Quote from sil3ntwar :

Thunderstorms are almost always forecast in that area of the world. Pretty much 100% humidty 100% of the time!

What? They live underwater?

Awesome!

Malaysian met is forecasting thunderstorms for all three days now. Hmmm.

Slower than the greatest of minds, of course.

On-topic: looks like it will be a wet weekend. Hurrah!

Great minds think alike.

Oh well, might as well start one.

Track (click picture for interactive map)



Number of Laps: 56
Circuit Length: 5.543 km
Race Distance: 310.408 km
Lap Record: 1:34.223 - JP Montoya (2004)


Schedule (local time, GMT +8)

Fri 02 April 2010
Practice 1 = 10:00 - 11:30
Practice 2 = 14:00 - 15:30

Sat 03 April 2010
Practice 3 = 13:00 - 14:00
Qualifying = 16:00

Sun 04 April 2010
Race = 16:00


Weather forecast
http://www.met.gov.my/index.ph ... amp;id=689&Itemid=905

Last edited by samjh, Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:37.

Argh! Dropped to 2nd. I shake my virtual fist at you, Hyperdrive!

It was an unpredictable weekend, as usual for Australia. What a race, though!

We're still getting our butt handed to us in the subleague comp.

Great vid.

A more modern video though; Sebastian Vettel in his pole lap at Albert Park yesterday. Watch for the handful of oversteer in the last corners! Fabulous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S8ump_08xE

Download it before Bernie's copyright army take it down.

Some people have gotten very imaginative with Red Bull's ride height issue. The fact is, no-one outside of Red Bull knows. But consider that Christian Horner has explicitly denied any ride-heigh adjustment system, and that is something which is very easily checked. I don't think he'll tell an outright lie about something that would be so easy to discredit if untrue. Rather, I think the early guesses were correct: Red Bull is just playing with the compression gas, which can be refilled during parc ferme.

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm proven wrong.

Quote from Intrepid :

Vettel has this championship in the bag as well. All he has to do is not crash!

Luscious Liz needs to hold herself together too. No popped spark plugs, broken exhausts, or whatever Murphy might throw her way.

BOM says possible showers today with 23C max temp. Tomorrow will be cloudy with patchy rain in the evening, max temp will be 31C, expected gusts of up to 65kph.

I'm pretty sure Kubica was doing a low fuel run yesterday. The problem with Renault is Petrov -- he's underperforming compared to his teammate. IMHO, the extra cost of Renault is not worth the reward. You would be better off upgrading one of your drivers to Kubica when you have enough money.

Meanwhile, I'm slowing changing my drivers from HRT to Lotus. First up is Chandhok, he will be replaced by Kovalainen. Hopefully Senna can keep his nose clean and finish the race.

Quote from sil3ntwar :

Stop fkn bitching about race times. We get 2 or 3 races a year at a decent time. You get 10+.

LOL. Good call.

For you Europeans, race times like these are what Red Bull is good for (and why they got into F1)!

F1 is a pretty good venue for F1 crashes, not races. We'll need to wait for Malaysia and China to decide whether the rules really suck or not. Hopefully, both races will be wet, and if there is no action even when wet, then we'll know there is no hope for F1 this season.

Reminded me of Need for Speed.

Weather forecast courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology: http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/vic/forecasts/melbourne.shtml

Forecast for Saturday

Cloudy periods. Isolated showers. Winds southeast to southwesterly averaging up to 20 km/h becoming light later in the evening.

Shower or two.
Min 17 Max 26

Forecast for Sunday

Cloud increasing late in the day with patchy rain developing during the evening. Winds north to northeasterly averaging up to 30 km/h tending northerly up to 45 km/h later in the evening.

Dry day. Evening rain.
Min 17 Max 31

All GT series are filled with fantasy cars. I mean, how many of us will ever get to own a Porsche 997 GT-3 or a Ferrari F430?

Quote from 5haz :

It should be the engineers that interpret the rules though, lawyers fall into the category of greedy businessmen anyway.

Everyone hates a lawyer until they need one.

Actually, judging by the recent diffuser hole issue and the F-vent issue, I think it's really the engineers who are trying to be clever with rules rather than lawyers. Lawyers actually know the established principles of statutory interpretation (literary rule, purposive rule, golden rule, ejusdem generis, "plain meaning", etc.), whereas engineers don't. But I digress...

Quote from 5haz :

Spec series are supposedly meant to showcase driver talent, but this only really happens if the cars have a small enough amount of grip that the skills of the better drivers really get to show through, in a spec high grip series such as what F1 is becoming this wont happen.

I used to think that mechanical grip should be increased in F1, but my thinking has changed somewhat recently. I still think that the focus of aero should be shifted from wings or over-body aero, to under-body aero. But for tyres, I think grip should be reduced, not enhanced. Wet weather races result in a lot of action because of low levels of grip, so perhaps F1 should adopt very hard tyres with low traction.

