F1 2011 thread

SaladCharger said:
No, I don't agree, not any driver can dominate in the best car, you do get different levels of driver skill, I think the correct way to word it is nobody can win a world title without a good car unless the rest are really bad. Right now we have so many talented drivers in F1 that it boils down to the best car. It's been like that for some time. I just think the designers dont get the recognition they deserve.

How many Drivers WC and Constructors WC were won between Adrian Newey and Rory Byrne over the past 20 years? Somethign worth researching.
Click to expand...

7 Championships each:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Newey#F1_Championships
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Byrne#F1_Championships
 
Little-Mermaid said:
Think Killa just trolled you guys :D
Click to expand...


Nope just wanted to see how it would sit when the beloved hamilton only won because he had a good car :D.

7 each is pretty good but one driver accounts for 7 of those 14 i think :eek: Although you look at webber and wonder would he be dominating if we took his partner in crime out the picture as he has the car to do it so naturally he would take pole and win almost every race as well.
 
Last edited:
killadoob said:
Nope just wanted to see how it would sit when the beloved hamilton only won because he had a good car :D.

7 each is pretty good but one driver accounts for 7 of those 14 i think :eek: Although you look at webber and wonder would he be dominating if we took his partner in crime out the picture as he has the car to do it so naturally he would take pole and win almost every race as well.
Click to expand...
No, one designer accounts for 7 of those 14, the other designer could make cars that anyone could drive to victory.

That aside, seems Newey is getting flack over the last race... dangerous tactics or speculation?
http://www.grandprix.com/columns/maurice-hamilton/running-the-risk.html
Now the responsibility lay squarely on the shoulders of Adrian Newey, Red Bull's technical director. Adrian, pale at the best of times, looked positively grey as he took his place by the pit wall. Newey is by no means cavalier over these issues, being a racer himself and also, lest we forget, having undergone the terrible aftermath of Imola 1994. Having weighed everything up, Newey decided against significant changes to the car's set-up. They would start the race as they finished qualifying.

It was no surprise to see Webber stop as early as lap three and switch from the soft (blistered) slick to the hard compound. Vettel followed two laps later - and took on a fresh set of the softer tyre. It immediately led to suggestions that perhaps Red Bull had been crying wolf.

Either way, it damaged the relationship between Red Bull and Pirelli. The tyre company, having done a superb and equitable job in their first season, did not take kindly to the original implication that their tyres were the culprit when, in fact, Red Bull had been, in the words of one rival, "chancing their arm and using safety as the excuse when it went wrong".

I suppose rivals, sick of being hammered by Red Bull, would say that. But when it comes to safety, I recall not only Mosley's words but also the even more critical quandary facing Williams as their drivers, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, fought with McLaren's Alain Prost for the championship during the final race of the 1986 season.

When Mansell's rear tyre suddenly let go at over 180 mph on Adelaide's main straight, Williams technical director Patrick Head then faced a very difficult decision.

Piquet was leading. If Head called in him for a precautionary change on the advice of Goodyear, it would cost Piquet and the team not just the race, but also the championship. An entire season's work had boiled down to this urgent moment of judgement. Head did not hesitate and, to Piquet's credit, the Brazilian has never criticised the decision to change tyres.

On that basis, if Red Bull really had been that worried then, with such a healthy lead in the championship, surely they would have decided to make adjustments and start from the pit lane?

With four degrees of camber, the footprint at 190 mph is extremely slender but Red Bull chose to walk an even narrower line of technical and tactical foreplay. You could say it was a case of scoring maximum points and minimum respect. Only Red Bull will know if it was worth it.
Click to expand...
 
If I remember correctly most of the cars suffered with blistering not just red bull, although they had it worse. Still comes down to the fact that Pirelli makes these tires to wear out fast, and now Red-Bull takes flack because of worn tires? Granted they did run more camber than what was recommend but it was only a matter of time before some one tried to push the envelope to gain an advantage. When someone gets hurt because of worn tires the blame will stop at the FIA making tires weaker so its more entertaining.
 
SaladCharger said:
No, one designer accounts for 7 of those 14, the other designer could make cars that anyone could drive to victory.

That aside, seems Newey is getting flack over the last race... dangerous tactics or speculation?
http://www.grandprix.com/columns/maurice-hamilton/running-the-risk.html
Click to expand...

That's true - Schumacher won all seven of his driver's titles in Byrne cars: 1994/5, 2000/1/2/3/4
Byrne seven constructor's championships: 1995, 1999, 2000/1/2/3/4
The combo won both titles six times though.

Adrian Newey:
He is the only designer to have won Constructors Championships with three different Formula One teams.
Click to expand...

