Formula 1 2024

[polishgenius]

To be fair, while Brawn obviously had a lot to do with it because he's a fucking genius, Schumacher was always known as both a great developer-driver communicating with the team about what the car needed through the seasons, and a guy with a great feel for a situation able to help his teams make strategy calls (also, helpfully, an insane ability to up his game if a risky strategy needed him to run on the very edge for a bit), and it's pretty clear as gifted as he is none of those things really apply to either driver now.   

If I recall, part of the reason there was strain with Alonso was that he wasn't as good at working with the team to bring and keep the car in line. I might be making that up but I have that recollection.

[Raja]

Of course there is some of that, but I don't think what held Ferrari back in those years was strategy, it was the car not being good enough, whereas here the car is at worst competitive with Red Bull.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Raja said:

I disagree. From 2015 to 2020, they had okay cars but they were always a bit behind Mercedes as opposed to now where the pace is clearly there in the car. They've never been as competitive as the Red Bull & Merc were last season.

Certainly in 2017 and 2018 they had, at least in parts of the season, the best car on the grid. The problem is that their development couldn't keep up with Mercedes and also that they had serious strategy errors and Vettel managed to implode at some point each season and just couldn't recover his form.

Ferrari have really destroyed their own championship hopes. There's at least three races they should have outright won and were let down by driving errors or bad strategy calls, and several others where both Leclerc and Sainz suffered DNFs or finished lower down the order than their potential due to iffy strategy calls.

What's compounding the problem is that Leclerc seems to have exposed a key weakness, a lack of strategic awareness. To be fair a lot of drivers don't have this ability at a high level, but if anything Leclerc seems to be much worse at it than most, whilst Sainz seems to be far, far better than most, maybe better than anyone else on the grid bar Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel at it (Verstappen is only okay at it). This is where the driver keeps the shape of the overall race in their head whilst they're also doing their own race and can make snap decisions on their own in the cockpit, overruling the pit wall if the pit wall is making a monumental fuck-up. Sainz has saved I think at least two of his own results by ignoring team orders and staying out or coming in when he judged it right, and was proven correct on both occasions.

It means that when the pit wall goes into full meltdown, Sainz can look at the situation and overrule the pit wall, whilst Leclerc can't, he just has to go with what the pit wall are saying even when it is self-evidently moronic.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

7 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Aside from the Schumacher era, they’ve been inept for decades.  They’ve had good cars and very good drivers at other points in time without really bringing the whole combination together.  Vettel and Alonso were let down by them too.

 

6 hours ago, polishgenius said:

To be fair, while Brawn obviously had a lot to do with it because he's a fucking genius, Schumacher was always known as both a great developer-driver communicating with the team about what the car needed through the seasons, and a guy with a great feel for a situation able to help his teams make strategy calls (also, helpfully, an insane ability to up his game if a risky strategy needed him to run on the very edge for a bit), and it's pretty clear as gifted as he is none of those things really apply to either driver now.   

If I recall, part of the reason there was strain with Alonso was that he wasn't as good at working with the team to bring and keep the car in line. I might be making that up but I have that recollection.

Schumacher, Ross Brawn, Rory Byrne (all transplants from his Benneton championship winning seasons), Jean Todt, a mandate from the Fiat top brass to do what it took to win, and an absolute mountain of cash from Marlboro. 

By the time Alonso showed up the personnel had changed.

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Certainly in 2017 and 2018 they had, at least in parts of the season, the best car on the grid. The problem is that their development couldn't keep up with Mercedes and also that they had serious strategy errors and Vettel managed to implode at some point each season and just couldn't recover his form.

Was that the car that was illegally consuming oil to increase usable power in race trim?

-

anyway, this guys stuff is amazing. 

 

[Wilbur]

Just make the F1 cars half the current physical size, and there you can replicate that game.

[Werthead]

Fernando Alonso moving to Aston Martin, because if your career is winding down, why not go out making the weirdest possible moves at the weirdest possible times? Though there have been rumours of discontent in the team with Alonso not getting on with Otmar and his relationship with Ocon not being as good as it was last year.

I have to say that makes Gasly to Alpine a very tempting move, and then Alpha Tauri can bring someone in from the Red Bull junior team. Hauger? The current F3 champion and doing well in F2, but Lawson and Daruvala are doing better in this F2 season. Or Red Bull could draft in someone like Piastri who should have been in F1 years ago.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Werthead

[Toth]

8 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Just make the F1 cars half the current physical size, and there you can replicate that game.

