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#41 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 06:46 AM

After more than 3000 miles, one of the two Toyota's leads the lone remaining Porsche by 31 seconds... the other Toyota is 3 laps down...  an LMP1 lap is something like 3:20, so ~10 minutes...

 

The other Porsche isn't retired, but it's been in and out the garage due to God-knows-what and is 38 laps down...

 

The 2 Audi's are umpteen laps down... it hasn't been their day...

 

1 hour 15 to go... (the damn golf tournament bumped it from FS1 to FS2...)

 

(The race will cover fewer miles than usual because a bunch of laps at the beginning were in hard rain behind the safety car... plus a long-standing yellow at the end of the long Mulsanne Straight...)


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


#42 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 07:05 AM

The guy in car 84 is a quadruple amputee... he's lapping at 217 mph... 

 

http://www.roadandtr...f-le-mans-2016/


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


#43 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 08:05 AM

With 6 and a half minutes remaining, after 3,236 miles, the #5 Toyota led the #2 Porsche by 69 seconds...

 

Then the #5 Toyota lost power... and continued slowly... with sporadic stops and starts (aka Ctrl-Alt-Del)... until it was passed by the #2 Porsche... on the very last lap... with just 3 minutes and 20 seconds to go...

 

The other Toyota (#6) finished 2nd... while the broken #5 Toyota, that had seemed so sure to win just a few minutes earlier, finally crossed the finish line... in 45th place...

 

That's Le Mans....


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


#44 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 08:15 AM

On a happier note, Ford returned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of GT40 dominance... and beat Ferrari again... with a team of American drivers...

 

gurney.jpg


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


#45 RShack

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Posted 19 June 2016 - 08:45 AM

F1 @ Baku is on now... NBCSN...

 

It's crazy to have a race there... they're doing it for all the wrong reasons... but it's gonna be a great race because the track is so insane...


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


#46 DuffMan

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Posted 20 June 2016 - 10:31 AM

Every Porsche that was won Le Mans

 

yphlg544xkfwuo2aqrve.gif


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#47 RShack

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Posted 20 June 2016 - 12:52 PM

^^^^^^

 

Porsche's dominance at Le Mans made everybody forget about Ferrari's previous dominance.... because Porsche did it more...

 

BTW, Dan Gurney shows up in history in lots of places... one of them is in Porsche history... he drove a Porsche to that company's 1st-ever F1 victory...

 

Gurney did the same thing for for 2 other manufacturers...

 

* Brabham (which soon won 2 World Championships... championships that likely would have been his, had he not left to form his own race car manufacturer)...

 

* His own AAR Eagle-Westlake... he's the only American to win an F1 race in his own race car...  at Spa in '67, within just 2 weeks of his Le Mans win with Foyt... many people (including me) think it's the prettiest F1 car ever...

 

d0aea53909a1d39347a48c3ae955da05.jpg


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


#48 RShack

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Posted 23 June 2016 - 06:35 AM

Drivers don't even get to catch their breath during pit stops...

 

During the F1 race in Baku, the Williams-Martini team changed all 4 tires in just 1.92 seconds... 

 

Officially, F1 only tracks things to hundredths of a second... so officially they just tied the record... but the FIA's instruments track it to thousandths of a second, and this beat the former record by a few thousandths...

 

 

3.0 second pit stops used to be fast... but now they're slow...

 

They got it down by lots of little things... for example, as the car comes in, notice the big arrows on the back of the hands of the 2 front tire-removers... those guys are telling the driver *exactly* where to stop... so the other guys don't have to reach even an inch farther than optimal....  also, all 4 of the wheel gun guys have to get their gun on the wheel nut before the car even stops... if just one of them doesn't do it until the car actually stops, then it's a 2.2 second stop...

 

You can tell by their reactions that they know they nailed it...


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


#49 RShack

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Posted 23 June 2016 - 07:38 AM

With 6 and a half minutes remaining, after 3,236 miles, the #5 Toyota led the #2 Porsche by 69 seconds...

