mistybear87 said:a driver can really only tweak the brake balance—maybe the differential if you're lucky, but I honestly doubt it. In the pits, they can adjust the wing angle, but anything else requires specialized tools.
Rain setups definitely still exist, and these cars aren't any slower than the ones from the early 2000s. If you took today's engines and tires and put them in an old car, the modern ones would actually be faster in the rain.😉
"That is more or less the thing of the past. You can change a few bits here and there, but there is actually a small difference this days between dry and wet setup."
"There is no such a thing anymore."
I think I’ll take the word of Brown, Button, and all those other engineers and drivers who are actually closer to the action.
Anyway, the rain absolutely trashed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. GP3 is starting under some pretty sketchy conditions.
Higher wing angles? Smaller brake cooling ducts? Ground clearance? Suspension stiffness—and all those other settings (which are huge when you factor in tire warm-up)? Differential settings? Brake bias adjustments?
Like I was saying, the classic wet setup basically went extinct about four or five years ago. With all those little tweaks you mentioned—most of which can be adjusted with just a flick of a switch on the steering wheel or a quick turn of a wrench on the wings—today's cars wouldn't even stand a chance against cars from ten years ago if they were running a traditional rain setup.
The last car to actually run a "real" wet setup was the Red Bull Racing entry at Monza back in 2008.
A car that runs perfectly at 82 degrees isn't going to be perfect anymore if it jumps up to 91—especially if you, as the driver, finally found that sweet spot at the lower temperature.
And honestly, stop rambling about those old rainy-day setups. That whole thing basically died out somewhere around 2008.
Tyler Richardson4 said:Does anyone actually know how much time it takes to switch from a dry setup to a wet one? I ask because Kimi looked seriously fast during Q1 and Q2—plus his free practice times were solid—but he just didn't step it up at all in Q3. He shaved off two tenths, sure, but if he already hit that kind of pace on mediums in Q2, then switching to softs didn't really move the needle much. I'm really hoping he went to a wet setup, though I'm worried there just isn't enough time between Q2 and Q3 to make that change.
There’s no such thing as a "wet setup" in Formula 1 anymore—that hasn't been a thing for years.
Kimi looked great in practice when it was a bit cooler than this afternoon, but once the heat kicked in... well, you have to look elsewhere for why he lost that pace.
fadedwalker18 said:The Sauber car looked incredibly fast at the Hockenheimring (unless maybe Force India was just having a nightmare!?) . Personally, I think Kamui Kobayashi has what it takes to grab a win—well, before Sergio Perez does in that Sauber—but let's be real, the Sauber car still isn't quite at that elite level yet. 😢
There's zero doubt in my mind that Sauber can win. It’s all about whether they can actually nail qualifying and stay out of the Q2 scrap.
At the Hockenheimring, Kamui was in the back of the pack but still managed to shave ten seconds off Fernando Alonso's time (comparing Alonso's last pit stop at lap 41 to Kamui's at lap 43)—and we all saw that Fernando Alonso definitely wasn't exactly babying the car during those final laps.
Melissa Peterson said:Are you certain the winner of the Brickyard 400 actually takes home more than the prize for the Coca-Cola 600 (or whatever they call it these days)?
Yeah, I'm positive. Honestly, I think it even edges out the Coca-Cola 600 and both of those races in Texas.
As far as prestige goes—I mean, winning at the Brickyard was definitely second only to Daytona for a while—but that really shifted about ten years ago. Back when that race first kicked off, there wasn't much of anything else out in the Midwest, so building a massive complex wasn't such a huge hurdle. Nowadays, you’ve got tracks like Kansas, Kentucky, and Chicagoland relatively close by. Plus—and this is a big one—remember what happened back in 2001 when NASCAR inked that new deal with NBC? Up until then, folks living in Indiana couldn't even watch the race on TV because of blackouts, so if you wanted to see it, you basically had no choice but to show up at the Brickyard in person.
The Southern 500 in its true, original form—you know, the one traditionally held the day before Labor Day at the start of September—hasn't actually existed since 2004. Sure, they’ve started running a race under that name again recently, but for us die-hard fans? It just doesn't feel the same.
If my memory serves me right—and I go way back to when I first started following NASCAR in the late 80s or early 90s on that long-lost ESPN—I think there used to be some kind of trophy for whoever could sweep three out of the four biggest races. We're talking the Daytona 500, the Winston 500 over at Talladega, the Coca-Cola 600, and the "real" Southern 500.
