Racing Discussion II. It's light's out and away we go!

[Imperial States of Duotona]

Hello can I interest you in our lord and saviour touring cars?

I saw the farce that was the DTM finale this year. I'm fine.

[Philjia]

Hello can I interest you in our lord and saviour touring cars?

I saw the farce that was the DTM finale this year. I'm fine.

I refuse to recognise DTM as touring cars since they switched to GT3 regulations.

[Imperial States of Duotona]

I saw the farce that was the DTM finale this year. I'm fine.

I refuse to recognise DTM as touring cars since they switched to GT3 regulations.

Fair enough. Touring cars are the only series I've seen live, ever since I went to Snetterton to watch the BTCC.

[Hirota]

At least until Merc finds a way to rules lawyer their way out of this. Like I've already seen people pouring over the sporting regs to prove the safety car procedure was conducted incorrectly as though that makes Lewis win by default.

Yeah, I really don't know what they expect to gain by that, you can't go back and change the results of a sporting event after the fact just because the officials made a bad call.

Yes you can, it's happened in F1 repeatedly before - most famously in Spain 1976 TWO MONTHS after the race, but Malaysia 1999, Austria 2020 & Russia 2020 also spring to mind.

Edit: Forgot the British Grand Prix in 1976 too, that took two months for the Ferrari, Tyrrell and the Fittipaldi appeal to disqualify James Hunt to complete.

[Imperial States of Duotona]

Yeah, I really don't know what they expect to gain by that, you can't go back and change the results of a sporting event after the fact just because the officials made a bad call.

Yes you can, it's happened in F1 repeatedly before - most famously in Spain 1976 TWO MONTHS after the race, but Malaysia 1999, Austria 2020 & Russia 2020 also spring to mind.

Edit: Forgot the British Grand Prix in 1976 too, that took two months for the Ferrari, Tyrrell and the Fittipaldi appeal to disqualify James Hunt to complete.

A shorter example was Brazil 2003, where Räikkönen was given the win but then after further reviews and a protest by Jordan they ended up giving the win and trophy to Fisichella at the next race.

[Cannot think of a name]

Hello can I interest you in our lord and saviour touring cars?

WTCC was pretty exciting to watch but now I can’t watch in the US.

[Philjia]

Hello can I interest you in our lord and saviour touring cars?

WTCC was pretty exciting to watch but now I can’t watch in the US.

I think the TC America Series is the current top flight touring car series in the US. Their races are streamed in full on YT.

[Vassenor]

Back to marathoning old Le Mans videos while waiting for the new WEC season then.

[Cannot think of a name]

WTCC was pretty exciting to watch but now I can’t watch in the US.

I think the TC America Series is the current top flight touring car series in the US. Their races are streamed in full on YT.

I honestly keep forgetting World Challenge is on YouTube. Along with IMSA it might have been my first love even though I was racing dirt tracks first. As a kid my dad would take me to Sears Point to watch the Champion World Challenge races and I would root for that yellow #77 Le Car because it was such and odd ball.

One of my favorite racing games was the first BTCC game for the Playstation. Though I thought the conceit that if you weren't tops in the points standing you'd get 'fired' from your team, especially when you drove the Ford and were clearly doing better than your teammate who apparently wasn't in danger of getting let go.


OOoooo, I want to do a LeMons rally in a Le Car. We'd call ourselves the Baguettes.

[Cannot think of a name]

Back to marathoning old Le Mans videos while waiting for the new WEC season then.

I've been binging the 2021 Supercars series from Australia on Motor Trend.

Also, apparently the Netflix series on this years F1 season is going to be fun to watch.

[Cannot think of a name]

Obviously I haven't seen any of it, but the racers on Twitter including Mario Andretti have been heaping praise on Hamilton himself handling defeat gracefully, I guess even if Team Mercedes isn't.

[Outer Sparta]

Obviously I haven't seen any of it, but the racers on Twitter including Mario Andretti have been heaping praise on Hamilton himself handling defeat gracefully, I guess even if Team Mercedes isn't.

