In the round-up: Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says he won’t make an “emotional” choice over the team’s driver line-up for the 2021 F1 season after Romain Grosjean scored his first point of the year at the Nurburgring.
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What they say
Steiner was asked whether Grosjean’s first points finish of the season in Germany will have a bearing on the team’s driver line-up choice for 2021:
I don’t think so. We cannot be this emotional that we can go from race to race and decide on and off. It needs to be, as I’ve always said, a decision for the long term, not for the short term, and don’t want to fall into that trap.
I stay very stable on that one. I want to evaluate what I’ve always said want to evaluate how can the team perform or how we think the team will perform based with which drivers in the next two, three, four years?
Quotes: Dieter Rencken
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Social media
Notable posts from Twitter, Instagram and more:
That first taste of an F1 car 👌
We have @yuki_TY0511 with us in Faenza for a seat fit! 👊
Getting prepped for a previous car outing at Imola on the 4th of November 🤙#AlphaTauri #F1 pic.twitter.com/tmKn2q4BbQ— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) October 14, 2020
Excited to announce I’ll be racing in the final round of the intelligent money @BritishGT Champs at Silverstone November 7-8. I’ll be joining my team @Rocket_Msport & lining-up in the McLaren 720S with my buddy @chris_buncombe. Big thanks to our partners for making this possible. pic.twitter.com/RXLXWy7tYz
— Jenson Button (@JensonButton) October 14, 2020
Button and Buncombe will share a GT car for the first time during #BritishGT’s blue riband #Silverstone500, but it won’t be their first motorsport outing together. they’ve already raced a Trophy Truck in the Mint 400, Vegas to Reno and Baja 1000 off-road events. pic.twitter.com/QGmFWTNOXv
— 🇬🇧 #BritishGT 🏁 (@BritishGT) October 14, 2020
INDY CAR TEST! This will be fun! Massive thanks to @RLLracing for the shot! Always wanted to come and try one of these! See you in Barber November 2nd. @IndyCar pic.twitter.com/BneJtGw1LM
— Antonio Felix da Costa (@afelixdacosta) October 14, 2020
- Find more official F1 accounts to follow in the F1 Twitter Directory
Links
More motor racing links of interest:
Daimler CEO committed to F1, seeks to slash costs (Reuters)
"The net financial impact will be halved in the next three years. We have an even more aggressive cost reduction target in Formula 1 than for the rest of the company."
"'I have never hidden the fact that it’s a big dream of mine to come try out an Indy car,' said Antonio Felix da Costa, a native of Cascais, Portugal. 'I am a big fan of how America, and IndyCar in particular, goes about the sport and have been a huge fan for many years. I have known Bobby for a few years. We always met at the BMW Christmas dinners and every year I kept saying ‘Come on, let me have a go’ and finally now I got the call to come meet the team and test.'"
Yuki Tsunoda: First F1 seat fit (Scuderia AlphaTauri)
"My main priority is to do those 300 kilometres,” he said. “I don’t want to crash or go off the track because the more mileage I do, the more I can understand the car, so I will take it easy. But I am confident that I can do it and I will drive the way I normally do."
"At the end of the final day of the FIA Girls on Track - Rising Stars shoot-out, 12 of the 20 participants have been selected to progress to the three-day Training Camp hosted at Circuit Paul Ricard 14-16 October."
Entry list notebook: Motul Petit Le Mans (IMSA)
"The Motul Petit Le Mans is typically the season finale for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, but this is anything but a typical year. Due to scheduling shifts necessitated by the global coronavirus pandemic, two events are still to come following this weekend’s race at Michelin Raceway."
WRC 9 - RaceFans review (RaceFans YouTube)
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Comment of the day
TylerS says the unique DAS system used by Mercedes shows why they deserve praise, not criticism for doing a better job than the rest of the field:
I know Mercedes gets a lot of flak for winning all the time, but this is a perfect example of why. They came up with a unique idea, checked with the FIA that it would be legal, implemented it, used it, won the race.
Any of the other teams could have done the same, but didn’t for any number of reasons. You can’t really fault them for simply doing a better job on things like this. At the end of the day, F1 is a technological competition as well as a driver/team competition.
TylerS
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bosyber (@bosyber)
15th October 2020, 7:17
It is hard to read the headline message as anything but Grosjean being gone regardless, though strictly speaking that wasn’t said, and perhaps not even intended.
ColdFly (@)
15th October 2020, 8:02
Must be an extremely slow news day if such an obvious answer (what else did you expect Steiner to say) from last weekend makes it to the round-up and even the headline.
It might get another 3000 subscribers, but I long for the old round-ups where I could read what others were publishing in the past 24 hours.
graham228221 (@graham228221)
15th October 2020, 8:36
GREAT NEWS: if you can scroll past the headline, that’s literally still there in the round-up.
Simon
15th October 2020, 20:38
@graham228221
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e1/87/8f/e1878f02e8e240ffdbaa340000a6d5e4.jpg
BasCB (@bascb)
15th October 2020, 10:56
I actually think mirroring other sites headlines in the title for the daily round up was not great and probably got some negative from other publications as well @coldfly.
