In the round-up: Daniel Ricciardo questions whether Formula 1 needs to keep chasing ever faster lap times.
What they say
Ricciardo pointed out that F1’s rising downforce levels have made corners relatively easy at some tracks like Silverstone:
I’m always a bit torn, like it’s all well and good going fast but if [Copse] is full and everyone’s doing it, it’s not really that exciting. It would be better [to have] less downforce and [be] sliding through there.
I know Sebastian [Vettel] and a few guys they just want to see the lap time as low as possible. But also what you get with more downforce is a more stable car. So it also looks… [Copse] is as fast as we’ve ever been but on an onboard it probably looks easy. Two or three years ago it was much slower but you’re probably sliding a bit.
It’s never fast enough, that’s the reality. We’re doing 1’27s [at Silverstone] or whatever and we feel we could go quicker. Even if we’re going 10 seconds a lap quicker we’re still going to want more. We’re never going to be satisfied so let’s just maybe make it a bit more.. exciting’s not the word, but different. Sebastian will roll over if he hears me say that!
Quotes: Dieter Rencken
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Links
More motor racing links of interest:
Alonso expects 'long wait' before confirming 2019 plans (Crash)
"It could be interesting, because I obviously enjoyed a lot last year the Indy 500. I don’t know that car in a normal setup, in a normal circuit, so it can be a possibility."
Team owner Gene Haas perfecting his juggling act in NASCAR, F1 circus (Autoweek)
"A lot of the other Formula 1 teams have business hierarchies that really don’t understand what racing’s about. I think they have a tendency to make some decisions that are a little more judgmental than, say, from a racing point of view."
Kubica driving 70% left-handed after injury (Motorsport)
"In 2010, I was doing Eau Rouge with Renault in qualifying with one hand because I was covering the hole to stop the rear wing and I was going through Eau Rouge one-handed. This was much more dangerous than my driving now, because then I was really driving only one-handed."
How Kubica could return to Williams (Motorsport magazine)
"Post-Hockenheim that prospect was rendered null and void, after a meeting in Renault's headquarters where it was agreed that Ocon would be a Renault driver in 2019, replacing Sainz."
"To keep Chadwick racing this season has cost about £250,000 through sponsorships and parental support and she estimates that it could be four times that if she can step up to the next level of European F3."
Senna to miss remainder of Silverstone meeting after FP1 incident (Daily Sportscar)
"Rebellion Racing driver Bruno Senna, involved in an accident in Free Practice 1 at the exit of Copse Corner, has suffered a fracture to his right ankle, and will play no further part in the Silverstone meeting."
Toyota ends title sponsorship with Grand Prix of Long Beach (Press Telegram)
"Toyota has ended its 44-year partnership with the Grand Prix of Long Beach, officials announced Thursday, August 16."
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Comment of the day
Does Jacques Villeneuve have a point about the difficulties facing young racing drivers:
I am 19 now. Have driven/raced a lot since I started in karts at the age of four.
I paid for all my racing expenses (karts, engines, air fares, hotels, food) from 2007 on by selling certificates from my main sponsor door to door, five nights a week, every week, creating a Karting school and doing motivational speeches.
With that money I raced many Rotax races like Florida Winter Tour, US Grand Nationals, Challenge of the Americas, Italian and Brazilian Karting Championships. I participated in multiple championships but NEVER had a real chance to win most of those races although I still had a Top10 in MiniMax at Grand Nationals in 2011 and Top15 in Rotax JR in 2014.
Why was it so hard? Because my budget was 10% of my competitors which translated in:
– 2 sets of tires/weekend
– One chassis every two years
– One engine and a borrowed spare.
– No data, no mega team.My competitors, and I was in many championships with drivers that are now in F2 and F1 and whose parents are now buying F1 teams, had $300,000 a year budget for Junior Rotax, unlimited tires, 10 engines and three chassis per race.
Still, with my work for years, i moved to a Formula Mazda and then A ProMazda and won the 2016 Formula Car Challenge in the US. While selling dinner certificates to a group that was visiting my home track, they invited me to race F4 in China.
I went and won the 2016 FIA F4 Chinese Championship.
In 2017 I was invited to race F3 in Japan, which I did and raced for a novice team but still placed a bunch of sixths and sevenths in Fuji and Suzuka.
