Quote from Hyperactive :

Imho an option worth considering is to think about should the drs even be used on every circuit? Malaysia doesn't really need it. Neither does spa, brazil, canada and monza. And for some tracks like abi dhabi, hungary, spain, monaco and silverstone need it more than we need air to breath. On those tracks you could just make it that the time is measured on last turn and then on the whole next lap you could use drs for one overtake attempt at any chosen place.

Agreed, sounds like a nice possible compromise

Quote from BlueFlame :

Yea but in the days of Jimmy Clark, Lorenzo Bandini, Pedro Rodriguez and Graham Hill, they didn't even have AERO, funnily enough, many people say this was the best period of F1. You don't need DRS or KERS as an 'overtaking tool' Back in the old days, a driver could get it done with three pedals a shifter and a wheel ONLY. Non of this, differential mapping bullshit you see on the wheels nowadays. Maybe that's the problem, they have too many dials to twiddle over the distance of a race, they forget that they are actually paid to race.

I mean cmon, Jim Clark was only human, and HE could overtake with less things at his disposal. Maybe that';s the problem with modern F1, there's too many variables, too many diff settings, engine map settings, clutch settings etc...

It's no wonder Ayrton Senna said karting was pure racing, you only have pedals and a wheel, which is all you need.......

Well...

They did have aero in the 'old' days. I'm sure you recall Rindt's letter to the then governing body. And even before wings they "had aero".

Secondly, today's cars have developed gradually. To beat the others things like driver adjustable diffs were introduced. To save mistakes semi automatics came along. It's called progress.

Sure you could ban it all - and in many ways I wish they would - but you can't stop progress and you cant unlearn stuff. If you want all of that, go and watch Formula Ford. Or come to a Monoposto meeting - we're at Brands in a couple of weeks...

Heavily restricted progress at that. Real progress would see AI drivers and cars that were constantly changing in shape etc... Progress has been actively legislated against.

I completely understand DRS, and why it's there, but it's so apologetic. It's a bit 'meh'. If you going to do something to improve the show you may as well go the whole 9 yards and do something mental. If the battle is truly lost, just go for it. Copy BTCC's race/ballast format if needs be.

On a side note, I'm not really sure if they removed all the aero on the cars you'd automatically see exciting racing. I've seen plenty of boring kart races in my time, and that's sprints of 15-20 minutes.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Sure you could ban it all - and in many ways I wish they would - but you can't stop progress and you cant unlearn stuff. If you want all of that, go and watch Formula Ford. Or come to a Monoposto meeting - we're at Brands in a couple of weeks...

You get the sounds and the smells but watching racing on TV is far better in terms of knowing whats happening etc, but you're right, you can't UNLEARN stuff, but if all us F1 fans want all of the dials and buttons removed from a wheel so that it can remain JUST that, a wheel, not a gunpod control, why do they insist on the silly stuff they have?

There's only one button they need on the wheel. Pit Limiter. Paddles for gears, OK, but I'd much rather see a clutch back in F1. That's where the real men were.

These real men didn't use h-shifts and clutches through choice!! If they were around at the time, and made cars faster, then I have no doubt Clark, Hill, Chapman, steward, Fittipaldi, Senna, Rosberg, Fangio, Brabham et al would have used them.

Quote from tristancliffe :

These real men didn't use h-shifts and clutches through choice!! If they were around at the time, and made cars faster, then I have no doubt Clark, Hill, Chapman, steward, Fittipaldi, Senna, Rosberg, Fangio, Brabham et al would have used them.

Also, F1 cars are too reliable these days. Of course they used them through choice, they chose to be F1 drivers at THAT time, so you should say, "they probably would of happily used sequential gears".

But I will trust Ayrton on that and that I'm sure Keke thinks F1 should be fully manual aswell as Emmo.

There was no choice in it, as the technology didn't exist then. Even if they'd wanted it, they couldn't have it.

F1 has ALWAYS been about using technology to get the car/driver round the track faster. It has NEVER been about ensuring the drivers have a hard time of it; that's been a by product of the former requirement and the lack of the relevant technology.

I'm 100% sure that, in their respective championship years (or in years when they were contenders but didn't quite win it because the car wasn't quick enough), if they were asked to choose between a car that had h-shift, manual clutch, no power steering and a buttonless steering wheel, or a car with paddles, fancy steering wheels that control aspects of the car (although curiously not brake balance), power steering, then they would have chosen the quicker car (assuming it was at least as reliable as the other car). And that's ignoring the aero development. The drivers will always always always choose the quicker car. You can't blame the drivers for having it easy. You can't blame the teams. You can't even blame the rule makes, as they've tried to keep costs, speeds, safety, fans expectations, the need for technology etc in check (albeit with different priorities over the years).

