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#21 Mike in STL

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 12:23 PM

I think if you combined the skill of F1 driving, with the stock car aspect of all cars being essentially the same, you would have a perfect product. But these races where a couple guys are at the front, and everyone else is minutes or laps behind, it doesn't make for much excitment. Appreciating the skill it takes only lasts so long before you want to see some competition to keep you engaged.
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#22 RShack

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 01:30 PM

I think if you combined the skill of F1 driving, with the stock car aspect of all cars being essentially the same, you would have a perfect product. But these races where a couple guys are at the front, and everyone else is minutes or laps behind, it doesn't make for much excitment. Appreciating the skill it takes only lasts so long before you want to see some competition to keep you engaged.

 

You're right about there being a problem...

 

F1 has a big problem that's coming to a head... while it's supposedly 1 racing series, in reality there are at least 3 tiers of teams... (this year there are 11 teams, each team has 2 cars, so 22 cars)... this is mostly due to the way that Bernie Ecclestone has mismanaged the series while making himself a billionaire... (I won't bore anybody with the details unless you're interested, which you probably aren't)...

 

The fact that there are 3 tiers of teams means there's really at least 3 races happening at once.   The casual once-in-a-while viewer doesn't realize what's happening because it's only natural to mainly care about who's vying for the overall lead... the mention of drivers battling for 7th place doesn't seem exciting... and the idea of a drivers earning "championship points" seems arcane and boring... but it has huge effects on what the team can be like next year, because points are the basis for F1 HQ distributing gazillions of dollars after the season ends..

 

While everybody's waiting for Bernie to die (he's ancient) or get kicked out by the private equity firm he pretty much sold the entire dang sport to, the whole thing is way more interesting if you have an idea about who's who and where each of the teams, the drivers, and the car powerplants fit into the whole scheme of things...  this is not something that you can grok just by watching one or two races... which means you have to watch more for it to be super-interesting... but are you gonna watch more races if it's not already super-interesting?  

 

It's a circular problem... but in a way, it's kinda similar to baseball, in that baseball also can be boring if you don't know enough to see all the little interesting things that aren't obvious to somebody who's seen just a few games...

 

 

Much to my surprise, my bride has become a huge F1 fan.. she will not watch a baseball game... and, while she understands football (from her late Dad always having had 2 TV's going at once in the living room on Saturday's and going to multiple bowl games each winter), she won't watch football either... but she's nuts for F1... and is glued to both qualifying and the race itself...  she'll pick up on strategy things that I miss... she can tell when a given driver needs to change tires, etc.... IMO, it's a dang miracle   :smile:

 

 

However, even if/when they fix the problems that Bernie has wrought, it will always be true that passing at Monaco is a relatively rare thing, just due to the nature of the track... yet Monaco is among the most fascinating races on the F1 calendar...  

 

Another excellent race is Canada... which happens in 2 weeks in Montreal... on an island in the river ... it's a much faster track, it permits more passing, and the track itself is quite challenging, just in different ways than Monaco is...


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#23 Pedro Cerrano

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:00 PM

Not a huge racing fan but I always enjoy watching the 500. The power of these cars is insane

There is baseball, and occasionally there are other things of note

"Now OPS sucks.  Got it."

"Making his own olive brine is peak Mackus."

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#24 BSLChrisStoner

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:08 PM

The driver pov shots are wild. 

Did I see they had 350,000 fans attending? Wow.



#25 Pedro Cerrano

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:09 PM

The driver pov shots are wild.

Did I see they had 350,000 fans attending? Wow.


Becomes the 45th biggest city in the country or something

There is baseball, and occasionally there are other things of note

"Now OPS sucks.  Got it."

"Making his own olive brine is peak Mackus."

"I'm too hungover to watch a loss." - McNulty

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#26 RShack

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:20 PM

Not a huge racing fan but I always enjoy watching the 500. The power of these cars is insane

 

Indycars take about 3 seconds to go 0-60... F1 cars take about 2 seconds...  

 

F1 cars weigh less... they also cost *way* more... because Indycars are pretty much standardized parts from Dallara (Italy)... whereas each F1 team makes their own cars from scratch...

