Tag Archives: f1

Mar201008

Rob

0

The Bahrain GP – the track, the tests and a prediction

F1 has just under a week to go until the first winner of 2010 will lift the trophy. It all starts in the Kingdom of Bahrain at the Sakhir circuit. It’s been on the calendar since 2004 and has provided some good racing, it stays in it’s position of the first race from last year having deposed the Australian GP.
This year the drivers will run on the full length circuit compared to the Grand Prix circuit. This change takes that circuit from 5.412 km to 6.299 km and adds a twisty in field section after turn 4, the drivers will run 49 laps for a total race distance of 308.651 km. It will be the first few miles of running in anger for the new teams and the new drivers to F1, lets hope that they can all keep it together for those first few corners.The first corner is tight [...]

Feb201024

Rob

0

How the FIA failed entirely in expanding the grid

When it was announced that the FIA would be looking for new teams to bolster the F1 grid I was surprised – isn’t this a club where you have to know Bernie and have had dinner with him a few times plus have filled his pockets with gold before you can fill in the form? But no, they were indeed opening up F1, and they had a lot of applications.
The FIA (and Bernie) should have looked at the applications that were tabled and then thrown away the financially unsound ones and then looked at what was left, there was a lot of talk about due diligence  at the time. This process was obviously not through enough, two of the teams that were granted entry have been sold and bought before the new season has even started (Campos Meta and Manor), and a third is rumoured to have mounting financial problems [...]

Feb201012

Rob

0

Lotus take off the covers to their 2010 car

Lotus unwrapped the car that will return an iconic name to F1 today, the team has completed a brief shakedown of the car at Silverstone so it works and they are scheduled to join all the other teams for the third test in Jerez next week.
The car looks very business like without some of the more refined aero features that we’ve seen from the other teams, I guess that reflects the limited time that they’ve had to build the car. The classic Livery is back however so it seems.
It’s great that another one of the new teams has actually delivered on building and lanuching a car, I have the same hopes for them as I did for Virgin, just to be on the back of the pack – perhaps even beat them once in a while. That will surely be the aim of Lotus initially anyway.
With Jarno Trulli and Heikki [...]

Feb201011

Rob

0

Virgin pass on most of the testing for the second day

Virgin Racing have made it to the second test of the season but must be hugely frustrated at only having completed a handful of laps over the two days and still being wildly off the pace.
Being 8 seconds adrift is an age in F1 and if it’s because of the weather and the limited running then that is understandable but I fear it could be more deep routed than that. It’d be interesting to compare the Force India’s or the Renault’s first few laps to those times though to be sure.
It seems that their engineering standards aren’t as high as they need to be for F1 at the moment either with the front wing coming off the car during it’s first run in the morning. The team say that the cause has been identified and with the parts that they should be getting overnight then we should see more of [...]

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