F1 Coverage - The Verdict: 2013 Season (Part 2)
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Saw it, looked a bit too busy, information overload in my view.
Only managed to see the race, but the BBC coverage was at the standard it was last year. Ben/DC remain extremely rapid at picking up things going on. Gary seemed a bit overwhelmed when they spoke to him, presumably because he was balancing commentary duties for 5 Live and BBC.
FOM now do need to change when they feed in replays for the start, because it was painful switching to replays knowing that a challenge for the lead was likely in the second DRS zone. They ultimately had to abort the start replay to cut back to live.
Start replays are vital, and they shouldn't make the mistake of MotoGP and wait until half the race has passed. The sensible time to throw them is towards the end of lap 2, if the race is sufficiently settled, before the DRS zones activate.
This may lead to a 'time crunch' to get the producer(s) to deliver all of the replays in time, but I think it would be acceptable to lose one or 2 of the onboard angles going with this approach, particularly as the big broadcasters will show them after the race anyway if they find anything significant.
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I caught a little bit of the beeb's coverage last night, mainly to see the post race stuff. I caught the last few laps and I fully agree on others hammering Crofty for being 'shouty' but I wouldn't say Ben Edwards is any better, he's no doubt insightful but I was wishing for a few more silences to let DC speak. Maybe it's down to the type of viewer I am, but I'm finding the 'lead' commentators of both broadcasters less relevant to me. If anything I feel sometimes more in the know then they do with live timing and various other data feeds etc. Ben and Crofty are watching the same pictures as me and I can quite clearly see with my own eyes what's going on!! I don't need the overly dramatic rises in volume from either!
Post race (BBC) did seem a little flat in comparison to last year but I attribute that to being out of the swing with it, it'll get more natural feeling as the season progresses. Now I'm sure I'll be committing forum suicide here but I'm struggling to take Gary Anderson seriously. I know he's an immeasurably more experienced in F1 then I'll ever be but I'm sick of reading confident assertions from him, only for the actual qualifying/race to utterly destroy them. According to Gary (after only viewing a few laps in pre-season testing) the McLaren was THE car to beat and the Mercedes wasn't one of the outright top runners.......hmmmm funny how the actual season has played out differently. It's becoming a standing joke on the Autosport forums that Gary is able to see things that the teams can't see despite them spending vast amounts on their own technicians and engineers. I think Gary's strengths are in explaining how the race strategies unfold and general race engineering but for his own credibility he's got to stop predicting things only to see them blow up in his face.
One last point....I've been saying since last September that Webber is going to Porsche in 2014, the story first breaks cover during the WEC coverage yesterday. If I had inklings from friends within the 'WEC' world for months, then how on Earth has it managed to avoid the mainstream motorsports press??
The original view (debatable) but not for longer than needed
1 or 2 different off board angles but not for longer than needed
1 relevant on board (eg yesterday it made total sense to show Raikkonen's on board from the start but I don't think they needed to really show Rosberg's, but only needed to show Raikkonen's up to turn 2)
The problem you have I guess is if something happens at the start and/or somewhere on lap 1, as you then want to show 2-3 off board angles as well as maybe a couple of relevant on board shots too. Obviously if there's a SC on lap 1, that's fine as you can fit everything in no problem before they go back racing, but if it's a normal start like yesterday, you can very easily miss the start of the DRS zone stuff, which could be crucial (either a pass for the lead, or maybe they make contact). Luckily yesterday I think they showed they are prepared to move away from the start replays to the live stuff if something is going on that needs to be shown.
Regarding Webber, I noticed the stuff on RLM about him joining Porsche, but.....I haven't seen anything official anywhere. Me personally, I'd like to wait until I see something official, though given what's gone on the last 3 weeks, the timing of it would kind of make sense.
Yeah, would probably agree. Though to be honest I do think it made sense to show Kimi's on board given his bad start. If someone up front makes a bad start then I think it's reasonable to show their on board if at all possible, or if someone gets squeezed right up against the pit wall for example.
A bit like Kimi's final stint in China last year but with it happening to *all* the drivers. Two or three cars scrapping in the final few laps trying to judge the ever lengthening braking points and struggling to hit apexes would exciting racing make IMHO.
Can you imagine how boring it would be without it?
At least now there's a chance of avoiding a Vettel lights to flag victory.
The problem as I see it is that everyone has quickly worked out that there is only one tactic for using the tyre, and that is to drive at 80-90% to sector times. If some drivers approach a race driving a race like that then thats ok, but you need the contrast of other drivers attacking the race, maybe making 1-2 stops more, but they are able to drive flat out to make up the time.
At the moment we kind of have the illusion of there being multiple strategies at play when really there aren't.
I'm also not that jazzed on the start replays, if they're insistent on having every angle I can't see why they can't show a side by side view, especially when the most interesting element has only been somebody getting bogged down on initial traction.
Yeah regarding the Egg shells tires etc....I'll be the first to say I'm an out and purist. I want to see cars race, now I appreciate the need to be mechanical sympathetic to ones car, and that is a skill, but driving to preset deltas is not 'racing'...it's hot-lapping albeit with 21 other cars on the road. I've never once asked for extreme tire deg and I was a little dismayed with the appointment of Pirelli as I was happy with the Bridgestones. In order to generate excitement for the casual fan, F1 has gone too much now in the way of 'toys' to spice up the show. I'd happily lose the dire tires and live with DRS (as much as I dislike that) and KERS.
The bridgestones had incredible endurance but the 'racing' spectacle was ruined by the inability of cars to get past once stuck in dirty air, DRS would've resolved this on it's own imo.
The problem is the 'powers that be' don't care what we think as we'll still tune in next time. They're too busy chasing the casual fan who has an attention span of seconds. Not that I'm saying anything that none of you haven't thought or read before. I'm kinda stating the obvious!!
