Will we ever view drivers as having the same greatness as past generations?

Ah, will it be cheating if I use a seeing eye dog?

Dale

 

"Service animal."

No problem, my friend, you may use Alonso's poodle, "Felipe."

 

Having driven a '96 F1 with paddle shifting I have to say it is fairly easy (I never quite understood e.g. the Topgear shows making this look so difficult, it isn't if you have done a bit of track time like Skippy). The real trick is learning to drive a race car with downforce and I'm not there yet; for that I'll need a bunch more practice (driving a F3 only goes so far).

But you said "competitively". Well, that's another story. If any F1 car would be easy to drive competitively, then there'd be thousands of F1 drivers coming out of the woodwork. Driving any F1 car competitively is hard and is only done by a handful of pros.

 

Yes, I suppose it's easy to noodle around in an ex F1 car for giggles. Now drive it for 20 minutes doing laps within, say, three seconds of a proper time and tell me how easy it is. Come on, you have track experience and you really think driving a modern F1 car at speed is easy?

 

I didn't say anything about noodling around. It is awesome, emotionally and physically draining but not hard. Then again I never thought any car incl many exotics was ever hard.

The only "car" I ever thought was really hard to drive was a Henschel truck without a synchronized gearbox.

Maybe we have different definitions of hard. To me that means a task I had difficulties accomplishing. A modern F1 car is not more difficult to drive than any aero single seater. It just is faster and because of that physically more demanding. But not more difficult.

 

People need to look past all the records, wins and statistics when looking for greatness. I rate my drivers on greatness by the number of times I jump out of my seat during a race and yell "Whoo HOO!!!", its has nothing to do with records, wins or World Championships titles which is why I don't rate our current world champion as one of the greats.

Sebastian may certainly have a broken a lot of records, won a lot and won two world championships but he doesn't entertain me or impress me that much - he's in the fastest car on the grid, with full 100% support from his team, has super reliability and lets be honest not really much competition this year ( well at least for the first 2/3 of the year ) so of course he's going to get wins. Even some of Schumi's wins and world titles were a bit predictable and easy which don't impress me but at least he had a few great races where he displayed GOD like driving skills.

I recognize greatness in many drivers on the grid the last few years , drivers like Hamilton, Webber, Alonso, Kimi, hell I even recognise that Kobi is a great driver and he doesn't have any wins.

I will give you this though, Seb is GOD when it comes to qualifying - he has an incredible ability to extract every last tenth of seconds from a car when he's in qualifying trim and in clear air but in race pace he just doesn't impress and I think in a lesser car ( even if he was given Webbers car ) he wouldn't be anywhere near as successful.

I know people are going to make reference to his one win in a Torro Rosso back in 2008 but go back and watch the race and look at why he won, it was more a case of luck rather than any display of greatness. He got pole because he was one of the first cars out on the track and got in a great lap before it started pissing down with rain. His competition for the race were way back in the grid as a result and with the race even wetter it made any decent overtaking almost impossible. Hamilton and Kimi back in 14th and 15th, Kubica in 11th, Button starting from the pits.... I mean come on who was left to challenge Seb for the win? Even the start was a safety car start so no chance of any overtakes into the first corner. It all played out perfectly for him. Although it still took some skills to bring the car home in one piece I wasn't surprised that Seb got the win that day.

I'm still waiting for some display of greatness from the kid...his ballsy overtake of Alonso this year when he went on the dirt is about the only one so far.

 

Part of Seb's talent is that he usually goes no faster than needed. In Q that's closer to the limit than it is during most races.

 

+1

 

Frankly, I think comparing any sports figures between then and now is silly. All you can say is so-and-so was great in his day and such-and-such is great today.

Dale

 

Brace yourself,
We agree

 

+1

A futile exercise at best.

OTOH, it does give us something to BS about between races......

Cheers,
Ian

 

Exactly, what the drivers had to do in the pre 1995-2000's was not to get killed before setting their records. This put a great burden on not crashinig and not damaging the equiptment.

