F1 Fanatic round-up: 1/6/2010

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If you’ve not already rated the Turkish Grand Prix make sure you do as soon as the poll will be closing shortly.

Later today we’ll have the results of the latest round of the Predictions Championship. Here’s the Tuesday round-up:

Links

And again a new front wing for Renault (F1 Technical)

“Just one race after its newest wing, the R30 is again equipped with a new version. The curvy stacked panel that was present since the the beginning of the season has made way for a 2-panel winglet similar to Brawn GPs last year.”

Alonso Survives Wheel Damage In Turkey (Speed)

Fernando Alonso had a lucky escape in Turkey when he ran the last four and a half laps of the race with a badly damaged left rear wheel.”

The driving force of British motorsport (BBC)

Thanks to The Genuine Jim for posting the link to this article on the British motorsport industry.

F1 Austin announcement a big surprise to many

“One of the oddest things about Tavo Hellmund’s plan to build a $250 million Formula One racing facility is that people who would seem to be the most likely investors ?óÔé¼ÔÇØ very wealthy Texan car enthusiasts ?óÔé¼ÔÇØ aren’t. Most weren’t even approached. Neither were their friends. That segment had no idea Hellmund’s project was in the works ?óÔé¼ÔÇØ and some of them apparently would at least like a chance to get in on the action.”

Comment of the day

F1 Novice raises a good point about how the limited and delayed fragments of team radio we hear in F1 broadcasts prevents us from gaining a true impression of what happened in a race:

Who decides which snippets we get to hear on the TV anyway?

The edited bits we get to hear don’t paint the full picture and open up the potential for these conspiracy theories – with the technology available these days and if F1 really wants to get closer to the fans then we should be able to tune into whichever team radios we want to and review them at our leisure at a later date if and when we want to.
F1 Novice

Site updates

The driver form guides for 2010 have been updated so you can compare every drivers’ performance to his team mate throughout the season. Find them here:

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Kevin Hodge and Josh!

On this day in F1

Today is former McLaren racing boss Ron Dennis’s birthday – he turns 63 today.

It’s also the birthday of one of his former employees – Martin Brundle, who drove for McLaren in 1994. The BBC F1 commentator is 51 today.

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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34 comments on “F1 Fanatic round-up: 1/6/2010”

  1. Prisoner Monkeys
    1st June 2010, 1:15

    It’s an interesting idea from F1 Novice, but there’s one fatal flaw to it: if anyone can listen to team transmissions, the teams themselves will. And I’m pretty sure you’ll find that McLaren and Red Bull and Ferrari won’t appreciate each of the others listening in on their strategy calls.

    1. I agree with PM here.

      Sometimes you can have a little too much knowledge; a bit like when they published the fuel weights last year… something many on F1F were pushing for, but actually meant each team knew exactly when the other was stopping and hence took something away from the race.

    2. Don’t they do that anyway? I thought there was an open stream.

      1. I thought that to…

      2. Prisoner Monkeys
        1st June 2010, 6:56

        Yes, the teams do listen in on everything that is broadcast during the race. However, nothing that we hear is heard live. There is a delay as FOM filter everything to prevent more sensitive information from getting out, and also to screen for explicit language. The teams use what they hear, but if you opened the radio channels to anything and everything, it would just leave everyone wide open to scrutiny from the other teams. And then they’d probably end up speaking in code (ie, “That’ll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo!” being code for “Lewis, pit this lap”), so it wouldn’t make sense to anyone except those in the know. It’d be a farce

        And given that there’s almost always someone talking to their driver or team, the commentary would be constantly interrupted by a string of radio transmissions.

        1. Yes, teams do all listen in on one another via the Kangaroo TV systems (you can hire these when you go to the circuit to watch). Failing that, all of the radio frequencies are published by the FIA and encryption is NOT allowed. It’s just us mere mortals at home that are not allowed a piece of the pie…

          1. MouseNightshirt
            1st June 2010, 10:03

            Well, if encryption is not allowed, there is nothing to stop you sitting at the edge of the circuit with a bunch of receivers and re-broadcasting it over the internet.

          2. MouseNightshirt
            1st June 2010, 10:03

            I mean nothing to stop anyone. :)

        2. FOM released that McLaren was having fuel trouble. An we know we hear a lot of code anyway, precicley for that reason. Kravitz also hears lots of things that we don’t.

