Kevin Magnussen, Haas, Paul Ricard, 2019

Magnussen would “love” more two-day F1 weekends

RaceFans Round-up

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In the round-up: Kevin Magnussen enjoyed having qualifying and the race on the same day in Japan.

What they say

Although Magnussen had a poor result at Suzuka, he enjoyed the changes to the weekends prompted by Super Typhoon Hagibis.

Absolutely, it’s been a really fun day. I think a very interesting and very intense. I’d love to see this be the way forward in the future.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Snapshot

James Calado, Jaguar, Formula E testing, Valencia, 2019
James Calado, Jaguar, Formula E testing, Valencia, 2019

Formula E began testing for its 2019-20 season at Valencia yesterday, with new teams Mercedes and Porsche joining the 24-strong field.

Social media

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Thank you Singha Corporation for a nice day!

A post shared by Kimi Räikkönen (@kimimatiasraikkonen) on

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Comment of the day

Is Sebastian Vettel right that Ferrari have all they need to beat Mercedes?

They have a slightly better car sometimes. What they lack is operational perfection to get the most out of every weekend and then a safe 0.3-0.5s lap time advantage.

They fixed the car with one third of the season to go. Before then they were only competitive on the right tracks.

But overall yes they are there about. Especially Vettel under-performed greatly. If he was two to three tenths ahead of Leclerc like a great driver should be, then that would be enough for many more wins this year. But with all the mistakes in last two years what feels like every second weekend was thrown away in some kind of incident (mostly Vettel under pressure).

Meanwhile look at Hamilton, I cannot remember when was the last time he dropped the ball? Certainly not every second race. Even Bottas would be a serious threat if he did that.
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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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22 comments on “Magnussen would “love” more two-day F1 weekends”

  1. Meanwhile look at Hamilton, I cannot remember when was the last time he dropped the ball? Certainly not every second race. Even Bottas would be a serious threat if he did that

    I think the year he was beaten by Rosberg was probably the last time. Hamilton certainly wasn’t at his best and has been a far better driver since. That is why Bottas has not seemed as competitive as Rosberg IMO.

    1. True there were years when Rosberg seemed way off Hamilton. But still Rosberg was getting his hands dirty in ways Bottas does not. Makes him a great #2 but not that great competition for #1.

    2. @dbradock though Rosberg had another rivalry background and looked more eager to win than it seems I’ll ever sense in Bottas. It’s like the guy accepted to be second from start while Rosberg was in the team before Hamilton and had a more established status. Rosberg has been a better competitor than Bottas imho.

      1. @spoutnik And Rosberg had been beating Schumacher most weekends too.

    3. If Vettel had been in the dominant Mercedes he would have been at 99% and made far fewer mistakes too, and likewise, if Hamilton had been in the Ferrari and knew he would have to give 100% and seize each and every opportunity, he would have made more mistakes.

      1. @balue Hamilton has shown to be far more good at wheel to wheel battles than Vettel throughout his career. We have over a decade of evidence of both of them, and Vettel has only shown glimpses of such skill. Hamilton has done it in every season (even in his troubled 2011 season). I doubt that it was Vettel trying too hard, he’s just not as adaptable a driver as Hamilton.

        1. @3dom Even in overtaking situations it is much easier in a dominant car to appear the better driver when the car is obviously faster and better handling and when you can bide your time to make a clean pass, and likewise worse in a non-dominant car where you know there might only be one opportunity and you have to go for it when it’s not an ideal time and you are desperate to get ahead to get the points needed to stay in the championship fight etc.

          When Hamilton was in Vettel’s position of having to scrape every last tenth and point in the McLaren, he was much more error prone both when it came to forced and unforced errors. His fights often ended in crashes and an unforced error in reality cost him a championship (going off in China 2007) as we all know.

          But I don’t know why there’s a need to argue what seems an obvious point that surely everyone realize. I simply wanted to remind people about this fact before it is empirically declared that Vettel can’t deliver championships because of errors, when we all know this is not true.

          1. 2007 was his rookie year @balue. I’m not sure you can compare that to the recent mistakes Vettel has been making.

          2. @balue who had the best car last year was arguable. They seemed pretty even imho.

            I appreciate what you’re saying about a driver being able to be less “on the edge” if their car is better.