Another key person in the Schumacher victories was Ross Brawn - winning the 2009 titles with Brawn GP and Jenson Button.

2 of the 3 guys are back together as Mercedes, but with little impact in 2011.
 
Last edited:
Little-Mermaid said:
If I remember correctly most of the cars suffered with blistering not just red bull, although they had it worse. Still comes down to the fact that Pirelli makes these tires to wear out fast, and now Red-Bull takes flack because of worn tires? Granted they did run more camber than what was recommend but it was only a matter of time before some one tried to push the envelope to gain an advantage. When someone gets hurt because of worn tires the blame will stop at the FIA making tires weaker so its more entertaining.
Click to expand...

Well i would rather have that chance than the old way in all honesty. One pit stop, round and round. nobody could over take.

OMG no please keep the tyres like they are. I don't think i could go back to the old f1 now. If people are worried about their safety they can get into tricycles just in case :p. Bring back refilling now as well :D. I miss those incidents.

Well if you want to push the envelop why blame pirelli? You are taking the chance not pirelli, why should they get the crap because a team wants to gain an advantage by putting their drivers on the line? F1 is so safe these days it would take a freak accident for someone to die.
 
Last edited:
killadoob said:
Well i would rather have that chance than the old way in all honesty. One pit stop, round and round. nobody could over take.

OMG no please keep the tyres like they are. I don't think i could go back to the old f1 now. If people are worried about their safety they can get into tricycles just in case :p. Bring back refilling now as well :D. I miss those incidents.

Well if you want to push the envelop why blame pirelli? You are taking the chance not pirelli, why should they get the crap because a team wants to gain an advantage by putting their drivers on the line? F1 is so safe these days it would take a freak accident for someone to die.
Click to expand...
F1 is a dangerous sport, over the years they've made it a lot safer but with the tires they also created an element of danger. Everyone knew this was going to happen at some stage so why is RB taking so much flack for something the FIA created? I fully agree with RB's strategy, think they handled it well. Rather take a chance than coast to the end of the season, people want racing.
Suppose its just media hyping it up and sour about RB dominance :D
 
Well then they must they are pushing the tires and stop blaming pirelli.

If they were so worried about safety they would not be pushing their luck and expecting the fia to help them, as if they need more help :D. They have the best driver in arguably the best car, what more do they want? :p
 
killadoob said:
Well then they must they are pushing the tires and stop blaming pirelli.

If they were so worried about safety they would not be pushing their luck and expecting the fia to help them, as if they need more help :D. They have the best driver in arguably the best car, what more do they want? :p
Click to expand...

Better tyres? :p
 
killadoob said:
Well someone needs to drive his cars don't they?

So as good as he is without drivers that take your car and pomp the field you have nothing. As lucky as the drivers are that get to drive his cars he is equally as lucky to have had the drivers to use it to it's full potential.

Without pure genius behind the wheel you have an average car. Vettel is pure genius, he just slaps that thing on pole almost every race now.
Click to expand...
Ok, so you think Webber is better than Alonso and Hamilton then. Pull the other one.
 
Last edited:
killadoob said:
Well i would rather have that chance than the old way in all honesty. One pit stop, round and round. nobody could over take.

OMG no please keep the tyres like they are. I don't think i could go back to the old f1 now. If people are worried about their safety they can get into tricycles just in case :p. Bring back refilling now as well :D. I miss those incidents.

Well if you want to push the envelop why blame pirelli? You are taking the chance not pirelli, why should they get the crap because a team wants to gain an advantage by putting their drivers on the line? F1 is so safe these days it would take a freak accident for someone to die.
Click to expand...
Seems everyone is over Senna already. Newey was rightly worried for his drivers safety but it wasn't enough to make the change... You have to ask why since they are in the lead by far...
here's another perspective:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/may/16/adrian-newey-ayrton-senna-death
Adrian Newey, the man who designed the cars that have made Red Bull a dominant force in Formula One, has spoken for the first time about how close he came to leaving the sport after the 1994 death of Ayrton Senna in one of his cars.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Newey revealed how badly he was affected when Senna was killed while leading the San Marino Grand Prix in a Williams car.

"The little hair I had all fell out in the aftermath," Newey said. "So it changed me physically. It was dreadful. Both Patrick Head [Williams's technical director] and myself separately asked ourselves whether we wanted to continue in racing. Did we want to be involved in a sport where people can die in something we've created? Secondly, was the accident caused by something that broke through poor or negligent design? And then the court case started."