The team unfortunately folded and I was invited to drive for a great team this year but some of my sponsors decided to not continue.I am on the hunt for sponsors everyday and every night. Two weeks ago, I won the Utah Enduro 6 Hour driving a 620hp Lamborghini Super Trofeo, thanks to the team that hired me to drive for them.
My future is very clouded but I am not giving up.
So I really appreciate Villeneuve’s and Hamilton’s comments, because what is happening in motorsports not only at the top but at the base of the sports is absurd.
The solutions are not that difficult. Budget cap in Karting. If I could do it and race in so many races with $25,000 a year that I would raise myself, everyone should. In my whole career, I was able to afford three days of coaching to learn as much as I could from a pro karter.
In the meantime, the “winning” kids were coached daily and home schooled. While I would be going to school, fundraising, selling door to door under sun or snow, they would be learning, practicing, testing, doing data and developing their engines and tyres. Then on the weekends, we would meet on these events, and we were supposed to compete on “equal” terms.
But there’s a caviat: most of these “drivers” won multiple championships but when they had to face financial challenges when moving to cars, they were not emotionally equipped to go after the money and work hard for it and they quit.
Unless they are on a completely different financial stratosphere like the usual suspects, they all quit. I have been blessed by luck, wonderful friends and by having the drive to go after the money all the tine and things have been happening to me.
But I met tons of great kart racers that were suffocated by the overly expensive Karting world, that never had a chance to move beyond the junior classes because the unlimited budget of other drivers, confined them to not even being able to pass to the finals and would go home on Saturdays with a broke spirit.
Thanks to my dad I persevered. In his words: “Karting is like kindergarten, high school. It is not the career, is where you learn about the career. Realise that karting is not the goal and the goal is pro racing.”
So whenever I would qualify 17th and not winning on a 45-kart field, I would understand that it was due to many factors, not lack of talent. But that was a hard process for a then 12-year-old kid, but my mind was beyond karting.
Changes are needed.
Bruno Carneiro
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StefMeister (@stefmeister)
18th August 2018, 0:56
When cars get too much downforce/grip people complain it looks too easy & that once great corners are no longer corners.
When they take downforce away/Slow the cars down people complain it’s too slow, Not physical enough & Doesn’t push the drivers enough & allows people to jump in & be on the pace straight away.
faulty (@faulty)
18th August 2018, 1:25
Whilst I agree with you, I think the problem with F1 has been that the management didn’t know what they wanted for the sport, they were super acute in the financials of the business, but the commercial side was seriously stuck in the 1980s and Bernie didn’t give a rat’s about the competition, other than the political competition he led the teams into. For his gain.
If they wanted F1 to be physical they could look at Indy and such championships, with steel brake rotors and no assistance to steering, for example. But before that, management need to decide what they want.
NS Biker (@rekibsn)
18th August 2018, 4:50
Saw a quick video clip of an F1 race from at least 20 years ago. When engines could overwhelm the tires which appeared amazingly wide. It involved a dive into a corner and a pass with some sliding and incredible recovery action. That’s when you realize that current downforce levels and yaw sensitivity doesn’t allow this sort of thing. Rats.!
I winder if part of the drive for faster lap times is just to shorten the races. Some are long enough the broadcasts actually cut into championship golf on occasions, which I am sure drives the North American networks round-the-bend.
If slow lap times are bad for race action, why is it we enjoy the rain events soooo much.??
anon
18th August 2018, 9:21
@rekibsn, I presume that you did not see the complaints from just a few years ago about how the cars were “pathetically slow”, with people making complaints that the cars were “slower than GP2 cars”. That was, of course, utterly false – even the slowest cars on the grid, such as Manor’s cars, were still quite a bit faster – but it was a fairly common rant that was used to veil a whole set of grievances against the sport that were being aired at the time.
The thing is, I feel that a lot of people are all too guilty of looking back at the past and idealising it, most often because they were probably fairly young at the time – judging from the statistics on the age of the fan base and the period which they mostly idealise, most of them probably were fairly young children back in the 1990s – and perhaps weren’t aware of the less attractive side of the sport, or some of the other flaws that were present at the time.
