Motors The Bit-Tech Formula 1 2014 Thread - Season Complete

Oh, I wasn't aware the collision had been caught on camera.

Completely agree - it works for road-going HGVs, so you'd think it'd be an obvious solution for trackside recovery vehicles.

 

Longer skirts and we could be onto a winner here.

On a serious side. Skirts or impact proctection systems on the recovery vehicles makes more sense than canopies, part of the thrill of the sport is the open cockpit and open wheel format. Obviously minimising risk to the drivers, teams, spectators and marshalls is paramount but if they really wanted closed cockpit racing we would have heard more about it ages ago.

In my view sensible actions going forward would be.

Skirting to/impact protection devices on recovery vehicles (If the medical car is called the race is usually stopped anyway)
Communication to the drivers directly which turns an incident has occured in either audio queues or a dash notification in conjunction with existing flags and LED boards.
Stricter control on lap Deltas to prevent cars chasing down the safety car when deployed.
Shear and lateral impact testing on rollhops.

The teams have had a massive upheaval in terms of regs so moving the onus onto the organisor makes more sense from a financial point of view. Also things like the skirting/impact protection will benefit not only F1 but other formulas. Imagine a formula ford car in that kind of impact.

 

For the cars, I think a tall windscreen shaped like the forward section of an F15 canopy is the way to go . Not fully enclosed, but forward protection.

In the last five years there's been three serious head injuries caused by objects travelling along the cockpit into the driver's face. With a screen up front Massa wouldn't have been hurt, Bianchi and De Villota would have had much better chances and she might ultimately have survived.

I agree that fully enclosed wouldn't be entirely practical, but there needs to be some forward protection of the driver's head.

 

I think that introducing flimsy cockpits into the mix would only serve to delay drivers from exiting the vehicle after an incident - the amount of reinforcing they would need to put in to make the cockpits a viable safety device would be enormous, especially if you take into account the amount of energy involved Bianchi's accident.

Skirting under the back of the tractor would have allowed the crash zones of the car to absorb a lot of the energy and slow the car before the driver reached it.

 

Looks like the FIA's response to the crash is to slow cars down more under yellow flags, likely a 'yellow flag speed limit' similar to the pit line limit...

link

 

That is what i would do too - double yellow should mandate the use of the pit limiter on the track too. Of course it would demand more detailed measurement of time than sector times (or yellow should be valid for the whole sector) and harsh punishments (like 5 second stop & go or more).

 

Makes sense to me.

On another note, Mercs came very very close to being embarrassed by Bottas today

 

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Should be after the first double yellows you put Pit limiter speed on until after the final set of double yellows. It makes simple sense, and won't hinder other teams and make teams push their luck.

 

Makes sense, means they are not loosing time to the cars in front or behind that way.

 

Most boring race of the season so far. Unless something drastic happens in last few laps.

 

Tyre choice was far too conservative. Track seems nice enough but needs some tyre wear to make it more interesting

 

Hamilton takes the race.

 

Ultimate snoozefest...

 

President Putin presenting the trophies? Blimey. Reminds me of this...

http://sniffpetrol.com/2014/10/09/putin-to-win-russian-gp/#.VDp6MPldV5Q (quite funny)

Good to see Lewis taking some more points, good win (if boring) from him. Impressive to see Nico come back from the mistake on the first corner - suppose it shows how dominant the car is.

Great result for Jenson as well, P4 is pretty good. Great result for McLaren too.

 

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Boring race, tbh. It was nice to see Rosberg make an arse of it at turn one, although it's a shame we didn't have soft and super soft tyres; which might have punished him for being stupid.

Massa was not on it at all this weekend. In every interview I've seen with her, Claire Williams has (rightly) gushed about Bottas, but barely acknowledged they have another driver.

Nice to see the McLarens put 20 points between themselves and FIndia too.

I did laugh when it looked like Lewis intentionally blanked Putin, got weighed and immediately walked to the back of the room to fuss with his hair. Protocol was observed shortly afterwards, but I swear I didn't imagine Bernie glaring at Paddy Lowe when Lewis did that.

On a related topic, surely this is the last season we'll see Sutil and Maldonado? Two donkeys like that and we have the likes of JEV scrambling to find a seat for next year. Does Sutil have a sugar daddy? I remember hearing something about PDVSA considering pulling their sponsorship for Pasta.

 

Nico being able to comeback from last to an unchallenged 2nd in a dry race with zero safety cars and no one in a points position retiring indeed makes it obvious that the Mercs are still dominating at will and that Lewis was just taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive and probably could have lapped Bottas if he would have actually pushed.

Well, there is at least some hope for next year, maybe the Honda engines will be competitive...

 

Well the have just been told to bay exxon mobil [i believe] 1+ billion dollars so the may not have the money to spare to throw at Pasta...

EDIT: it was exxon mobil

 

Sky showed some laps of Lewis and he was cruising around without a care in the world and still lapping faster than everyone behind him, was a very boring race but you get them in the Calander. Nico ended the race as a contest when he did his move on lap one.