EDIT ( this actually started out as a post on the chinese grand prix thread following on from my praise of Toki's support for ferrari but it grew a bit and i though it deserved it's own home )
i was thinking last night about which team i do support in f1 and i honestly can't say there's a single one i really do support as "my" team. certain teams anoy me at times, other teams i admire for various reasons and some i have soft spots for but i dont actually support any of them. i used to back in the '70s and early '80s and even into the '90s but somethings changed, maybe its that they are all a little bit faceless and corporate. to a certain extent the pit stops might actually be adding to this as you see a swarm of identical kwik fit ants swarm over their cars before retreating to their pit to sit down again with very little show of emotion even when their cars doing well. traditionally mclaren have been called the dull team, but to be honest apart from when they make mistakes, ferrari do a good red version of the silver team, williams and bmw do white versions, toyota a red and white version, red bull a red, yellow and blue version (with torro rosso doing an impression of them) honda have no real profile at all these days and give the impression of trying to hide in case anyone notices they're not doing well and they have to fall on their swords. most dissapointingly of all force india who, as the tail enders are treading in the footsteps of minardi ,have another low profile when you'd hope they would try to establish their own different identity to stand out. all the teams seem to be more concerned with damaging their image rather than creating an image in the first place.
actually i've just realised what the problem is, there are no team principals who are passionate about racing and stamping their identity on the sport. when i started watching (and no they weren't using chariots back then ) and the regs allowed designers to come up with (very) different solutions to making a F1 car.
most of the teams i remember, apart from mclaren and brabham, were run by their founders and mclaren were only different because bruce had died. bernie had bought brabham and they still had character due to their maveric design approaches with the bt46 in both surface cooled and fan cooled designs, renault came in as a corporate team and they were different due to their belief in the turbo. in fact most of the cars looked different, if you followed F1 you would still know a brabham was a brabham even if it for some reason had been painted by williams and if you saw a rebaque you could tell it was last years lotus though you may have been confused by the tyrrel 009. (obviously this didn't apply to shadow and arrows, as was proved in court but that's a different matter
) these days if you stick any of this years skins on the BF1 in LFS you can easly believe your racing against this years F1 grid, a tyrrel paintjob would not make a lotus 78 look like a tyrrel p34 nor an all red coat of paint make a mclarren m23 look like a ferrari 312 t2
since the '80s, the rules have been tightened up repeatedly to stop any great jump of imagination by designers, the lotus 88 was banned before it could race ( to be honest chapman was pushing it with his twin chassis design as it was hard to agree that the bodywork wasn't an aero device fastened directly to the suspension) and when the 6 wheel williams fw08d started setting very fast testing times in the winter between '82 and '83, the 83 regs were altered to ban 6 wheelers or 4wd ( when the fwo8d ran at goodwood in '95 it set a time that was only just beaten in '99 by a '98 mclaren, a car that was 16 years younger with more power )
this rant has wondered around abit from its starting point but it all ties to the same point, all the teams identities appear to be so similar that they may as well be the same, i'm sure die hard fans will say they are all different but for the casual fan it's not so. in this time of discussion about the challenges facing F1 and changes required, let's see the regs and the teams allow individualism to show through.
VIVA LA DIFFERENCE
i was thinking last night about which team i do support in f1 and i honestly can't say there's a single one i really do support as "my" team. certain teams anoy me at times, other teams i admire for various reasons and some i have soft spots for but i dont actually support any of them. i used to back in the '70s and early '80s and even into the '90s but somethings changed, maybe its that they are all a little bit faceless and corporate. to a certain extent the pit stops might actually be adding to this as you see a swarm of identical kwik fit ants swarm over their cars before retreating to their pit to sit down again with very little show of emotion even when their cars doing well. traditionally mclaren have been called the dull team, but to be honest apart from when they make mistakes, ferrari do a good red version of the silver team, williams and bmw do white versions, toyota a red and white version, red bull a red, yellow and blue version (with torro rosso doing an impression of them) honda have no real profile at all these days and give the impression of trying to hide in case anyone notices they're not doing well and they have to fall on their swords. most dissapointingly of all force india who, as the tail enders are treading in the footsteps of minardi ,have another low profile when you'd hope they would try to establish their own different identity to stand out. all the teams seem to be more concerned with damaging their image rather than creating an image in the first place.
actually i've just realised what the problem is, there are no team principals who are passionate about racing and stamping their identity on the sport. when i started watching (and no they weren't using chariots back then ) and the regs allowed designers to come up with (very) different solutions to making a F1 car.
most of the teams i remember, apart from mclaren and brabham, were run by their founders and mclaren were only different because bruce had died. bernie had bought brabham and they still had character due to their maveric design approaches with the bt46 in both surface cooled and fan cooled designs, renault came in as a corporate team and they were different due to their belief in the turbo. in fact most of the cars looked different, if you followed F1 you would still know a brabham was a brabham even if it for some reason had been painted by williams and if you saw a rebaque you could tell it was last years lotus though you may have been confused by the tyrrel 009. (obviously this didn't apply to shadow and arrows, as was proved in court but that's a different matter
) these days if you stick any of this years skins on the BF1 in LFS you can easly believe your racing against this years F1 grid, a tyrrel paintjob would not make a lotus 78 look like a tyrrel p34 nor an all red coat of paint make a mclarren m23 look like a ferrari 312 t2since the '80s, the rules have been tightened up repeatedly to stop any great jump of imagination by designers, the lotus 88 was banned before it could race ( to be honest chapman was pushing it with his twin chassis design as it was hard to agree that the bodywork wasn't an aero device fastened directly to the suspension) and when the 6 wheel williams fw08d started setting very fast testing times in the winter between '82 and '83, the 83 regs were altered to ban 6 wheelers or 4wd ( when the fwo8d ran at goodwood in '95 it set a time that was only just beaten in '99 by a '98 mclaren, a car that was 16 years younger with more power )
this rant has wondered around abit from its starting point but it all ties to the same point, all the teams identities appear to be so similar that they may as well be the same, i'm sure die hard fans will say they are all different but for the casual fan it's not so. in this time of discussion about the challenges facing F1 and changes required, let's see the regs and the teams allow individualism to show through.
VIVA LA DIFFERENCE
