40 replies to this topic

[Don Capps]

It was with a faint sense of horror that I found myself nodding in agreement with Max Mosley recently! However, I think he touched on the same nerve that got me in no end of trouble on the Big Forum in The Past: is racing in "F1" a contest of Men or Machines? Max thinks it should be as much on the Man-to-Man side as possible. However, in the contemporary 'F1" scene, the technoid geeks who program the various chips are about as important as the driver. The Machines have always been important, but where is the crossover point? While I would vastly prefer to go into combat in an Apache AH-64D Longbow with all the latest bells and whistles, I prefer to fly an older Cobra (AH-1 G or S or F model - and would love to try the USMC W model) or a Loach (OH-6A).

I miss drivers actually shifting, braking, pressing the loud pedal, and doing, well, driver stuff. Yeah, what they do today isn't easy, but is it racing? Why not have a formula that combines the best of something like CART on the teachnical side and the organizational of "F1 Nation" with circuits that are varied in type from oval to road to street circuit? When "F1" pulls out of Europe soon -- two race according to the FIA -- why shouldn't the organizers look elsewhere? They did so in 1952....and in 1953 got some excellent races. Think about the possibilities of something like that. Maybe if someone were smart, they could call it "Grand Prix" racing.....

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Fast One]

Great thought, Don. One reason I have trouble according modern drivers the same reverence that I have for those of the past is that the modern driver has too much help. Telemetry to tell him where he can be faster...telemetry to tell the team whether the car is sick or well...radios to tell the driver what the team thinks and what everyone else is doing...traction control (whether they admit it or not)...rev limiters (is it even possible to miss a shift these days?)...wings...diffusers...active suspension (see traction control...)...and worst of all, courses which render the driver irrelevant. What difference does it make on race day how fast your driver is? No one can pass anyway, except in the pits. Driver ability only counts for qualifying, which is when the real skill gets displayed, and during the fist 10 seconds of the race, which is when everyone falls into parade order. And I haven't even brought up the oceans of gravel traps which remove the fans from the trackside views, and remove judgement from the necesary skills of the modern driver.

That said, you can never go back again to what was. Racing has changed in the most fundamental of ways. It went from being an adventure for the drivers, teams and fans to pure entertainment. Drivers used to be test pilots, with the same derring do and the same high mortality rate, and we viewed them with awe because of it. Now the only thing they deveolop are their CV's and investment portfolios. Race results are manipulated to favor certain drivers and teams, or to keep competition close. It is fake show biz now, and if you put todays lot in an Auto Union and made them drive the real Ring, the real Spa, Solitude, or Bremgarten, complete with trees, ditches, curbs, and houses, 9 out of 10 would **** their pants and go home.

I still watch modern racing, but with less and less enthusiasm each year. The technology won't go away, the great tracks wont be restored, and all we can do is take out our teeth and flap our gums about what we lost. But remember this: at least we saw racing when it was pure. Many current F1 fans have never seen anything but parades of four-wheeled commercials on sissy tracks. Yes, we CAN remember. That's why we're here at the Nostalgia Forum.

[Dennis David]

My own feeling is that it has always for me been just as much about the cars as it has been the drivers. I actually think that today it is too much the drivers and not enough the cars. I'm not talking about drivers aids rather that the cars are so interchangeable. You give Arrows a Mercedes engine and see what happens. I used to be a big Lotus fan and I really didn't care who was driving as long as they were winning. Just like the Ferrari fans, they used to boo Senna all of the time but imagine if he had driven for Ferrari instead of Williams.

In fact in the past it was either the cars or the country that came before any particular driver. A lot of it changed when Fangio would move from team to team. Many thought that it was a bit much actually.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Grand Prix History

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

[Keith Sawatsky]

An interesting point Don.

Does it mean for example that NASCAR is the "ultimate automotive contest" of racing drivers........with their "low-tech Conga line".........to plagiarize another poster at Atlas ?

(Sorry to you NASCAR fans out there but I was trained to take the shots when they presented themselves)

Conversely, I relish the older Can-Am cars and sports cars such as the 917 Porsche and 512 Ferrari types that raced at LeMans and other tracks back in the late 60's and early 70's.