 

Then the #5 Toyota lost power... and continued slowly... with sporadic stops and starts (aka Ctrl-Alt-Del)... until it was passed by the #2 Porsche... on the very last lap... with just 3 minutes and 20 seconds to go...

 

The other Toyota (#6) finished 2nd... while the broken #5 Toyota, that had seemed so sure to win just a few minutes earlier, finally crossed the finish line... in 45th place...

 

That's Le Mans....

 

Imagine a flat-out car race from Juno, Alaska to Baltimore... and your car is leading whenever it wants to... and it looks like it's clearly gonna win when it gets to City Hall... but then it loses power in Arbutus.   That's what happened to Toyota...

 

To add insult to painful injury, while the Toyota managed to complete its last lap, it was disqualified because that lap took too long... so, after losing the lead with just 3 minutes left in the 24 hour race, instead of finishing 45th, they are recorded as not even having finished the race... (which is just plain wrong)...

 

The last few minutes of the race are shown below.... the stupid announcers are so busy complaining about some other issue that they didn't hear the Toyota radio when the driver plainly said he'd lost power... so, the whole thing happens with the big mouth announcers not even realizing what had happened... if only they had listened, they'd know...

 


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


#50 RShack

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Posted 02 July 2016 - 01:33 PM

F1 - Grand Prix of Austria

 

A beautiful setting in the Austrian Alps... 200+ feet of elevation change... getting through Turns 1 and 2 means climbing more than 200 feet... then Turns 3...9 are all downhill... including some negative camber turns...

 

 

Always a fast track, it's just been repaved... so it's low friction... which means low grip... especially since new tarmac always has oil seeping up through it...

 

Plus, being in the mountains means the weather changes like crazy... sunny one minute, pouring rain 5 minutes later...

 

As if that's not enough, the FIA got tired of drivers going over the curbs to short-cut corners (they all do it)... so they had the track install some very stout curbing with much more dramatic rumble bumps, thinking that would deter drivers... it doesn't... if just one of them uses the curbs to go faster, then they all have to unless they wanna lose... well, on Qualifying day (today), 4 different cars had their rear suspensions break...

 

Plus, Pirelli caught Mercedes being clever... teams want to run tires at lower pressure than Pirelli advises... so, the FIA takes tire temp on the grid right before the race starts... if your tires aren't inflated enough. you get penalized... well, Mercedes figured out a way to have the reconnaissance lap (right before the race starts) heat the tires more than you'd think... which means they could run lower pressure, use that trick to satisfy the tire temp guidlines, and then have the tires run at cooler temp = lower pressure during the race... doing that has bought them 1/10 second per lap...; which is a lot.   

 

Pirelli got steamed... so, now they take tire temp prior to the tires being put on the car... plus, Pirelli mandated an increase in MIN tire pressure of 4 psi... which is a huge amount... which means cars will get less grip from their suddenly-harder tires...

 

To review:

* A fast track

* In the Alps with elevation changes creating neg-camber corners (= physics inviting cars to plow straight ahead rather than turn)

* New tarmac which is smooth and oily

* Likelihood of rain at some point during the race

* Pirelli-mandated Draconian increase in tire pressure, making the tires grip less 

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Race LIVE: Sunday @ 7:30a on CNBC (not NBCSN)

Race re-run: Sunday @ noon on NBCSN (not CNBC)

 

Massa's s 2014 pole position qualifying lap...

 


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


#51 DuffMan

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Posted 03 July 2016 - 06:45 PM

DVR'd today's Austrian GP. Just finished watching, a finish! I would love to be a fly on the wall in the post race meeting between Rosberg and Hamilton. This has got to be the last year they're teammates. They've never liked each other and this year it's really been causing a bunch of problems. Rosberg was definitely in the wrong today and it cost him.

#52 DuffMan

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Posted 05 July 2016 - 10:07 AM

Here's a pretty good summary of the various incidents between Rosberg and Hamilton.

 

http://espn.go.com/f...rosberg-rivalry



#53 RShack

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Posted 09 July 2016 - 06:44 AM

DVR'd today's Austrian GP. Just finished watching, a finish! I would love to be a fly on the wall in the post race meeting between Rosberg and Hamilton. This has got to be the last year they're teammates. They've never liked each other and this year it's really been causing a bunch of problems. Rosberg was definitely in the wrong today and it cost him.