We idealise the action on track and talk about how it was less predictable – even though, from mid 1987 to mid 1996, the same four teams won every single race, and most of those went to Williams and McLaren – but, given the highly selective nature of human memory, we tend to deliberately blank out our memories of the more boring races and bias our minds towards the handful of races that we want to remember. It’s not just the 1990s either – it’s fairly evident from older and younger posters that it happens for older and newer eras too – but, given the most active fans now were those who grew up in the 1990s, that is what is popular now.
Go back to that era and, reading and listening to what was being written and said at the time, it seemed to be more the case that, rather than celebrating the cars and races of the time, people were moaning that the cars were a bit pathetic compared to the turbocharged cars of the 1980s – the claimed power outputs of which were soon exaggerated far beyond reality to fuel the myth.
We talk about the sport being more affordable, but the 1990s was a period where the grid saw mass bankruptcies – if you go back to, say, 1990, over a dozen teams that were on the grid then went bankrupt within a few years, so the current problems that the teams face now have been occurring for decades. The 1990s was an era where budgets massively increased as tobacco money flooded the sport – by the early 1990s team budgets were, adjusting for inflation, approaching the equivalent of $100-150 million a year then, and it was that rampant cost inflation that killed off so many teams.
We complain now about engine usage restrictions, but the idea is hardly new – the first proposals to restrict engine use per season actually date back to the early 1990s, and if it had not been for the bigger teams then vetoing the move, we would have seen limits on the number of engines that could be used per season as early as 1994. In fact, a whole swathe of the measures that exist now – restricted engine development and engine usage limits, highly restricted testing, restrictions on windtunnel hours and so on – were originally proposed back in the early 1990s, but constant vetoes and threats of rebellion by the teams meant that they were postponed for years.
Pay drivers, too, were endemic – I recall that one driver, possibly Berger, suggested that probably only the top three or four teams actually hired drivers on merit, and that the majority of the drivers in the field were there because of their money, or because they had the right connections with powerful figures, rather than because they were talented enough to compete.
We complain about technology being too prevalent, but that complaint was also routinely being made in the 1990s too – commentators and fans bemoaned how the rapid technological arms race of that era was pushing up costs and reducing the importance of the drivers. Even the drivers made similar criticisms – Senna might have been praised for his performance in the 1993 European GP, but he actually downplayed it quite a bit, saying that, given he probably had the next most advanced car on the grid after Williams, he felt that win really was more of a reflection of the superiority of his car than his own ability.
@faulty, since you bring it up, it is worth noting that the use of steel discs doesn’t really have that much of a difference. When they first entered, Jaguar tested steel and the more common composite compounds used now, and they concluded that there was no difference in terms of peak stopping power – the main benefits were mainly the reduced unsprung weight and reduced cooling requirements, given that it improved the handling and reduced the drag produced by the car.
F1 in Figures (@f1infigures)
18th August 2018, 10:26
+1.
BMF66
18th August 2018, 13:35
You just won the internet.
2face
19th August 2018, 23:19
You can probably sell this exellent comment as an article to a motorsport magazine:-)
Strontium (@strontium)
18th August 2018, 1:21
That video of the broadcast discussions is amazing! (And 10 times better to listen to than David Croft)
bosyber (@bosyber)
18th August 2018, 11:49
Would love to have that playing as one of the sound options for F1tv, you are right, it’s great @strontium
LB (@burden93)
18th August 2018, 13:46
+1 Amazing how much is going on behind the scenes!
SatchelCharge (@satchelcharge)
18th August 2018, 15:02
Wow that was intense
jpvalverde85 (@jpvalverde85)
18th August 2018, 1:33
An UP for Bruno! Best wishes for your career! Hope you can get onboard Gp3 soon :-D
budchekov (@budchekov)
18th August 2018, 3:07
Hmm, interesting development at Long Beach, could some rich kid hotshot get their dad to come up with the $$$$$ to bring F1 back ?
@ On your team Bruno, I’m rootin’ for you, thanks for sharing that. :)
https://brunocarneiromotorsports.com/
Phylyp (@phylyp)
18th August 2018, 3:10
What a COTD. Wow. Best wishes to you, Bruno Carneiro! You may not be winning races or championships now, but you’re already a winner.