Both racing types mentioned above where and still are relatively "low-tech" by todays FIA-GT and F1 standards.........but from a spectators point of view........it's the "unlimited" sports cars that took my breath away.......not the boring races brought about by the strict equalization of NASCAR's rules.

The drivers that I have read about all spoke in awe of these creations.........something that I don't think can be said for the F1 or NASCAR machines of today.

[desmo]

I agree with Dennis wholeheartedly here.

I think that today's F1 cars demand just as much of the driver as cars from any time past. The driver's attention is just taxed in different ways.

[Alfisti]

It's ewsy to run the risk of looking atthe past through rose coloured glasses if your not careful.... though i do agree... there are too many aides.

For starters the wings ned to be reduced and slicks returned as well as widening the cars. Trying to ban the gizmo's will be hard but they will have to try. To me the big issue is the tracks. They have all ben neutured and there is little room for a driver to shine... this is the biggest thing that needs to change iMHO.


You can't remove all the other stuff that you mentioned Don because i was F1 as much for the techno side as ido the racing side.. F1 must remain top of the development tree. I see no reason why radio's should be banned.. it is alsoa safety device remember.

I still think it is hard to drive these things and when push comes to shove the better drivers have still shone inthe current formula so they still make a difference.

One important point. People always compain the car makes too much difference but what is the use of driving different cars if there is no difference betweeen them??? It's all about balance.

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[BRG]

Alfisti is right about the balance between technology and driving. The two best racing formulae in UK are the Caterham 7s and TVR Tuscans. Both have more power than grip, little or (in the case of the Caterhams) no aerodynamic downforce and quite narrow tyres. Incredibly competitive, exciting, close racing with overtaking. But the technical interest is minimal and all the cars are the same. What we need is a balance between that racing style and the team and technical culture of F1 - something like a "super" CART perhaps, with a better power to weight ratio, and more choices of chassis.

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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[Roger Clark]

I agree with most of what has been said, particularly concerning the variety of the circuits. It is, however, worth remembering that Laurence Pomeroy, writing in the mid-50s said that only two drivers certainly, and six possibly, could overcome defficient machinery. I think I know who the two were, but would be hard pressed to name another four. The cars have always been most important.

I have to say that I really enjoyed Silverstone this weekend, including the 15 mile walk that went with it.

[Ray Bell]

Just imagine the judgement getting a 150-yard brake point right at 200mph! That is where the modern driver has to be so accurate... when the brakes can pull so much speed off so fast, it becomes the final telling point in the exercise, and those lines are getting finer all the time.
DD - Senna in a McLaren? better yet, a Lotus? ... only drove three races for Williams...

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Roger Clark]

To emphasise Ray's point about the precision required in modern racing: Caraciola once said that he always allowed a 10% safety margin on corners. If the most successful driver of his era is doing that then you can see why drivers could occassionaly perform remarkable feats. Nowadays they're much closer to ten tenths all the time.

This is a trend that has existed throughout racing hitory nd makes it easy to see why overtaking is so difficult

[Dennis David]

You must remember that the races were longer and things like tires had to be managed or you would spend half the race in the pits. It was like a mini endurance race not the all out sprint of today.

Ray what I meant was if Senna had gone to Ferrari instead of Williams then the Ferrari fans would have fallen all over themselves as opposed to booing him as they had done in the past.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Grand Prix History

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

[Don Capps]

Racing in the top levels has never been easy. There is always an element of skill required beyond that of we mere mortals, whether it was 1921 or 1937 or 1955 or 1961 or 1982 or today. I admit to being a hopeless romantic in certain things and totally out of step with the masses (at those on The Big Forum) quite often.

It is difficult to impossible to "uninvent" technologies. The current flap over traction control is an example. In a contest of wills, always bet on the teams...even when they "lose" they find a way...

