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Comment by beaker52 | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple of aspects of Formula 1 that make it very compelling to watch (my opinion of course, take as you will):

- Accessible aerodynamics (it's on the road in front of you, not up in the air)

- Technological developments (e.g. this year, one of the teams has a steering wheel they pull toward/push away themselves to change the geometry of the front wheels)

- Watching high-performing athletes demonstrating the ability to operate a machine at speeds over 200mph and still having the capacity to understand the strategic situations unfolding around them, even gathering information from the crowd in the grandstands, or the tv screens that flash past them as they navigate the track

- Seeing an inter-disciplinary team design and operate a machine that fuses aerodynamics, mechanics and hybrid propulsion systems, driven by a human operator, monitored in realtime by a team of engineers distributed around the world

- On-the-fly risk/reward decision making in race strategy from observing current data whilst incorporating gut feeling based on past experience to great effect

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The balance of importance between driver and constructor is quite unique in sport. A sufficiently good car can make an average driver competitive (e.g. Bottas), but also a sufficiently good driver can make an average car competitive (e.g. Schumacher).

Plus everyone involved is such a drama merchant (or crook!) that the season often plays out like a soap opera.

After spending years trying to put myself in a position to work in the sport, now I mostly just follow F1 for the politics and gamesmanship more than the racing itself.

There are much more fun motorsports to watch, but rarely do they come so packaged with intriguing technical drama.

A few years ago I did a spec Job application to RBR racing

I wasn't cheeky enough to mention the two DNF's (ran out of fuel) they had had the previous season, and how as a former Research Assistant / Experimental officer at a world leading hydro dynamics RnD org - I would have at least made sure the second one did not happen

How are you so sure that you would have succeeded when they didn't?

I would have identified the issue and put plans in place to make sure it didn't happen the second time - any idea how much a DNF costs a top F1 team?

I worked on Campus at Cranfield Uni (close to RB and Maclarren) At a tier 1 research organisation in hydrodynamics, there was one US lab that was working at our level.

I worked on research projects and managing out risk like this is a big aspect of the work. If the materials for a single run of an experiment cost as much as for a small flat you take great care not to fuckup or at least not to make the same mistake twice

I also did a niche specialised Vocational Course in thermofields basically to support military /aerospace.

Were I an interviewer, I think I would have actually really liked that one. It demonstrates real understanding of how human mistakes get made and prevented.

That was brought home to me, when I asked the guy that I shared an office why they used band new non rechargeable batteries for each run of a particular experiment - testing how to improve mixing for the chemical industry.

He commented that some of the runs cost 20k (about 10x my salary at the time) in chemicals to fill the tank (this was a full size 1:1 experiment) so using a brand new set every time made sense - and also the environmental cost of disposing of the several tons of chemicals was not trivial either.

Americans Cup (Sailing) has that similar appeal

It's a pretty rare event in comparison though.

F1 races are less common than other car races. The limited, exclusivity of the peak of sport is part of the appeal for fans and competitors alike.

Interesting though that compared with most individual series vs motorsport as a whole, F1 has more races (or at least, this season certainly would have done), and Liberty was rumoured to even be pushing for a 25 race calendar (nudging even closer to the BTCC calendar, and they do 3 per weekend...).

If the double-headers do well this year, I can see that being how they manage that many next year.

2019 F1 21 races vs NASCAR 36.

Yeah, but Indycar was only something like 18, WEC 8, WRC 14, Blancpain 10. An F1 race isn't a rarity in itself compared with most other motorsports, even MotoGP was only scheduled for 20.

The balance is probably around 90% the car and 10% the driver. In the years of RB dominance, a subpar driver like Webber almost got the championship. OTOH Alonso lost a decade in Ferrari and McLaren while being, tied with Hamilton, the best driver in the grid.

The 10% of what the driver adds to the mix is what makes Hamilton champion instead of Bottas.

The ratio varies - I would say it depends on the car, teammates and team. But ultimately driver skill is what determines who gets to drive for Mercedes, Ferrari etc. So once a pairing has been made, either the drivers are closely matched, or one or both will be changing teams or leaving F1 all together.

> once a pairing has been made, either the drivers are closely matched, or one or both will be changing teams

That's not always the case. Eddie Irvine spent 4 years as n.2 to Schumacher pretty happily, only changing teams because Jordan offered more money. He was pretty spectacular on good days but nowhere as good as The Michael.

Right. The current era is definitely more competitive than past eras. Teams were often cash strapped back then, so sponsorship money trumped driver skill in some teams. Also Ferrari was very much Schumacher’s team. Irvine was his supporting driver much more than a true teammate, unlike what we have these days in most teams, including at Mercedes and Red Bull.

