Formula One 2009 season (F1 motor racing)

With the demise of the Honda team and rumours about Toyota threatening to pull out if there are no results this year, how likely is this? An all american F1 team! With no US and no Canadian Grand Prix, who would be interested?

Hmmm, that shall be interesting. Hopefully it'll drum up a bit more Stateside interest in the sport...gotta get them away from their abominations of motorsport that are NASCAR, Indy & CART.

What are your thoughts on the 2009 spec cars? Ugly as a sweaty old man's pimply bum I reckon.

Any big change in the rules like this can go one of two ways. Somebody gets it right and disappears off into the distance or we have a great season as people slowly get to grips with things and we have lots of different winners.

Last year was pretty well as good as it gets, outside of some shocking decisions from the powers that be. It will be a hard act to follow.

You're right, they are pig ugly, they look like a stress ball made into an F1 car.

A Virgin F1 team...nice


Branson keen on Honda - F1 boss

Tycoon Richard Branson would "love" to take over the Honda Formula One team, Bernie Ecclestone has said. Honda have confirmed Branson's Virgin Group is one of several potential buyers of their F1 outfit.

Well Branson's a highly successful nasty piece of work. He should fit right in.

Is he really? I remember watching a TV programme about him and the reporter had to admit at the end of the programme, that although he was hoping to show him to be an unpleasant git, he just wasn't, he was a genuinely nice guy who treated his employees well.

Why do you say that, just because he is sucessfull??

I've heard from others that have worked for him he's something of a tyrant.

Opinions do seem split though.

Yes. Jealousy does tend to cause you to form such opinions of those who are more successful than you could ever dream of

I'd be more excited by the start of the season if I knew I'd be watching the race on the box in the UK. In other words, RTL's F1 commentaries are such a load of crap that I wonder if watching the races is worth the pain.

That's an opinion I can go along with, and that's before you add in the lengthy adverts.
As you probably can't get the Beeb in Dresden, have you considered Premiere? The commentary's not too bad, and there's no adverts, plus on some races the in-car footage is stunning, although generally I used to stick with the main picture.

Well since the end of the Murray Walker era the UK commentary has improved a teeny weeny bit. But I still think watching the races with the TV muted is better than listening to a bunch of semi-informed motormouths. Even Brundle and Blundell can get quite nauseating when they get outside their realm of knowledge and start talking about other aspects of F1. Does anyone know if the F1 team has moved en masse from ITV to BBC?

On a separate note, I am surprised that we've had no witty comments about the fact that they'll finally be some virgins on the grid.

Edit: Just checked out the US F1 link. To be fronted by Peter Windsor. God help us when he gets interviewed. I had to ensure his commentary on Motors TV when I spent a year working in the US - that's what got me into commentaryless viewing in the first place.

Any word on if or when there will be a USGP? We are all pulling for a return to Long Beach!

here's a good video with the new changes for the 2009 season

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTkVKPdyWs0

BBC have issued a press release with details of their coverage - The 2009 Formula One season on the BBC

Nice, this is close to the offerings on Premiere, with the advantage of it being free and in English, and the possible disadvantage of losing the signal in heavy rain.

And extra one hour analysis by David Coulthard. Oh joy. Well if I need a nap on a Sunday afternoon I know what to watch.

By the way, anybody up for the odd session at Molly's to watch some of the races?

And still no way to receive the transmission in Dresden. There should be a law against it...

Stream it off the intarwebs perhaps?

You can stream it straight of the RTL site. Ok it's in German but I've found it pretty good.

This site can also be your friend. You can often find English streams off there. And Chinese.

http://myp2p.eu/

Makes a change from ITV cutting the press conference (except for LH) and post-race analysis, just so you can sleep through a 40-year-old Bond film, though.

You need to read the Tow Bowyer biography of Branson, it's very a interesting read and shows him in a very different light! It's worth reading Branson's own autobiography Losing My Virginity and the Bowyer book back to back, Bowyer challenges many of that claims made in Branson's book. This talk of a Honda takeover is typical of him, he clearly never had any intention of taking over Honda but thought he'd get his mug on the telly on the back of all the rumours for a bit of free publicity - dick!

I can't wait for the season to start!!

Tim.

Looks like the cost saving must be working and we have a new private team. Good luck, they have good drivers and should have a good car with all the money Honda poured in last year.

The old Honda team will race

Good news, but I can see them struggling, what with almost no testing in a season where testing is banned (unless you count the Friday warm-ups), plus an engine they probably weren't expecting to have to integrate into a Honda chassis.

Good luck to them, though.

So now we have the Red Button and Jenson Button. Which is going to draw more viewers?

Update on changes fr the new season

Kinetic energy recovery system and others.

And now a new points system

Not sure I agree with this one. I can see it should lead to more overtaking attempts at the front though.

I think someone at the Beeb got overexcited writing that article, or more probably wrote it one way, then edited it.

Planet-F1 seems to be a bit more concise.