Has F1 been developed at an artificial rate because of the rules, as Intrepid seems to be against? Yes. It always has been. That's what makes motorsport good - the rules. If it was a free for all (formula libre) it would be rubbish. Beating people within the rules is the point of motorsport. Yes, it's over-regulated in many ways now, but only because the teams could do crazy things that would be expensive, be too fast for their ability to maintain safety in crashes and so forth given the technology around today. It has to be regulated. And it has to be regulated in such a way that the fans don't leave and the sponsors don't leave, but the two often want different things. Even karting has been restricted - there is no way on God's Earth that any human being would design a go-kart and want to leave it effectively the same for so many years. You'd want better suspension, better brakes, better tyres, better aerodynamics. But karts remain the same because they are over-regulated. They get away with it because it's a sport for 8-12 year olds who just need to learn the basics before moving to proper cars where they can learn about how to drive properly.

Sure, it's easy to sit at home having never driven a racing car and say F1 is rubbish now, and that the old generation would hate it. But they wouldn't have hated it if they were given the choice of using it or letting a rival be quicker.

The question isn't 'quicker car' it's the question of more challenging to drive.

Take the S1 Quattro and a Mini Metro, driving the Metro could be Walter Wrohl, we all knew he's good, but you know the guy driving the quattro may not be as skilled, but you get that excitement with the car moving around, knowing how much of an animal it is, the limit of adhesion at every possible moment, you won't get that with the Metro, all you'll see is a very good driver driving a boring car, quickly.


Golden ages of motorsport in general were when H shift was used. And although sequential has been, and is being implimented towards road cars, it doesn't alter the fact that the majority of cars on the road are either fully auto or fully manual so H stick is something we can relate to, a guy banging from 6th to first on a H stick takes skill. Notching down gears incrementally doesn't. Heel and toe technique demands fierce skill in competition, left foot braking does not.

We need to demand less from our F1 drivers from an engineering P.O.V and more from them from a DRIVING P.O.V.

I also wasn't talking about one team on a grid having a sequential and others not, I was talking about the days when ALL cars were fully manual, and what would the REAL boys prefer. I think Hamilton said once that he'd like to go back to H stick.

That's just not how the world - not just F1, but any aspect - works. Sure, the H-shift is more challenging, although a stick sequential (i.e. mechanical rather than electronic) still allows mis-shifts and early downshifts, so it doesn't need to be H pattern.

I always thought the Quattro was a dull car myself. I'm a Stratos man. I had the 'pleasure' of doing some laps at Hethel in a Quattro and our Stratos earlier in the year, and the Quattro is nothing interesting at all. Personal opinion.

Why do we have to relate to it. Being able to relate has never been the interest - it's NOT being able to relate that captures the imagination. You have no idea what it was like to drive a Mercedes Streamliner, or a Lotus 49, or a Williams FW14B, or a Red Bull RB6, so being able to relate is meaningless.

Left foot braking takes skill. As does adjusting the car on the fly - bearing in mind you wouldn't know what to do to the options having 5 weeks to consider your decision. They have seconds to choose.

Heel and toe isn't used that much in single seaters. At least not since the 80s. Hewland sort of engineered it out of necessity.

In the days when all cars were H-shift, any one driver would have switched immediately for any quicker option if it came along. When it did, you didn't hear Mansell asking for H-shift. We're over-regulated as it is - you think banning anything post 1980 in gearbox development is a good thing? Haven't you said before that F1 needs relevance to road cars (which are increasingly moving away from H-pattern anyway to various electro-hydraulic 'boxes, or even no gearbox at all in the case of electric cars.

You think regulating all aero development since 1970 would be a good thing?

Have you thought about watching EuroBoss or Historic F1 championships?