DRS has done far more to make F1 more exciting than the tyre regulations, wouldn't be boring at all.
Also we've seen plenty of Vettel dominated wins in 11 and 12 with these regulations, I think its a bit of Red Bull spin to suggest they are being denied success by the regs.
This isn't really a moan - getting those DRS zones and tyre elements right is really hard for the race organisers. 80% of the time they do a great job and for me, F1 has become a far better spectacle over the past three years as a result. It may not be "pure" but it has broadened the following and provided a greater spectacle for television audiences.
Teams that don't run in Q3 imo should be fined and given 10 place grid drops. When fans pay through the nose to attend a race the least the teams can do is go out and actually live up to their obligation of participating in the 'sport'.
Not all of them - I'd say on balance that very few races throw this problem up - but things were bad in China.
I completely agree. There are few things they could do to fix this but I quite like the idea of giving a point or two for pole.
Regarding qualifying, yeah, Saturday was poor. I mean ok I know it was partly wanting to not be first out so someone else could clean the track, but waiting what, 8 minutes for the first car to go out in Q1 and something like 7 minutes for the first car to go out in Q3 is quite clearly unacceptable.
Plus you have the issue of Fridays where the teams just run the same set of primes in FP1, so they don't want to be first out having to clean the track with their tyres. Ok, there's talk of teams getting an extra set of tyres for Friday's if they run a rookie/young driver in the session in the hope it'd mean more running (in effect you'd get to use 2 sets rather than just 1), but the top teams won't do that, so it'd only maybe be 2-5 teams that might go out a bitmore on a Friday. I expect Bahrain FP1 in particular to be horrific in terms of the whole nobody wanting to go out and clean the dusty track with their only set of prime tyres, purely because it's Bahrain and therefore it'll be dusty/sandy.
BIB - I have always found Ben too 'shouty', and often he gets DC so worked up he ends up being 'shouty' too. I first noticed it last year when I watched the highlights for the very first race of the season, having literally just finished re-watching the Sky coverage we'd recorded. Going from one to the other was ear-splitting (imho only, obviously!) but ever since then I've found myself saying "don't shout so much" to the screen too often! I find it far more annoying than Croft's average volume levels - at least, usually, Martin doesn't end up being dragged along the same volume road, and maintains his calmer style. Having said that, though, Croft has plenty of other commentating quirks that annoy me! (Especially his pronunciation of 'Sutil' with the emphasis on totally the wrong syllable! Shades of DC's Vettel mispronunciations there - but at least eventually DC made the effort to change, so there's hope yet... in about three years' time
I haven't had a chance to catch up on the entire thread/comments from the weekend but from the ones I've seen the general consensus seems to be it was all a bit of a mess with respect to the word 'tyre' having far too much of an impact to what was going on for all the wrong reasons :mad: Whilst some may call that 'exciting', the emphasis isn't right - it should be exciting for many different reasons/variables, rather than one particular element dominating. It's a world away from the 'exciting racing' I grew up around at Silverstone when I was younger.
The main problem with that (I've always held this view) is that you potentially risk the title being won on a Saturday, not a Sunday. That really isn't something I'd be happy with.
Every pass? Really?
I think at the majority of tracks they have got DRS spot on so far. There's the odd one where it's too effective and the odd one where it doesn't work at all, but it isn't a precise science.
Ultimately I think it does a good job of replacing the longlost slipstreaming effective and I'd far rather defend it being too easy to overtake than defend utterly boring races where overtaking is impossible (vast majority of races pre 2011).
I disagree. If it enables them to close up a bit and outbrake someone, fine. It's if they just blast past and by the time they get to the braking zone there's say 2-5 car lengths between them that I don't like it. Plus I can live with it being used to close up resulting in a pass further round the lap.
Possibly you're right, I think it should be possible to create tyres that need changing 2-3 times per race but don't need to be treated like egg shells when they are being used. There must be a middle ground here !
Has DRS killed off the art of defensive driving?
Imo it has, why fight when you know you're going to get blown past in the next zone anyway? Especially taking into account how fragile the current tires are. Button pretty much summed it up yesterday asking mid race does he even both fighting Lewis. There's fighting for your position and knowing when to fold, it's another thing waving a driver past.
I guess in a way it has yeah. Obviously it depends on which track it is and where the DRS zones are, but on the whole.....yeah, probably, especially when combined with the tyres as they are. If the tyres lasted (in the case of China's 56 laps) options 15-20 laps and primes 25-30 laps then you might get more actual fighting even when the DRS is deployed. Then again, even when it isn't deployed, you get drivers being told to not fight, they're in a different race, don't lose time fighting, don't ruin the tyres by fighting etc.
You'd hope so. I'd be more than happy with (in the case of China's 56 laps, would be different for other tracks/lap numbers obviously) options that lasted 15-20 laps and primes that lasted 25-30 laps, meaning you have various options, most of which result in being able to go full pelt for pretty much the whole race (taking fuel saving, safety cars, wet tyres etc out of the equation). As an example, if the tyres were on average lasting 15 laps for the options and 25 for the primes, you could do 1 of:
Option, prime, prime (full pelt all the way)
Option, option, prime (nearly full pelt the whole way)
Prime, prime, option (full pelt all the way, move to options before the 2nd set of primes fall off the cliff for a late race charge on the quicker tyres)
Prime, option, prime (shorter middle stint with a longer final stint on slower tyres that'll degrade less than the options making you quicker towards the end, full pelt all the way)
Or any other combination you can think of, but they all pretty much result in drivers being able to go full pelt for basically the whole race (subject to fuel saving, safety cars, wet tyres etc as I said), rather than driving to a delta, not fighting, and generally not being driven at 10/10ths