Possibly posted before, but...I wonder what Alonso thinks of his teammate? Is this called, 'sleeping with the enemy' ? I would, and quite willingly... I have a friend that may know, but in FA's consideration will not tell...
In regards to Max and Alonso, Max has an amazing ability to shut out every distraction and get the most out of his car. I don’t think he cares who the second driver is. Would it surprise anyone on this thread if Max were able to put the AM on the podium consistently?
Just for the record: In Austria Lance beat Alonso in the sprint race and in the GP. Unfortunately the AM is such a POS that this all happened outside the points and thus has no effect on the current standings.
Nope, outside the top 10. He just stole the point from Max, and made a point. "Hey this AM is sh*t but I can still drive"
Ahhh, I see. Thanks for the heads up. So you have to be within the top 10 to get a point for fastest lap. I didn't know that.
I fear that Alonso is going to that dark side of his personality. When he feels that the team is failing him he goes cannibal. "GP2 engine, GP2 engine" Not a good scenario.
At this late stage of his career, I think he has little time for unkept promises of progress etc now. The car is falling backwards fast. Will he leave if this continues next year? I have zero problem with his reactions now. Patience vs lost time is never an easy battle to resolve.
As a bit of an aside it is astounding the competitiveness of F1 nowadays. In Q1 this past Saturday 1st through last were 0.7 apart! teams that are a few tenths off are seen as being a total disaster compared to only a few years back when the field was normally covered by several seconds. Go back to the 90's that everyone goes on and on like it was the best time ever and the field was covered by 12-14 seconds. There is no doubt that current F1 is the closest it has ever been which is masked by the dominance of one driver that skews everyone's perception of what competition really looks like.
That's because F1 has become a spec series. Paint all the cars exactly the same and watch them go past at 150mph. See if you can match each car to a team.
A spec series is when everyone buys the same parts and the only differences are the setups. F1 is far from a spec series as every team still designs and builds most of their own car. The massive amount of brain power directed to skirting the rules has generated a set of regulations that give very little room for innovation. Problem is that if you give technical freedom (even within a budget cap) then there will be massive differences in the performance of the cars making for racing that is incredibly boring. It is an almost impossible challenge for the FIA. I would say that even within the rules the cars are quite distinctive in their designs to someone who is observant. To the average fan the 6 wheel Tyrell is about as blunt as you need to be for anyone to notice technical differences between cars.
So true. Anyone with some technical interest in F1 will be amazed that all these cars with hundreds of variances can all be within a tenth of each other. When we see the top 3 teams, all with different engine manufacturers, different chassis designs, different drivers, etc, come within less than 1 tenth of each other in qualifying. That's remarkable.
I don't count every little aero widget as being distinctive. When the FIA has already shown renderings of the 2026 cars it sort of demonstrates that they are all going to look very very similar, not counting all the little aero widgets. If there were really distinctive differences there would be distinctive performance differences. The zero sidepod is a good example. Sure it was allowed, but it didn't work so back to what everyone else is doing.
Not really that surprising when the rules are so extreme in breadth that it drives the design to a single solution.
F1 is half-way to become a specs series, IMO. There are so many parameters imposed to the engineers, that the cars are very close in design. More than anything the rules restrict the work of the designers, and leave very little choice. Innovation is banned. Very sad
Innovation is awesome but it results in incredibly boring racing. Without restriction designers will be able to design cars that humans can't drive and will bankrupt anything in their path along the way. It is mechanical hedonism at its core and requires regulation as the theory of freedom in no way matches reality. There is nothing sad about it as regulations allow the sport to exist. People forget that at the end of the day motor racing is in the business of entertainment way more than it is a means of developing new technologies.
I look at it that way; if some of today's restrictive technical rules had existed in the past, F1 would still be living in the front-engine era! Of course, rear engine cars would have been banned for not conforming to the accepted standards. We would never had 4 cyl, V6, V8 and V12 cars on the same GP grid. The turbo would have been killed at birth. The 6-wheel Tyrrell would never have existed. John Barnard wouldn't have been allowed to introduce carbon fibre chassis. The rule makers of the past were far more open minded than today's ones ! I am not advocating total freedom, but less restriction, more choice. Why insisting on similar architecture for all engines, for example? Part of the show was to see the fight between torquey V8s against powerful V12s. It looks to me like the designed have been handed a canvas with most of the choices already imposed. Just join the dots !!! You talk about the cost, but what is the point for 10 teams entering 10 "different" cars costing $millions to built to obtain more or less the same result ? Look at the qualif times, there are often less than 2 seconds between the Pole, and the tail ender.
Even with much more open rules teams will still converge to a similar design because there is always going to be a single most efficient way. I would much rather see 0.8 seconds across the grid than the best car being 0.8 seconds faster than the 2nd best car and the worst car being too slow to qualify.
Spot on! This was seen at the beginning of 2022 when under the rules reset each team had pretty different looking cars even with the extremely restrictive design regulations. Quickly the best path was determined and teams modified their cars to end up with all the cars looking much closer to one another.
They could adopt simple rules that dont restrict choice. Give maximum capacity, minimum weight, maximum dimensions, and all the safety requirements, and let the engineers in different teams to solve the solution for themselves. Those who go to the extreme will penalise themselves, as it was proven many times; twice in the past, V16 engines were heralded as saviours, and both experiments failed ! But it would be interesting to see different types of engines in F1: boxer, broad-arrow engine, narrow-angle V4, transversal engines, etc ...