Quote from tristancliffe :

These real men didn't use h-shifts and clutches through choice!! If they were around at the time, and made cars faster, then I have no doubt Clark, Hill, Chapman, steward, Fittipaldi, Senna, Rosberg, Fangio, Brabham et al would have used them.

exactly not one of the drivers that were in F1 when wings first appeared opted to spend the rest of their career only driving F1 cars without wings, most of the drivers tris mentions drove F1 cars with downforce generators of some form, senna drove paddle shift cars when he had the chance, some of the cars in moss' era had preselector gearboxes so they didn't have to take a hand off the wheel when changing down for a corner, chapman attempted to develope a "2 pedal" car in the mid 70's with the lotus "queerbox", firstly on the 76 and briefly on the 78 but the gearbox couldn't be made reliable enough to race though ronnie peterson loved it as he already had some experience of left foot braking. in fangio's era mercedes fitted their sports car with an airbrake to improve braking and the drivers soon learned that if they left it raised they had more grip through the corners so even back then drivers used anything that made them faster or made driving easier.


there's no way to remove all the high tech from F1 without completely revamping every formula under it if you want F1 to be the top of the single seater performance pyramid.

Personally i think F1 started to plateu in terms of innovation in the late 90s after that it was very incremental, so to restrict the regs wasn't going to do much yet the rate of development stayed around the same(just engines are now untouched).

If the Regs where to go unrestricted we wouldn't get the level of innovation seen in the 60s, 70s or even 80s, we wouldn't even get close, unless they went for a completely unseen route of racing.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Even karting has been restricted - there is no way on God's Earth that any human being would design a go-kart and want to leave it effectively the same for so many years. You'd want better suspension, better brakes, better tyres, better aerodynamics. But karts remain the same because they are over-regulated. They get away with it because it's a sport for 8-12 year olds who just need to learn the basics before moving to proper cars where they can learn about how to drive properly.
.

Firstly, you don't know anything about karting. If it was a sport just for 8-12 year olds then you better tell the big manufacturers investing millions and paying adult professional drivers (which 90% of car series do not have) to beat each other because they don't seem to 'get their own sport '. I better tell those drivers who make an actual living from the sport that it's not for them and they should become professional F3 drivers, mind you last time I checked there wasn't any.

Karting certainly isn't immune from the development wars. Anthony Davidson said himself (to me, on record) that Formula Super A was the closest kind of philosophy of racing to F1 he'd ever competed in.

Karting has seen suspension, aerodynamic development ( http://api.ning.com/files/K1qF ... lRacing9Network_comc5.jpg), tyre wars (with major manufacturers like Bridgestone/Dunlop included), ABS systems developed, clutch systems (where F1 team involvement was sighted in the massive escalation of exotic material) etc... You are right that people will want to beat each other at all costs within the regulatory system. If you think karting has been immune from that then you are mistaken.

However, karting does enjoy not having to be sub-servient to the commercial pressures of relying on the income from millions of spectators world-wide like F1. It's regulatory system is actually quite simple relative to cars, though has become more confused in recent years.

F1 is above anything an engineering spectacle. So I am happy to see progress, but for me that would include real progress like AI drivers and crazy arse aero. In it's current state it's a confused mish-mash of being a driver's sport but entirely engineering driven.

As a career path, it IS for 8-12 year olds. If you aren't karting by then then the chances of getting to F1 are massively slim (but not zero). Karting for adults, both as arrive-and-drive and as an amateur sport (much like my racing), is fine and dandy.

It's more likely Anthony was talking to your brother, but we'll let that attempt at name dropping slip shall we. I don't think many karts have seen suspension very much. That picture is not of aero development. Sticking a kart in a wind tunnel tells you how bad they are, but it is not development.

Karting enjoys that postion by not being popular. F1 attracts fans because it's popular. It doesn't 'enjoy' not having fans, it's just not interesting enough to attract them. Which is fine, but don't pretend it's kartings choice to go mostly unnoticed.

Quote from tristancliffe :

As a career path, it IS for 8-12 year olds. If you aren't karting by then then the chances of getting to F1 are massively slim (but not zero). Karting for adults, both as arrive-and-drive and as an amateur sport (much like my racing), is fine and dandy.

It's more likely Anthony was talking to your brother, but we'll let that attempt at name dropping slip shall we. I don't think many karts have seen suspension very much. That picture is not of aero development. Sticking a kart in a wind tunnel tells you how bad they are, but it is not development.

Karting enjoys that postion by not being popular. F1 attracts fans because it's popular. It doesn't 'enjoy' not having fans, it's just not interesting enough to attract them. Which is fine, but don't pretend it's kartings choice to go mostly unnoticed.

If you really want I can PM you the link to the interview I did with him a year or two ago to save you the embarrassment of posting it on here .