Amusingly, that's the exact reason why the Formula E races at Monaco had been astonishingly good these years (especially in contrast to the silly cart courses dominating the rest of the calendar).

[Werthead]

So the current story is that Alpine had developed a plan for Alonso to remain in the team for one more year and then be "pensioned off" to their sportscar programme, with Piastri to come in at that point, potentially after a year in Williams (replacing Latifi) or McLaren (replacing Ricciardo) as a testing ground. The problem, of course, is that that nobody bothered to check with Alonso on this. Negotiations reached a stalemate with Alpine wanting a 1-year contract with Alonso and Alonso wanting a 2-3 year contract, with Alpine using Piastri as a possible replacement as their leverage. Alonso's leverage was less clear-cut, apart from just exiting F1. Then of course the Aston opportunity came up and that opened all the doors.

Things have fallen into place reasonably well for Aston Martin and Alpine (despite preferring not to drop Piastri immediately into the car, they can manage that), and may have helped save Ricciardo's drive at McLaren, which was looking increasingly shaky (with Piastri as a potential one-year stopgap for McLaren to explore other options; Alonso to McLaren again seemed unlikely). That does leave Williams with a likely open seat after Latifi goes. They should really consider Jamie Chadwick, especially if she wins the W Series title for the third consecutive time (as seems likely, having won every race of the season so far bar one), but Logan Sargeant might be a tempting option to get an American into F1.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Werthead

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

Fernando Alonso moving to Aston Martin

Well, when you're at the bottom the only way you can go is up. They've got some great personnel there and a bunch of money so who knows? The question is, why are they so far off this year? Aero? Engine? Drivers? Combination of the three?

Fernando Alonso would be a nine time world champion if he wasn't a master of wrong place / wrong time. 

He goes to McLaren at a time when they're quite competitive only to find a super talented rookie team mate who's less than thrilled about being number two driver. They do an excellent job of taking points off each other which allows Kimi to finally win a title.

He goes back to Renault when they are absolutely not competitive.

He goes to Ferrari when their fortunes are on the wane. He gets tantalizingly close to a 3rd drivers title in cars that had no business being that close.

He goes to McLaren only suffer 5 years of terrible Honda engines and clawing for just the chance of finishing in the top ten. Then he gets to see another team benefit from those years of development when Honda starts winning races with Red Bull.

Gods, what I'd give to see him in a competitive car again just once. 

[Werthead]

11 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Well, when you're at the bottom the only way you can go is up. They've got some great personnel there and a bunch of money so who knows? The question is, why are they so far off this year? Aero? Engine? Drivers? Combination of the three?

Fernando Alonso would be a nine time world champion if he wasn't a master of wrong place / wrong time. 

He had two shots with Ferrari. He was also offered a Red Bull seat in 2008 but refused to take it, not believing they would be competitive any time soon, so they gave it to Vettel instead. That's at least 4 WCs right there, and he may have been closer to Button in 2009 as well.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

5 minutes ago, Werthead said:

He had two shots with Ferrari. He was also offered a Red Bull seat in 2008 but refused to take it, not believing they would be competitive any time soon, so they gave it to Vettel instead. That's at least 4 WCs right there, and he may have been closer to Button in 2009 as well.

Bear in mind, Red Bull didn't exactly have banner seasons in 2007, 2008. More broadly, conventional wisdom at the time was  that to be competitive and to have a future, teams had to partner with a major auto manufacturer. Not just an engine supply deal, but to actually have them take an ownership stake in the team. Then the GFC happened and everyone conveniently forgot about that noise.

In 2008, if you told the F1 commentariat that they'd soon see the pinnacle of racing dominated by a soft drink magnate with a privateer team running customer engines, they'd have laughed you out of the room.    

How times change.

[Raja]

[Werthead]

This is turning into a fiasco.

Word is that McLaren are wooing Piastri with a very significant sum of money which might be more than he'd get racing for Alpine and are prepared to offer Alpine a swap with Ricciardo. Ricciardo is apparently considering the deal as he felt the working relationship at Alpine/Renault was more constructive than at McLaren. Ricciardo and Piastri would both get 2-year contracts in this scenario, which is great for Ricciardo (wo might otherwise have been forced out of the sport altogether as soon as next season) and for Piastri, since he gets two seasons in McLaren to evaluate how Alpine are doing.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Werthead

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Riccardo returning to Alpine sounds like a good idea. I doubt another season at McLaren is going to do him any favors. Also, between the two teams, Alpine is more likely to be the ones closer to the front IMO. 

