The F1 thread

[Raid]

Arrivabene replaced as Ferrari Team Principal by Mattia Binotto

Feels like a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to last year's loss to me, but I suppose the team principal is the one ultimately responsible for a team's performance at the end of the day. Still, Ferrari had the fastest car during much of last year, and it feels unfair to reward that with a firing. Maybe they blame him for the issue with car performance in the latter half of the season.

[Maturin]

Blimey, pre-season testing has come around already. I haven't been following developments that closely lately, but there doesn't seem to have been too many regulation changes this year; cars all look very similar to last years, apart from the wings. Be interesting if that has an effect on close racing. I doubt it though.

[Wrathbone]

Isn't meant to make it easier to drive in dirty air, and also have a less dramatic impact on aero if there is front wing damage due to it being a simpler design? I've not been following it much either, I just seem to remember those being cited as significant changes.

[Raid]

I think the idea of making them simpler is to mean they don't need as clean an airflow as in past years. I don't actually expect there to be much of a difference, as frankly they've tried this before and if anything it made things worse.

[Snowy]

So listening to Chris Evans of a morning, he is banging on for his Sky paymasters about how great it is that F1 will be available "Exclusively on Sky in 2019". Yeah Chris, great news, way to kill the majority interest in the pinnacle of motorsport...

Good as the F1 coverage is on Sky, I for one am not about to spend £40 per month for 4 hours of coverage, especially when for many races I used to just set it to 2x or 4x speed as they were pretty dull.

Will set up my VPN and stream it from another country, but it is going to hit the majority of fans hard.

[Raid]

I'll be losing access to the grandfathered-in Sky subscription where we get the F1 channel basically for free later this year. There's no way I'm paying for a Sky subscription solely for F1 and two or three shows on Sky Atlantic, so I'll be missing it. Annoyingly I've started getting excited this week about a sport that I'm not going to be able to see most of.

I can't help but think that Bernie and co knew that this deal would provide short-term gains but murder the sport's popularity in the UK; Lewis Hamilton was even asked a couple of days ago what he thought about the drop in audience, and the numbers were staggering - 8.9m saw him win his first championship, 1.3m saw him win his latest. Granted, some of that is going to be general fatigue from one team winning every trophy in the last five years, but it's not as if the sport is all about the championship.

[Drarok]

I'm still on the "free with HD" grandfathered-in Sky package, and I'm not expecting to change that any time soon. If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't have any way to watch it. Like Raid here, I'm not going to drop £40 a month on a sports package just for F1, since I have no interest in any of the other sports. Really stupid packaging by Sky, there.

Are there streaming subscription services in other countries? I hear the American commentators are pretty much all total garbage, though…

[DjchunKfunK]

Do they not allow you to just get the F1 channel for around £15 or something or have they stopped that?

[Drarok]

Trying to make sense of the small print here: https://www.sky.com/shop/tv/sports

Looks like an extra £10 a month for just the F1 channel, going up to an extra £18 per month after the 18 month (!!!) contract ends. Still steep, though nowhere near as bad as requiring an entire sports package (which I'm pretty sure they did for a while).

[Wrathbone]

C4 picked up the rights to show highlights this year, but it’s not yet clear what form it will take. I ditched my Sky sub last year due to the ludicrous price, especially after I realised that buying a day pass on NowTV for every single race would cost about the same as 3 months with Sky. I don’t mind highlights for most races and I’ll fork out for the odd one or two that I want to watch live. Sky subscriptions can fuck off, though.

[DjchunKfunK]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/47497979

Has some potential pitfalls but I suppose there is no harm in seeing how it works out.

[Raid]

I think the problem is that it's theoretically quite easy to get the fastest lap; you just pit at the end of the race for new tyres and drive flat out while everyone else is coasting.

I'll be interested to see how it works out, as it's likely only going to be back-marker teams trying for it, but I suppose the question is whether a Williams or McLaren with fresh tyres is faster than a Mercedes or Red Bull with old ones.

[DjchunKfunK]

I think the problem is that it's theoretically quite easy to get the fastest lap; you just pit at the end of the race for new tyres and drive flat out while everyone else is coasting.

Only counts for those in the top ten so doing that will cost you places.

[Raid]

Ah, I hadn't read that part. That's a weirdly artificial feeling rule, but I suppose that's par for the course in F1 these days. I was hoping it would at the very least cause some low-level excitement in the closing stages of every race, where the bottom ten would all start pitting to try and get the fastest lap. Limiting it to the top 10 makes it largely meaningless though, and it's importance will be entirely dictated by track position and the gap to the car behind. There's no point trying to go for one point if you'd lose more than that in the attempt.

[DjchunKfunK]

If it had applied to the whole field it would have resulted in the scenario you mentioned which would make it a bit farcical.