Romain Grosjean, Haas, Suzuka, 2019

Grosjean says he must improve his starts

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In the round-up: Romain Grosjean says he’s lost too many places at the start in recent races.

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What they say

Grosjean fell four places to 14th on the first lap at Suzuka.

The start, first of all, I was behind Kevin [Magnussen] by turn one so it’s been two races in a row that we just don’t get any good start performance. We need to understand that because I don’t think there is much more I can do. So that’s something we need to work on.

Then initially we had some good pace. We tried a one stop fitting the hard but honestly really two really good overtakes on Giovinazzi and Russell on the outside of turn one-two that was probably the highlight of my race, had a lot of fun and then we we pushed hard, tried to go to the end but the tyres just died to the end so a bit of a shame.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Would it achieve anything meaningful for Lewis Hamilton to stop racing in the name of reducing his carbon footprint?

He’s in a very similar position to high-profile musicians who join climate campaigns. Their lifestyle (in their case, touring) makes them painfully easy targets for dismissal and accusations of hypocrisy. Those opposed to whatever protest is taking place pull these kinds of people aside and (figuratively) beat them with a stick, over and over, in the hope that doing so will ruin the credibility of the entire movement. In the minds of some people, it does just that.

That makes them good and bad for these movements. On one hand they raise the profile of the cause and potentially influence their fans to become involved. But on the other they provide an open goal for anyone who fancies taking a cheap, effective shot. They’re a gateway to deploying the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attack, which is particularly difficult to directly defend against.

But Bono stopping touring, or Hamilton stopping driving, or Sherlock stopping advertising cars, or Prince Harry catching a hot air balloon, would be tiny drops in an ocean of whatever height it happens to have risen to when those things happen. They’re cogs in a machine with multiple redundancies and what they do as individuals doesn’t really matter. I dislike misinformed, virtue-signalling preaching by ‘celebrities’ as much as the next person, but I welcome genuine voicing of concerns from famous people who have a platform and something they truly believe in.

So I hope he doesn’t stop racing, because as an F1 fan I want to see the best drivers racing for as long as possible. And I also hope he doesn’t stop saying what he thinks about stuff, especially stuff he’s researched and developed a proper interest in.
Neil (@Neilosjames)

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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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19 comments on “Grosjean says he must improve his starts”

  1. Anthony Blears
    19th October 2019, 0:46

    Outstanding COTD @Neilosjames

    1. The system is the issue.
      We need to change it.

    2. Agreed, very well put.

  2. On CotD, I’d say the problem isn’t the debatable apparent hypocrisy itself, but the evident instrumentality at the hands of a selective political agenda that does not hungers for the better. One evidence: Amazon fires are seasonal, just as the hurricanes and the fires at the US. But oil leak isn’t, and there are tons of gallons leaked at Brazil’s coast at this very moment by around 2,000 km and counting. Any mainstream concern or fuss? Nope!

    And why is that? Because it is known the ship which dropped them, accidentally or not, is a foreign one. Hence, there is no political use for the good woken fakes. — By the way, some believe the ship is Venezuelan. Yes, Venezuela, the very dictatorship that integrates UN’s Commission on Humans Rights whilst its forces runs over protesters with their cars without much concern from the world. Hence, I guess if that’s true, the fuss will remain missing.

    Like countless celebrities, Lewis is just another blank check. Whatever is written, his trustworthiness will guarantee its “value”. Shame, because when you echo made-up thoughts and words without critical thought, you’re nothing but a hollow vessel.

    Now, I reckon he would be more coherent if he moved up with his speech to F-E. It would be a huge loss for F1, though. As @Neilosjames, I hope he remains until the last drop of excellence is extracted from him. But I also hope he speaks and behaves more authentically. I don’t see the x-factor at his affairs outside F1 any similar to what he displays at the tarmac.

    1. “And why is that? Because it is known the ship which dropped them, accidentally or not, is a foreign one. Hence, there is no political use for the good woken fakes. — By the way, some believe the ship is Venezuelan. Yes, Venezuela, the very dictatorship that integrates UN’s Commission on Humans Rights whilst its forces runs over protesters with their cars without much concern from the world. Hence, I guess if that’s true, the fuss will remain missing.”

      I really don’t understand where you’re going here. Why does it matter if the ship is foreign?

      1. @exediron — Amazon fire is seasonal, as I said. There has been larger fires in the near past, but the only reason the woken world is suddenly worried about that is the new Brazilian President is said to be a Conservative, and is “affiliated” to Donald Trump. Also, the fact a Conservative is politically skeptical (theoretically, ofc) raises a red flag under the eyes of any environmental militant, an interventionist by default (not to mention alarmist, instead of collected).

