F1 Fanatic round-up: 25/5/2010

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This week I’ve written the Turkish Grand Prix preview for the ITV-F1 website. I’ll post a link to the article when it’s live. Of course you’ll see all the usual pre- and post-race material here on F1 Fanatic over the coming week.

Here’s today’s round-up:

Links

F1 Hospitality Up (Brad Spurgeon)

“It was while we were at the Singapore Grand Prix in the autumn of 2008 that the financial crisis really hit. It was felt there and throughout the series last year. But this year I have felt a certain return to the good times of years past, at least in the hospitality and party areas of the race. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Monaco, where the whole principality felt like one giant party.”

Renewed American bid to break into F1 (Autosport)

“Parris Mullins, the advisor to YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley who led a last-ditch bid to try and save US F1 earlier this year, is behind a fresh American attempt to break into Formula 1.”

McLaren Automotive confirms 35 dealerships (Auto Trader)

“McLaren promises that the dealerships will be focussed on delivering the best possible service to its customers, rather than becoming brash ‘palaces’. This philosophy is borne from the company’s motto – ‘sanity before vanity’, something it claims can be seen in its first road car project since the seminal F1 was launched in 1992.”

Comment of the day

In yesterday’s debate on KERS a few people suggested that, if it does come back, the limit on how often it can be used should be per race rather than per lap. I’m not convinced, for reasons I explain here, but here’s Mark Hitchcock making the case for why it should happen:

I think the amount of uses should be per race, not per lap because it encourages slightly more strategic use of the KERS.
When it’s per lap there are always going to be optimal points of the lap where it’s best to use it. When it’s per race a driver could use all his allocation up at the start to gain places on the grid or he could save it for later in the race when he needs to defend.

Or if a driver knows their car isn’t very good whilst heavy with fuel then he’d use more of his allocation towards the start to stay ahead of the others until the car comes to him in the later stages.
Mark Hitchcock

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Sumedh!

On this day in F1

Jacques Villeneuve won the Spanish Grand Prix for Williams on this day in 1997. But it was the driver who finished second who caught the attention of many. Olivier Panis in the Prost benefitted from the performance of Bridgestone tyres to work his way up from 12th on the grid to finish second.

Unfortunately Panis crashed heavily in the next race in Canada, breaking his legs. After his return from injury he seldom produced the kind of performance he displayed that day in Barcelona again.

Author information

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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72 comments on “F1 Fanatic round-up: 25/5/2010”

  1. congrats on getting some work for itv keith! am looking forward to reading it.
    i think once a lap is good for KERS, not a few times a race! we wan’t to see lots of overtaking don’t we?

    1. But KERS produced good overtaking last year because only a few of the cars had it then. If everyone has the same specification of KERS, and it is limited to a few seconds per lap, everyone will use it in the same straight or high speed section of a given race track. If it’s limited to say, 3 minutes per race, then in theory, you’ll see drivers using it on the optimal sections, but on different laps to each other, hence you may well still get more overtaking.

      1. very true. but lets say you use kers to get away from me on a straight and I don’t use it. I can catch up on you for the rest of the lap and then use my boost before the start/finish line.
        or lets say we’re both allowed 6secs of boost a lap, you could use up 4secs down a straight (sounds normal) but i could surprise you by doing it for 6 secs and passing you…
        tbh this is all just imaginary.
        it’s a tricky conudrum though i’ll admit.

        1. @Sato113 that is all very well in theory but it would not happen. The engineers look at where is best for laptime. It will end up a hard fact where to use it for every team. If like you said you did it for longer somewhere else then you would not surprise pass anyone as you would have dropped further behind the other guy for not using it at the optimum place. We saw this when 2 kers cars were close last year, no passing.

          1. Jose Arellano
            25th May 2010, 18:31

            if theres not a limit per lap. and you have a faster car you dont use it but you make your rival use it for defense.. and then when your rivals its gone you use yours and you pass him.

      2. Also I think it would need a system that you have to use it whole straight if you use it. I can recall that Champ Car push-to-pass was that kind of system. Once you pressed it, it was on as long as you were in 100% throttle. That meant also that amount to be used was actually little over the time officially allocated – if you had two seconds left and then used it in a straight where you had full throttle for ten seconds – you got those eight extra seconds.

  2. Happy birthday sumedh! And Panis really did perform well in the Prost in 1996 and 1997. He took that win in Monaco in 1996, and got 3rd at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1997, too.

    1. I always had the feeling Panis accident was the start of the decline for ProstGP, as well as a major hit to Panis racing career.

      1. He was on for a podium at Argentina as well before his car failed, and before the accident I think Villeneuve said he could be a major threat for the championship.