Teams are still cash strapped!

> Eddie Irvine spent 4 years as n.2 to Schumacher pretty happily, only changing teams because Jordan offered more money

I think you mean Jaguar. He moved from Jordan to Ferrari.

Yes, sorry.

"ultimately driver skill is what determines who gets to drive for Mercedes" - not what happened with Bottas. Doubt that's what happened with Sainz.

You know something no one else does?

Also, a good driver might not be a good team member which might put them in a disadvantage. Räikkönen was considered one of if not the fastest on the grid during his best years but iirc wasn't very good as a team member in the car's development phase which hampered his and his car's performance

But always against his teammate.

You can put whatever driver you name in a Mercedes from 2014 until today, and he will end at least in second place in the championship. I cannot imagine a single driver, not even Maldonado, that would end worst than 2nd except due to incredible bad luck with the car reliability.

Verstappen is an incredible good driver that probably deserves to win multi-championships. But as it is now, Bottas is closer to that achievement than him.

Nothing will ever be as great as Räikkönen's press conferences, though.

"Kimi!!! How did you feel the car was today?!"

"Car was good." walks off

One of Räikkönens great skill is giving feedback to the engineer that's why he is still driving and good at developing cars.

Dunno if it's a valid comparison, but my kid races indoor karting. He's average level, that means he's within 1.5% of the best in race conditions (i.e. on a 40 seconds lap, he's about than 0.7 seconds behind the best on average). And given the time it took to reach that, I'd say that being a competitive pilot may be just 10% of the victory, but those 10% are super tough to reach.

I think you are pointing to something very important. The car and team get you 90% of the way. But the last 10% is almost 100% up to the driver.

Reminds me of a Yogi Berra quote:

> Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.

I've been doing a bit of karting lately and the difference between a 58s and a 59s lap is crazy. Super hard to shave that second off, but it's also so obvious that the guy doing 58s laps is way faster.

Last year there was a hobbyist race on my local track and the person who won it was a guy who mainly practices at home on his computer. I imagine a gokart simulation is close enough to the real deal that training on it actually can help a lot. You can get much more fine-grained feedback on how well you're taking certain corners etc. One thing that trips me up is understanding the kart - my local ones have somewhat poor acceleration, so it seems it's not actually best to take the corners as sharp as possible and try to accelerate out of the corner, but instead try to maintain as much speed as possible going into the corner, even if you end up on a bad line. This would be easy to test in a simulation, but I just have to go by gut feeling.

The 1st rule we've learned is : you look all over the place, not just the kart in front of you.

The 2nd rule we've learned is : no skidding, never. That's really hard to do. But look at top pilots, they don't skid.

The 3d rule is : you do your best time on every single lap (super good pilots do almost the same time on most of their laps, within 0.3 sec range; it's hard to believe they do it, but they do !).

4th rule : figure out the best trajectory. According to my kid's teacher it's a question of 10 centimeters here or there (good luck figuring that out !).

Strangely, passing a car is the last thing you learn. But in retrospect,it's normal : most of the time you run after the one in front of you. The opportunities to pass another pilot are rare (most of the time you're much faster so the blue flags forces them to let you pass).

As a dad, I'd say : find a good teacher, it makes a big difference.

I knew a bunch of Indy car drivers and they could visualize a road course lap in their head down to 0.3 repeatably.

how much do you weigh compared to the top drivers.

I don't think that matters as much as you might think. We have 3 race classes at our local track. The Pro guys (top level) are easily 1-2 seconds above the Pro-am guys (mid-level). Some of these pros are not exactly lightweights and are considerably above the minimum weight. Yet they manage to slaughter everybody else out there. You would think they had a disadvantage to the people who are running the baseline weight in the kart, but you sure can't tell it.

The very top drivers (1.5s faster than me) are probably around my weight, I'm ~70kg. There are heavier guys who are doing 1s faster laps than me.

Now imagine that the wealthy father of another average level kid is allowed to enter the race with an expensive kart that makes 10% more power, has 10% more grip and overall gives the driver a "free" 1.5 seconds per lap. Suddenly an average driver can crush a top notch driver every time.

Because that's F1. There's not a balance driver/car. There are good cars, average cars and poor cars, almost all of them driven by good drivers. In karting (and many formula cathegories) the reverse scenario is true: there are good drivers, average drivers and bad drivers, all driving similar karts.

So then I would like your prediction on who would become WDC:

* Hamilton/Verstappen in a Williams?