ColdFly (@)
18th August 2018, 10:34
That’s a great COTD indeed; might be worse to dedicate an article to him – struggles to rise through the ranks – @keithcollantine.
I always doubt a budget cap will work (if you have more money than morality then it’s easy to find the loopholes), but strongly believe that the entrance series should be fully SPEC (maybe even consider leasing them and randomly allocate karts/cars during a race).
If ‘rich kids’ can afford home teaching and more time to train, that’s good on them and they deserve to perform better than others who do not train as much. No sports will find the best person in the world, but should find the best combination of talent/hard work/dedication/learning/etc. I’m convinced that I can run faster than Bolt, just don’t bother to come off my couch ;)
Phylyp (@phylyp)
18th August 2018, 10:53
@coldfly +1 to the idea of expanding that into an article. It will also be very motivational for anyone who is dissuaded by how easily money opens doors in motorsport.
ColdFly (@)
18th August 2018, 11:57
*worth it
Aapje (@aapje)
19th August 2018, 16:56
Agreed, expanding this into an article would be great unique content for racefans.
Aldoid
18th August 2018, 14:39
I agree as well. Someone should forward it to the powers that be. Carey, Brawn, Todt, whoever. All of them, even. If it were a petition I’d sign it immediately.
David BR (@david-br)
18th August 2018, 17:34
+1 Great COTD, a real insight, thanks Bruno.
V12Beard (@v12beard)
18th August 2018, 18:35
add my +1 to that, too. perfect comment.
Shimks (@shimks)
19th August 2018, 7:19
+1 from me too! Very eloquently put, too, Bruno!
Dom (@3dom)
19th August 2018, 18:11
Fantastic insight there Bruno. Thank you for sharing. I hope that you continue to enjoy competing in motorsport and that the hard work really does pay off. Wishing you well
Niefer (@niefer)
18th August 2018, 4:37
I really think bringing and developing the ground effect concept would attend both sides. Because while it relies heavily on aerodinamics, it brings tons of challenge to contour certain curves, whilst it also would benefit the pursuits and position battles around the track.
Jere (@jerejj)
18th August 2018, 7:29
Regarding Ricciardo’s comment: I’m also one of those that want to see the lap time as low as possible. I definitely prefer the current generation of cars with the current downforce and grip levels over the pre-2017 ones.
Like Stefmeister points out above:
”When cars get too much downforce/grip people complain it looks too easy & that once great corners are no longer corners.”
”When they take downforce away/Slow the cars down people complain it’s too slow, Not physical enough & Doesn’t push the drivers enough & allows people to jump in & be on the pace straight away.”
– Just make up your mind already people.
Great COTD, BTW. Fascinating reading.
@HoHum (@hohum)
18th August 2018, 22:43
@jerrejj, I agree with Ric, although I want to see cars that are as fast as their tyres allow them to be (and don’t mind some negative lift), when the PU can break traction at any time the drivers skill rather than their bravery (or desperation) makes the difference. I believe the lap times in F1 became the main aim because Bernie needed to sell the series to business-men (not racing fans) in order to fulfil his Scrooge McDuck fantasy. And we had the same controversy when traction-control and automatic gearboxes were introduced, F1 banned those without going backwards, we can reduce the aero-effect and F1 will be more entertaining for it.
Todfod (@todfod)
18th August 2018, 7:37
Probably the best COTD I’ve come across. Best of luck Bruno! Hope you have a lot of years ahead of you in motorsport.
Great to actually have a real life experience to match with Villenueve’s statements. I kind of knew that karting is an expensive sport at a grass root level, but great to get in the mindset of a person who has to compete against all odds.
I’m going to find it very difficult to support a pay driver in F1. It’s a harsh reminder that every billionaire’s son has crushed the dreams of a few more deserving and talented drivers who didn’t have the money to compete.
Sviat
18th August 2018, 9:49
I think it was no doubt the best comment of the day ever on f1fanatic/racefans. I love such insights.
Jimmi Cynic (@jimmi-cynic)
18th August 2018, 10:45
+1
Phylyp (@phylyp)
18th August 2018, 10:55
@todfod – very good point, I’d not seen it that way until I read your comment.
Aldoid
18th August 2018, 14:33
So right about this. I’ve never been enamored with pay drivers.
