Right-o.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/3...the-day-award/
https://www.formula1.com/en/champion...f-the-day.html
https://www.formula1.com/en/vote.html
It's been mentioned on screen on the graphics towards the end of the race many times this season. The commentator's don't usualy talk about it because they don't want it to overshadow their own "driver of the day" discussions, like Brundle used to do.

Quite.

It seemed strange for Crofty get the drivers mixed up considering there wasn't a whole lot of action going on at the same time. Also there seemed to be fair less reactionary shots from the pit-lane (not that there was a lot to react to) compared to qualifying which was good.

Thx, well have def missed that.
Probably looking at on boards or timing screens or watching another stream on sky sports app so not seeing the world feed on screen messages.
That first link whatever it was gets flagged as suspect on the Sky, Google and AV parental lists.

Croft is becoming more like Darren Fletcher in football every race. Relegating Brundle to scraps. Joy watching Austria 1999 Classic F1 after where Murray was in charge but Brundle could come in whenever he wanted and finish a point, including if an incident happened he'd roll onto what was happening on screen.

Yes, that was a glaring error. Whoops!

Brundle moaning about drivers having more control over their starts was bizarre, presumably he would have preferred having Max driving around on his own in 3rd all race.

That was a better race than Monza but only because Mercedes nearly sabotaged their own comfortable win by trying something different with Lewis's strategy. It does help when there's another team that are at least keeping Mercedes semi-honest as Ricciardo was doing today.

But late-race uncertainty and some Max Verstappen fun mid-race aside, I'm not sure there was much there to convince Chase Carey that the sport doesn't need lots of gimmicks. But you know what you're getting from Singapore, a two-hour procession under lights that looks cool and usually has a mid-race SC to bunch the field and liven things up - sadly we got the SC at the start for once instead.


With the best of respect that sounds like an entirely imagined-up reason and I don't think that's the case at all.

It got mentioned plenty of times in the early season before it became obvious it was a largely pointless exercise as you wouldn't know the winner until hours after the race, even when the voting process hadn't been sabotaged to try and give it to a Manor, and it carried even less prestige than the frickin' DHL pole position award that noone cared about because it was a half-assed tacked-on effort to engage the fans.

Just had a flick through the C4 highlights. Forgot about the marshall getting out of the way of 20 F1 cars hurtling towards him at the last minute... that was scary stuff.

What was the corner crew spotter doing to let that happen?

Between that and the unsafe Williams release, I don't know why they're fiddling about with Halo before fixing this.

To be fair, that member of the pit crew needs a bollocking for not being aware of his surroundings on a live track.

I am amazed somebody hasn't been seriously injured in the pit-lane. Whilst speed limits and things like that have been introduced, there's a heck of a lot of people that are unprotected from any potential mishap there might be.

As for marshals and vehicles on track, from watching some older races, from way back to even the relatively recent past - some of the goings-on are nuts. There were plenty of warning signs over a Jules Bianchi style incident.

Going back to the 70s/80s - track marshals seemed to have no fear/ a death wish. They would just run onto the track without fear as soon as an incident occurs. They seemed to have total faith that other cars wouldn't run into them. Even the way people used get right up close to the winning driver as they went past to wave the chequered flag on grid was insane.

Today it seemed like a late call to bring the safety car in, so perhaps that's why he got caught out. Somebody should have been able to make him aware well in advance though - that shouldn't be happening. Indeed, shouldn't bringing the safety car in be after confirmation that all marshals have resumed their positions? It really was a close call. Any later and he wouldn't have known which direction to move. One thing that springs to mind is that if the cars were as loud as they used to be, that would have given the marshal a bit of a heads up!

True, but he was in a place where he was going to do his job (albeit not needed right at that time) and if anything had gone wrong with the two cars battling each other then he was going to get wiped out. Totally avoidable risk - make it clear that in narrow pitlanes you can't release your car until they have space to go straight to the fast lane.

The investigation and lack of penalty has told teams exactly how they need to behave in future to be competitive.

There was quite a serious back injury to a camera operator a few years back which means they don't be on the Pitlane outside the garage on race days anymore.

Channel 4 didn't hide the graphic. They did refer to it in commentary mind. They might have to rethink that for future highlights shows.

Just finally watched the race. Not the greatest but the battles between Verstappen & Kvyat was very fun and the closing stages too was very enjoyable! The smash at the beginning was rightly called a racing incident but how in the name of pre-paid venereal disease did Bottas and Williams NOT get punished for what was a blatant unsafe release?
Yes the member of the pitcrew messing with the wheel-gun hoses could have been somewhere else for a second or two, but that is besides the point, it was so unsafe and that had to have been punished!

I thought Crofty wasn't too bad today. he did make a few poor mistakes, as did Brundle, with not paying attention to which car it was or what was happening on a couple of occasions, but wasn't as bad as they have been!

Podium interviews were good, not some zeleb trash but decent questions for once!

As for the marshal on the track who came close to getting an F1 car drive at 200mph up his arse - WOW! Bet he hasn't run that fast in his what could have been a shorter life!!

An interesting article from over the weekend on how Mclaren with its sponsors are using digital and social media.

http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/09/...sors-out-front

I've said it before but I really think they should shorten Singapore. 2 hours is just too long, even though it did get exciting in the end.

I watched with NowTV again. For Italy I had to put up with blurry-o-vision for the first half of the race before it finally sorted itself out. In Singapore it lost the connection 4 times in Qualifying, and 3 times in the race.

Losing patience with it now.

Here's a German article examining the procedure for restarting the race after a safety car and ensuring marshalls are off the track in case anyone is interested.

http://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/f...-11544893.html (in German)

First official interview with Chase Carey: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/i...ase-carey.html

Also more info on the Marshall incident:

I must admit, I do agree with his proposal that F1 should be a week-long extravaganza wherever it goes. I mean doing stuff like airing the fan stage shows, and the music concerts after the event on TV or online would be awesome, or having some stuff like stunt shows a la the Race of Champions instead of some boring vintage car parade, then after that you watch an afternoon of great racing and then finish up by watching the post-race concert. I mean they already have some big acts like Queen, Prince, Elton John, Rhianna, Lenny Kravitz etc. on at some of the more high profile ones... What's not to like? I mean if the F1's boring at least you might find some of the other stuff interesting.

Focus on the basics first, every F1 race should have at least 100k attending on race day. Everything else grows from there.

But what i've suggested should in theory increase attendance, especially if you get more for your buck.

An interesting read, the interview, without him ever saying anything concrete.

A week long extravaganza is nice but most folk are only going to be there for the race or the weekend at best, maybe Friday as well. I think many folk would be happy to see the efforts focused there and preferably with circuits not having to pay eye-watering fees for the race and therefore having to gouge the fans at every single opportunity. To be fair, it does sound like there's some talk of actually making this happen.

Getting back to circuits where the fans turn out regardless of weather and session is also a must. OK, it's just practice, but the difference between a, say, Silverstone practice session and some of the newer venues is just staggering. If they are going to push this "we're the biggest global annual series" aspect then practice sessions in front of a handful of folk...not so good even if race day is a reasonable crowd.

Also, if they've any sense, they'll look at the circuit tender/design process. Yes, it's difficult with FIA safety rules etc. But they need to find a way to make any new venues genuinely impressive racetracks, as opposed to genuinely impressive facilities. The hit-rate of new tracks since Malaysia and the start of Tilke's "reign" is woefully crap and, doubly bad, for every Sochi or Baku there's a classic racetrack being displaced off the calendar.