 

I'm glad Indycar is making a comeback... when Tony George (from the family that owns the Indy Speedway) split from CART and started the Indy Racing League (IRL), he damn near killed American open-wheel racing... but the family fired his sorry ass, and now US open-wheel racing is back to being one series again... it's involving more American drivers than it used to... and is getting better and better all the time...

 

The Indy 500 is an amazing thing... if you've never been there, it's hard to grok how damn big that place is... at it's peak of popularity, they had half-a-million people in there on race day (including in the infield)...  to give you a sense of the scale of the place, the track is a rectangle with rounded corners... if you imagine the corners squared off like a true rectangle. then the 2 long sides are each 1-mile-long, and the 2 short sides are each a quarter-mile-plus long...


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#27 Pedro Cerrano

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:36 PM

A rookie wins it. Presumably on fumes. Good for him.

There is baseball, and occasionally there are other things of note

"Now OPS sucks.  Got it."

"Making his own olive brine is peak Mackus."

"I'm too hungover to watch a loss." - McNulty

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#28 Pedro Cerrano

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:38 PM

I hate the taste of straight white milk. So I would either need it with chocolate syrup or just hope I didn't gag.

There is baseball, and occasionally there are other things of note

"Now OPS sucks.  Got it."

"Making his own olive brine is peak Mackus."

"I'm too hungover to watch a loss." - McNulty

@bopper33


#29 RShack

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:40 PM

Alexander Rossi just won the 100th Indy 500... as a rookie...

 

He did it by getting crazy distance from his last tank of fuel... everybody else needed to pit for just a splash of gas at the end... but he didn't...

 

Last year, he raced in five F1 races... for the Manor Racing team... which is one of the bottom-tier teams... right now, he's still their "reserve driver"... meaning he's the #3 driver on a 2-car team... he basically came to Indycar to have some way to race while waiting for an F1 seat to open up...

 

Winning the dang Indy 500 isn't a bad way to pass the time while waiting for the job you want   :smile:


 "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige


#30 RShack

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:43 PM

I hate the taste of straight white milk. So I would either need it with chocolate syrup or just hope I didn't gag.

 

When 2-time F1 champion Emerson Fittipaldi (Brazil) won the Indy 500 after quiting F1, he damn near caused a friggin' international incident by drinking orange juice instead of milk... he had a bunch of orange groves in Brazil and was in the orange juice business down there... when he took a big slug of OJ instead of milk in the Indy 500 winner's circle, all hell broke loose... he didn't fully realize what he was doing...


 "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige


#31 Mike in STL

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Posted 29 May 2016 - 02:58 PM

604994f47239f6b38279ff7bfa393cea.jpg


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#32 RShack

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Posted 30 May 2016 - 04:21 PM

Alexander Rossi on winning the Indy 500...

 

The emotional rollercoaster of this race is ridiculous,” Rossi said. “There were moments where I was stoked, moments where I was heartbroken, moments where I was stoked again. I need to see a psychiatrist after this. It was tough. But I just really focused on doing the job I could. … I knew everything that was going on. I focused on my job: making sure the car was in the right spot all the time.”

 

To the racing world, Rossi is hardly unknown. He’s been heralded since his teenage years as a possible American star in Formula One, which rarely grants an audience to  American talent. [EDIT:  They rarely use American talent only because American talent is usually busy doing other things.]

 

http://sports.usatod...00-formula-one/


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#33 RShack

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Posted 09 June 2016 - 09:27 AM

F1 Canada this weekend... Montreal... very much not like Monaco...

 

Monaco is all narrow streets and high downforce... Montreal is high speed with low downforce... at normal downforce, these cars can drive on the ceiling once they get up to 90... but with lower downforce, they're not as stuck to the track... yet they're going faster (due to reduced air resistance)... so, when it comes time to slam on the brakes, they need quick hands...

 

While they've fixed it now, for a few years in a row the cars' sticky tires and high lateral G's would literally rip up the asphalt at the apex of the hairpin turn... the cars would rip it up in practice, so they'd patch it for qualifying... then they'd rip it up again in qualifying... so, they'd patch it after qualifying for the race... then they'd rip it up during the race... creating a  pothole made by tire-grip that they had to drive around...