To me, Grand Prix racing will always be what I first encountered: red Maserati 250Fs and Ferrari 553/555/625 (whatever the Scuderia was running at that moment) and Lancia D.50s, silver W196s, and specks of blue (Gordini) and Green (Vanwall, Connaught). However, I really enjoyed it until somewhere in the mid-80s when I soured on it for many reason.

I follow "F1" but not very closely compared to my former enthusiasm. But, that's just me. I still think when Bernie & Max reduce the number of WDC rounds in Europe to perhaps two at most, that Euro CART would be an excellent substitute. Of course, I would really prefer a formula where teams had to choose the bodywork of a 1954-1959 front-engined GP car and run skinny tires (albeit slicks) and with real gearboxes and so forth.... Hey, I can muse out loud, right?

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Fast One]

Re Roger's point:

To be fair to the older drivers, there was a reason for holding a little back. There were big trees or houses or ditches or telephine poles waiting for you if you missed that braking point. As I've said before, you would see a driver like Black Jack do some absolutely hang-it-out, Wall-of Death stuff when his chin was firmly tucked down (The lower it went, the faster he drove!), but he only did it went the gain merited the risk. All the old drivers did it so, at least the ones who lived.

Todays drivers admittedly HAVE to take it to the edge. The team is sitting in the pits with real-time telemetry, and we know what happens if Frank Williams thinks you're holding a little back. On the other hand, today's drivers CAN take it to the edge, because the trees, buildings, ditches, and poles have been replaced by vast oceans of gravel the even kept Andrea de Cesaris alive to retirement. Why hold back when there is virtually no risk? Sure, we still have the occasional fatality, but they are aberrations, not the price of doing business like they were. So it isn't quite a fair comparison between the drivers of the past and those of today.

Like I said before, put a modern driver in 1950's conditions, and see how much he'd hold back. It was a question of staying alive.

[Ray Bell]

Is that why Stirling was so fast? I don't think the scenery was the factor you might do, but the driver's confidence in his car and himself was more relevant.
On a given day at a given circuit a driver would set a time that was his limit. Others might back off, they would be beaten. Always, I believe, the fastest were on the limit.
At Warwick Farm I once watched Leo Geoghegan lap after lap in practice in a Lotus 59. The rear wheel was perhaps a 12" wide rim - and there was not less than 10" of the tread hanging off the edge of the bitumen at one point through Homestead corner... He never knew. Two inches of tread left to do the work - how close was he to disaster? and he did it lap after lap. The BRM (Mays/Roberts)book story of Albi recounts something similar with Fangio at Albi... haybales etc, it's all the same. The drivers just drive to the limit they set for themselves. Top drivers have higher limits.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Roger Clark]

I agree with most of what has been written in this topic. However, I find it impossible to believe that anybody who has seen Schumacher at the limit, or Senna before him, wouldn't believe that they would be outstanding in any car, at any time. As Mario said, "if you can drive, you can drive, period".

I prefer the old days, and that's why this forum is so interesting, but for all its faults, modern racing is still racing It's still the ultimate challenge of driver and machine as it's been for the last 100 years.

[Don Capps]

Roger uses the Andretti quote in its proper context. An excellent driver is an excellent driver regardless of era or category. The ability of Michael Schumacher would easily have put him in a car in the 1950's. Or the 1930's.

The sport of motor racing - particularly at the "F1" level - has changed into an exercise of applying technologies to make the machines as quick as possible with relatively little regard to cost or the driver in some cases. To an extent, drivers are simply lightbulbs to the teams today, screw one in and then unscrew him and try another - pretty much as it always has been in some cases. The ability to push a machine to the very edge of the envelope is there today and it is expected. The whole "package" that is "F1" supports that.

Put the current "F1" teams and drivers on several of the old circuits as they were - Spa-Francorchamps, the Nurburgring, the old Silverstone, the old Monza, the Charade circuit/Clermont-Ferrand, Reims, Rouen, Znadvoort, Brands Hatch, Road America, Watkins Glen, the old Osterreichring, Pescara, and the Bremgarten circuit are just a few of many that leap immediately to mind - and they would be still be fast in either the machines of today or the past. And if you put Rosemeyer, Fangio, Ascari, Moss, Clark, Surtees, Stewart, Rindt, Hunt, etc. in today's cars on today's circuit they a;so would be very quick.