        1. Perhaps even a win in Argentina – Panis was sitting behind the two Williams when his car failed and Villeneuve (having some tummy trouble) only just scrapped home ahead of the much slower Eddie Irvine. Had his car lasted, Panis would have had a good shot at victory.

          The Panis-Prost-Mugen Honda-Bridgestone combo was a very promising one in 1997. Panis scored podiums in Brazil and Spain and was one of only three drivers to finish on the same lap as Michael Schumacher at Monaco. You only need look at what some of the other Bridgestone drivers did later in the year (think Damon Hill nearly winning Hungary in an Arrows-Yamaha) to see the potential.

          After his leg breaking shunt in Montreal, Panis had to have his legs pinned back together. The pins were still in place when he made his comeback drive at the Nurburgring. Panis had been told by his doctors that another serious shunt while the pins were still in place could have very serious consequences indeed. It almost certainly took the edge off his speed somewhat.

          The pins came out in early 1998, I think, but by that point Prost was in the downward spiral from which it never escaped. Panis never fully recovered the career momentum.

  3. Panis was on fire in 1997. I remember Villenueve saying before the Canadian GP that he feared two men greatly in the title race, Michael Schumacher, obviously, and Olivier Panis too.

    To be honest, I think that car was very good in 97 too, as we saw with Trulli coming close to winning in Austria that year. Only time he ever had good race pace.

    1. That was a good race for Trulli.

      I know he does tend to fade in races (partly his own fault in races but also because in qualifying it looks like he performs miracles) but he has had some good races. He was great on his one and only GP win even if that was at Monaco so reliant on the pole anyway but he did have good pace I think, Suzuka 09, Aus 09 and France 08 as recent examples that sometime he can deliver on a Sunday just not often enough.

    2. Was always a big fan of Panis when he was in F1. He now does Le Mans series, I was lucky enough to meet him at Silverstone 09

      http://twitpic.com/hggh6

  4. Ned Flanders
    25th May 2010, 0:35

    Some of you may remember I made an F1 quiz last year which I posted on the forum. Well, I managed to stumble across it again today and I thought I’d post it here for y’all to have a go at again. Let us know how you did- I got 80% but I suppose I must’ve remembered some of the answers from when I wrote it.

    PS, on Q20, bear in mind that I made this BEFORE the start of the 2010 season
    PPS- happy birthday Sumedh!!

    1. I can’t see the link, so I get 100% by default.

    2. Ned Flanders
      25th May 2010, 0:39

      OK so stupid wordpress won’t let me post the link, so now I look like a wally! If you still want to do it, just type ‘ned flanders f1 challenge’ into google, and it’s the first link

    3. 28% only … too much history for me :)

      When was that quiz made? It was tough to answer about Hamilton’s retirements not knowing until when.

      1. Ned Flanders
        25th May 2010, 1:03

        Can’t remember exactly, but it’ll have been between the last race of 2009 and the first race of 2010

        1. That’s what I thought. I was wrong in Hamilton’s retirements anyway…forgot about Melbourne 2009.

    4. I got 68% in the end :)

      Though I don’t agree with Hamilton retiring only 3 times, unless the quiz was created after he was rammed out of the Belgian Grand Prix, but before he crashed out of the Italian Grand Prix (the very next race). So 72% then :P

      1. Ned Flanders
        25th May 2010, 11:25

        Yeah, I remember that I did the Hamilton question wrong. So you can have an extra 4%!

    5. Only 48%. I’ve only been following F1 for about 5 or 6 years, so I had to guess at some. Couldn’t even remember the 1972 champion, other than it wasn’t Lauda or Hill.

      1. 32%. Better than I thought I would get.

    6. 80%. I really wanted to get 100 as I knew Ned would create a hugely difficult quiz and I wanted to be smug but fine the quiz wins.

      Love the comment of “80%* Kimi Raikkonen 80%* Pretty impressive, but if you had of spent more time practising than drinking vodka you could have done so much better!”
      How did it know what I was doing last night? :P

    7. 88%.I got Question 3 wrong,as I pressed the wrong one.Question 5,I misread it,thought it was his first race and Question 11.I remember Klien and Frisacher but who is the third.

      1. You beat me! Nice job…gutted now. I am taking that quiz again! :D

      2. Guilherme Teixeira
        25th May 2010, 17:24

        I remember Klien and Frisacher but who is the third.

        Wurz?

      3. I’m surprised anyone would remember Friesacher but forget Wurz! I got it wrong because of Friesacher!

  5. If there is anyone near to Liverpool today (Tuesday 25th May) there will be some F1 cars, Le Mans cars, Super cars, motorbikes and all sorts of other vehicles being raced up and down The Strand between Pier Head and the new Liverpool One as well as Power Boats and Jet Skis on the River Mersey this evening.