            What I’m saying is that regardless of the last 2 years, if you look at both Ham and Vet’s wheel to wheel racing over their whole F1 careers (I think 13 and 11 years respectively), Ham has shown to be significantly better. Even in 2011 when he did have his worst season he showed how good he can be, just look at the way he raced Alonso to take the win in Germany that year as an example of how good he still was wheel to wheel in his worst year. I think Vettel is still a good driver, but he’s not done enough to show that he’s anywhere near as good as Hamilton wheel to wheel, and for that reason I can’t believe that he would have done as good a job as Ham if the situation was reversed, because you need that skill to be able to eke out the points even on weekends where you’re on the back foot. That’s what Ham and Mercedes did mid-season last year

      2. I would have agreed with the Vettel statement until mid-2018. But since then, I don’t. Vettel is now perfectly capable of spinning off on his own, running wide on his own, crashing it into the walls on his own no matter which position he is running in at that point of the race.
        Give Vettel the Mercedes of 2018 or 2019 and we may even have got Bottas as champion.

      3. Except 2018 ferrari had the fastest car at a lot of tracks and at a lot of those tracks vettel still managed to make mistakes and throw away the win

  2. Of course Ham is not an Englishman, he is monegasque like every f1 driver, except Albon, he is thai.

    1. @peartree Thai people seem to have great southern British accents don’t they? 😜

      1. @3dom that’s racist.
        I just tag along Lewis Hamilton to get more coverage.

  3. If we had to change the GP-weekend format, then here’s a compromise I’d suggest:
    Friday: Only (current) FP2 either 90 minutes or 120 minutes to compensate for the lack of FP1 and 3 to an extent
    Saturday: Only Qualifying
    Sunday: Race
    At least for the Middle Eastern-venues, this alternative format wouldn’t be such a bad idea given the daytime FP1, and FP3-sessions are more or less a waste of time anyway, so might as well do without them on these two venues.

  4. :D Thank you for COTD.

    As for Deamon Hill claiming Lewis does not get the credit he deserves?

    What credit exactly does he deserve? Mostly people tend to agree he is the best of current-outgoing generation.

    There are a number of fans who can easily claim with some evidence to suggest he is the greatest of all time.

    To support that he is the greatest in several recorded stats. He needs few more wins and two (one is nearly done) more champions to match Michael Schumacher. And then most of measurable stats will be on his side.

    What more does he deserve? He might not impress fans with his pleasant personality or simple lifestyle. But racing driver wise, nobody can dispute it much.

    1. Perhaps he’s referring to the large swath of people who recognise the statistics but don’t credit him as being a more outstanding driver than anyone else who would be given the same equipment.

      The tired refrain of “If Fernando/Max/Leclerc/etc. had Lewis’ car they’d have X more driver championships” is common in any environment where team/equipment play an outsized factor for individual accolades.

  5. Regarding the proposed changes in qualifying, effectively, I see the modified race weekend as 1 long race with a forced red flag in between. Teams will be allowed to change tyres, repair cars and refuel during the red flag. The starting order for this long race will be the reverse championship order.

    So, what is really happening is that qualifying is being completely abandoned (not just being replaced by a different format) and we have got reverse grid races. While it is being advertised as a “different type of qualifying format”, I hope fans see it for what it really is – abandonment of qualifying.

    I really hope this proposal doesn’t go through. Abandoning qualifying would be a travesty.

  6. Re COTD: “What they lack is operational perfection to get the most out of every weekend and then a safe 0.3-0.5s lap time advantage.”

    The operational perfection is easier to achieve, and Mattia Binotto seems to be the perfect TP to fix these issues with time. But the second part is much harder… At the moment, Ferrari managed to sort-of fix their downforce issues but they only have a slight edge in qually trim, in race pace it seems to be the other way around, the Mercedes is quicker and kinder on its tires. In Singapore and Monza, this qually advantage proved to be enough to win because track position and straight-line speed were paramount. And this fooled everyone into thinking Ferrari is the new car to beat, but I think they are still second fastest in race-trim.

  7. Like 2017 in reverse then @gechichan?

  8. “Racist paedophile threatened to kill journalists and said Lewis Hamilton is not English (LeedsLive)”

    Probably BigJoe off here.

  9. And I’d love to have my work commitments reduced by a third Kevin.

Comments are closed.