Perhaps the one variable that is at the root of all this is that the hoopla surrounding "F1" is at such a level that now the emphasis has tipped the commercial aspects more to the fore than in the past. Such things are perhaps inevitable. I think "F1" (or any of the other major racing series for that matter) has now become "major league" and somehow something always seems to get lost in the shuffle. There seems to be a real lack of "soul" in the modern version of the sport. It is possible that this element is subjugated to the hype, corporate control, micromanagment by the FIA, and just the way of the world.

Stop and consider if you could ever envision another effort like the Connew again? Or could another Frank Williams break into the game? Or a Masten Gregory ending up on the podium in his first WDC event in a privateer entry? Or another Keke Rosberg who said EXACTLY what was on his mind regardless of whose ears he zinged.

Oh well, just my rambling thoughts on this topic this morning.

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[GaryG]

I think what gets lost is that F1, as well as, all racing is actually a TEAM sport, not a drivers sport. I think inside the sport, they look at the entire package, and the driver is only one part of the package - like the quarterback in American football. I think to Williams and McLaren the Constructors Chaampionship is far more important than the Drviers Championship. The outside world basically looks only at the championship driver and little about the championship team. So I would have to say it's team v team.

[Roger Clark]

don,

Do we really want another Connew? how many finishers were there in the 1957 Monaco GP? (5, I think). Did Rosberg speak his mind more than J Villeneuve? I'll concede on williams unless Minardi suddenly finds Saudi sponsorship, but it's the strength in depth of all the teams which has squeezed out the minnows.

A quote: " it bacame increasingly important to achieve maximum publicity for the win. for this reason Press relations were based on a lavish budget which made possible not only champagne paries to meet the drivers after victory, but alos extremely informative and well-produced "hand-outs" distributed before the race and an ample supply of photographs and other souveniers after it".

Maybe the fact that they drank the champagne gives it away, but it's Pomeroy writing about the pe-war German teams.

[Ray Bell]

So put the comparison into another form:
Would Schumacher have been a Caracciola or a Rosemeyer? Would he have been a Stuck, von Brauchitsch or Lang? Not a Lang, in my opinion... more like the Rosemeyer... his salvation is that he's lived in the nineties and no forests have jumped out in front of him.
Another major change is that the language of F1 is now English, not German or Italian.. it all makes a difference.
A little off the topic, I guess, but an interesting sidelight would be to compare each of the drivers to their equivalent in that era...

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[desmo]

Ray, given all the unknowns I can't even make valid comparisons of drivers on different teams in the same year. Comparing drivers from different eras seems to me an impossibility. All I feel confident in saying is that the best drivers from any era could probably adapt and be successful in the cars and circumstances of any other era.

[Ray Bell]

I agree wholeheartedly, desmo. But we can have our mental aberrations, can't we... comparing G. Villeneuve with Nuvolari, for instance...?

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Dennis David]

Actually I would compare him more to Lang and less to Rosemeyer. Bernd was a daredevil with loads of personality Schumacher is neither. Come to think about it I liked Lang better than Schumacher, a modest down to earth guy more like HHF yet fast, especially on fast tracks like Tripoli. Did have a problem in the rain at first.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Grand Prix History

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

[Ray Bell]

I always think of Ginther in the same sentence as Lang because of their mechanical empathy.
It reminds me of mentioning Ginther to Frank Gardner, whose retort was about him blowing his head off in a caravan in Mexico.
Frank has little appreciation for the past, but he was finally dragged along as guest of honour at an Historic meeting recently.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Roger Clark]

Ray's is a fascinating suggestion. I've always bracketed together Nuvolari, Moss, gilles and (tentatively) Schumacher beacause they all seem to give of there best when the odds are against them. Caracciola was reincarnated as Stewart and later Prost. (Behra/Alesi? (Lang/D & G Hill?, Rosemeyer and Button? only joking!)