    The event is called the Pageant of Power and is being put on by the people who run an event of the same name at Cholmondeley Castle, in Cheshire. Amongst other vehicles on show will be a Bentley Speed 8 – a Le Mans 24-hour race winner in 2003 – the Silk Cut Jaguar – Le Mans winner in 1988 – a supercharged Bentley Blower from 1926, and a JCB dragster capable of 100mph.

    There are other motorsport related events on in Liverpool all week, there’s some more information here:
    http://www.cpop.co.uk/liverpool-pageant-of-power

  6. Happy birthday Sumedh!

    I’m not convinced that KERS-per-race would be that much different from KERS-per-lap. Everyone would just use it at the start when everyone is closest together. Saving it for afterwards means you can pass people, but you’ll still lose time in the half a lap it takes to do so, so it’ll always be optimal to use it most in the first few laps. The only thing I can think of to make this work would be to ban it before your first stop.

  7. Happy Birthday Sumedh, & congrats to Keith for the preview for the ITV-F1 website.

  8. Happy Birthday Sumedh :)

    Interesting point by Mark Hitchcock, but I still think it’s better per lap because this way they guarantee that they’ll have it for the rest of the race..

    On the quiz I got 44%! :D I thought I’d get a 0 lol the questions were too historical for me too, but I tried my best to guess the best possible answer, didn’t do too bad after all :)

  9. OH NO! NOT ANOTHER US TEAM!

    Happy Birthday Argentina :D!

    1. Prisoner Monkeys
      25th May 2010, 5:29

      OH NO! NOT ANOTHER US TEAM!

      What’s wrong with an American team? I know “Parris Mullins” sounds like “pair of morons”, but Mullins isn’t two people and the Windsor-Anderson dream team have nothing to do with this attempt.

    2. From what Parris Mullins is saying in the interview, it looks like the USF1 left a lot of people in the US (and others as well) with a will to prove a team with US roots can make an impression in F1, if done correctly.

      I would like them to have a go at it, as it would make the series more global, make a US GP even more feasable and give better driving opportunities for drivers from the Americas. No negatives on that.

      And a happy birthday to Sumedh

  10. Re the comment of the day, possibly fine in theory, but to my understanding of how KERS works totally impractical.

    Kers works by collecting energy whilst under braking, the box of energy is capable of being filled in one lap.
    Not to use that box of energy in the next lap, means that energy is wasted, because it is full and the energy that could be collected on the next lap cannot because there is no space to store it.
    Also in a lot of cases it is not possible or feasable to use all the energy in the box in one ‘push’.

    If the number of times the driver could use the KERS power were ‘small’ then it would probably be calculated not to be worth fitting.

    In my opinion it would be better to have the KERS power available all the time, automatically. So that it is the first power source used and the engine power coming in when more power is required. No ‘push to pass’ but to make the car more efficient, the most efficient would probably have the fastest acceleration.

    1. Oh lol, I guess I should refresh the page before I post something.

    2. Mark Hitchcock
      25th May 2010, 12:06

      That’s all very true
      I was guilty of thinking about “the show” more than the optimal use of the technology when I wrote that comment.

      How typical that my first comment of the day is a bit poorly thought out!

      1. I accept first comments of the day are very often not though out. I have been known to be guilty of that, often.

        Probably the best option for a ‘push to pass’ option is to let them use a few more revs. I assume they have plenty now that there is an 18k limit.

  11. Limiting use of KERS to a number of times per race makes no sense at all.

    People seem to make the mistake that KERS is a “push to pass” system. It’s not. It’s supposed to be “green”. To have some road relevance and it’s supposed to help towards saving fuel in road cars.

    Indeed, limiting the number of uses “per race” works for a simple “push to pass” type system (where the revs are allowed to go higher for a while). It obviously does not work for a system that’s supposed to be green and weighs a lot.

    1. “it’s supposed to help towards saving fuel in road cars.” In theory it should, but your post made me think back to Belgium 2009. The start weight said Fisichella started the race lighter than Räikkönen, yet Kimi’s Ferrari had KERS and Fisi’s Force India hadn’t. Both stopped on the same lap. So either was the Ferrari engine very thirsty, or…. I don’t have a clue! Anyone who does?

      1. Well, KERS is supposed to help save fuel in road cars. Not in F1 cars.

        KERS only saves fuel in the sense that it gives extra power without burning fuel.

        For instance a push-to-pass system with a temporary rev limit increase would mean that the engine burns more fuel for that period of time. KERS doesn’t. KERS reuses the energy recovered from braking.

        Still I don’t think actually saving fuel is the issue. Having a green image is.

        1. Yeah, I understand ypu, but don’t you remember that race? Was it perhaps because Fisi was stuck behind a KERS car so he saved fuel to try to get ahead during the stops?