Sure, that the quote is not completely fresh is not great, but then it is the first time we see this mentions, isn’t it? So just relax and accept that not everything anyone records and writes down is published within the swamping of information we get on the saturday and sundays of a race weekend. It’s not as if this is something that has been lying on the shelves for weeks either.
ColdFly (@)
15th October 2020, 14:00
It must be my age, and longing for the old days when the round-up was my single daily update what the rest of the online news posted on F1 (motorsports). @bascb. And whilst others keep asking for the loud engines to come back; I (am known to) complain at times about current round-up and want the original version back.
I understand that since most other F1 sites are now syndicated there is less original content around. And as this site has grown up to bring a lot of news first, and full articles ‘when it happens’ it doesn’t want to link too much to other ‘competing’ sites, especially since a lot was shared in a separate article earlier.
It seems unfortunate though that I now have to check another news aggregator, rather than anxiously waiting for midnight UK time to see what else is happening.
And yes it is interesting to share some social media content as well. But (again showing my age) this should never precede the round-up of in-depth articles IMO
@HoHum (@hohum)
15th October 2020, 13:24
@coldfly, I agree, I could click or not click on a headline to see what else was being talked about without visiting loads of sites that may or may not have had something of interest in them.
Mayrton
15th October 2020, 13:18
If Grosjean has a F1 seat next year, I am going to apply for one too. Apparently anyone will do at Haas
Andy Bunting (@wildbiker)
15th October 2020, 7:37
I’m amazed that Crashjeans has lasted as long as he has!
Ben Rowe (@thegianthogweed)
15th October 2020, 9:13
I don’t get why people still call him this. The last time he was totally responsible for his own retirement was May 2018 nearly 2 and a half years ago! He had 7 retirements last year, but the only one he could have the slightest bit of blame for was Britain, but most blamed Magnussen more for that. He’s had several incidents in practice since, but then so has Hamilton and several other great drivers.
The start of 2018 was when I thought Grosjean was terrible, since then, he’s looked better than Magnusen and pretty decent IMO. He makes quite a few small mistakes, but he is one of the few drivers not to have a single penalty point at the moment. He is nothing like as bad as people think.
Having watched the last year really carefully, Grosjean was clearly that bit better than Magnussen so I’m really not convinced it is any more likely that Grosjean will be gone than Magnussen which most seem to be thinking. I actually think Grosjean is more likely to be staying if anything and I haven’t thought that because of this race result. He’s been with the team right from the start, has more experience as he’s been on the grid longer than most and as I keep saying, isn’t as bad as people think.
GeeMac (@geemac)
15th October 2020, 9:50
That’s how the internet works. Step 1: Find a target for abuse. Step 2: Allocate a stereotype to said person. Step 3: Never take that stereotype away even in the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Step 4: Get bored and repeat.
James
15th October 2020, 10:00
+1 Most of the criticism Grosjean gets is based on perceptions often not based in reality, coupled with a lot of confirmation bias as when another driver punts him off the track a lot of fans assume it was his fault or he must have brought it on himself. It’s almost like other drivers are held to a lower standard when it comes to criticism, people have gone quiet on Singapore 18 when Perez used his car as a weapon against Sirotkin, yet if it were Grosjean people would still be bringing it up now.
Mayrton
15th October 2020, 13:24
Nah, we just expect more quality in drivers given there are only 20 seats. I think we are being generous towards him. He should have left the circus at least 2 years ago to make space for new talent
marcusbreese (@marcusbreese)
15th October 2020, 11:13
@thegianthogweed @james
I think that Netflix have a lot to do with perpetuating it, they portrayed his standing within Haas as being quite error prone. A lot of the scenes with Gunther had him either lambasting Grosjean for an incident or hoping that one wouldn’t happen.
FOM also used to play a lot of his radio messages which were rather negative, but again I think they were just playing to public perceptions – most drivers sound pretty negative on the radio.
There’s some truth to it I suppose, he has certainly had more incidents than most other drivers but he’s also proven extremely capable – his 10 podiums with Lotus attest to that.
Sadly he’s allowed the public perception to get to him and it’s turned into a self fulfilling prophecy, and I very much doubt he’ll recover from it (in F1). He should go and race in Indycar or Formula E where there’s a lot less public pressure and I think he’d thrive.
Balue (@balue)
15th October 2020, 9:48
The Kaellenius statement should quiet any speculation about Mercedes pulling out
t1redmonkey (@t1redmonkey)
15th October 2020, 10:30
Probably a double driver switch for Haas next year since they don’t really have anything to lose at this point.
Mayrton
15th October 2020, 13:25
About time…
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
15th October 2020, 17:26
cotd das is uber cool but uber deceptive, it is a way to achieve active suspension, had any other team come up with it, das would have not seen the track.
Rhys Lloyd (@justrhysism)
17th October 2020, 8:15
The statement by Daimler CEO about aggressively slashing costs of their F1 programme over three years conveniently neglects to mention that it’s actually required per the incoming cost cap.