Zoxxo

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Formula One - ITALY Schedule on NBC Sports Network
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THINGS ARE DIFFERENT THIS WEEKEND SO HEADS UP

ALL SHOWINGS WILL BE ON NBC SPORTS NET!!

Practice is being shown TWO times.

Qualifying will be shown THREE times.

The Race will be shown THREE times.

The post-race show "F1 Extra" is shown immediately after the race
show whatever time that may be. So the simplest way to make sure you
record it is to simply added enough extra time to the race broadcast
to get (a) any extra time that was needed to record the entire race
including any delays, and (b) "F1 Extra".

I pulled this directly from NBCSN (zap2it.com, actually.) I have no
guarantee that it is correct.


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ALL TIMES PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME !!!!! Eastern time in parens
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Friday September 4, 2015
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Saturday September 5, 2015
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Sunday September 6, 2015
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GP2

Monday September 7, 2015
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GZire

Yay!!!! More F1!!!

Zoxxo

And possibly more Vettel tantrums and wingeing!!!

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VetteDrmr

Wingeing? Is that a "whining binge"?

SO looking forward to this race. I have no idea why, but I am!

Thanks for the info, and have a good one,
Mike

BrianCunningham

thanks

Zoxxo

It's like what people do with House Of Cards but instead of entertaining yourself with great drama you do so with crying and blaming anyone/everyone but yourself for your self-inflicted wound.

That he would think he could pound one set of F1 racing tires through Eau Rouge 44 times - while *always* running ALL FOUR WHEELS off of the prepared surface time and time again, over who knows what crap, and NOT have a hefty risk of not making it to the checker, demonstrates that he's still not one of the true greats. His race craft is poor. His thinking is flawed. His ego has too much control.





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RX-Ben

You know it was not Vettel's idea to do the long stint. Team decision, and the team's Pirelli tire engineer was involved in that decision.
And on lap 29, Vettel radioed "Think about an extra stop if it makes sense"

Zoxxo

All fine and good. But then live with the consequences of that decision. If you decide to do what many think was a risky move ("we THOUGHT it was not a risky move" is not the same was "it was NOT a risky move" (despite the obvious evidence to the contrary.))

Vettel is the driver. He is "king" and he ultimately decides what to do (which, I suspect, is a/the key element behind his ranting.) Dear Sebastian, Ferrari needs a team LEADER and not a consensus builder. Voting on the fly re: what to do will not win championships. Try to imagine Prost or Alonso throwing such a fit.

While a Pirelli engineer was in the Ferrari pit it's certainly not a given that he was ever consulted or that he offered an opinion one way or another. I certainly haven't seen anything from Pirelli that admits to that.

Since the rules, the teams, and the FIA steadfastly refuse to allow Pirelli to TEST the tires (what a concept) just how are they supposed to offer answers to these questions? "Will they last 100 laps? 50? 20?" Who knows? The teams have to design their wings using CFD *but* the get to try them out each race weekend to see if they work (and very often they do not!) Pirelli operates under the same constraints but they have no way to do real-world longevity tests aside from extrapolating from relatively short runs in practice sessions. So, it would seem to me that Ferrari's decision to run the car through Eau Rouge (et al) 45 times at 180+ mph (through the "gutter") when they are doing so based solely on the wish/hope that things will work out, is an iffy decision at best. But it's the decision they made so they should stand behind it and not blame Pirelli because the tires aren't made of kryptonite.

I'm not sure what positives Pirelli gets from playing this game. Does the PR value of being in F1 outweigh the amazing amount of grief and abuse they take for it? And Michelin sure does have a short memory after *they* were basically driven out of F1 by Bernie and Mosley for reasons unclear and now they want back in? At least we can say that a couple of things are clearly in evidence here - corporate masochism is far from dead and corporate memory is short indeed.

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Zoxxo

See the two articles:

o FOM offers clear message of support to Pirelli

o Debris caused the problems in Spa, says Pirelli

Here: http://adamcooperf1.com/

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gs568

Both Nico and Vettel were interviewed during practice and didn't express anger about the situation. I would guess that they were coached as to how to respond about the inquiries.

Zoxxo

Gee, ya think??

I thought it was interesting that both Vettel and Rosberg said essentially the same things - almost like it was from the same script (which it almost surely was.)

Here:
http://adamcooperf1.com/2015/09/04/e...sm-of-pirelli/


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VetteDrmr

Interesting article about tire pressures from Mr. Cooper. What did you think about Pirelli's statement during qualifying today about the number of damaged tires (63) at Spa vs their normal metrics?

And, I never thought tire pressures would go down during a long stint!

Looking forward to the race tomorrow!

Have a good one,
Mike

gs568

Yup. Too much money involved for them to be badmouthing Pirelli.

Zoxxo

That was just restating what they had said in their report and what they had reported to both the teams and to race control during the Spa weekend. Nothing "new" in that. It basically boils down to blaming the Spa folks for not doing a good enough job of cleaning the track. How true that is I have no way of knowing.

Pirelli (in the report and this lifted from Adam Cooper's blog):
That is weird.

Edit: Ah, I just read the bit you're talking about. I was thinking that it had to do with the tread wear. F1 tires a very different things from even the standard racing tires from Tire Rack with the tread, in particular, being quite thin and lightweight. You can see this clearly when they show the thermal camera shots and just how fast the tread will gain/lose temperature. There's very little mass there to hold heat in. So it makes sense in that context.