 

One lap...

 

 

Practice 2:  Friday 2p-3:30p on NBCSN; Replay 10:30p-12a

Qualifying: Saturday 1p-2:30p, NBCSN; Replay 11:30p-1a

Race:  Sunday, 1p-3:30p, NBC (not NBCSN); Replay: 8p-10:30p NBCSN (not NBC)


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#34 RShack

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Posted 18 June 2016 - 08:29 AM

If you're bored, right now on NBCSN, there's Qualifying for tomorrow's F1 race in Azerbaijan (of all places)... they're having a race there only because Bernie Ecclestone is a dang pirate... but that doesn't matter because the Baku city street track is completely insane... in a good way... 220mph in some places... tighter turns than Monaco in other places... it's nuts...


 "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige


#35 RShack

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Posted 18 June 2016 - 02:39 PM

50 Years Ago Right Now...

 

This weekend is the 24 hours of Le Mans... from 4p today (French time, 8a Eastern) until 4p tomorrow...

 

This is the 50th anniversary of Ferrari getting their butts kicked by Ford in dramatic fashion.  Enzo Ferrari had really, really pissed off Henry Ford II... so Henry decided that Ford would do whatever it took to humble Ferrari at Le Mans, which is a race Ferrari had owned for a decade...

 

This led to the creation of the legendary Ford GT40... which not only finished 1st in 1966, but also 2nd and 3rd.   Because Henry Ford II was in attendance, the team decided to have a formation finish... so the 3 leading cars crossed the finish line together, more-than-several laps ahead of the best Ferrari...  

 

The following year, they came back and won again... fighting off a challenge from the Porsches.. this was the race that Dan Gurney and AJ Foyt won... in a car that had a bubble in the roof to accommodate Gurney's height... Gurney got excited on the podium, shook up the winner's magnum of champagne and sprayed everybody with it.... that started the international tradition of race winners always doing that...

 

After getting beaten badly twice, Enzo Ferrari pulled strings to get the Ford's banned... the method for banning them was to invent a new rule that said engines could not be larger than 5 liters... which outlawed the big 427 V8's that powered the Mark II and Mark IV GT40's... by now Henry had humbled Enzo and was bored with it, so Ford packed up the program... but John Wyer got the now-obsolete Mark I development versions of the cars, which had 289 V8's... which were still permitted... so, even after Ford quit, the GT40's won again in 68... and again in 69 for the fourth year in a row, 2 full years after Ford quit... (that's a long time in race-car years)... by 1970 the Porsche 917's were just too much for 5-year-old GT40's to win again...

 

Ferrari has never dominated at Le Mans ever since the Ford GT40's handed them their ass...

 

 

Ford-GT40-2.jpg

 

 

 

1966-ford-gt-mkii-fia-le-mans-neg-147540


 "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige


#36 Mike in STL

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Posted 18 June 2016 - 04:17 PM

Question for ya Shack. What is the margin of victory in the 24 hour race? Laps ahead of second place? I saw at four hours in, 19th place was already a lap behind.

Whats kind of the point if the leader just goes into cruise control for the second half?
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#37 RShack

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Posted 18 June 2016 - 05:11 PM

Question for ya Shack. What is the margin of victory in the 24 hour race? Laps ahead of second place? I saw at four hours in, 19th place was already a lap behind.

Whats kind of the point if the leader just goes into cruise control for the second half?

 

Well, you gotta realize that just finishing the damn thing is a major triumph...

 

Beyond that, sometimes a given team will dominate... and sometimes nobody dominates...

 

For example, the last win by a GT40 was 1969:

 

In a dramatic finish, Ickx and Herrmann repeatedly overtook each other as the Porsche 908 had brake problems and the Ford GT40 suffered from exhaust problems. In the last lap, Ickx let Herrmann pass him early on the Mulsanne Straight, faking he had not enough fuel anymore. Ickx used the slipstream of Herrmann to pass him again just before the end of the 5 km straight. Ickx managed to hold on and beat Herrmann by a few seconds, or about 120 meters (394 feet). Ickx and Oliver won with the GT40 chassis 1075, the same car that had won the previous year. This was second time the same car had won two years in a row; a Bentley Speed Six had done it in 1929 and1930.