this is all based on there approach to the task of driving. Personality is impossible to judge when all we have is 30 second TV interviews and in the case of the former eras, not even that

[Ray Bell]

The article on von Bauchitsch in Motor Sport is fascinating.. particularly since it mentions he is the last surviving pre-war GP winner. Also in there is mention of a driver of an Austin 7 who ran in a SA race pre-war who is still alive.
I think I've got a fair idea of the drivers who raced here pre-war and are still alive, and their riding mechanics... funny thing, one day I was talking to an old man who was from Rhodesia or somewhere like that... he told me he raced a motorbike there in the thirties... not on a circuit, just town to town, and there weren't any real roads, just bush tracks. He wasn't a front runner or anything, just someone who had a motorbike and joined in. Anyway, they let everyone know the 'road' would be closed for the race... then out in the bush a few of them came across a car! The owner had been fishing or hunting in the area for a week - nobody had found him or told him!
If you hunt around you find people... very interesting talking to them.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[This message has been edited by Ray Bell (edited 04-27-2000).]

[magnum]

HAving recently moved to the states, I watched CART for the first time in a while and could only smile at the inboard shots of Papis and Co. shifting a gear lever at Long Beach. I found a nice site on the web as well, some weeks ago, and I was watching Senna qualifying at Monaco with a gear lever ... and I know exactly what Don was saying - on the one hand, you just want to go back 20 years (technologically and maybe even ethically), on the other there's this understanding that F1 is "meant" to be about technological achievement.

Seems the only way to go back to "racing" (as opposed to the "chess game" that Max wants to see) is to begin restricting the amount of technology available. Max, too, is a bit of an oddball - on the one hand he talks about strategy, on the other, he wants to ban traction control. If he wants the driver to have more input, surely semi-automatic gears, fly by wire throttles, hand-clutches and a whole host of devices should be scrapped as well?

To the cursory viewer, it is already obvious that f1 doesn't have the technology available in many road cars (ABS, for instance) - so ... does f1 give up its status as a testing ground for technology (and would this impact on the sudden deluge of manafacturers?) and revert back to racing? It would probably mean less sponsorship, less marketing, less tv revenue - but it would be an improvement, surely, from these boring boring sunday afternoon drives.

[Ray Bell]

Whiole F1 certainly is cutting edge in a lot of ways (all they're allowed to be, I guess), the state of the nation with F1 is such that sponsors expect results, there's so much money at stake that it can hardly be a 'proving ground' for anything. By this I mean that everything has to be fairly well proven before they can risk running it in races... interesting thought.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[desmo]

To all you who would retro-engineer F1 back to the 60s: There are plenty of racing series to follow that take the Neo-Luddite view that technology is the enemy of a good show. Here in the USA you can go to any dirt track on a Saturday evening and watch stick shifts pushrods and carberetors all in full display. F1 has a long and storied history of being the showcase for the finest cars that can be engineered. Must the sole protruding nailhead be bashed down to the prevailing level of mediocrity in order to cater to those who are incapable of appreciating the machine half of the car-machine equation. If you think that low-tech racing is more entertaining to watch why not just watch CART or NASCAR or one of the many, many other series that already exist with that philosophy?

[magnum]

desmo i agree - however, my point was that even Max seems to want to reduce the technology of F1 - ABS, traction control, grooves - and again, while F1 is and has always been about engineering, there has always been "space" for the human. And the human in F1 is as important (and more so for the "show") as the cars themselves - at least, that's why they "invented" the drivers championship. If F1 allows technology to rule the day, then why do we bother with the driver's championship? Just screw in a robot and be done with it.

[Darren Galpin]

From a techno-nerd as Don calls us...... (sorry for not replying earlier, but I'm in Singapore on a business trip and I've just worked out how to get netscape running on this Unix box).

I agree that the best of today's drivers are probably as good and skilled as those in the past. However, I think that the aerodynamics of todays cars make it a touch too difficult for the ability to be shown. So, throw away the wings, clamp on the basic wings allowed in Formula Renault 2000 so that they can still have the sponsorship areas, and allow a limited venturi beneath the car to generate the downforce in the same way as in CART. Then they could have the downforce and follow each other around the corners, and the better drivers could show what they could do.