 

When you have 2 drivers on the same team competing for the World Championship, you're gonna get this kind of stuff... it's guaranteed...

 

It's not true that they never liked each other.  They've been racing vs each other since they were kids.  When they were racing karts vs one another, they were pals.   Now, not so much.  Once they retire, that might change yet again.


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


#54 RShack

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Posted 09 July 2016 - 06:53 AM

F1 - Grand Prix of Great Britain

 

 

Silverstone:  site of the very first F1 race... one of the tracks every driver wants to record a W on his resume...

 

With the exception of just 3 teams, all the F1 teams are based within a short drive of this track.  This includes both the Mercedes F1 engine plant and the Mercedes F1-team base.  Even the Germans are British  ;-)

 

Qualifying:  Today at 8a on NBCSN

 

Race:  Sunday 7:30a on CNBC (not NBCSN)

Replay:  Sunday 2:30p on NBCSN (not CNBC)


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


#55 DuffMan

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Posted 22 July 2016 - 10:24 AM

Looks like we get two more years of the inter team rivalry.   Rosberg signed a 2 year extension keeping him with Mercedes through 2018.



#56 RShack

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Posted 14 August 2016 - 04:29 PM

What do F1 drivers see, and how long does it take them to see it?

 


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


#57 RShack

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Posted 14 August 2016 - 04:34 PM

F1 car design changes:  2016 vs 2017

 


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


#58 DuffMan

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Posted 15 August 2016 - 05:28 AM

Unfortunately it's missing the halo.



#59 RShack

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Posted 15 August 2016 - 05:36 AM

Unfortunately it's missing the halo.

 

They punted the halo issue 'til 2018... lots of iffy things about it to be looked at closely.... so say the engineers, not just Bernie's mouthpiece... neither of the prototypes they ran during joint midseason testing were confidence inspiring....

 

There's an old racer's saying (maybe Smokey Yunick, maybe somebody else) about building race cars that says "if it doesn't look right, it's not right... if it does look right, it might be right"... for the most part, engineers agree with that... none of the things they tried looked right...


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


#60 RShack

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Posted 15 August 2016 - 06:01 AM

^^^^^

Re: the proposed F1 halo...

 

For the most part, I'm not buying the halo thing... it reminds me of how everybody has to take their shoes off at the airport because of that one doofus who got caught trying-and-failing to light up his shoe...  well, Jules Bianchi was no doofus, he was a very good driver in a slow car, but this whole thing is about him dying in that very-to-the-max freak accident that was caused in large part by the FIA not making them slow down in yellows... it led to him dying only because he went off at *exactly* the place where that mobile crane was getting another, previously crashed car out of the way... odds-wise, it was like getting hit by lightning...  and it wouldn't have happened if he wasn't doing 134 mph in the rain in the very curvy section that was yellow-flagged for danger....

 

I'd be all for the halo if I thought the pro's outweigh the con's (we can't have drivers dying), but I'm not convinced the pro's do... a far bigger benefit accrues from the FIA simply enforcing the dang rule that they'd been playing silly games with for years...  I think the main reason they're pushing the halo is because they need to blame something for Bianchi's needless eventual death, and their report whitewashed the FIA's very own huge part on letting it happen...  

 

AFAIK, everybody thinks Charlie Whiting is good at his job, me included, but a whole lot of this is on him...  it was like not enforcing the as-written strike zone, but with fatal consequences... he let them all go fast where the danger signal clearly ordered them not to... but they won't admit that because everybody either likes Charlie or is afraid of Bernie or both... and because they don't want Bianchi's family suing them for eleventy billion dollars... so, they pretend it was a technical issue that needs fixing, when it was no such thing... their proposed fixes would not have saved Bianchi anyway.... what would have saved him was the FIA telling drivers that Yellow Flag Speed in that section is X mph instead of letting them all go crazy provided the data stream shows that they momentarily lifted for a split-sec...


 "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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