Hamilton fanboys on social media can't seem to let it go. Can't they just recognize Verstappen's brilliance as well as the fact that both Hamilton and Verstappen put up an amazing title fight? It's like the whole Messi-Ronaldo discourse but in F1.

[Cannot think of a name]

Obviously I haven't seen any of it, but the racers on Twitter including Mario Andretti have been heaping praise on Hamilton himself handling defeat gracefully, I guess even if Team Mercedes isn't.

Hamilton fanboys on social media can't seem to let it go. Can't they just recognize Verstappen's brilliance as well as the fact that both Hamilton and Verstappen put up an amazing title fight? It's like the whole Messi-Ronaldo discourse but in F1.

I haven't seen that, just Mario and Patrick Long and a few others saying that Hamilton himself handled defeat gracefully. I've only heard about the protests from you all (not doubting it, just that's where I've heard of it).

Combo breaking Hamilton's run of championships is good for F1, it suggests that the season might be worth watching. And I like Hamilton personally. I liked him when he was in a McLaren.

[Outer Sparta]

Hamilton fanboys on social media can't seem to let it go. Can't they just recognize Verstappen's brilliance as well as the fact that both Hamilton and Verstappen put up an amazing title fight? It's like the whole Messi-Ronaldo discourse but in F1.

I haven't seen that, just Mario and Patrick Long and a few others saying that Hamilton himself handled defeat gracefully. I've only heard about the protests from you all (not doubting it, just that's where I've heard of it).

Combo breaking Hamilton's run of championships is good for F1, it suggests that the season might be worth watching. And I like Hamilton personally. I liked him when he was in a McLaren.

Basically that's just on social media with Hamilton fanboys claiming that "Hamilton got robbed" or some shit like that in every single reply to F1, Max Verstappen, and Red Bull Racing's accounts. Obviously most fans are not like those minority subset who feel entitled to their idols winning every single race and every single championship.

[Vassenor]

Obviously I haven't seen any of it, but the racers on Twitter including Mario Andretti have been heaping praise on Hamilton himself handling defeat gracefully, I guess even if Team Mercedes isn't.

Was this before or after the radio messages where he complained about the race being manipulated to make him lose came out?

[Bombadil]

I haven't seen that, just Mario and Patrick Long and a few others saying that Hamilton himself handled defeat gracefully. I've only heard about the protests from you all (not doubting it, just that's where I've heard of it).

Combo breaking Hamilton's run of championships is good for F1, it suggests that the season might be worth watching. And I like Hamilton personally. I liked him when he was in a McLaren.

Basically that's just on social media with Hamilton fanboys claiming that "Hamilton got robbed" or some shit like that in every single reply to F1, Max Verstappen, and Red Bull Racing's accounts. Obviously most fans are not like those minority subset who feel entitled to their idols winning every single race and every single championship.

To be fair this entire season has been Hamilton and Verstappen fans arguing bitterly over every disputed decision, and there have been many this year - far more than usual in part due to Verstappen's aggressive driving style - which is fine, it's racing - and just the highly competitive nature of the season itself.

Personally I think the decision was a little unfair, but not even on Hamilton, there were lapped drivers behind Verstappen who were robbed of their chance to gain a place as well in the restart.

Still the rules need to be clearer, why bother with rules at all if they can all be over-ridden on the whim of one man.

[Outer Sparta]

Basically that's just on social media with Hamilton fanboys claiming that "Hamilton got robbed" or some shit like that in every single reply to F1, Max Verstappen, and Red Bull Racing's accounts. Obviously most fans are not like those minority subset who feel entitled to their idols winning every single race and every single championship.

To be fair this entire season has been Hamilton and Verstappen fans arguing bitterly over every disputed decision, and there have been many this year - far more than usual in part due to Verstappen's aggressive driving style - which is fine, it's racing - and just the highly competitive nature of the season itself.

Personally I think the decision was a little unfair, but not even on Hamilton, there were lapped drivers behind Verstappen who were robbed of their chance to gain a place as well in the restart.

Still the rules need to be clearer, why bother with rules at all if they can all be over-ridden on the whim of one man.

