What a terrible race it was! Six cars only for all 73 laps!!! Definitely some sort of history got made.. It was quite dismal... the only upside would be that only in such few participants could Schumi manage a win ..his first for the season.. so all in all..not bad eh?
posted by Janaki @ 8:47 PM
10 Comments:
Well..Im bleary eyed from watching the race all thru last night. Like Shumi said in the post match interview, it could well be that they had a very good car and no good competition. I think the ferraris have been increasingly doing well, they have been completing the last couple races with a much fitter car and tyres than anyone else.
Off we go to Magny Coers!! Klaxons ablazing!
Not bad for Narain Karthikeyan though.
It was all quite avoidable actually. Quite a reflection on the moronic, inflexible way in which F1 is run these days.
Waiting for Magny Cours.
Not Schumi's fault that Michelin couldn't develop tyres the teams could rely on. Come to think of it, if they could survive Imola (which has a harder surface and similar high-speed stretches), why would Indy be such a problem? Even more ridiculous since a few of the NASCAR puppies can touch similar speeds with heavier cars and higher rated engines! Strange, this race. Am happy that Narain survived, and did well.
yep narain was the high point of it all..
Heretic: It was def not Schumie's fault that Michelin could not get the tyres right, they effed up and did it royally too, but Ferrari and the FIA did not help matters much by being as inflexible as they were. They had a choice in the matter, to put a chicane in at the corner which was causing the problem, which might not have been the best as far as their chances were concerned, but if they really wanted the spectacle to go on, it was something they could have done.
Your point about Imola being tougher and about NASCAR is quite preposterous, every track has a different characteristic to it, the Brickyard has a high camber on the oval sections which puts an unbelievable amount of stress on the tyre shoulders, which is the highest at the point where Ralf had his shunt. And they found the same problem in at least a couple of the other cars too. This is not last year, where you could change tyres as much as you want to, there is just one set of them that you got to run with. Flatspotting a tyre, or having one disintegrate at 200+ MPH is not a fun thing to happen and more than you or me all of the team owners are hard nosed businessmen, if they decided to take the risk of litigations and sponsor ire by doing what they did, the reasons have to be more than just fickle.
And if the McLaren crash at the European GP was any indication, I am not surprised that none of them chose to run, it is way too risky and it is quite frankly poppycock from the FIA when they go on about slowing down cars for better safety, while they can't give two hoots when an actual safety issue pops up. That does not mean that Michelin is not to be blamed, but goof ups like these do not happen every day and in the better interest of the GP everyone else should have rallied around trying to make it happen.
This race was a joke... I slept-watched it, waking up every 10-15 laps later, to see the same situation :)
I guess there wasn't any overtaking? was there?
haha bhim.. who wld overtake whom? in fact the only time schumi was second was when he stopped for pitstops... anyway hopefully a fortnight later when they are back in europe and tis a better race..
Codey, do read the press release by FIA,
http://www.formula1.com/news/3209.html
I would tend to agree with them in this issue 100%, I'm sure you would see the sense in their argument too :)
COdey: Your point on Turn 13 is well taken; there are very few circuits that match the curve slopes that Indy offers. Unfortunately, the Michelin compounds didn't live up to their (the manufacturer's) initial hopes of surviving the turn.
About having a chicane dropped in, I'm not so sure! We've had NASCAR teams race there for ages now, and Michelin clearly had an inferior product that couldn't sustain the grind. No point penalizing Bridgestone runners for running on superior tyres. Is there? Jaygee, my apologies for this transgression. I'm only hoping Magny Cours offers more fun.
PS: Yes of course I'm only an effing fan who watches it on television; imagine if I had to pay $150 and see only three teams on the track!
Jaygee: I'd read the F1 release on the day itself, it does not mention one very important fact that the Michelin teams had offered to run the race, with the chicane at turn 13, and take no points for the race.
See, the given factor in the equation is that Michelin messed up and on a scale that probably would never happen again in F1, but shit does happen, right?
That being the case, what were the options?
a) Let the cars race at full tilt risking an accident(s) and should something go wrong, never hear the end of it in courts (remember Senna's death?)
b) Ask the drivers to slow down at turn 13, which is unsafe and rubbish. Unsafe because the Bridgestone runners would not be slowing down and there would be no set way in which Michelin runners would slow down. A good example of how it would work out would be what happened to DC last year at Spa with Alonso and a couple of years before that between DC and MS at the same circuit.
You just cannot have drivers slowing down at an imaginary chicane, it is sheer madness and no driver at this level of the sport is going to slow down, while racing at full speed. DC was supposedly begging his team to let him race on the warm up lap and in the European GP, even with his disintegrating suspension and tyres Kimi was still pushing his car like crazy.
No driver will run his car artificially slower, they'd rather pack up and go home than do that.
The point is not really if Michelin messed up, they did. There is no disagreement about that. The point is what happened after the mess up. If the FIA was so concerned about the fans, they should have worked out a real compromise, not the farcical one of "slow down at turn 13." For all their melodrama about making the sport safer, the FIA did not come up with a viable option to keep the race running, that would have kept driver safety too intact. And what Bernie and Max can do in the sport is limited by one's imagination and they make it point to often let it run free.
The moot point is that instead of pulling together the entire sport now is a circus of selfish, stubborn asses.
Heretic: Nascar teams run a totally different spec, so does CART and IRL when they come to Indy. All of them run the full oval and really, these are different cars. Racing spec tyres is a closely guarded black art and every form of racing is different from the other. Did you know that for a full oval race they run a much harder compound, and probably a smaller tyre too, on the inner side to keep the car turned in at all times? There is just no comparison, as it would be equivalent to saying why should a stock car or an IRL car not run at par with an F1 car?
Probably the only good point is that both Minardi and Jordan got points in their kitty, which should now allow them to save a whole lot of money by means of getting free transportation to the venues.
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