James Bond (@jamesbond)
18th August 2018, 7:38
Lucky for Dan the Renault will go less fast through Copse.
MarcusAurelius (@marcusaurelius)
18th August 2018, 8:01
Wow, that COTD. Time for a COTY poll?
Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
18th August 2018, 8:35
@KeithCollantine
I think that was probably the best / most interesting COTD I’ve ever read.
Genuinely, I think this would have made a great article in its own right.
Maybe an interview with him in a few months time (end of season / start of next season) would be great to see how he’s progressing, both sporting and financially?
Good luck to Bruno! I am more than impressed by his grit and determination on and off track.
Respect to anyone with the drive (no pun intended) to relocate to a country half a world away from home, with language barriers, etc to further themself.
Such a nice positive story.
Todfod (@todfod)
18th August 2018, 8:39
Kind of ironic that the COTD is so relevant to the article on how Kubica might be driving in F1 with Williams this year. It’s ridiculous to think that the worst driver on the grid is getting his father to buy out a team and put him in that seat as soon as possible. Kind of goes to show that drivers can buy themselves success through carting all the way to F1.
I feel really gutted for Ocon if that’s the case. He’s been driving great all year and made his mark as a bright talent for the future. To think that he could be without a drive, is just ridiculous and unjust on many levels.
I think Mr. Chase Carey and Ross Brawn need to sit down and have a real think about this. F1 just received a major body blow with Alonso dropping out of the series, and citing the lack of fair competition between teams in F1 as a major reason. Then you have some billionaire’s no talent clown son throwing a serious F1 talent out of his race seat because his daddy bought him a team. After Alonso’s body blow, this would seem like a tight slap in the face of F1.
We already see from the COTD that money talks at a grassroots level (karting) and continues to do so up until the highest level. But when in F1, it seems ridiculous that drivers can literally buy teams and eventually buy championships. If Stroll buys the team and puts Lance in it by Spa, F1 would have officially become a joke to me.
Jere (@jerejj)
18th August 2018, 11:39
@todfod ‘Lack of on-track action’ actually rather than ‘lack of fair competition between teams’ to be precise.
LB (@burden93)
18th August 2018, 13:52
The thing is regardless of what Lawrence Stroll does, Lance is never going to win a championship. When he goes to FI, he’s going to be hugely found out by either Perez or Ocon. Could you imagine the result if he was against Hamilton, Vettel or Alonso…
Robbie (@robbie)
19th August 2018, 14:44
@todfod So you’ve got Lance buying a team and buying himself a Championship. Wow. You have quite the imagination. The worst driver you have ever seen has bought himself a Championship. And F1 runs the risk of becoming a joke to you? You seem able to make up your own jokes just fine.
Lance must have massive hissy fits the likes that no parent would ever want to go through, if you think he got his father to buy a team. Yeah, next thing you know there’s Lawrence putting a group of wealthy friends together to rescue Force India, just so his son can have a drive. Wow, his friends must really fear Lance too.
Never mind that Stroll and his group have saved a team from leaving F1, and the jobs that go along with that, which has seemed a big issue around here when talk comes to budget caps and therefore smaller teams. So…no credit to Stroll and group for that…it’s all about one job…his son’s. Right.
Never mind that the Kubica article centres almost entirely on Wolff trying to save a job for his driver Ocon. Even at the expense of Vandoorne. Vandoorne seems mere fodder to be turfed at the drop of a hat, just because of Wolff’s desires for Ocon, but that’s no problem…as long we get in some Stroll insults that’s the main thing.
Kubica might get a ride out of this. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled if that happens, and many around here would love to see that. How enamoured Kubica is going to be showcasing his return in pretty much the worst car on the grid is another story. I’m sure he’ll be hoping for a leap in performance from the team if indeed he’ll be there sometime.