Yeah the new winning system seems a little crazy, it basically means a driver can win 9 races, then drive like a pleb for the rest of the season, while the others have no real incentive to win.
Once you have enough 1st places then you would want to come last as even last year they increased the amount each driver has to pay depending on the number of championship points they earn ~$2,500 per point.

You don't think it was done because Massa would have won last year under these rules? ferrari bias.. never

This sounds nuts, if there are say 3 drivers who could win and one of them has 6 wins but crashes in every other race, the rest could have 5 each, allowing for a few random results, but finish in the points every race, but the crasher would be champ! If that's how it's going to work, that's just stupid.

Yep, sounds like a stupid idea to me.

By the way, here's a useful calendar of all the F1 races this year that can be imported into Yahoo, Google, Outlook and most other calendars of your choice http://www.colinchau.com/blog/2009/02/f1-2...oogle-calendar/

Tim.

Just finished my team on Fantasy league F1, is anyone else doing it this year?
It makes it more enjoyable at least.


fish n' chips & F1... sounds interesting...

Ross Brawn's new team seems to have got off to a fantastic start, fastest laps in the last two tests. In German, I'm afraid.

Looks like FOTA can boast some success, having apparently found the new system didn't meet FIA's own rules:

FIA defer 'winner-takes-all' system


More Mosley-style weasel-words in the last sentence, implying the teams agreed it all. Not very credible, given FOTA's alternative and much more sensible proposal.

It will be very interesting to see how F1 goes now all the teams seem to be pulling in the same direction. Ecclestone has ruled by divide and conquer. I see a lot of power games in F1 over the next 2 to 3 years.

Re: new points system. This simply means *every* win matters. I haven't seen yet a valid point as to why that wouldn't work. In the "win 9 races and then coast the rest of the way" scenario above, the key is getting those wins. And if they do win 9 races, then they earned it, and no system can be fairer - certainly not one which awards the title to a consistent 2nd/3rd place driver. From this respect, the situation is no different from early 00s, when the leading team(s) would shift their focus to the next season's car as early as July.

I don't think that's so much the problem, as the fact that they still wanted to keep the points system as it was, leading to the possible scenario of someone well down the points list actually winning the championship and begging the question "why have points at all?"

I really don't understand what FIA's objection to FOTA's suggestion was. That would surely also have encouraged racing to win, without the downside of the points confusion.

But according to Bernie, we will get his system next year.

You're assuming that the winner gets 50% of the wins, which would be pretty impressive, but that almost never happens. As I suggested earlier, winning just six races and crashing out of the rest could make a driver champion, which is ridiculous. Wins should be rewarded but so should consistancy.

No, I'm not assuming that, just discussing one of the examples given earlier in the thread. In your example, it still makes sense - the driver with the most wins takes the title. DNFing/consistency is a different matter, and for that we have the Constructor's championship. (Were you suggesting 'crashing' in lieu of a generic DNF, or was it a bit tendentious, as in "a bad driver might win the WDC"? The 'most wins' is 'the most wins', after all, and one can't ascend to WDC by crashing on purpose or being negligent. Again, the good side of this rule is that every race counts.)

..which is now a moot point anyway.

Until next year

Interesting Logic.

What about the worlds most popular sport, Football, where you don't have to have the most wins to win the championship?

Great session. Good start to the BBC coverage by using the old Fleetwood Mac music. Then interesting stuff, a new world order. Who could possibly have predicted a Button pole two months ago. It's going to be a looong season for Hamilton.

Talk about mixing things up! Great performance by the Brawn team, but Lewis Hamilton has got big problems. It took me a while to figure out why there was so much waffling between the sessions, until I realised that there were no ads so they had to fill the time up!

Yeah, really good coverage, I noticed that about the waffling too, though. Good to see the field really mixed up, and Button suddenly in a good car. I don't think the protests against the diffusers will succeed (McLaren don't have one, for a start), and others will be forced to follow. Who knows, it could even turn the McLaren into a decent car. It's going to be a long season for them.

The only peeves I have about the BBC coverage are the fact that they display the new positioning graphic in the middle of the screen - don't most sports fans have 16:9 now? - and the fact that you can't record the practice sessions on Freesat, but these are relatively minor compared to the ITV effort.

I enjoyed that. Branson was like a cat that got the cream. I never ever watch F1, but this might just get me hooked already. I am a sports sadist 'cos I rather enjoy the spectacle of McLaren suffering already.

I'm already getting into the "geeky" stuff like the fact that going to slicks, and removing the 4 grooves, actually has MORE effect on the front tyres 'cos they were narrower anyway. So they have x% more extra grip on the front compared to the rear now.

Hopefully the championship will go to the best driver this time around!

It never does , it goes to the best driver in the best car.

So, a great race to watch, plenty going on. Let's hope they'll all be like that.

Can't help feeling that Vettel is a little hard done by for what I saw as a racing incident - after all, Kubica could have left him more room.

I'll bet McLaren can't believe their luck in coming 3rd, although it was a good solid drive from Hamilton, with a strategy that worked, he'd have been struggling to be in the points at the end, without others dropping out and a safety car.

Well done to Brawn GP, also their race pace wasn't as far ahead of the others as we might have expected from qualifying.