Hamilton did play a role in crashing Verstappen in Silverstone, but in that instance, I wouldn't blame Hamilton fully and it was more of an incident leaning towards Hamilton causing the crash. In that context, Hamilton needed to win and aggressively went for the corner, bumping Verstappen's car and sending the Dutch driver toward the wall.

[Cannot think of a name]

Basically that's just on social media with Hamilton fanboys claiming that "Hamilton got robbed" or some shit like that in every single reply to F1, Max Verstappen, and Red Bull Racing's accounts. Obviously most fans are not like those minority subset who feel entitled to their idols winning every single race and every single championship.

To be fair this entire season has been Hamilton and Verstappen fans arguing bitterly over every disputed decision, and there have been many this year - far more than usual in part due to Verstappen's aggressive driving style - which is fine, it's racing - and just the highly competitive nature of the season itself.

Personally I think the decision was a little unfair, but not even on Hamilton, there were lapped drivers behind Verstappen who were robbed of their chance to gain a place as well in the restart.

Still the rules need to be clearer, why bother with rules at all if they can all be over-ridden on the whim of one man.

Well, I'm in the land that gave us NASCAR, so I'm probably not the one to answer that question. But I will say having raced just about my entire childhood (basically as soon as I developed the bare minimum motor skills to steer a car where I wanted it to go), bitching about stewarts and their decisions is as much a part of racing as anything. The adage being 'if you're not winning, they're cheating.' Which in NASCAR was true a lot, especially when Smokey Yunick was the crew chief.

But even in my low stakes club racing for kids dads would get real fired up about calls the stewarts made which tended to involve behavior that would embarrass the kids. Honestly we were just stoked that we had a car that we were told to drive as fast as we could before we could cross the street unsupervised.

F1 has always been crazy political and there's waaaay more at stake. If you get a chance watch the documentary on Senna, same kind of shit but in the early 90s instead of now. Lots of arguing in the drivers meetings.

I mean, the sport was largely born of rich people showing off. (the thing that makes series like NASCAR unique, it was started by relatively poor people showing off. Relatively poor, they did have all that illegal moonshine money. There's an okayish indie movie about the early days of NASCAR called Red Dust (dirt?) Rising that highlights it. Basically a handful of guys who were running out of places to race their rum cars.

Anyway, long story short, this stuff happens at all levels of racing. It's not my favorite part (though the Smokey Yunick stories are awesome. Stuffing extra gas in the car by using eleven feet of extra wide fuel line, putting a basketball in the tank to pass tech and then deflating it with a rod afterwards, moving the entire body of a Chevelle back and putting a plate under the car (people at the time thought he made a 7/8ths scale car).

Ferrari has a lot of scandals with the popular concensus being that F1 favors Ferrari as the signature brand of F1. They had developed a brake pedal where the driver could rotate his foot left and right to adjust brake bias, and one with an extra pedal that got found out when one of their drivers walked away from his stalled car in frustration and journalists photographed the cockpit. I never got the end of the story but recently there was a secret settlement between F1 and Ferrari about engine architecture (apparently didn't really work out in Ferrari's favor since they've been also rans). Coulthard and Schummaker were always accusing each other of shit. Gordon Murray was sort of the Yunick of F1, showing up with things that would quickly get banned immediately, like the fan car with a giant fan on the back he said was to cool the car but actually was actively sucking the car to the ground (later taken a step further with the Chapperel 2J which had two snowmobile engines doing the same thing...I saw that car at the Monterey Historics, when it ran it sucked up all the oil and rubber on the track and flung it in the air creating a terrible stench.)

Racing has always considered the rules to be more of a suggestion. Clearly I'm mildly obsessed with some of these moments.

[Vassenor]

and one with an extra pedal that got found out when one of their drivers walked away from his stalled car in frustration and journalists photographed the cockpit.

Nope, that was a McLaren.

[Cannot think of a name]

and one with an extra pedal that got found out when one of their drivers walked away from his stalled car in frustration and journalists photographed the cockpit.

Nope, that was a McLaren.