Just two questions for me:

1. Will Hamilton's new motor hang in there?
2. Will Kimi beat Vettel?

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Zoxxo

This is true but not in the negative way this is often intoned. "Drivers should be able to speak out!", they say. Fair enough. But not to say anything about anyone with "consequence be damned" as the underlying premise.

Pirelli is spending a *lot* of money on something that they really don't need to do. Bear that in mind. The design and construction of shipping and fitting of Formula One racing tires is *not* Pirelli's business. Yes, the exercise benefits Pirelli but it also benefits F1, the teams, and the entire, billion dollar enterprise. If F1 is seen to be a "net negative" to the tire manufacturers of the world - to the point that none of them volunteered to play the game - F1 would be out of business overnight. To have years of effort by hundreds (thousands?) of people undone by one highly public, over-excited rant from an influential person who doesn't have 95% of the facts at his disposal - a rant of the kind that the planet's headline-seeking press dreams of - is grossly unfair. Pirelli had every right to complain and insist that Bernie repair things. Even "throw grandma under the bus" Bernie gets that one.

Vettel needed to have the bigger picture drilled into him (yet again.)

"Controversy" is not the same thing as "biting the hand that feeds you."

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Zoxxo

Will Buxton's latest blog entry (Sept 7) is pretty interesting

https://willthef1journo.wordpress.com/

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VetteDrmr

Maybe, although it doesn't make much sense to me. Also, those tires have no problem melting clag onto them after a race.

I have to say, those two questions were answered pretty decisively!

Indeed, although couching this as a "safety" issue is disingenuous at best. If the tire is SO sensitive as to be safe at one pressure, but dangerous 0.3 psi (or 1.1 psi in Nico's case) lower, that's an unacceptable design, IMO.

And, what about cut tires due to contact? It happens all the time, so should they BAN body surfaces that can cut a tire? Give the teams minimum recommended tire pressures, monitor those, and if one goes too low AND the tire comes apart, it just goes back on the team.

BTW, the race stewards got it right this time!

Have a good one,
Mike

RX-Ben

Will's article is interesting and just forces the point. The new psi requirements were +5psi over the prior minimum. That got negotiated down to +1psi by the teams. Sounds like a bit of a joke if you are taking Pirelli at face value.
Will's prior post, about the track limits, is a good read and addresses the ongoing joke of track limits.

Zoxxo

Heh. indeed. Here's an interesting take on that bit (see segment - "a revealing side-effect")
http://www.espn.co.uk/f1/story/_/id/...cedes-pressure

I think you're missing the point. It's a safety issue for obvious reasons (and they declare it a safety issue to give the FIA the ability to enforce things that are not in the rulebook.) Pirelli and the FIA have good reason to set tire pressure limits since F1 tires are such critical, sensitive, and for the most part, UNTESTED (aka "experimental") components. If the tire manufacturer tells the teams "no lower than X psi" and a team decides that they want to run at X-10, shouldn't there be a way to force them to not do such a clearly dangerous act? Making PSI limits a hard rule isn't realistic so the limits have to come from the manufacturer.

Pirelli was not saying that the safety factor swings from "no problem" to "deadly" over 0.3 psi - just that when they set a lower limit it needs to be heeded; that the teams can't flaunt the safety recommendations of the manufacturer and then howl to the world that they make "dangerous" tires after one of them fails and throws their driver into a wall. (the word "recommendations" needs to be reconsidered, me thinks.)

Maybe. But a cut tire historically yields a deflated tire with an intact carcass (at least until the driver runs it off the rim speeding back to the pits at 100 mph ) It doesn't generate a 180 mph carcass disintegration.

I've thought for years that a team that could create a "Ben-Hur" front wing that could take a hit from a competitor's tire and not break would gain a nice advantage.

But the idea is to eliminate 100% any tires "coming apart" ahead of the curve. I say the way to do it is to monitor the pressures via telemetry (FIA's, not the teams') and insist that they meet the minimum pressure at the time the lights go out. If they don't, then car X gets called in for new tires during lap #1. THAT would cure the teams' BS of trying to get around the rules PDQ. Start with tires set too low and your driver now has a chance to do a truly historic drive.

In that article I referenced above... "After the race Lewis Hamilton revealed Mercedes 'run to the bare minimum' with tire pressures, adding: 'all the time it is above [the minimum amount] but as low as we can go. If it's 20 PSI, we'll be 20.1 or 20.001, whatever. It's what F1 is all about."

That "what F1 is all about" is the real issue here. That translates to "whatever we can do to take advantage of those gray areas in the rules in order to win." (And, of course, it's those same engineers who WRITE these rules that are chock full of gray areas...) And that means/includes doing questionable/borderline things that the engineers can convince themselves aren't needlessly dangerous.

It's clear that the team engineers fancy themselves to be TIRE engineers when they are not. That kind of arrogance can get people killed.

On topic/point is this article (Adam Cooper @ Motorsport.com) for the details behind all of this:
http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/it...e-whole-story/

I agree.

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Zoxxo

I thought so at first but then realized that Pirelli was just setting their "first price" for the negotiations that would follow all the teams' moaning and crying and gnashing their teeth about it.

Prior TWO posts, actually (I only mention it because he so often goes for loooong periods between his blog posts that getting two of them in just two days was so unusual.) I agree, they were excellent. He's a keen observer and a skilled writer. NBCSN was smart to retain him when they got F1 (or at least I like to think they were smart )

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