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Riccardo returning to Alpine sounds like a good idea. I doubt another season at McLaren is going to do him any favors. Also, between the two teams, Alpine is more likely to be the ones closer to the front IMO. 

It sounds like Alpine have contractual arrangements with Piastri but Piastri had a contractual arrangement with McLaren that Alpine was not privy to. Alpine have indicated this may be a breach of their contract with Piastri.

So McLaren need to do a deal with Alpine, or Alpine may need to consider legal action. Of course, forcing someone to race for you who doesn't want to anymore isn't really viable.

The real question is if McLaren is a better prospect than Alpine. The Mercedes engine is superior to the Renault and pretty much the only reason Alpine have just edged McLaren in the constructor's is down to Ricciardo underperforming. Piastri is probably thinking if he is in the car, he's equalling Norris (whether that's true or not remains to be seen) or almost so, and McLaren are 30+ points clear of Alpine in fourth place.

Commentators have drawn comparisons with the Button dispute of 2004, when Button wanted to leave BAR for Williams but after arbitration he was forced to stay where he was. He was grateful for that when Williams' form collapsed (arguably it's never recovered, bar flashes of the old form in 2014-16), BAR got bought out by Honda and then transformed into Brawn, where he won the WC.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Werthead

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Commentators have drawn comparisons with the Button dispute of 2004...

...Or the Alesi dispute in 1990. If the numbers I've seen published are to be believed, that whole Tyrell-Williams-Ferrari shamozzle made Alesi's Ferrari contract one of the most expensive in F1 history; second only to Senna's salary for McLaren in 1991. 

[Iskaral Pust]

Ricciardo’s career progression is a doozy.  S1 of Drive To Survive showed getting bent out of shape at RB because Verstappen was the new golden boy, so he flounced off into a series of mid-grid cars with shrinking relevance on race days and getting outperformed by his younger teammates more and more often.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Either way, I think he needs a change of scenery. Fortunes can change very quickly in this sport, but McLaren has a lot more ground to make up than Alpine does if they want to be competitive. 

[Werthead]

Alpine have said they wouldn't have any trouble with Ricciardo returning to the team if it came to it, so clearly they're already thinking of that as a fallback position.

5 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Either way, I think he needs a change of scenery. Fortunes can change very quickly in this sport, but McLaren has a lot more ground to make up than Alpine does if they want to be competitive. 

Both cars won races last year with complications elsewhere on the track, and Norris nearly won a race on pure merit alone. They came 3rd in the WC in 2020 ahead of Ferrari, and 4th in 2021 only behind the Big Three. Their under-performances in 2021 and 2022 have come through mechanical issues or Ricciardo checking out.

There isn't a million miles between them, but at the moment it does feel like McLaren are the slightly stronger package. Historically you'd want to be in an manufacturer team like Alpine, but Alpine/Renault have not shown tremendous pace in getting on top of the regulations since 2016, let alone the ones this year.

 

Results since 2016:

• Renault/Alpine: 9-6-4-5-5-5 (currently 4th by a whisker) - 1 win, 5 podiums
• McLaren: 6-9-6-4-3-4 (currently 5th, also by a whisker) - 1 win, 9 podiums

 

There's not a lot in it, but I'd give McLaren more the benefit of the doubt at the moment.

Edited August 3, 2022 by Werthead

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Alpine have said they wouldn't have any trouble with Ricciardo returning to the team if it came to it, so clearly they're already thinking of that as a fallback position.

Both cars won races last year with complications elsewhere on the track, and Norris nearly won a race on pure merit alone. They came 3rd in the WC in 2020 ahead of Ferrari, and 4th in 2021 only behind the Big Three. Their under-performances in 2021 and 2022 have come through mechanical issues or Ricciardo checking out.

There isn't a million miles between them, but at the moment it does feel like McLaren are the slightly stronger package. Historically you'd want to be in an manufacturer team like Alpine, but Alpine/Renault have not shown tremendous pace in getting on top of the regulations since 2016, let alone the ones this year.

 

Results since 2016:

• Renault/Alpine: 9-6-4-5-5-5 (currently 4th by a whisker) - 1 win, 5 podiums
• McLaren: 6-9-6-4-3-4 (currently 5th, also by a whisker) - 1 win, 9 podiums

 

There's not a lot in it, but I'd give McLaren more the benefit of the doubt at the moment.

You have a point. And yeah, it's entirely possible that Ricciardo's poor form is diluting McLaren's true potential.