I do get them mixed up now and then. I thought the guy who ran the 24 hours of Le Mans buzzed was a Bentley driver but when I tried to google it all that turned up was a Jaguar driver that claimed to have run the race buzzed because he thought his Jaguar was disqualified. His co-driver was one of the dudes that tried to escape a German POW camp with a cobbled together hang glider. There was another driver who was the getaway driver for the Great Train Robbery using a Lotus Cortina. I meant to google all the stories to get them straight but the post was taking too long and lost the point so I just gave up. Mea culpa, McLaren. I was only sure of Gordon Murray being the fan car guy because his new hypercar has a fan out the back, too, the G50. G50? T.50. There's a lot of these stories to keep straight.

EDIT: Haha, I forgot our own cheating. My brother weighed 90 pounds dripping wet so we had to add weight to his kart which is SUPPOSED to be done by bolting diving weights to the pan, but to balance the car we loaded his nerf bars and part of his frame with buckshot so his weight was perfectly distributed. And a pain in the ass to life onto the stand because it weighed a metaphorical ton. And we had to do it in such a way that didn't give away that the nerf bars were way heavier than they should be. My only edge was using a more torque heavy engine than the KT100s because I had all my brother's extra weight and need the extra oomph, but it also meant that I could pull out of the corners faster so I developed a style that let me get on the gas even earlier and would pass coming out of the turns. It was great for getting through traffic, getting from 10th to 4th was easy. The next three positions were trickier. Which is why I'm not a race car driver now...

[Philjia]

To be fair this entire season has been Hamilton and Verstappen fans arguing bitterly over every disputed decision, and there have been many this year - far more than usual in part due to Verstappen's aggressive driving style - which is fine, it's racing - and just the highly competitive nature of the season itself.

Personally I think the decision was a little unfair, but not even on Hamilton, there were lapped drivers behind Verstappen who were robbed of their chance to gain a place as well in the restart.

Still the rules need to be clearer, why bother with rules at all if they can all be over-ridden on the whim of one man.

Well, I'm in the land that gave us NASCAR, so I'm probably not the one to answer that question. But I will say having raced just about my entire childhood (basically as soon as I developed the bare minimum motor skills to steer a car where I wanted it to go), bitching about stewarts and their decisions is as much a part of racing as anything. The adage being 'if you're not winning, they're cheating.' Which in NASCAR was true a lot, especially when Smokey Yunick was the crew chief.

But even in my low stakes club racing for kids dads would get real fired up about calls the stewarts made which tended to involve behavior that would embarrass the kids. Honestly we were just stoked that we had a car that we were told to drive as fast as we could before we could cross the street unsupervised.

F1 has always been crazy political and there's waaaay more at stake. If you get a chance watch the documentary on Senna, same kind of shit but in the early 90s instead of now. Lots of arguing in the drivers meetings.

I mean, the sport was largely born of rich people showing off. (the thing that makes series like NASCAR unique, it was started by relatively poor people showing off. Relatively poor, they did have all that illegal moonshine money. There's an okayish indie movie about the early days of NASCAR called Red Dust (dirt?) Rising that highlights it. Basically a handful of guys who were running out of places to race their rum cars.

Anyway, long story short, this stuff happens at all levels of racing. It's not my favorite part (though the Smokey Yunick stories are awesome. Stuffing extra gas in the car by using eleven feet of extra wide fuel line, putting a basketball in the tank to pass tech and then deflating it with a rod afterwards, moving the entire body of a Chevelle back and putting a plate under the car (people at the time thought he made a 7/8ths scale car).

Ferrari has a lot of scandals with the popular concensus being that F1 favors Ferrari as the signature brand of F1. They had developed a brake pedal where the driver could rotate his foot left and right to adjust brake bias, and one with an extra pedal that got found out when one of their drivers walked away from his stalled car in frustration and journalists photographed the cockpit. I never got the end of the story but recently there was a secret settlement between F1 and Ferrari about engine architecture (apparently didn't really work out in Ferrari's favor since they've been also rans). Coulthard and Schummaker were always accusing each other of shit. Gordon Murray was sort of the Yunick of F1, showing up with things that would quickly get banned immediately, like the fan car with a giant fan on the back he said was to cool the car but actually was actively sucking the car to the ground (later taken a step further with the Chapperel 2J which had two snowmobile engines doing the same thing...I saw that car at the Monterey Historics, when it ran it sucked up all the oil and rubber on the track and flung it in the air creating a terrible stench.)