Anyway…it sounds from the article like some mid-season switch of drivers hinged on assumptions that FI was about to stop racing all of a sudden, leaving Ocon without a ride, and that doesn’t appear to be happening, so Wolff can stop with his manipulation game and leave things alone for 2018, and just make his moves for 2019. Or, if somehow a switch seems what is needed, with Stroll going to FI by Spa, it sounds like that is going to take the cooperation/manipulation by Wolff as well…so hardly strictly a Stroll/money thing, no? Hardly Lance running the show as you would like to portray, no? It’s also Wolff looking out for his own. It’s also jobs saved. It might mean a ride, if you can call it that, for Kubica. And it might mean Vandoorne is toast. At least two seats have been saved on the grid. And whoever has the seats for next year, things will change again from that too. If Stroll is so bad, we’ll have the definitive proof once we know his car is at least half decent, and I doubt the group will put up with that forever.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
18th August 2018, 8:54
Wow what a COTD! I’m also for an interview!
JJ (@kerbbi)
18th August 2018, 9:07
An interview with Bruno would be something – I’d definitely read it. Good luck, Bruno!
Anast75
18th August 2018, 11:01
Completely agree! Good idea!
Jimmi Cynic (@jimmi-cynic)
18th August 2018, 11:00
Agree with Ricciardo – Too much of a good thing. While it’s fun to see lap records tumble, it’s not as much fun to watch.
I prefer to see the drivers put the cars on the edge. Less downforce should allow less dirty air – for better racing battles. So many flat out corners this year, that there appears to be only a few actual corners left on many tracks. If I wanted to watch no-corner racing, there’s the NHRA.
Would be happy to see them remove power steering, return to foot-clutches, stick shifts and less computer game console knob-twisting. Won’t happen, because not road relevant. This is F1 for the touchscreen generation.
Jere (@jerejj)
18th August 2018, 11:40
@jimmi-cynic It’s more about how the downforce is generated rather than the amount of it.
Jimmi Cynic (@jimmi-cynic)
18th August 2018, 21:27
Unfortunately, F1 can’t or are unwilling to generate more downforce without more dirty air. Look at the following distances between 2016 and now.
anon
18th August 2018, 21:01
@jimmi-cynic, why exactly are you calling it “F1 for the touchscreen generation” when features such as foot clutches were phased out decades ago?
In the case of the foot clutch and stick shift, if Chapman had been able to get the technology to work, he would have eliminated them back in the 1950s when he introduced his first semi-automatic gearbox. He had multiple attempts to eliminate them, trying again in the 1970s with the Lotus 76 (the original version of that car had no clutch pedal – the clutch was automatically activated by the on-board electronics) – he saw it as a pointless old fashioned contrivance that got in the way of his objective of making the cars faster, and was only retained because he couldn’t find a robust enough alternative.
Forghieri has said that Ferrari could have fitted a wheel mounted paddle shift gearbox as soon as 1980 if budgetary constraints hadn’t forced them to drop the idea (Ferrari could either afford to develop a turbo engine, or the paddle operated gearbox, but not both at the same time) – it is known that Gilles Villeneuve tested that gearbox in 1979 (although it was a different design to the one raced in 1989).
What we recognise as a modern paddle shift gearbox is still 29 years old – it’s been around in the sport virtually as long as you say you have been, and I somehow doubt that you claim to be part of “the touchscreen generation”.
Equally, power steering has been around for decades now – it’s probably at least 25 years old, so it really isn’t that modern an invention. At least you’ve not been ranting about even older inventions, such as carbon brakes – that piece of technology is well over 40 years old now (Surtees is recorded as having tested carbon brakes in 1975, and Brabham were experimenting with them in 1976).
Jimmi Cynic (@jimmi-cynic)
18th August 2018, 21:33
My point, which you have missed entirely, is to put more emphasis on the driver’s skill. In response to Ricciardo’s position that F1 looks too easy.
But my fatal mistake was to exaggerate on the internet and I’ve been duly punished.
Although, since the invention of paddle-shifters, the one-handed steering skill has diminished.
anon
19th August 2018, 10:50
@jimmi-cynic, if the point has been missed, it was because you communicated it very poorly and made it instead come across as a rant about “the youth of today”. It comes across as you wanting a very specific form of “testing driver skill” that really seems to be yet another tiresome retread of “this is what I think F1 should be like because this is what it was like when I began watching the sport”.
Jimmi Cynic (@jimmi-cynic)
19th August 2018, 20:28
anon: Rant? Really? You live a very sheltered internet life if you mistook this for a rant:
No rant, sir. Mere personal opinion. No slagging of youth – or middle/old age. I’d also be happy to see F1 lose the Todt Thong and a hundred plus kilos. Is that a rant too?