Newey and Head were charged with manslaughter in Italy – but his soul-searching was the reason he considered leaving Formula One. "The court case was a depressing annoyance, and extra pressure, but it did not make me question whether I wanted to be involved in F1. It's the self-searching rather than the accusations that really matter."
Click to expand...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/formula_one/14699837.stm
Red Bull design chief Adrian Newey spent the Belgian Grand Prix worrying about the safety of drivers Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber because of tyre problems.

Red Bull, who recorded a 1-2, had asked to change tyres before the race because of blistering sustained in qualifying.

Newey told BBC Sport: "It was one of the scariest races I've been involved in. It was heart-in-the-mouth stuff."

Tyre supplier Pirelli said tyre damage was partly caused by Red Bull.

"We've never had a safety issue," said Pirelli motorsport chief Paul Hembery, who said the damage was caused by the lack of running on Friday because of wet weather and taking the tyres to the limits of their recommendations.

That is a reference to the amount of camber - or lean away from vertical - that Red Bull run on their tyres.

Pirelli's recommended maximum camber is four degrees but Newey revealed that the camber on the Red Bulls had been "just a hair over four, four and an eighth, or something, just a tiny bit over".

Newey added: "Obviously if we had known there was a safety concern about it, we wouldn't have done it.
Click to expand...
SO WHY THE HECK DIDN'T YOU JUST PUT THEM IN THE PITLANE FOR THE START YOU PLONKER?? Of course you knew there would be a problem, when did you suddently start fearing for their safety? After the start of the race? No, it was BEFORE the start of the race. We would all have had fun watching your drivers climbing their way up the order but NOOOO, you CHOSE to put them in front despite, as you yourself put it, putting their safety on the line.

I suspect Redbull can't do much from behind fullstop.
 
Last edited:
SaladCharger said:
Ok, so you think Webber is better than Alonso and Hamilton then. Pull the other one.
Click to expand...

He has the better car so naturally he will win everything.

Remember it's not the driver who wins titles as you mentioned earlier. So i would imagine without vettel webber would open a can of whoop ass.

Are you saying even with such a good car webber would not beat hamilton and alonso? errrm that doesn't make sense since he has the best car. We all know hamilton only won a championship because of his car much like shummi and vettel.
 
killadoob said:
He has the better car so naturally he will win everything.

Remember it's not the driver who wins titles as you mentioned earlier. So i would imagine without vettel webber would open a can of whoop ass.

Are you saying even with such a good car webber would not beat hamilton and alonso? errrm that doesn't make sense since he has the best car. We all know hamilton only won a championship because of his car much like shummi and vettel.
Click to expand...
Well I'm glad you finally agree.
 
"Seems everyone is over Senna already. Newey was rightly worried for his drivers safety but it wasn't enough to make the change"

Can i ask what they could or should have differently regarding senna's death? Apart from senna not feeling right how could they stopped that accident? Did they know it was going to happen, were there signs? Why did they put his life on the line?
 
killadoob said:
"Seems everyone is over Senna already. Newey was rightly worried for his drivers safety but it wasn't enough to make the change"

Can i ask what they could or should have differently regarding senna's death? Apart from senna not feeling right how could they stopped that accident? Did they know it was going to happen, were there signs? Why did they put his life on the line?
Click to expand...
From Wiki:
The Williams team was entangled for many years in a court case with the Italian prosecutors over manslaughter charges, ending in a guilty verdict for Patrick Head. The Italian Court of Appeal, on April 13, 2007, stated the following in the verdict numbered 15050: "It has been determined that the accident was caused by a steering column failure. This failure was caused by badly designed and badly executed modifications. The responsibility of this falls on Patrick Head, culpable of omitted control". Even being found responsible for Senna's accident, Patrick Head wasn't arrested: in Italy the statute of limitation for manslaughter is 7 years and 6 months, and the final verdict was pronounced 13 years after the accident.[10]

A 600-page technical report was submitted by Bologna University under Professor of Engineering Enrico Lorenzini and his team of specialists. The report concluded that fatigue cracks had developed through most of the steering column at the point where it had broken.[11] Lorenzini stated: "It had been badly welded together about a third of the way down and couldn't stand the strain of the race. We discovered scratches on the crack in the steering rod. It seemed like the job had been done in a hurry but I can't say how long before the race. Someone had tried to smooth over the join following the welding. I have never seen anything like it. I believe the rod was faulty and probably cracked even during the warm-up. Moments before the crash only a tiny piece was left connected and therefore the car didn't respond in the bend."[12]

Senna did not like the position of the steering column relative to his seating position and had repeatedly asked for it to be changed. Patrick Head and Adrian Newey agreed to Senna's request to lengthen the FW16's steering column, but there was no time to manufacture a longer steering shaft. The existing shaft was instead cut, extended by inserting a smaller-diameter piece of tubing and welded together with reinforcing plates. Many surmise, based on the "yellow button tracking analysis" done in 1997 by CINECA that the movement of the steering wheel during the final seconds into Tamburello was abnormal. A reference point (yellow button) on the onboard video is seen to move several centimetres in its own plane, due to the steering wheel moving up and down, indicating a fully or partially buckled steering column.