* Antonio Giovinazzi in a Mercedes?

Don't forget the classic "to finish first, you first have to finish"...a drivers skill is not just better reaction time or better peripheral vision, it's also mental calm, not making stupid mistakes on lap 69 of 70, situational awareness etc.

Antonio Giovinazzi in a Mercedes for sure.

>>> Now imagine that the wealthy father of another average level kid

Indoor kart racing is, in my country, affordable to, say 50% of population (you may have to make some choices though). Count +/-120€ per month (2 training session + 1 race). Swimming lessons are 30€ per month I'd say.

Outdoor karting is really expensive and is for the 1% (which I'm not part of :-)). Count 1000€ per race, gasp !

F1 is well, for ultra rich :-) Plan robbing 1 bank, or 10 (binary joke intended).

But according to many, indoor karts makes you a great pilot because the machine doesn't compensate for your failures.

I have family that do outdoor karting, and they are learning just how expensive it gets. They are certainly not the 1%, and are actually considering switching their kid to spec miata as running a actual car is cheaper than karting. The kids they race against are sons (almost entirely sons) of ex f1 drivers, leading political figures of nations, and ultra wealthy. And this is all US based karting which has no segway into f1. It's truly a 1% sport, you either need to be ultra wealthy or very quickly get supported by someone with that level of wealth.

I've done outdoor KZ class (125cc 2 stroke, 6 gears, both front and rear brakes) karting, apart from a very wealthy parent most kids that make it to the top in Europe drive for factory sponsored teams.

I have occasionally (and very recreationally) raced on track days. I do not know kart racing well, but even in a relatively slow (15 year old BMW) car, it's incredibly scary to race towards a brick wall at ~180 km/h and only brake at the last moment.

So I think that 10% is a lot of skill and dedication, but also a sort of numbing to that fear.

I've done a lot of track days. You realise how big the skill gap is between an average person like me and a proper fast driver.

I've occasionally gone into a corner way faster than I should with my abilities, frightened myself, but the car has stuck to the track. It made the corner. I couldn't do this intentionally, even knowing that I can throw it into the corner x mph faster than I'm comfortable with and I will come out the other end pointing in the right direction, I still can't do it.

Then you realise that if I gave my car to a racing driver, he would drive it like that in every corner of every lap. Because he has to, because if he doesn't he's giving away time.

It blows my mind.

My limit for how fast I can drive a car is so much lower than even an average road cars physical limits.

Agreed, I'm much more at the limit of the kart for every corner. If i crash, its not much $ out of my pocket. The value of the car is always at the back of my head when doing track days - even when its relatively "cheap", and thus I am slower. It take me much much longer to get up to the limit on the car :/

The driver matters more when the cars are close in performance. Any driver on the grid would have been either World Champion or runner up in a Ferrari in 2002 and 2004, Red Bull 2011 and 2013, Mercedes in 2014-2016 and maybe 2019. The only opponent would be the team mate. The car matters nearly zero in the fight with a mate, that is only about driving skill: how to be fast and when, when to try to overtake and when not, etc. Most F1 drivers are very fast but not all of them are as wise in their driving as they should be. Some of them regularly end a race and score points, others regularly crash or throw away good results. (And some drivers are there because they are backed by sponsors with the money needed by the teams they drive for.)

Chain Bear uploaded a video just a few days back where he analysis this: [What's more important: The Driver or the car?] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMN0oB0Waqw

It’s also the balance that the FIA has never managed to maintain to anybody’s satisfaction.

A lot of the issues with F1 stem from the fact that it’s actually two seperate competitions. If you let constructors build the fastest car that they safely can, then two bad things happen. Firstly, the fastest car will win. Secondly, the teams with less money can’t compete. The F1 brand is about having the most technologically advanced cars, but really it has to constantly hold the best teams back in order to keep things competitive. That’s why the regulations are so hopelessly complex (this years new regulations have to cover up the holes in last years poor regulating...), and it’s why anything that is truly innovative is nearly always instantly banned.

F1 is constantly swinging between a state of dominant constructors (Mercedes the past 6 years), and being more like a spec series (the new 2021 regs). If F1 wanted to actually live up to its brand, it would let the constructors build mostly whatever they wanted to. But if it did that, it would also have to divvy up the prize money more fairly to keep the lesser teams from going under, which it’s never going to do because of how political it all is.

A budget cap is one solution to keep design regulations to a minimum and ensure that smaller teams can compete. F1 introduced a $145 million budget cap for the 2021 season, going down to $135 million for 2023-25 seasons. Right now the three biggest teams (MB, Ferrari, Red Bull) spend somewhere around half a billion or so per season.