          1. Or maybe they just didn’t want to risk Fisi getting ahead and they stopped Raikkonen on the same lap.

  12. Don’t know if anyone mentioned this in yesterday’s thread, but would it be possible to integrate standard Kers systems into the cars not as push-to-pass systems, but just as a continual energy recovery system complementing the engine and cutting its fuel consumption…?

    1. yeah probably but that wouldn’t help overtaking.

      1. But is the point of Kers to help overtaking, or was that just its selling point?

    2. I made that point, so good to know there’s someone else who thinks alike!

      KERS should not be about overtaking; but it shouldn’t be just for being green either.

  13. Apologies if this has been noted somewhere – but has anyone noticed that a record four women have qualified for the Indy 500? …and that Danica Patrick was the slowest of the four?

    This puzzles me: a google search for “women indianapolis 500” brings up the story on many news outlet sites – but hardly any sports or motorsports sites… the FIA’s Women and Motor Sport Commission should take this and run with it, methinks.

  14. Happy birthday Sumedh!

  15. Here’s my Turkish GP preview for ITV-F1;

    http://www.itv-f1.com/Feature.aspx?Type=General&id=48486

    The F1 Fanatic preview will be up tomorrow.

    1. Mark Hitchcock
      25th May 2010, 13:29

      Nice one. Moving on up to the BBC next?

      1. We’ll see – I’m not looking to give up F1 Fanatic though!

    2. Beautifully done Keith. You managed to cover everything too and now I’m even more excited for Turkey

    3. A nice piece of preview, it really got everything to look forward to in Turkey.

      So let us set up a joint effort to have the live blog directly from Turkey next year!

      At least 1 busload of F1Fanatics on site doubling the attention rates!

    4. Great piece Keith. Congrats and keep up the great work!

    5. so did ITV invite you or did you suggest it to them? well done! it’s a good read.

      1. It was a request from ITV, I should be doing a few more during the course of the year – previews and a post-race feature as well.

        1. Outstanding new, Keith. Good to see you getting recognition from a major network. Congratulations!

  16. Thank you all!! :-)

    Great preview of the Turkish GP, Keith!!

  17. Why does ITV still have an F1 site? Are they in denial? :-)

    1. No idea. When they lost the coverage they said the site would continue to run until the end of 2009. Evidently it was popular enough for them to keep it!

    2. They do tend to have pretty good pieces by James Allen and others and their news tends to be pretty much on line.

  18. I’m rolling out a new batch of interactive charts this weekend to show all the lap times set by each driver during each race. I’ve just tested the code by generating all the charts for the last race. You can see all the charts here in the form guides for each driver (scroll down for the Monaco ones):

    F1 2010 statistics

    Later all the charts for this year’s races will be updated with interactive charts.

    One feature of the charts I haven’t drawn attention to before is if you click and drag over a series of laps, the chart zooms the scales in to that range, making it easier to look closely at particular stints, for example.

    1. Nice charts. As usual.

      The interactive selection sure is nice.

      Is there an easy way to add a selection of the vertical axis too? Now the pitstops tend to squash all the detail out of the regular laptimes.

  19. I got to the party late, on yesterday’s discussion of KERS, but since I see a bit of comment here on the subject, thought I’d repost here.

    Well of course KERS should be in F1, as F1 is totally relevant to road car technology and is completely green.

    After all, how else can the KERS in my singleseat open wheel car that I drive to work be developed so that I can hit 200mph instead of the measley 170mph it is capable of now? It’s completely important that we all have that. The systems already developed in the last decade by Toyota and Honda in their hybrid and electric cars simply won’t do the trick.

    And the fact that the batteries need replaced so often simply means that F1 will be creating new technology for disposal in a completely green and planet-friendly way of disposing of thse batteries, and bringing jobs to a whole new industry as well.

    F1 must continue on in this vein, and forget about the racing, as being green and road relevant is surely more important than the actual racing.

    1. Sure it’s mostly just for image, but KERS technology is filtering down to Ferrari’s, BMW’s, Porsches and perhaps the London Underground.

      More importantly it actually does contribute to the raceing …

  20. The other thing I wanted to comment on today comes from a portion of Keith’s article on the ITV site.

    It was noted that Button’s computer display malfunctioned and he didn’t know when/where to shift. Again this brings the question to my mind, has F1 “improved” itself too much? I always know when to shift my Shelby Mustang. My tachometer shows me. Racecars used to have tachometers. Perhaps Button would have benefited from one in Spain.

  21. I think the involvement of an US interest in F1 through an existing team will be a win-win situation for everyone concerned. With questions being raised about whether Sauber or Hispania will be able to last till the end of the season, more financial investment should be welcomed with open arms.

    1. Ned Flanders
      25th May 2010, 18:28

      Oh wow, this came from nowhere! Keith, get writing!

Comments are closed.