIT: forgot to say the iphone can be a bit of a bugger regarding bluetooth, it really does not like pairing with other phones, it's one area that it really does fail in.

regarding ringtones, i've no idea about the blackberry but yes the iphone does need mp3's converting but that's not a problem, a bigger pain is the limit of 30 secs and as far as i can tell no way of using music for a text tone, i'm often working with ear buds in so i prefer a longer text alert so i notice it, it's not a problem if i'm listening to stuff on phone but i also use a walkman mp3 player as it's compatable with napster's unlimited legal download service.

Last edited by tinvek, Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:38.

not really sure they should be banned from mid season, double diffusers, despite being against the spirit of the regs weren't banned mid season and neither was the "f" duct.

2012 regs seem pretty clear cut, teams can hardly complain about having to remap their engines for the longer exhausts when they've spent so much time remapping to hot blow the diffusers.

apart from the hot blower issue, i wonder if heidfeld's fire and perez's crash have forced the issue, big side on crash in the renault and you could conceivably get the driver trapped with part of the hot exhaust forced up and over into the cockpit.

peugeot just about played that within the rules, he wasn't blocking down the straights or taking a defensive line and he's allowed to take his own line through the bends as it's the faster car's duty to move off line to make the pass when lapping, davidson got a load of stick last year for trying to force slower cars off their line when passing them so he'll just say he was doing what he was told by the officials.

very close to the edge of interpretation but audi did the same a few years ago and it's always happened in endurance racing when there are 2 teams this closely matched.

1977 martini 936 (hard to get a photo that does it justice and don't confuse it with the 76 paint

http://www.diecast.org/data/sac_cars/tsm111801.jpg

and the martini "moby dick" 935

http://www.motorsportretro.com ... orsche-935-78-Martini.jpg

Quote from Mustafur :

Highlight reals don't cut it any more I'm afriad, atleast with a hill climb format live view is easily poosible combine that with a knockout stystem or somthing similar and you got some action.

live coverage is easly possible with any rally, just look at the IRC rounds, to suggest you make rallies single venue hill climb events is like saying bathhurst would be easier to cover if they held it on a go kart track and it ran for just 60 mins, oh and while we're at it to get bigger tv audiences hold it at 1am local time so it gets bigger world wide viewing figures

Quote from Mustafur :

Highlight reals don't cut it any more I'm afriad, atleast with a hill climb format live view is easily poosible combine that with a knockout stystem or somthing similar and you got some action.

thats not rallying, hill climbing exists allready and if it was so great for tv coverage it would be a major world wide motorsport with full network coverage but it isn't.



and anyway who says the current cars are slow? stage times are faster than the days of group B due to the extra speed through the corners.

if you really want to get the magic back into rallying do away with the micky mouse short rallies we have today, bring back running all night etc and get rid of pace notes and reccies so it comes back to the driver who can best read the road and the co driver who can best read a map and judge what a stage will be like.

despite being welsh, the rally GB in wales is a good example of just how poor today's rallies are, when i started watching the RAC, it ran from sunday to wednesday and even on the spectator day run on sunday they covered more stage miles and road miles than they do in a full days running today. on the monday morning they'd leave HQ and not get back till tuesday night and go to scotland and back, now the manufacturers are complaining about this years welsh route because they have to drive from north to south wales and it's too long for them!!!!!


take a look at the IRC on eurosport, that's closer to old style world rally championships and has excellent tv coverage because they work with the tv company rather than just assuming tv companies want something they can cover from one location

Last edited by tinvek, Fri, 27 May 2011 08:58.

looks like merc and ferrari got caught out by renault in qualifying



http://f1.fanvision.com/TheExp ... and%20Prix%20Gamesmanship

someone pointed out elsewhere that this may be to combat red bull's large angle of rake as they use a high exhaust overrun flow to bridge the gap between the diffuser and the track, whilst i'm not a lover of how it's being done, if it means an end to the whole flexi wing / front wing clearnece debate than it's probably for the good.

also it's pretty stupid that cars are running at 100% throttle all the time and relying on ignition retard, apart from the "green" issue if it's not stamped on it'll have major implications when the turbo engines arrive as effectively the turbo's will be producing boost pretty well continually with no lag, something that david vizard used on his daughter's drag racing mini in the 80's to ensure she had full boost straight off the line.

according to the pricipals behind homeopathic medicine, by dumping bin laden's body in the ocean for it to be absorbed into the world's water and eventually find itself in a massively diluted form in everyone's drink, the US have cured the world of any future terrorism

damm they've put it back

off to work i go

define "just before the race begins"

10 mins till i run out of door

Quote from DeKo :

The race is meant to go ahead in 15 minutes, and the site is still down for maintenance. That doesn't make any sense, why don't they reschedule it for half 10 or something?

bet they won't get the numbers they want in the time between the site going up and race starting

Quote from boothy :

They had almost 600 when I last checked, the Daytona 500 event this year had splits of 43 with well over 10-15 splits so somehow their performance has gone backwards

especially since they were looking for 2000+ judging by the $5 credit figure

what's annoying is i completely altered my schedule for this, normally on a sat i'll watch Dr who with son then go to bed for a couple of hours before work, tonight i skipped dr who and slept early just to look at a server error.

hmmm i might just be able to get into it before i run out of the door to go to work

hope this helps a lot for the future, but can't help feeling they should have worked up to this by picking a quieter night to hold a test first and then build the numbers up, i'm guessing there's going to be a lot of complaints about peoples' saturday racing being spoilt