Racing has always considered the rules to be more of a suggestion. Clearly I'm mildly obsessed with some of these moments.

The way F1 works has resulted in the sport being in a place where either you've found a loophole in the rules that allows you be miles faster than anyone else, or you haven't. Only four out of the ten competing teams won one of the 22 GPs in the 2021 season, and only two won more than one. Contrast with, say, the 2021 British Touring Car Championship (Yes, I am biased), where eight out of fifteen teams won at least one of the thirty races, using six of the eight different cars used in the series, and all four engines.

[Cannot think of a name]

Well, I'm in the land that gave us NASCAR, so I'm probably not the one to answer that question. But I will say having raced just about my entire childhood (basically as soon as I developed the bare minimum motor skills to steer a car where I wanted it to go), bitching about stewarts and their decisions is as much a part of racing as anything. The adage being 'if you're not winning, they're cheating.' Which in NASCAR was true a lot, especially when Smokey Yunick was the crew chief.

But even in my low stakes club racing for kids dads would get real fired up about calls the stewarts made which tended to involve behavior that would embarrass the kids. Honestly we were just stoked that we had a car that we were told to drive as fast as we could before we could cross the street unsupervised.

F1 has always been crazy political and there's waaaay more at stake. If you get a chance watch the documentary on Senna, same kind of shit but in the early 90s instead of now. Lots of arguing in the drivers meetings.

I mean, the sport was largely born of rich people showing off. (the thing that makes series like NASCAR unique, it was started by relatively poor people showing off. Relatively poor, they did have all that illegal moonshine money. There's an okayish indie movie about the early days of NASCAR called Red Dust (dirt?) Rising that highlights it. Basically a handful of guys who were running out of places to race their rum cars.

Anyway, long story short, this stuff happens at all levels of racing. It's not my favorite part (though the Smokey Yunick stories are awesome. Stuffing extra gas in the car by using eleven feet of extra wide fuel line, putting a basketball in the tank to pass tech and then deflating it with a rod afterwards, moving the entire body of a Chevelle back and putting a plate under the car (people at the time thought he made a 7/8ths scale car).

Ferrari has a lot of scandals with the popular concensus being that F1 favors Ferrari as the signature brand of F1. They had developed a brake pedal where the driver could rotate his foot left and right to adjust brake bias, and one with an extra pedal that got found out when one of their drivers walked away from his stalled car in frustration and journalists photographed the cockpit. I never got the end of the story but recently there was a secret settlement between F1 and Ferrari about engine architecture (apparently didn't really work out in Ferrari's favor since they've been also rans). Coulthard and Schummaker were always accusing each other of shit. Gordon Murray was sort of the Yunick of F1, showing up with things that would quickly get banned immediately, like the fan car with a giant fan on the back he said was to cool the car but actually was actively sucking the car to the ground (later taken a step further with the Chapperel 2J which had two snowmobile engines doing the same thing...I saw that car at the Monterey Historics, when it ran it sucked up all the oil and rubber on the track and flung it in the air creating a terrible stench.)

Racing has always considered the rules to be more of a suggestion. Clearly I'm mildly obsessed with some of these moments.

The way F1 works has resulted in the sport being in a place where either you've found a loophole in the rules that allows you be miles faster than anyone else, or you haven't. Only four out of the ten competing teams won one of the 22 GPs in the 2021 season, and only two won more than one. Contrast with, say, the 2021 British Touring Car Championship (Yes, I am biased), where eight out of fifteen teams won at least one of the thirty races, using six of the eight different cars used in the series, and all four engines.

