Spanish GP 2012 - Barcelona

[FW17]

No - I'm saying the rest shouldn't be capable.

and why should that be?

[raymondu999]

You are of course welcome to have your own opinion - but in my view the elite achievement of an F1 grand prix victory should be an exclusive one - the point of the competition is, after all, to find out who is the best out of the 24 drivers - the very select group - and not about 24 equals.

[ArchAngel]

Why not NK? He also deserves to win a race.

Imagine if Pirelli picks Narain's lottery ticket in one of the succeeding races and he manages to beat Vettel & Button to the top step of the podium. Why, Seb & Jense would have to lift a 'cucumber' up over their shoulders! Paul Hembry would completely wet himself in ecstasy & faint, thinking he'd already died & gone to heaven!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7LJ44UPrT4[/youtube]

What an 'effingly unreal season we're having, with things happening in fives so far: 5 different winners from 5 different teams in 5 Gran Pirellis (not Grand Prix), 5 sh!t-for-luck races for Schu, and Lewis' pit crew & side of the garage... it's almost mind-bogglingly beyond any conspiracy theories!

[GrizzleBoy]

You are of course welcome to have your own opinion - but in my view the elite achievement of an F1 grand prix victory should be an exclusive one - the point of the competition is, after all, to find out who is the best out of the 24 drivers - the very select group - and not about 24 equals.

Well that's the very soul of competition after all isn't it? The problem comes around when the top hats want a show instead.

I don't know any other sport on the planet where victories come only from experimenting, lucky breaks and factors that are uncontrollable or not 100% intended.

Can you imagine if football players were made to play with balls or boots that restricted them from fully utilizing their whole potential?

Can you imagine the whole game being "dumbed down" because Lionel Messi is just far too dominant and everyone else needs a chance too?

Can you imagine the post match interviews?

Yeah, the boots were just working really well for us and we used just enough effort to not wear out our ball control skills to the end of the match.

Our opponents came out and pushed really hard in the first half, but they used too much of their football skills and their boots just started to come away from them which gave us the opportunity to come back at them towards the end of the match and they had no defense/boots left.

There was a lot of talk before the match about how we should go about ball and football boot management as this pitch does have a tendency to really hammer the studs and tear away at the leather on the ball.

We'd love to give it our all, but we found giving JUST enough of a percentage of our best/capacity gave us the win this time.

I'm even cracking up right now as I type this

Would it be great to see Wolverhampton fighting Chelsea for the FA Cup in a championship where a teams ability to play football no longer really matters all that much?

Sure, it would be interesting, but deep down the fans would never truly accept the victory as much more than a gift and the team themselves can never feel truly happy that it was their efforts and their efforts alone that gave them the chance or the victory.

[raymondu999]

Can you imagine if football players were made to play with balls or boots that restricted them from fully utilizing their whole potential?

I don't watch footie myself so I can't really relate to the example, but I do get what you're saying. I guess we actually saw a glimpse of the tyre lottery situation early on already, in Malaysia - where we saw two drivers triumphing in the wet, in what weren't (aren't?) race winning cars, but it was sort of dismissed as just fantastic wet drives by two good drivers. It's basically devalued all of the performances this year for me. If a Williams with on-song tyres could beat a Ferrari and a Lotus with off-song tyres, then it's not out of the question that Ferrari and Sauber really did have the quickest rain packages, thanks to their on-song tyres.

[Joie de vivre]

tyres have too much big influence on this years F1 ... DE FACTO!

what is the tire? is product made of rubber that helps to transform power on surface and move a car ... and this rubber is a factor who is the best ... this is not F1 for me anymore

[raymondu999]

Aye - I'd almost rather have spec racing over this. The "spec" parts should be spec and shouldn't, in my opinion, be performance differentiators. Inevitably they will be in the real world, but the issue is that now the performance differentiator these spec tyres provide has surpassed the performance differentiation of the non-spec parts, which really defeats the point of having different cars, to a certain extent.

[cod3master]

Did anyone notice that the 3 Winner Cars were all without strange and complicated
Blown Diffusor Exhausts?

Ferrari, Williams and Lotus dont use that ultra sophisticated; it sometimes works and sometimes not exhausts.

Is this may a new direction the teams should follow ?
For example Redbull seems to have serious problems, they should maybe also go a step back.

[raymondu999]

Meanwhile - the other 4 races (except China) have all been won by cars with "strange and complicated exhausts."

Not to mention Hamilton probably had a hell of a victory shot without his penalty

[beelsebob]

Did anyone notice that the 3 Winner Cars were all without strange and complicated
Blown Diffusor Exhausts?

Did you notice that Ferrari suddenly became a good car – because they changed the exhaust

[motobaleno]

I LOVE THIS F1.
i think that it's the exact opposite with respect to a random lottery: it is simply far more complex: complexity is very different from random and lottery.
it's the same thing that people prefer pop music with respect to jazz saying that jazz is random noise...it's not noise, it is simply more complex.....

[banibhusan]

I don't think you can single out exhaust as the most decisive factor for the current situation in the championship. It was true in case of last year, but not this year. The tyres are playing too big a role. As someone already said, it's all about who makes these tyres work best on any given weekend. We all expected Lotus/McLaren to be the quickest, but it was Williams who made the tyres work best. RBR made it work in Bahrain and that's why they won. Seems like the top 6 teams have all got a realistic chance to win the upcoming races. We really can't say which circuit would suit which cars. So far most of the predictions have gone wrong.

For the past decade we have been complaining that aerodynamics is playing a major role in F1 instead of the mechanical side of a car. For a change, this year, the spotlight has been shifted from aero to the tyres. And we are still complaining that the tyres are playing too big a role now.

[sAx]

I LOVE THIS F1.
...with respect to jazz saying that jazz is random noise...it's not noise...

+1

[zoro_f1]

here is a small statistics from times of maldonado and alonso.left times are from maldonado and right times are from alonso.

maldonado did a fantastic job also in the second pit stops. look the difference between the stops of the two drivers.

[Ral]

Not to mention Hamilton probably had a hell of a victory shot without his penalty

Which flies in the face of the "random" argument, and partly against yours about the elite not being able to win because of the tyres. I'm with you, and in fact I don't think a lot of people would try to argue that Hamilton didn't have the best chance of anyone winning the race if he hadn't been penalised. But why was that?

Because Hamilton did the best job setting his car up to use the tyres on that track. Of anyone, by far with the exception perhaps of Maldonado. The Lotus cars had some issues with the temperatures and you could argue the Ferrari was running a bit better on Sunday than it had done in qualifying. But Hamilton was flying on Saturday and Sunday both, in both conditions on both tyre compounds.

So, Hamilton, in what so far has arguably looked like the best car in the field, did the best job setting it up and would probably have lapped the field, right up to and including his team mate had it not been for the penalty. Proving that it was him, Hamilton who did that job with his engineers, regardless of the tyres. Because his team-mate went nowhere in the same car with the same tyres. That elite enough for you? How about Alonso consistently out-performing his team mate every single time they've been on the track? How about Raikkonen's 14 point advantage over his team-mate in the championship standings, despite all his qualifying mishaps and mistakes?

The cream still comes to the top. They just have to work a bit harder for it, especially because there are more competitors now close enough to take advantage of any mistakes.