Williams released its own video to prove the movement was normal by Coulthard manhandling an FW16B steering wheel, yet the effort required by Coulthard to deflect the wheel in the demonstration is termed to be "quite considerable". The nature of Tamburello requiring a light and anticipatory grip on the wheel (because of the high speed and bumps) coupled with Senna's slight frame causes some[who?] to question whether or not the movement of the yellow button was indeed as "normal" as Williams has claimed.

During the trials,[13] Fabrizio Nosco, a Regional technical commissioner, testified that both of the vehicle's black boxes were intact, except for minor scratches. He said "I have seen thousands of these devices and removed them for checks. The two boxes were intact, even though they had some scratches. The Williams device looked to have survived the crash.". In a move that apparently breached FIA regulations, Charles Whiting, a FIA official, handed the black boxes to Williams before the regulating body's own investigation into the accident. Williams claimed the black boxes were unreadable, and the boxes returned for the court proceedings were indeed unreadable, a full month after the accident. The black boxes might have put to rest the cause of the accident.

At the conclusion of the Italian trial, Senna's FW16, chassis number 02, was returned to the Williams team. The team reported that the car was in an advanced state of deterioration and was subsequently destroyed. The car's engine was returned to Renault, and its fate is unknown.[14]

In May 2011, Williams FW16 designer Adrian Newey expressed his views on the accident: "The honest truth is that no one will ever know exactly what happened. There's no doubt the steering column failed and the big question was whether it failed in the accident or did it cause the accident? It had fatigue cracks and would have failed at some point. There is no question that its design was very poor. However, all the evidence suggests the car did not go off the track as a result of steering column failure... If you look at the camera shots, especially from Michael Schumacher's following car, the car didn't understeer off the track. It oversteered which is not consistent with a steering column failure. The rear of the car stepped out and all the data suggests that happened. Ayrton then corrected that by going to 50% throttle which would be consistent with trying to reduce the rear stepping out and then, half-a-second later, he went hard on the brakes. The question then is why did the rear step out? The car bottomed much harder on that second lap which again appears to be unusual because the tyre pressure should have come up by then – which leaves you expecting that the right rear tyre probably picked up a puncture from debris on the track. If I was pushed into picking out a single most likely cause that would be it."[15]
Click to expand...

Regardless of the reason for Senna's crash, Newey nearly quit F1 after that and admitted himself that his heart was in his mouth for the last RedBull race. Does that mean he had no say in getting setup fixed before the start of the race?
 
Last edited:
Dude in all honesty senna's death was nothing more than a freak accident, had safety been better he would not have smashed into wall like he did. No one really knows for sure who was fault, placing blame is always when you have no idea.

If they had conclusive evidence there would have been a good case for manslaughter but none of the evidence was set in stone. It was a really sad day in f1 but safety was fairly poor, i mean how high many speed tracks these days can you smash into a wall with no protection? These days they will cancel a race if they cannot fix a wall protection system that has been damaged, back then there was no protection at all. If there were some wall barriers senna would still be alive.
 
Last edited:
killadoob said:
Dude in all honesty senna's death was nothing more than a freak accident, had safety been better he would not have smashed into wall like he did. No one really knows for sure who was fault, placing blame is always when you have no idea.

If they had conclusive evidence there would have been a good case for manslaughter but none of the evidence was set in stone. It was a really sad day in f1 but safety was fairly poor, i mean how high many speed tracks these days can you smash into a wall with no protection? These days they will cancel a race if they cannot fix a wall protection system that has been damaged, back then there was no protection at all. If there were some wall barriers senna would still be alive.
Click to expand...
Go easy on the hormones killa, this isn't a discussion about senna, it's about Newey. The guy admitted his heart was in his throat for that last race - and if you read my earlier link, he can't watch the senna movie for obvious reasons - and I want to know if he's bulltwanging or if he deliberately put those guys safety on the line despite having a hard time with a past incident. Let's forget about Senna for now and concentrate on the topic. Senna was brought up in context but it's not about him, it's not even about who was at fault - I certainly don't blame people for unintnentional accidents - F1 is a dangerous sport.

Here's my point - why whinge that your heart was in your throat when you were the cause of it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X