Today's wheel banging would not have been tollerated in years past.

 

Really? Being on the perfect gear every time with a manual transmission, and mastering up and down shifting at racing pace is a heck of a lot harder than an automated one... and that's why nobody wants to bother with that anymore (much easier to just pull a paddle, and feel like Schumacher ). Yeah, there're a ton of buttons on the steering wheel now, but most are rarely touched (and when touched, drivers are told where to move them; big deal). Other than the paddles, the most often used buttons are KERS and DRS, which can be compared to changing the 'manettino' on modern Ferraris. Hardly challenging.

Indeed. Much more complex (and expensive), and harder to fix and maintain... but easier to drive.

Indeed. A good example is MS. Consistently losing to your 'lesser' teammate for 2 seasons is not bad luck. One or two races, maybe. Almost forty? Time to drop the excuses .

True. It's all about 'managing the race', as he puts it. He (usually) leaves his opponents for dead the first few laps, and manage the race from there. No need to 'prove himself' otherwise. He does that in qualifying . Consistently driving the car to its limit to achieve pole is all the proof anybody should need. 'Duking it out' with opponents is a skill lesser drivers need to develop to finish better... but not when you're in front . That's the same reason almost every Ferrari driver prefers paddles over a proper manual transmission: The manual transmission driver might be better, but you'd be faster. Which one matters the most? Enough said. Ha ha.

 

Not according to John Surtees in a recent BBC interview at Maranello alongside Alonso.

He said that the cars are harder to drive these days because of all the systems on them that the driver has to adjust every corner to get the best out of it.

Basically he said back in his day there was far less to think about.

 

No doubt that modern F1 car tech is more complicated to manage on track. But is that the same as harder to drive?

 

There is an old guy in New Zealand who is a brilliant F5000 driver called Kenny Smith and he bought a Leighton House of the late 80's or early 90s' ... can't remember exactly but I think it was not turbo charged. Anyway I chatted to him about this F1 car and he said it was fairly easy to drive because the suspension was so amazing. Where his F5000 would be all over the place, and any other car he has driven, the F1 car would just zoom over it like there were no bumps.

Now this guy is very, very fast and still winning F5000 races today. He has raced Formula Pacifics and been NZ champion and Formula Brabhams (similar to F3000) and so on. So I believe for a person who is used to downforce cars they are not that hard to drive, but like every race car getting to 10/10ths is probably where the excitement comes in.

And lets face it there ARE drivers on the grid of F1 races that do not belong there. These are drivers that are there because of $'s and sponsors they bought in but are otherwise rich play boys. Yes these guys are not winning races, but they are only 3 or so seconds (?) a lap off the pace.

Would I be able to do better than Hampster on Top Gear, er, probably not because I'm now 43 and never driven a car with downforce, or at least wings. To be fair to Hampster, you can't just jump into any race car and reset your brain. You have to dial yourself in if you are not used to the performance.

I would be worried if the absolute best in engineering produced a race car that was hard to drive since their goal is to win races, which implies they need to be good race cars. No race car that is out of control all the time is a good race car.
Pete

 

Ah the Leyton house car, I was tempted to buy that one. Was a bargain 10 years ago. A Newey car I believe.

Those F1 cars are ideal to drive.

As for the Hamster: I think he was exaggerating the difficulties. Somebody who has driven a F40 at speed has enough tactile sensitivity to drive an F1

 

Unfortunately it was crashed by another drive who Kenny lent it to. Kenny was very upset afterwards and I don't know if it was ever able to be repaired.

It was a silly, silly, immature accident that should never have happened. Trying to pass the whole field in seconds instead of respecting the car and being patient ...
Pete

 

Ouch!

I found that car (sans engine) in an ad online about 10 years ago. The car was dirt cheap and had an identical sister car. Sounds like the perfect source for spare parts.

 

Well I hope Kenny bought it then and made one a runner again.

Kenny has connections so probably would have known about that non-runner.
Pete