For the record, touchscreens have been in use longer than paddle shifters – patents go back into the early 1970s. It was a metaphor for this generation of cars – “Rising downforce levels make F1 look easy, Ricciardo warns”
I’m not saying this gen of F1 car is easy to drive – they aren’t – or current generation of drivers aren’t extremely skilled – they are. But with the greater level of downforce, it looks easier than a few years ago.
Arun
18th August 2018, 11:11
Definitely the best COTD I’ve read. I’ve no problems with the amount of money it costs to run an F1 team in, but I’ve lost count of how many talented drivers have to stop racing as a teenager because of the cost at the lower levels. Seriously needs a budget cap if it’s possible.
ruliemaulana (@ruliemaulana)
18th August 2018, 11:36
Re COTD:
Best of luck, Bruno!
I love that you tried so many option on supporting your dream and widening your connection at early age.
Don’t you worry, that attitude is a trait of successful person.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
18th August 2018, 13:19
Back in 2016, there was a TV show on 10-year-old British karters called “Britain’s Fastest Kids”. Typical budgets there were already in excess of £25,000, and the main highlight of the program was an autistic 10-year-old trying to do the same series as one of the other people, but on a £10,000 budget… ….because that was all that could be scraped together, and it was helping him to communicate with people. Unfortunately it looks like Fenn couldn’t get any higher up the racing ladder because even economising on a 250% scale did not enable stepping up to the next level of expense, but the possibly-inadvertent point was made that there was a cheaper method (and better, and cheerier method, if comparison between Fenn and the over-pressured £25,000-budgeted children was anything to go by) for karting to be than is currently the paradigm.
Junior car series usually have limits on how much equipment can be used per weekend. That, and setting randomised equipment for people, would be a good start. Allowing multiple paths through development series is also important, because that’s how cheaper paths get developed (typically the rich/better-funded kids prefer one series, the poorer children go for another one, and the best 1-2 from the latter series end up doing just fine when sharing the next stage up with the richer drivers).
Lack of stability or sustainability of funding in F1 is probably the biggest issue. Because at the moment, the biggest backers know they’ll win simply by throwing enough money at their target, because the level of skill needed to drive a F1 car to the 107% rule can be obtained in the series below F3, let alone any series providing significant contribution to the FIA Superlicence points tallies. So there’s an arms race for that guaranteed method of entry, leaving only the scraps for the occasional super-savvy independent and a handful of F1-team-picked development drivers. The former very rarely get through now and these days, even the latter risk being squeezed out (e.g. Ocon) or left stranded by psuedopolitical changes (e.g. Jerun Devanhala, the “One From A Billion” F3 midfielder who presumably no longer has funding from that source as of 2 weeks ago).
None of this is likely to help people from a lower-working-class background, for whom even getting the funds to win the UK Corporate Games karting competition (which I reckon would cost about £400 in training, travel, accommodation and race practise) is unrealistic, let alone the FIA-type variety of “starter kart”, but at least upper-working-class types like the Hamiltons (who were resourced enough to get 3 jobs at the same time to fund Lewis’ racing at one point) wouldn’t have to rely on extreme luck (in the form of unusually early McLaren patronage) to get there. Also, about the homeschooling: it isn’t necessarily more expensive than sending a child to school, but it does take a lot of time… …and if a working-class parent has the choice between homeschooling a child and getting a job with more hours, that’s the point where the ability to homeschool without cutting income (more often available to upper-middle-class people and the wealthy) suddenly becomes yet another way to have an economical advantage for people who already had the resource advantage.
Urvaksh (@thedoctor03)
18th August 2018, 14:06
Excellent COTD. Very moving. More Power to you, Bruno and all those young karting aspirants who keep fighting against the odds.
Wayne
18th August 2018, 20:14
We want d cars to be the fastest legally possible.. We want more real over takes..we want the drivers to work harder.. We want the races to be more unpredictable.. I think this year has been reli reli gud in terms of the championship. I would like the mid field to more competitive in relation to the front runners…
Allstar GP
19th August 2018, 14:06
Well, I for one won’t be happy until I see a Silverstone grid of 20 cars each with 2 Saturn V rocket boosters attached.