My specific point is that saying 'karting is for kids' is like saying 'BTCC is for kids' because the Ginetta Junior series is on the same program. It's exactly the same logic. You can race a car at 14 and it's becoming a vital choice for those who want to go that route. 14 is a child in my book. There are kids who are testing Formula Renault's at 14 now! I really wouldn't be surprised to find drivers who've driven them at a younger age. Karting is becoming a less vital route for kid drivers, so playing devil's advocate are cars now 'just for kids'?

I won't deny there are plenty of young drivers who kart with the sole intent of becoming an F1 driver. It's an ideal tool for talent spotting and that's big business for f1 teams. We do lose a good few drivers every year but occasionally we gain some from cars too (Ben Hanley + Schumacher' pre-comeback' springs to mind). But whether you can swallow this fact or not, karting (at the top) is a professional sport. It is a fact that there are drivers who are paid a wage to compete and win races. There are plenty of so-called 'professional' single-seater categories that can't boast that fact. Karting, like cars, is a multi layered motorsport that ranges from young kids through to amateurs and then professionals.

Anyway, what were we talking about again? oh yh, DRS sucks!

No need. I won't be embarrassed. When is it my turn to name drop? Or would that embarrass you? At least Terence isn't as insecure as you.

I never said kids (not that baby goats are good at driving) or children. I was quite specific about my age range. By 14 they should be in cars, as they have a lot to learn that go-karts won't teach them. And as you rightly point out, more and more kids are skipping the karting stage as it's becoming less relevant to car racing.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I never said kids (not that baby goats are good at driving) or children. I was quite specific about my age range. By 14 they should be in cars, as they have a lot to learn that go-karts won't teach them. And as you rightly point out, more and more kids are skipping the karting stage as it's becoming less relevant to car racing.

I'll ignore the first paragraph because I think I made my point that I was not lying.

I'd agree for drivers that haven't yet been picked up by an F1 team or a major sponsor that they should leave karting as early as possible. Reason being they'll just be wasting a vast amount of limited resources not gaining the exposure they need in karting. You won't be able to compete against the best (and thus gain any benefit), so you may as well go cars and learn the ropes before you lose all your money. I'd specifically advise that to many drivers looking for a career in car racing.

Certainly an F1 team like McLaren however, once they get hold of a driver, will keep them in karts for as long as possible. Nyck de Vries, McLaren's latest hotshot, will be doing his second year of senior karting this year before doing cars next year. If you have guaranteed resources for several years it's best to make the most of racing in karts until you move. McLaren obviously see there is a benefit there but that's NOT in all cases as stated.

But while I enjoy seeing young karters do well in cars, like many, my interest now as a karter is focussed on the professional aspect of the sport because I personally feel karts are an inherently better vehicle to drive.

God, it's so easy to put Intrepid on the defensive. Hilarious.

Every forum post on this forum has a defensive nature to. One is always defending their opinion, without this forums would be pretty dull places. Tristan has spent plenty of time defending F1's current development for example while Blueflame has 'defended' his point of view... that's how this game works!

"I think this...."
"I agree"
"me too"
"I agree as well"
ZZZZzzz......

Yh, I'm being defensive! I aint Bhudda ffs!

It's also pointless as your both so set in your ways that you'll never come to some sort of agreement on it, this arguments been going on for years.

It is possible to converse without one person being defensive OR always agreeing. But you wouldn't be you without your hatred of anything anti-karting/bbc/government/people.

What you need is a girlfriend. There must be a girl (or a boy?) that is suitable. Somewhere. Mustn't there?

Quote from tristancliffe :

What you need is a girlfriend. There must be a girl (or a boy?) that is suitable. Somewhere. Mustn't there?

If you've ever watched a romantic comedy you would know that the two people that hate each other at the start always end up together at the end...

Quote from tristancliffe :

It is possible to converse without one person being defensive OR always agreeing. But you wouldn't be you without your hatred of anything anti-karting/bbc/government/people.

What you need is a girlfriend. There must be a girl (or a boy?) that is suitable. Somewhere. Mustn't there?

I've re-read my post, and see nothing in it that could possibly be retorted with pot calling the kettle black, least of all in childish image form.

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :

It's also pointless as your both so set in your ways that you'll never come to some sort of agreement on it, this arguments been going on for years.

Who cares, it entertains the forum at least.

The last few posts weren't quite necessary anyway.

I don't find it entertaining at all.