Rosberg: No desire to return from retirement

F1 Fanatic Round-up

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In the round-up: Retired reigning champion Nico Rosberg has reaffirmed that he has no desire to come out of retirement and race in Formula 1 once again.

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Notable posts from Twitter, Instagram and more:

He may be on the other side of the world but @fernandoalo_oficial still made an appearance at our #Renault40YearsF1 evening!

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Comment of the day

After the latest F1 fan survey results were posted online yesterday, reader Haribo offers this observation.

I am most interested by the final chart representing the fans’ preferences for sporting changes, it’s quite amazing to see how fans have come to accept DRS whilst wishing good riddance to rapidly degrading tyres. Back in 2011-12, the sentiment was that DRS was toxic and it was the degrading tyres that were primarily responsible for the improved racing, even with the concerns over tyre management. I guess when the quality of racing soured from 2013, the end of degrading tyres was inevitable.

However I take this survey with a pinch of salt considering there are tens of millions of Formula One fans, I sincerely hope this does not have too much of an influence of the future of the sport.
Haribo

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Will Wood
Will has been a RaceFans contributor since 2012 during which time he has covered F1 test sessions, launch events and interviewed drivers. He mainly...

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24 comments on “Rosberg: No desire to return from retirement”

  1. There is touching the wall….and then there is ploughing into it.

    1. Chris (@tophercheese21)
      27th May 2017, 2:48

      To be fair, if there’s one GP to crash your car during FP1 or FP2 it’s Monaco, purely because of the day off, on Friday. lol

    2. Clearly Vettel, Hamilton and the other top tier drivers cannot take the car to the limit. I believe only Stroll, Ericsson and Palmer are the true talents who hit their ultimate potential at Monaco so far.

      Someone give Stroll a Mercedes contract already. This guy is a gem.

    3. You are supposed to touch the wall where others do and not to park into the wall.
      I can excuse his accident, but his explanation is ridiculous. Its a giant video game for him.

  2. “How do we know we are legal now? I’ve got no idea. We’ve gone through scrutineering but to me now scrutineering means nothing. The precedent that it has set is huge. Absolutely huge.”

    I can’t be the only one who read this and assumed it had to do with some important technical ruling on the car. The floor, perhaps, or the engine mapping. (They are actually squabbling over the size and placement of the drivers number on the car)

    1. They are also squabbling about the fact that if a car can be cleared twice and then denigrated the third time on the same weekend, that it could just as easily happen with any technical regulation as with a cosmetic one. That throws the legitimacy of the sporting contest into serious doubt, however inadvertently. There is nothing about the situation that would have prevented it from being about any other regulation, or any team/combination of teams. Nor is there anything that would prevent a bad component from being tried on the basis of regulation roulette.

      Many of the experimental components we see are added because the FIA said they were OK beforehand – but they also OK’d Force India’s numbers, and then reversed it at the end of a weekend, after that design had been approved by scrutineers (and, due to the regulations, locked in place – only had it been deemed in breach of the regulations during the weekend could it have been altered post-scrutineering (attempt), otherwise the whole car would have had to have been re-scrutineered). What confidence can we have that good items were permitted and bad ones barred correctly, since new technical components follow the same incorporation system as the Force India numbers did?

      Had this been about a component that wasn’t measured at scrutineering, that would have been another matter – Force India isn’t presuming that any scrutineer team will measure everything in the rulebooks at every race (or even the whole season in aggregate). As it stands, there is now precedent that the FIA pre-race assessors and the scrutineers cannot be relied upon to give verdicts that follow the regulations as they actually are.

      Also, if those pre-race/Thursday scrutineering checks were done according to the written regulations, then the written regulations are no longer in force where any individual scrutineer decides otherwise (scrutineering decisions are only subject to steward sign-off, not debate). I knew things had got bad, but I had no idea how bad things had become.

      So yes, it is to do with an important technical ruling – whether any of them are as they seem, and indeed whether we are in a written formula any more (as opposed to being a guesswork formula). That may seem extreme, but there is now precedent for such thinking right there in the penalty book.

      We haven’t heard the last of this.

    2. Fireblade, the SFI like many other cars changed their liveries to conform to the shark fin numbers or 3 letter abbreviation rule. Andy Green is saying their car went to scrutineering and it apparently passed, only for the team to then get penalized and forced to rethink their number/letter positioning, possibly after some lobbying. In short Andy Green is saying that he doubts scrutineering is doing it’s job, consequently it might mean that you can do whatever you want to the car.

      1. I can recall several instances where cars passed scrutiny at one race, and then, without any changes being made to the cars, failed scrutiny at the the next race. (Where the item which was in contention was performance related, such as engine mapping or wings) So I don’t see this as some startling new development showing that scrutineering is suddenly proving itself untrustworthy.

        1. But when the car was found illegal on its second scrutiny did they also deem the car illegal for the first scrutiny? No, I don’t think so. This is the point here. Your car can pass the scrutineering multiple times with no faults but then after the race your car could still be declared illegal.

          Normally if a team puts something in the car and the car then passes scrutineering then the team can rightfully assume that the car is legal. The car is now legal. But with this ruling the teams have no way of knowing whether the car is legal because at any stage the car can be declared to be in breach of some rule regardless of how many times it has passed scrutineering before during the same weekend where these kind of issues should be found.