Well, basically every other sanctioning body has more parity than F1. Before Hamilton and Wolff were running the board you could predict the winner by which car Adrian Newey designed. Sports cars sometimes end up like this, usually at the hands of Porsche, but Audi had a run (before the R8-18, which was its whole other thing) that they turned into a marketing campaign with the "Unfair Advantage," the story of how their quattros became so dominant they had to be outlawed. But the 917/30 is credited with killing Can Am (along with the gas crisis) not because it dominated (before the 917/30 it was a never ending parade of McLarens, but at least different McLarens) but because it signaled that if anyone wanted to beat the 917/30 it was gonna take gallons of money because Porsche showed up with a sports car that put out 1200hp that weighed as much as a dinner plate. But F1 being a series with only 1-4 serious contenders I would say goes back to the pre-war era when Alfa Romeo dominated and Bugatti before that.

[Cannot think of a name]

Hands down, though, the most interesting story in Can Am is Shadow, the race cars made by an honest to goodness spy.

EDIT: I was trying to remember why I didn't already have that book, now I remember, it's $95...jesus christ.

[Vassenor]

The way F1 works has resulted in the sport being in a place where either you've found a loophole in the rules that allows you be miles faster than anyone else, or you haven't. Only four out of the ten competing teams won one of the 22 GPs in the 2021 season, and only two won more than one. Contrast with, say, the 2021 British Touring Car Championship (Yes, I am biased), where eight out of fifteen teams won at least one of the thirty races, using six of the eight different cars used in the series, and all four engines.

Well, basically every other sanctioning body has more parity than F1. Before Hamilton and Wolff were running the board you could predict the winner by which car Adrian Newey designed. Sports cars sometimes end up like this, usually at the hands of Porsche, but Audi had a run (before the R8-18, which was its whole other thing) that they turned into a marketing campaign with the "Unfair Advantage," the story of how their quattros became so dominant they had to be outlawed. But the 917/30 is credited with killing Can Am (along with the gas crisis) not because it dominated (before the 917/30 it was a never ending parade of McLarens, but at least different McLarens) but because it signaled that if anyone wanted to beat the 917/30 it was gonna take gallons of money because Porsche showed up with a sports car that put out 1200hp that weighed as much as a dinner plate. But F1 being a series with only 1-4 serious contenders I would say goes back to the pre-war era when Alfa Romeo dominated and Bugatti before that.

Hell, isn't Porsche still miliking the "Nobody's perfect" thing for cash?

[Cannot think of a name]

Well, basically every other sanctioning body has more parity than F1. Before Hamilton and Wolff were running the board you could predict the winner by which car Adrian Newey designed. Sports cars sometimes end up like this, usually at the hands of Porsche, but Audi had a run (before the R8-18, which was its whole other thing) that they turned into a marketing campaign with the "Unfair Advantage," the story of how their quattros became so dominant they had to be outlawed. But the 917/30 is credited with killing Can Am (along with the gas crisis) not because it dominated (before the 917/30 it was a never ending parade of McLarens, but at least different McLarens) but because it signaled that if anyone wanted to beat the 917/30 it was gonna take gallons of money because Porsche showed up with a sports car that put out 1200hp that weighed as much as a dinner plate. But F1 being a series with only 1-4 serious contenders I would say goes back to the pre-war era when Alfa Romeo dominated and Bugatti before that.

Hell, isn't Porsche still miliking the "Nobody's perfect" thing for cash?

IMSA in the 80s was the Porsche show for sure. They make a lot of hay over their dominance of Le Mans with 20 overalls with the next closest being Audi with 13 (buuuuut Audi went and got those all in one go with the R cars. Even the combo breaker was essentially an Audi dressed up as a Bentley.)

At least when it was all about Porsche in the 80s (seven straight wins) privateers could buy 962s, arguably the best race car ever built. Or the 917. But that's such a subjective fight.

And they have some great shit talking ads built on it.

And in 2023 they're back again with Penske. Looking forward to that.

But yes, Porsche sells almost exclusively off their racing heritage and that's predominantly endurance racing because their Indy car was...not as inspiring. Their first TAG engine for McLaren was good, the 3512 not so much.

I guess they were thinking about another go at F1 this year but decided against it. It would give me a reason to watch F1.