By the way, have you any idea how difficult it is to build/design a microchip which will compress all the data gathered on a lap into a 1s burst as it passes the pits, works at the correct speed when in an environment heated by the engine, and not have the actual silicon melt? Very, as the heat of the engine slows the speed at which the chip can work. Just take a look at the chip in your computer and the massive cooling fan attached to it. I could do with a fan here too, as the heat is making me think and type slower...... Techno nerd indeed....

[desmo]

magnum,
There seems to be a large misunderstanding that if the rules were relaxed, that the grid would suddenly become full of cars with the "drivers" as merely passengers with the car doing the actual driving. There is no, absolutely no danger of this far-fetched scenario coming to pass in anything like the near future. Do a little research into robotics. The sort of AI software that is capable of such a thing is a very long way from becoming reality. If and when software sophisticated enough to adapt in real time to the endless dynamic variables contained in an F1 race, then it will be kept as a military secret, as it could be devastating when applied to military hardware.

I have heard this proposterous contention stated before, and I'd like to correct it before the more gullible start to believe it is now possible. This is a red herring thrown out as a justification for limiting technology in F1 by those who have another agenda or are ill-informed enough to believe it.

Darren, you are exactly right about limiting the wings and allowing a modicum of ground-effects downforce to achieve an competive situation where overtaking is possible. This in tandem with a return to slick tires wouldn't be a cure-all but it would unquestionably help.

[Don Capps]

Darren,

As a matter of fact I DO know a great deal about such challenges! I have spent many years now in the techno-nerd business (I command a Battle Lab which is heavily involved in virtual training systems) and spent some time at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as Serious Techno-Nerd.

However, I am at heart a romantic with a touch of Ned Ludd in me I am afraid. I think what we have finally come up against, in my lowly opinion, is the question of how much of "racing" should be entertainment and how much should be technology testbed and how much is advertising? The old "Spam in a Can" argument applied to terrestial adventures.

Given its head, "F1" will mutate into a variation of "Spam in a Can" very quickly. This is nota question of "good" or "bad" only a question of what does "racing" mean to the FIA and the teams. I love places like Bristol & Martinsville and miss the old Spa circuit, so I have no objectivity and disqualify myself from the voting immediately.

Yes, I have a great interest in leading edge technologies both personally & professionally. But, deep down, I find myself missing something in the current nature if things that is "F1." Perhaps is simply maturity, sensing these folks are merely mortal in spite of their incredible skill. Or, just the crass commercialization and media circus which has elevated it from a niche sport to a Major League Sport and that that entails. It is simply a matter of taste: as much as I miss my '56 Porsche Speedster at times, it is far easily to live with my Honda Odyssey...

Long Live Grand Prix! Hoorah for Formula One! Remember what Carly Simon warns us: "These are the Good Old Days..."

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[This message has been edited by Don Capps (edited 04-28-2000).]

[Fast One]

I certainly don't think you can go back and ignore the technical progress made in the past three decades, but it is NOT unreasonable to restrict technology to things which have some ultimate practical application on production vehicles. I'm not sure that banning active suspensions and the like is the way to go. On the other hand, wings have no practical use outside of racing, so all research done there on has no purpose. Wings make cars faster, but not relative to each other, so the speed increase is at best irrelevant. It's pretty clear that they have had a horrible negative impact on the quality of racing. Current F1 aerodynamic packages make setting up another driver for a pass impossible, because they prevent the trailing car from getting close enough. Get on the leading car's gearbox and your own car can't sustain its speed.

In addition, wings and other aerodynamic aids have increased cornering speeds to the point where almost every racing course worthy of the name has been abandoned or emasculated. The only tracks that aren't total jokes are Spa and Suzuka, and Spa is a shadow of its former self. The simple elimination of wings, diffusers and the like would improve close racing and passing opportunities, slow the cars down enough that the multitude of chicanes currently embarrassing Formula 1 could be eliminated, and some great tracks reinstated on the calendar. All without really hindering development in areas that have practical application in real life. After all, I have always liked the fact that GP cars were automotive labs at speed.

