Originally Posted by fluffed:
“I'm with Villeneuve at the moment about F1. You have a bunch of cars doing their own thing, sometimes they come across other cars in the process, but they can make the pass and be away into their own little world again pretty quickly most of the time. Not really thrilling stuff.”
I really don't enjoy agreeing with JV cos, for the most part, he just likes sh*t-stirring but, erm, I do too.
Today's race was a classic example.
You can't tell me Hamilton enjoyed letting Raikkonen pull away from him in the last few laps for fear of damaging his tyres too much to allow him to defend against Vettel.
It kinda bugs me when Coulthard and EJ are stood there trying to tell us that the race was "fascinating" or "intriguing" or "interesting" when they conveniently forget to mention that it wasn't actually
exciting.
Vaguely related, I have an old bit of software which was used (back in the 1990s) to predict pit-stops and fuel consumption etc.
I was trying to modify it to predict the results of races and it never ceased to amaze me just how much you needed to twiddle stuff to emulate real world performances.
I mean, say you started off with 2 equal cars and then you wanted to adjust the performance of one to reflect the difference in lap-time between a McLaren and a HRT, you'd have to reduce the engine power of the HRT to around 400bhp before it'd lap suitably slowly.
Point being, I think Pirelli kind of have a similar problem with the tyres today.
If you make one tyre just10% "worse" than another one, the difference in lap-time will barely be noticeable.
So you make it worse and worse and worse until you get the desired step in lap-time but by then you've created a tyre that's ridiculously hard or soft.
Thing is, the tyres are NOT the problem.
The problem is the aero' and sooner or later they're going to have to grasp the proverbial nettle and try to implement a means of policing turbulent air flow behind the cars.
Once they find a way to regulate the turbulent air flow they'll be able to allow the teams to use the best possible tyres again.