 

I think it's more impressive if you think about the distance rather than the hours... those guys are racing for about 3,300 miles... BAL to LA is only 2,600.   Once you think of it in those terms, the idea of what comprises a close finish kinda changes...


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#38 Mike in STL

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Posted 18 June 2016 - 05:40 PM

On that note, the distance, they should just do a cannonball run race every year and televise it.
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#39 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 03:52 AM

On that note, the distance, they should just do a cannonball run race every year and televise it.

 

Maybe you already know this, but just in case you don't...

 

The cannonball run movies were jerk-offs of an actual racing series... the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash... and the very first one was won by Dan Gurney... in a Ferrari Daytona with Brock Yates... they made it from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan to the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, Calif in 35 hours and 54 minutes...

 

brock-yates-and-dan-gurney-and-the-1971-

 

 

Above: after they made it...

 

Below:  as you can see, they cleverly disguised the Ferrari as a race car   :wink:

 

gurneyyatescanonballdaytona.jpg

 

This was during an era when Car & Driver was not just a good car magazine, it was also a great magazine that happened to be about car-related stuff... Brock Yates was one of the editors, and he invented the Cannonball Baker race to protest the ridiculous idea that we had to keep the speed limit low because going fast was dangerous... so, he wanted an annual coast-to-coast race that was executed without accidents... 

 

In the first one, the guys who finished 2nd did it in a drive-away Cadillac... back then, you could deliver a car for somebody else who wanted to fly, and get paid for it... you also had to sign contracts about what you could and could not do... which caused the guys who finished 2nd to have to hide the car in LA for several days before they supposedly arrived on time...  

 

Another team had the idea of using a van, putting huge fuel tanks in the back, and save lots of time by not having to stop for gas... they got pulled over for speeding in PA and got arrested for smuggling hundreds of gallons of gasoline without paying state taxes on it...


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#40 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 04:11 AM

Question for ya Shack. What is the margin of victory in the 24 hour race? Laps ahead of second place? I saw at four hours in, 19th place was already a lap behind.

Whats kind of the point if the leader just goes into cruise control for the second half?

 

The other thing to be mindful of is that there are 4 classes of cars racing on the track at once... so, the 19th place car might be in 1st place in its class...

 

When they show the car numbers in order, they are color-coded to tell you what class they are:

 

Red:  LMP1... these are almost like F1 cars with different bodywork.. they're funny looking  (LMP = Le Mans Prototype, which means you can't just go buy one, they're state-of-the-art dedicated race cars...)

 

Blue: LMP2... a lesser class of funny-looking prototypes... it's easy to tell some of them from LMP1 because some (but not all) LMP2 are open cockpit, whereas all LMP1 are closed cockpit...

 

Green: GTE-Pro... these are cars you can buy and convert to racing...they look like normal road cars, but with wings on the back...

 

Orange: GTE-Am... similar to above but slower... amateur teams (rich guys' hobby) that have both pro and non-pro drivers... some of whom are excellent... but when there's an accident between a very fast car and a lesser car, there's a pretty good chance that one of the non-pro guys is involved...

 

The biggest risk factor is the great discrepancy of speed between the fastest class of car vs the least-fast... there are way fewer classes than they're used to be... and it's way less dangerous too, in large part because of car design, but also because of the less-extreme speed differences...

 

 

 

Only one Japanese manufacturer has ever finished 1st overall... Mazda in 1991... so, it's been 50 years since Ford thumped Ferrari, and 25 years since Mazda had its win... it hasn't been for lack of trying... Nissan and especially Toyota have spent gazillions to win this, and they haven't... yet...

 

Right now, Toyota is in front with about 4 hours to go... and a slow car just pulled over and almost caused one of them to crash (but didn't)....  

 

EDIT: Due to pit stops, a Porsche LMP1 is in front, but the 2nd-place Toyota is hunting it down...

 

 

In GTE-Pro, the Ford GT's (a special effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the GT40's) are beating the Ferrari's... they're comparable under braking and in the corners, but the Ford GT's pull away on the straights... (heh heh)


 "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige





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