Last edited by samjh, Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:42.

Of course there is. 21 GT300 cars have entered this year, alongside 13 GT500 cars.

Firman failed in F1? He only got one season, and his teammate, Fisichella, didn't do much better (the Brazil win was a fluke, and Firman was right behind him but suffered a mechanical failure).

Even if they did "fail" in F1 -- granted that Ide did fail -- it doesn't make their driving standards "poor". Both have succeeded better than most.

Ide: 2nd in All-Jap F3, 2nd in F.Nippon, 5th in Macau
Firman: 1st in British F3, 1st in F.Nippon, 1st in Macau (or 2nd, depending on your point of view)

Japanese domestic motorsport is pretty strong. People like Satoshi Motoyama should have been in F1 long ago.

Last edited by samjh, Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:22.

For rear wheels: some tyre spin.

For front wheels: weave.

If your tyres are taking more than two laps to get up to full operating temperature, your tyre pressures are too high or your compound selection is wrong.

Quote from Darkone55 :

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/ ... n-f1-the-counterargument/

What a very selective opinion piece.

* If reducing downforce was the answer, then 1983 would have shown it, since we lost 80% of the aero efficiency in the 1983 rules, ” he says. “But there was no more overtaking than in 1982.

Ah, except F1 down-force between 1978 to 1983 used ground-effect. Aero efficiency was reduced because the FIA mandated flat undersides after crashes caused by badly-designed ground-effect cars, not because overtaking was hard. Different considerations!

* "Here’s the proof – if downforce prevented overtaking, historically the races with the fewest overtaking manoeuvres would have been the wet races, where maximum downforce settings are used...

Rubbish. Wet races involve much lower corner speeds and frequent driving mistakes due to reduced grip. These factors counter-balance the aero factor.

* On the subject of double diffusers making it difficult to follow, he said that early last year the Toyota drivers complained that the hardest car to follow was the Renault, which didn’t have a double diffuser.

Bollocks. Renault used DDD from the Chinese GP onward. They also had KERS.

* One of the reasons semi-automactic gearboxes have remained popular is that they prevent engines from over-revving on downshifts, which is even more important in this era of 8 engines per season.

But if F1 engineers can perfect the seamless shift, surely they can invent a system for a manual gearbox which would dip the clutch if the driver tried to select a gear that was too low for the engine speed.

Thereby negating the whole reason for removing semi-auto gearboxes. Driver error during down-shifting means possible damage to the engine due to over-revving. You can't have your proverbial cake and eat it too.

I actually agree about less grippy tyres and one-lap qualifying (I previously talked in favour of making tyres grippier in my other post, but lowering grip makes sense too), but the other stuff regarding aero are just biased. I don't doubt the competence and expertise of Frank Dernie as an aerodynamicist, but the opinions in the article are very clearly biased and not entirely honest.

Last edited by samjh, Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:02.

More about the Chevies: http://www.pistonheads.com/gas ... opic.asp?h=0&t=768107

I'm going to cut and paste my post in the Bahrain GP thread here...

------------

There is just one significant factor that makes overtaking difficult: aerodynamic sensitivity.

F1 cars have aerodynamic characteristics that open-wheel racing cars in other championships don't have:

• Small, fixed wing surface areas forcing teams to use very high angles of attack, which generate a lot of drag and wake.
  
• Teams intentionally designing their cars to produce maximum turbulence to make it difficult for pursuing cars to follow.
  
• Minimal down-force allowed from ground effect, forcing teams to make wings so aerodynamically optimal that their performance envelope is extremely narrow.

This can be resolved by:

• Issuing spec wings, front and rear, designed by an FIA engineering committee to produce only slightly more down-force than GP2, with minimum possible drag and wake.
  
• Getting rid of the flat bottom and plank rules, and allowing limited-sized venturi tunnels to be used for chassis under-body. Each team can design these as they wish, which keeps F1 at the cutting edge in terms of aerodynamic design. Ground-effect down-force can produce very high amounts of down-force while producing comparatively little drag or wake.

Problem solved! Cars can then follow each other closely enough to attempt overtaking manoeuvres, and the down-force capabilities of F1 cars retain their superiority over other categories of motorsport.

The FIA really needs to get over their paranoia over ground-effect vehicles. This is 2010, not 1999, or even 1980! Understanding of ground-effects in vehicles have improved leaps and bounds since even just a decade ago, and are no longer dangerous enough to justify maintaining their ban.

Also, simplify some rules. Drop the silly two-compounds per weekend rule, and the rule mandating the use of Q3 tyres in the race. Introduce another tyre manufacturer: tyre wars are OK. Make the tyres more grippy and less durable, which will increase mechanical grip and add more possibilities for strategy.

Last edited by samjh, Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:44.