Oh come off it. This is actually one of best ideas seen in F1 for a while. As long as these are kids local the circuits, and not just the sprogs of the wealthy paddock elite or talent agency divas in the making, this could create a whole new generation of fans - imagine these kids going into school on Monday and telling all their friends about how cool it was to see F1 cars that close, shake hands with the drivers etc. Edit: From F1 Fanatic article: So hardly child labour, more like 5 years of birthday and Christmas presents rolled into one.
Maybe I should have put a winky emoticon in. I'd have loved it as a kid. Hell, put me in a skirt and slap some lippy on me and i'd have joined the grid girls.
That is a surprisingly not awful change in direction. It begs the question why they didn't announce this at the same time as announcing the end of grid girls, it would have made sense.
It was no doubt reactionary when they realized grid girls move was not the PR boon they expected. Good move with the kids though. Do they allow kids on the grid normally is there not a safety risk? I suppose if you are with your parents it is fine, right time to get my daughter into karting
I would assume the reality is child+responsible adult in the same way that mascots at football games march out with the players, then march back to the waiting parents at the end of the tunnel. Also I wouldn't expect most kids to hold up a number board for fourty minutes without some kind of disaster happening.
From what I understand they will be children from lower formulas, so karting etc so they should have some form of sense when it comes to being around cars, they've had it in Formula E an I have not noticed a "responsible adult". Are they going to replace the line of grid girls post race applauding them with kids? Seems a little weird that if they do.
Alonso to race full WEC season after Fuji race moved to accommodate him, wow. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/43009816
Gotta love old Nando - skips Monaco one year, gets a whole event moved for his convenience the following!
The sport probably could do without the bad publicity and Memes an Alonso Huff would cause and it makes sense as they're still planning most dates. The teams and circuit owners would of taken notice of the "Alonso Effect" that occurred when fans from every series finally got to see how the greatest driver in F1 currently stacked up against the Yanks in their own category of "racing".
I call that screen the 'oh **** our insurers are going to make us fit the Halo, quick start developing!' I also expect a version of it to end up in Formula 1 within a couple of years now that the teams' hands have been forced. There will be no more repeats of those cheap hunks of blow moulded polycarbonate Ferrar iand Red Bul were 'testing'.
Yea kinda pissed that they abandoned the screen for the Halo cause princess stampy didn't like it. The Halo is a hideous POS that I can't even force myself to accept.
Have to agree, a raised screen, still more in keeping with the open cockpit "Raised screen" More screens So they can look good just the shaping needs working on IMO
That canopy wasn't a serious development, it was extremely cheap and wasn't even optically correct (which the very first prototype Indycar built was). That canopy and Red Bull's aero screen were the teams paying absolute minimum lip service to the idea of head protection, they were coming up with these cheap devices, running them once or twice a year, declaring them not to work well enough and pushing the planned implementation back another couple of years each time. When Ferrari ran the canopy at Silverstone it was almost a parody. Vettel did one lap, declared that it made him feel sick and they all went ' Oh dear that's a shame guess we'll have to back to the drawing board for and leave things as they are for several years again,' as if that wasn't the entire point of the exercise. Ferrari also did this a few years ago when they bought an old F-16 canopy and started firing tyres at it. It shrugged off everything they threw at it but they declared the test a failure since it failed to match their requirements, which were never published.