          So if you have a new part in the car you can ask and get verification thousand times and pass thousand scrutineerings during the weekend with everybody officially saying your car is ok but then after the race you may still be found illegal for the same exact part that has now been declared legal thousand times. Suddenly the car just is illegal. How can that be?

    3. Call me crazy but here is some alternative thinking: 1) the “ever present” Force India is firmly in 4th in the F1 Constructors’ Championship, 2) due to its performance, unusual livery and media coverage, FI has got two new sponsors this week (UNIFIN and SportBible) – the only team to achieve that so late into the season, 3) more sponsors mean more money for R&D which may translate in improved performance in detriment of other also-ran teams, 4) as a general rule envy is fed by success, so maybe some of the also-rans welcome and promote stricter scrutinies, after all this is a rat race, and/or; 5) maybe there is some romantic scruteneers that take offence on the fact that FI is better placed than some sacred cows of old time.

      There is also the possibility that this is simple a problem of too many sponsors for such limited publicity space…

      I just hope that the scrutiny does not lead to grid penalties, that would be so unfair.

  3. Good article here making the case for IndyCar vs F1.

    http://www.espn.co.uk/f1/story/_/id/19469106/dispelling-myths-indycar

  4. Raveendhana
    27th May 2017, 1:46

    So finally Haas learnt f1 is not so easy?

  5. @Cotd Possible implications of this survey to the future of F1 are indeed the interesting part of those survey results.
    As I remember, the big improvement in racing quality already came in 2010, when they got rid of refuelling. If it wasn’t for a single driver in the season finale not overtaking another driver, this would probably be much clearer in public perception.
    DRS and degrading tyres were relatively superficial changes compared to that, and only the DRS was a “gimmick” at the beginning, while the tyres were good in 2011/2012. I’m not sure how much of the downfall of that concept in 2013 was due to the changes to the tyres when some media suddenly decided punctures weren’t a normal thing in F1, and how much of it was due to teams getting their heads around how to treat and strategize those tyres. When we had one-stoppers or even near-complete race-distances on one set in 2014, a sure sign of too hard tyres, but those stints were entirely driven to a delta, it was clear there was a problem in the conception of those tyres.

    1. The early-2013 tyre simply didn’t work when raced upon, with a large number of punctures when teams ran within the range they thought was appropriate due to a serious problem with handling kerbs and similarly-shaped debris. Punctures are part and parcel of F1; clusters of punctures at several venues where kerb-riding is particularly common (and not attributable to unusual debris) are not. There was no method of strategising for such problems, because even avoiding kerbs altogether was only a partial cure, and a slow one at that. It did not help that on several occasions, the reasons given were unconvincing at best. At that point, it was unsurprising that elements of the media thought things were wrong.

      The late-2013 tyre was identical to the 2012 tyre because that was the best backup available at short notice (Pirelli had 2 weeks to react, not enough to create a new compound family of tyres). Pirelli then had to accept that it had gone too far, so went the other way in 2014. It didn’t dare risk a repeat the 2013 problems until the FIA obliged it to do so in 2017, since there were points in that crisis that saw Pirelli not be far off either being dismissed as the tyre supplier, or leaving of its own volition (both, I think, were possible at various points of that crisis).

      1. @alianora-la-canta actually those early 2013 tyres weren’t all that bad. It worked fine for the teams that got their game right. And it did blew up because at the time there were no strictly enforced minimum tyre pressues nor were the limits to changing the tyres around (using lefts on the right etc) that we now have.

        Honestly, if it had not been Red Bull being so much in bed with Bernie and complaining as loud as they did, i am unsure they would have managed to make the issue boil over like it did (sky, as they did with the engine/sound complaints, helped their commercial partner Bernie a lot there) and force Pirelli to change it. The advantage of the construction was that the tyre did not blow completely but only lost it thread.

  6. I think DRS has been reduced in priority in viewers’ perceptions because in two of the last five races, DRS was almost completely nullified, and in the other three, it was kept under relatively tight control. While I believe two of those races would have been significantly better without DRS, the nature of the tyres has become considerably more important than DRS in terms of contribution to how races play out.

    1. Yeah, I think that far less fans have big issues with DRS as we saw it in the first couple of races this year @alianora-la-canta. It seemed rather to do what it was supposed to – help a car be able to stay close to the car in front when following – instead of making for automatic highway passes.

  7. Stroll should probably hire Kimi as his PR guy. He seems to be blurting out too much recently.

    1. In his head, he’s as awesome as sliced bread. He’s the only driver who can wreck his car on every possible occasion or trail his teammate by large margins and yet find excuses that never point the finger at him.

      1. Looks like Massa is his PR guy.

  8. They moved the Pace billboard – because people were distracted and crashed – to the heliport.
    Smart Thinking.

    Why not put one in an operating theatre, nuclear power plant control room, or the oval office ;)

    1. Sundar Srinivas Harish
      27th May 2017, 10:50

      More like North Korea. Little Kim needs some distractions :P

    2. I expect that most helicopter pilots want to live….and are less interested in the pace of F1 drivers than F1 drivers. It´s fine.

  9. For once i agree with Rosberg, I share his desire to never return to F1 and would prefer that he did not keep rearing his head in interviews too.

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