Formula One ( F1 )

That Ferrari has got some weird surfaces on it. I think I won’t be surprised if they’re bluffing and turn up at the track with different sidepods.

I've really tried to throw myself into F1 this year, but can't grasp why the various teams are allowed to "launch" cars that are not the actual car that will show up to the first race. Does this happen every year or just when there is a sweeping rule change?

Merc looks pretty basic by comparison to the others. Apparently due to run today but probably not due to the weather. I'm guessing the version at the first race will be quite different.

Edit: The photos from their Twitter post also look completely different: https://mobile.twitter.com/MercedesAMGF1/status/1494605340482093057?cxt=HHwWgoCy7e3o870pAAAA

I've really tried to throw myself into F1 this year, but can't grasp why the various teams are allowed to "launch" cars that are not the actual car that will show up to the first race. Does this happen every year or just when there is a sweeping rule change?

It happens every year to some degree. Sometimes you get cars in camo to hide things, sometimes the launch pics have bits Photoshopped out or deliberately hidden, quite a lot of the time they have a show-only aero package and the car is far lower and more-aggressively raked.

I expected more of the cars to look more like the Mercedes that @mmccarthy just posted. The technology is such that there really isn't anything that the teams could fill a huge set of bargeboards with. I can sort of see that Ferrari might be trying to create a sort of pseudo bargeboard (because actual bargeboards are gone this year), but it adds an awful lot of unnecessary bulk to the airflow and awkward flow surfaces.

Looking forward to hearing the commentators referring to the Alpine as a Racing Point or Force India for the first few races this year! Expecting them to be down fighting with Williams & Haas. Hopefully they can do a better job than that, would be great to see Alonso providing some proper racing with these cars.

Not a fan of the BWT livery but their normal one for this year looks ace:

I do miss the chonky airbox of last year's car, but yeah the standard livery looks pretty good

Alpine taking a leaf out of Lampre’s playbook. Cool colours.

Updated predictions for the season:

Ferrari
Red Bull
Mercedes
Aston Martin
McLaren
Alpha Tauri
Williams
Alpine
Haas
Alfa Romeo

Just read this (quite late) about Gasly being scammed by a fake sponsorship opportunity. I'm sure at the time he was very unhappy but has kept the narrative to be about it being a life changing opportunity... whether it was true at the time or not.

Also not quite F1 but I saw that Jamie Chadwick is returning to the W-Series after winning it twice. It's a pretty damning statement on motor racing (and W-Series itself) that a driver who, over two seasons, won 6 out of 14 races with a further 6 podiums and is an F1 junior driver can't find a viable way to get a good F3 race seat.

Hasn't she been in a few F3 seasons already with unremarkable results?

British F3 where she beat her team mates. Formula Regional with Prema wasn't good though but I read that it was compromised by the fact that the car was engineered by Prema but was owned by her sponsor so somehow wasn't as good. Or that could just be the media-friendly way of saying she was slow.

I suppose, on reflection, perhaps the money or talent available isn't enough to get into Prema or Carlin and she doesn't want her career to be finished off by a mid-tier team.

I mean, Prema is the team in F3 though right?

I didn't follow it all that then and even recently it's just been highlights so my F3 knowledge is not great!

She did beat Hakkinen in the snow at the race of champions though!

I think Prema requires big backing to be one of the chosen ones but you'd have hoped for more than 9th out of 17 drivers. Juri Vips finished ahead of her and only did half the rounds.

The problem is, she's the "best" of the crop of W-Series so sooner or later they have to get her into a good F3 or F2 seat to prove that it's a proving ground for talent rather than a backwater with a limited talent pool (it's what also killed Formula Palmer).

Yeah, it's good to get her achievements out there to grow the talent pool (being included in the ROC for example), but I'm guessing it likely be another few years before it grow to the point where it'll provide F1 level drivers

Haas dropping the Uralkali livery for tomorrow's testing. First Rich Energy and now this, they sure know how to pick a sponsor

I wonder if that's a move to make sure they don't attract any heat or if Uralkali have told them they won't be able to send any money

Bit of column A, but of column B I reckon.

Also, on this whole 'porpoising' thing, I thought this wouldn't be an issue this year due to the cars not using flat floors (like they had in the previous ground effect era). If the car bottoms out, the strakes hit the ground, but the tunnels still allow air to pass through, so there shouldn't be a sudden drop in downforce right? In my mind it's possibly just the car literally bouncing off the strakes, but I can't think of a reason why the car would just shed downforce.

Now, all the media outlets seem to be disagreeing with my thoughts there. But I'm not sure that I'm wrong on that. Though I did not pay a whole lot of attention during my aero modules at uni so I am not exactly a trustworthy source. But there's one or two ex-industry folk here who might be able to shed some more light on this.

Looks like they may drop Mazepin as well. Not sure anyone will be crying about that, though.

Thats the Russian GP dropped too.

I guess for years we've wondered if there's a line F1 won't cross for money. Seems we finally found it. Either that or the possibility of the embarrassing spectacle of an F1 race without drivers and teams made them take action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od48aN3LOiY

Wow, don't think I appreciated quite how much porpoising was happening!

I can already hear it - it's this years striped tyre chat from Brundle.
5x a race explaining what porpoising is, why it happens and what it does.

Every. Single. Race.

This illustrates the problem very well...

https://youtu.be/ZheZi6E30qM

Shame it screws up Schwartzman's chances also