So Audi are looking to just buy McLaren!? Seems a bit drastic. Could buy Williams for far cheaper and I feel like they'd have more of the bits that Audi might be missing to make a run of it on their own. Or maybe the Porsche-redbull partnership involves buying out Williams?
Mclaren make a degree of sense to me. Mclaren are regular top 5 finishers, already have (or are building) top level infrastructure and the racing team is being run by a man VW group already has a great deal of experience with (Seidl). Any savings they could get buying Williams would be eaten up and then some dragging Williams up to Mclaren's level, nevermind thinking about challenging RB/Merc/Ferrari. Vs spending billions building a team from scratch buying an existing team is definitely the way to go. The big question to me is whether or not the Bahrainis would be interested in selling. Mclaren's a prestige brand and it's cost to the country is negligible. The only team that really looks in trouble at the minute is Aston Martin, the parent company's broke, Stroll snr's ego is going to crack sooner or later. But buying them would present all the same problems as buying Williams. Red Bull would be interesting, the in-fight over whether it's RB Porsche, AT Audi or RB Audi, AT Porsche would be epic. With RB already having an engine available they might be the cheapest option too. I dread to think how much building F1 engine/hybrid/batteries from scratch would cost.
Yeh I take the point on McLaren. Maybe the plan is Audi buy McLaren, porsche take over alpha taurih, so you have "red bull Porsche", with Porsche helping with the red bull powertrains on cost and development, "Porsche" or "Porsche alpha tauri" with a team largely lead by Porsche, then "Audi"/McLaren Audi" which is the McLaren team with the Porsche/red bull engines, just labelled differently.
From what I understand Dolton Capital see Williams as a long term investment that they plan to grow based on a high prediction of how much a Formula One team will be worth down the line. The numbers Audi are looking to spend, what Williams are currently worth and what Dolton say it will be worth are very much on different scales. The whole Audi entry and by extension VW group doesn't make sense to me. The duplication of resources for example and the way they're going about things makes me feel I'm missing something that is mindbendingly genius. Either that or its a catasterfuck of epic proportions. Didn't Audi announce they were making their own engines? Which is why a lot of disagreement is happening over "new engine supplier" rules. Porche get the leg up from Red Bull engines, while under the same parent company umbrella parallel development is happening with no rules governing the scenario of resource sharing. One or both have extra resources due to the new supplier leg up.
Isn't the whole 'spend 2 lots of money and compete against yourself' approach what they did in WEC with the Audi and Porsche LMP1 teams?
It felt like Monaco, but American. Everyone was the for 'the event' and everything going around the race and no-one notices that the race itself is ****.
That's kind, it looked to me like Sochi, but American. At least in Monaco there's plenty of people who want to be there, plus it's a race all the drivers would love to win. Here there were people who were paid to be there, people who's managers told them to be there and a bunch of racing drivers who could just barely hide their disdane for the place. If this race makes it all 10 years it's supposed to I'll be surprised.
The fake marina, football helmets for the drivers, largely non-event race - quintessentially American. It was w@nk.
I don't know what the channel 4 coverage was like, but every single sky pundit was licking the back teeth of "this fantastic Miami grand Prix", "what a great track" blah blah blah. It was, bland. Wasn't the worst gp ever, but was not the incredibly exciting race we were being told it was, which probably made it seem worse.
They were making an extra special effort, like sky had been told "plug the bejesus out of it or we'll cancel your contract immediately" level of cock suckery.
True enough. I don't know if they 'upped' their game or it just grated more due to the lack lustre racing.