          I know what we hear has been FOM screened but I thought the teams had acess to an open radio frequency.

          1. Mark Hitchcock
            1st June 2010, 14:36

            “Kravitz also hears lots of things that we don’t.”

            Yeah, he’s always talking about some mystical feed that we don’t get to hear. Can’t see any reason not to make that available to broadcasters if it’s already available to the likes of Kravitz (and therefore other teams).

          2. Right, Ted hears practically everything. It was at one of the races last year–Monaco, I think–that Brundle asked Ted “How do you know all these things ?!”

            Ted replied that “we are given radios here that we listen in on “. Obviously BBC can’t make everything known publicly, but that’s how Ted always knows why a car needed that new nose, if Brundle missed the contact on-track, for example.

        3. There is a delay as FOM filter everything to prevent more sensitive information from getting out, and also to screen for explicit language.

          Evidently, Alonso’s engineer calling the Virgin driver at Monaco a “******” wasn’t considered bad language. I did get quite a good laugh out of that one.

  2. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO
    Mclaren, Brundle & Kevin Hodge and Josh

    1. its ron dennis’ birthday, not mclarens.

      1. Sorry my mistake.

  3. Happy Birthday Martin Brundle! Many happy returns, Ron.

    And best wishes to F1Fanatics celebrating today!

  4. Has anyone else looked at the F1.com poll on the Webber/Vettel incident? I looked at about 7 other polls (including here) and they were all about the same – something like 75/15/10% (Vettel/Webber/Neither-both), whereas they have it as 38/33/29%.

    Its so much different to any other site that it struck me as a little odd.

    1. Thats very odd.

    2. Perhaps it is being pushed by Vettle-fan websites. Something similar happened here with Räikkönen fans last year, which annoyed Keith if I remember correctly.

      1. Same thing happened with a sudden influx of Polish readers voting for Kubica.

      2. Yep annoyingly all the Kimi fans are now Vettel fans. They are complete fan boys who can’t admit mistakes and they were shouting abuse at Webber and setting up facebook groups.

        One of them even said if Kimi was back in F1 he’d have beaten Lewis in the Mclaren, Won in the Ferrari or if he was at Red Bull he’d have let Vettel go by. Pathetic.

    3. Yeah it spoiled the “driver of the year poll” last year: https://www.racefans.net/2009/12/01/kimi-raikkonen-voted-top-driver-of-2009/

      1. I seem to remember a few skewed F1.com polls. I think it might be partly that its in an obscure place.

  5. Formula1.com should get that needed upgrade with live streams and live radio. Have a look at how Nascar and Indycar do it. I love it!
    You can follow you prefered drivers and listen to the radio singals of them too. But we all know f1 isn’t about the latest technologie (except on the cars and in the teams)

  6. Holy crap. Have you guys read the comments on that Statesman article about F1 in Austin? I was literally laughing out loud. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at something I saw on the internet. This was a good one:

    “Formula One is a joke. I decided to watch the race Sunday, since I’d never seen one before.

    Boring.

    Nothing happened until the end when the sissy European guy in second place tried to pass the sissy European guy in first place, got spooked and crashed. These are supposed to be the best drivers in the world?”

    1. To be fair – if you really look through the comments you’ll see that the one you quote was posted by someone who is obviously a resident crackpot; most of the comments, both for and against the project, are pretty much along the lines you would expect, such as benefits vs disadvantages for the local community.

    2. that, my friend, would be a troll.

    3. Last time I looked Australia wasn’t in Europe – not even close.

  7. Speed TV interview with Austin GP promoter Tavo Hellmund http://formula-one.speedtv.com/article/video-new-formula-one-us-gp-location/

  8. Appear to be missing a link, Keith:

    “The driver form guides for 2010 have been updated so you can compare every drivers’ performance to his team mate throughout the season. Find them here:”

  9. “After Istanbul the F1 racers head for Montreal on the 13th. That race is typically held in early June, and it would seem to make sense to hold the two North American stops, Montreal and Austin, close together on the calendar.”

    June? Really? Someone needs to sit him down to watch the 1984 US GP held in Texas…

  10. The Genuine Jim
    1st June 2010, 20:27

    Thanks for the acknowledgement, Keith. Makes me feel all fuzzy inside…

  11. Does anyone knoww where to find or get F1 frequencies ??

    1. What do you mean by frequencies?

Comments are closed.