Personally, I never really vibed with the Brickyard 400. To me, those races are almost always incredibly repetitive—boring, even. And honestly, whenever I think of Indianapolis, my mind goes straight to the Indy 500. As for what you mentioned regarding the other "major" race, there's a pretty clear reason for that. After Daytona, Indianapolis is where the real money is split.
ruggedfox28 said:I'm honestly just wondering if we're going to get some rain on this super boring track☕
Look, it might be "super boring" to some people, but looking back over the last 26 years at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (only Monza and Monaco have longer streaks), it's actually delivered way more incredible races than those two tracks mentioned in the parentheses during that same timeframe. ☕
You could really hear the heartbreak in the voices of our favorite commentators when Mark left Fernando Alonso out in the cold.
Honestly, someone needs to put a heavy weighted ankle cuff on Pastor Maldonado and send him off to go break rocks in the desert for a while—assuming he’s actually got enough sense to figure out how to swing a hammer.
Helmut Marko has already started "fine-tuning" Mark Webber’s car ahead of the race at the Hockenheimring...
stormybadger8 said:Honestly, if Vettel had pitted somewhere between laps 43 and 51—since that's when his gap to Hamilton started blowing out in lap 44—I’m not so sure Hamilton wouldn't have been fighting both him and Alonso for the win.
In that scenario, those three would've almost certainly pitted in a tight group, which means Grosjean and Perez probably wouldn't have even stood a chance at getting on the podium. With that kind of strategy, we would've seen a total dogfight between Alonso, Vettel, and Hamilton.😉
Instead, what we got was this whole mess involving DRS and the Goodyear tires. Vettel clocked a 1:15.752 on the final lap. The fastest Grosjean did was a 1:17.264 back in lap 57.😳
And get this—Vettel wasn't actually faster than Alonso or Hamilton during the race (at least, that's what we know). That tells me Alonso could have definitely been pressured if he'd gone for fresh rubber, and clearly, Hamilton dialed back his pace once he saw the guys behind him weren't a threat.
So, it's definitely not all black and white. The real headache came from the strategists—that hesitation caused by fearing Felipe Massa (Red Bull Racing) and Mark Webber (Ferrari)—and everyone just waiting on each other. But if Vettel had pitted, you can bet Ferrari would've mirrored him (and the same goes if Alonso went in), and I'm pretty sure Hamilton would've followed suit too.
Even with DRS active, Red Bull Racing was slower than Lotus on the straights. So, how exactly were you picturing Vettel passing Grosjean? The same logic applies to Alonso.
And if Vettel had pitted 20 or more laps earlier, you can kiss those super softs goodbye. He would've been stuck with a set that had over ten laps on them from qualifying, so those Red Bull Racing tires would've absolutely disintegrated before the end.
No matter how you crunch the laps or the combinations, those two would've come back out on track right behind Grosjean. Even Hamilton only managed to come out just a second ahead.
You can really see how much that bad start hurt him once he got stuck behind Stay yesterday, which ended up costing Romain quite a bit. As soon as the driver from Scotland pitted on lap 13, Romain started finding an extra second or two per lap—but even then, those first thirteen laps meant he dropped nearly fifteen seconds on Lewis Hamilton.
It wasn't even a case of Lewis fighting off Vettel or Alonso for the win yesterday; he was really just holding off Grosjean.
What's next? What they're doing to Red Bull is just plain unfair. What is the FIA even going to do about it—since McLaren and Digic couldn't even make it on track without having the FIA hold their hands?
Unfair?
If you actually bother to look at the FIA rulebook, it clearly states that while cars are under parc fermé conditions, no changes are allowed whatsoever—unless they're strictly for safety. And those engine maps loaded via laptop into the ECU? Yeah, those fall under parc fermé too.
Those aggressive qualifying maps that Red Bull had been running since mid-last season weren't actually legal according to the FIA rules. Why did the FIA let a—let's be honest—basically half-illegal car win a championship? That's a whole other story (probably because none of the rival teams bothered to file an official protest, right?).
It’s pretty interesting how Sebastian Vettel’s dominance over Webber really kicked off right when they started using that aggressive mapping.
As far as I'm concerned, all this electronic nonsense needs to be stripped out of Formula 1 as soon as possible.
Kobayashi was easily the driver of the race. I mean, he started dead last after the second lap—trailing by a massive margin—and still clawed his way up ten spots by the finish. 🙏
Everything else? Honestly, not even worth mentioning.
I’m practically praying for an earthquake or some massive volcanic eruption to just level this entire track—it’s hands down the biggest pile of garbage we've ever seen in F1 history.
Seriously, you could combine KERS, DRS, and Pirelli tires into one super-formula and it still wouldn't fix how terrible this circuit is.
Are they out of their minds? Canceling stuff just a few days before the race🤦
Well, it wasn't exactly just a few days before the race—the teams actually got the directive about ten days ago. But honestly, that doesn't even matter now because they've already scrapped the whole thing regarding the "delayed" ignition. What a complete circus this is.
And I was actually thinking about tuning in to watch the race in San Francisco-California. I absolutely loathe that track.