        1. So, the fact the ship is a foreign one does not imply any apparent liability towards Brazilian Government. Suppose it does and you will see Macron and Greta coming out the gate storming.
          (@exediron sorry, I forgot to specifically answer the question addressed).

      2. @exediron

        Wokeness has fairly strong biases, like:
        – anti-western
        – anti-right
        – anti-lower class
        – anti-male

        So the level of outrage differs by who does something. Venezuela gets less criticism than a less poorly behaving right-winger like Bolsonaro gets.

      3. @exediron The environmentalists have tagged Venezuela as an enemy-in-general-until-otherwise-advertised. They don’t usually do “shock horror” when an oil company does something that isn’t unusually awful environmentally, because its general day-to-day running is already consistently slated. I wouldn’t consider myself a massive environmentalist, but I’ve known about the anti-Venuzuela stuff since 2005 (a good six years before it started hitting the news waves). Now that Venuzuela’s crisis has become endemic, it’s out of the news again, so the opinions that are carried with its environmental stance have also disappeared below the horizon of the newscases. Oil tankers sink routinely in the waters around, and on the way to, Venezuela, precisely because of the power oil has there; it’s only when new records of oil get spilt that they make the news these days.

        “Amazon fire is seasonal” rather underlines the point. There are seasons when the Amazon isn’t on fire, so there’s time for the situation to cease, and then restart. News has always been more interested in things that stop and start again, than things which continue, regardless of political stance.

        Non-environmentalists rarely notice environmentalist opinions unless they’re connected with a news item or end up overtly linked with something they’re interested in, because everyone has a limit as to how much attention they have, and people generally prefer to give it to things that actually interest them.

    2. When you say Amazon fires are seasonal, you don’t mean to say they’re natural do you? Because the rainforest is being destroyed by man, and the context in which that is happening matters, doesn’t it?

      “While campaigning for president last year, Mr. Bolsonaro declared that Brazil’s vast protected lands were an obstacle to economic growth and promised to open them up to commercial exploitation.

      Brazil’s part of the Amazon lost more than 1,330 square miles of forest cover in the first half of 2019, a 39 percent increase over the same period last year, according to the government agency that tracks deforestation.”

      Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/amazon-fire-brazil-bolsonaro.html

      “In May 2019, eight former environment ministers in Brazil warned, “We’re facing the risk of runaway deforestation in the Amazon”, as rainforest destruction increased in the first year of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. In September 2019, Carlos Nobre, expert on the Amazon and climate change, warned that at the current rates of deforestation, we are 20 to 30 years off from reaching a tipping point that could turn big parts of the Amazon forest into a dry savanna, especially in the southern and northern Amazon.”

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest

  3. Nice COTD.

    I’m not a big LH fan, but he is entitled to use his platform to spread a message he believes in, even if it is at odds with much of his own lifestyle (which he openly recognises).

    Take a moment to consider the opposite. Imagine if he was using his immense profile to discredit climate change, constantly promoting V10 fossil-fuel guzzling motor sports, super cars and the value of airlines (and private jets). I can only imagine the articles being written in that scenario…

    1. @aussierod, they’d probably like it – the same newspaper (The Spectator) that was criticising Hamilton was the same one that happened to run articles advocating investing in crude oil, whilst simultaneously running full-page adverts directly next to said articles for companies that offered means to invest in oil.

      Given that the former chief political commentator of The Spectator and The Telegraph – both of which are owned by the Barclay brothers – has openly stated that both newspapers have manipulated news coverage in favour of their advertisers, particularly fossil fuel sponsors (leading to him eventually quitting in disgust at how openly both papers were manipulating their coverage), they’d probably be quite happy as it would feed into the sort of coverage that their sponsors want to see.

  4. Regarding the Motorsport magazine-post: Still, no further update on the Renault BB-gate has come out some six days after the Japanese GP. I hope something would come out by the Mexican GP.

    A thoughtful COTD BTW.

  5. So Grosjean needs to improve his starts?

    … and his race pace, and his overtaking, and his consistency…

    1. I agree with starts and consistency but think his race pace and overtakes have been quite good considering the Haas seems to be a pretty poor race car.

    2. @rocketpanda Improving starts would be a start…

    3. Dutchguy (@justarandomdutchguy)
      23rd October 2019, 19:26

      well, TBH, he could also be smarter when on the defense. Leaving the door mostly open, squeeze when someone is already alongside and then complain afterwards isn’t the smartest behaviour, and he keeps repeating the same kind of dumb mistakes

Comments are closed.