Then we could also see drivers drive again, and not just steer. They still won't be tested like they were in the old days, but perhaps that's a good thing. My point earlier was not that F1 should go retro, but that I personally can brook no comparison of Schumacher or anyone else to the great drivers of the past. I don't deny that they have the talent; they just aren't tested to anywhere near the same degree. Sad for them; sad for us, because frankly, the thought of Hakkinen and Schumacher powersliding through corner after corner, swapping the lead lap after lap sounds as exciting as any racing any time. It's not like we can't have high-tech cars and real racing. It only requires removing the useless technology of wings, etc.

[Huw Jenjin]

Short answer. F1 is about cars, and always has been.
All the drivers are great by any any standards, but certainly in the last ten - twenty years it has been cars cars cars. You just have to look at the GP grids on the tracks that favour cars to see the drivers are milliseconds apart, (that could be caused by anything).Show me someone who won a GP in a Dog.
Only Villeneuve at Jarama and Peterson several times in a 72 are examples of drivers really outshining their machinery and their colleagues.

[Darren]

Don, my advice would be to sit down for a long session of rallying. Best of all, get yourself a video of Walter Rohrl in the Audi Quattro. I forget which video it is, but there's an amazing sequence of footage where the camera focuses on Walter's feet during a special stage - he's dancing, not driving. After the stage he's asked about how he thinks about driving at that speed and replies that he doesn't think because it takes too long. Think rally - it's got the tech under control, you get to see amazing driver skills over extended periods, it's strategic and tactical.

[Don Capps]

Darren,

Until my feeble attempts at "time management" finally imploded, I used to follow the rally scene very closely. Indeed, it was the only form of motorsport I was relatively successful at personally, albeit at the club level.


After at period of time trying to figure out what the object of the exercise was, rallying seems to be pretty much back on track. Whenever I am home and Speedvision shows a round of the rally series, I usually watch. I still enjoy it as much as I did back in the 50's thru the the early 80's when something had to give - and the "F1" cars in the rally series finally pushed the envelope to the breaking point...

Again, I have mixed feelings about "F1" and were it not for my relationship with Atlas F1, I would most likely have once again abandoned any real active interest in the sport and returned to my other work, devoting the time I spend here at Atlas & 8W on my studies in military history (I still have several folks nagging at me about articles they want me to write). Indeed, that is an issue I am still having to contend with. Plus, whenever I come off my command tour, it is still uncertain whether I will retire or move on to another assignment.

However, at some point I will go back to the academic world from whence I was snatched up and have to start acting like a historian again and get back into the "publish or perish" grind. Most likely, I will still keep a foot in the motorsports world and simply try to do both.




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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Nathan]

I havent read other posts, so I may be off base here.

Personally I think motor sports has always been machine vs. machine. It just has been some drivers are so good, they can make a poor machine, look good. Its a simple fact, it doesnt matter how fast or good the driver is, its the machine that must last the race and provide the power for the driver to use.

I think the only drivers that can be considered for Driver vs. Machine are:

Nuvolari
Fangio
Clark
Senna
Schumacher

[f li]

Huw Jenjin:

Re: Someone who won a Gran Prix in a "dog."

Clark took the US Gran Prix with a BRM H-16 in the back. Wasn't that a dog??

[Don Capps]

Or Alan Jones winning in a Shadow?

Again, without the involvement of drivers racing the machines, who would really care? Keep in mind that as fascinating as the machines have always been to me, the drivers and the people have always been my first interest.

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[desmo]

I hope this isn't misinterpreted but I can see people anytime, anywhere. F1 cars are in that sense more interesting than people. Of course, I can see cars anywhere, anytime as well but F1 cars are more dissimilar from street cars than F1 people are different from you and I, I suspect.

[Ray Bell]

There were a couple of people won unexpectedly in the old Ferguson, too.. Moss at Oulton Pk and Hill at Lakeside.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...