I'd go with something more radical: a 2x5 meters max box, 100 kg of gas for the 300 km race, 600 kg minimum weight, 50 million budget maybe including the drivers (there is a very long line of them) and maybe a max downforce test if it can be made hard to cheat. Then let the teams do whatever they want.

Somebody will optimize for the engine, somebody for the aerodynamics, somebody for the suspensions, somebody for the tires (buy them from whoever they want) etc. I guess very few will spend much on the driver.

At the beginning they'll be slower than the current cars (which are only marginally faster than the v10s of 2004) but year after year they'll improve new areas of the design and get fast again. I expect a lot of technical drama and very different solutions. It's going to be back to the 70x and 80s with today's technology and processes.

It could definitely be managed better, to optimize for what they seem to be trying to (sport + performance).

Budget caps seems like a cop-out though, as eventually the budgetary rules inherit all the complexity in the current technical rules.

I think some kind of FRAND forced tech licensing / transfer + shared manufacturing would be an interesting solution. Whereby a hyper-optimized solution by a leading team can be licenses (or is outright open sourced) for the next season. And similarly, where all builders have access to a neutral manufacturing facility (a la TSMC).

There is something like that in the engine market where some teams are customers of other teams (usually with last year's engine)

Customer teams get exactly the same engine that the works team uses. The reason they don’t perform as well is that they still have to design the rest of their car (which includes a lot of performance impacting design), and they also may have to modify the engine to fit it in their chassis.

This and the difference in resources. Only Red Bull managed to systematically outperform the factory team of their engine (Renault.) McLaren is more on an even ground with them but still a little bit better. Renault is not pouring much money in their car.

And people who like to think about possible unfairness could argue that manufacturers build about 100 engines per season, test them, then pick the ones to keep, the ones to give to customers and the ones that turned out not to be good enough for racing. It's hard to get the very best engine if you are only a customer and you're really competing against the manufacturer and not only an appearance.

But that’s not a solution for balancing the concerns of the two competitions. The new regs are going to bring F1 closer to being a spec series than it’s ever been before.

The budget cap is just a little over the current Haas budget. Personally I don’t find the prospect of watching a race with 10 Haas level teams in it to be a particularly compelling idea. I’m also not that excited about the idea of constructor innovation being limited to what you can achieve with a Haas budget.

The budget cap is probably the bluntest tool available for addressing constructor performance balancing. For example, the current chassis rules make aero incredibly complex to design (which is expensive), and makes close racing impossible (because of all the dirty air). They would have been better off simplifying those rules (and maybe bringing back ground effect). Look at how well Racing Point performed last weekend, they nearly got a podium. The only significant change they made was copying the Mercedes 2019 aero kit.

I would be very surprised if Haas is spending anywhere close to the incoming budget cap. They arguably have the smallest expenditure thanks to the Ferrari parts deal and contracting the chassis out to Dallara. Of the current teams, I think only Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mclaren (by a much smaller margin) are spending above the incoming cap.

Sealed ground effect will probably not return to F1, not for performance reasons but safety. Introducing the seal greatly increases downforce but once it is broken, the dropoff is incredible. Maintaining that would be nearly impossible with surface imperfections and debris on the track.

The Haas budget for last year was ~ $170 million, not all of that goes to capped expenses, but after you account for that it puts them just under the new cap (Williams, Toro Rosso and Alfa Romeo all spend less than Haas). Renault, McLaren (about $270 million each) and Racing Point (about $190 million) are all above it. There are also 0 teams currently under the cap who make their own engines (Renault is the lowest budget non-customer team). So in terms of budget the current cap really does push everybody down to about the same level as Haas.

Regarding ground effect, the new 2021 regs have already brought it back. They’ve simplified the wing designs, and moved a lot of the downforce to ground effect. It’s not the same level of ground effect that F1 had in the 70s/80s, it’s more like the current IndyCar ground effect design. But the result from a following car perspective is the same. Moving the downforce from wake generating bodywork to under the chassis. However the overall effect is less downforce and therefore slower cars on circuit.

Those numbers are pretty generous, I would beg to differ on at least some of them. [1][2][3]

My mistake when you mentioned ground effect, I thought you meant sealed (skirts and fans). The ground effect you mean is already a thing in present F1 thanks to diffusers. The new rules have just made the diffuser bigger and simplified the front and rear wings.

[1] https://www.racefans.net/2019/10/07/todt-admits-2021-budget-...

[2] https://www.racefans.net/2019/12/27/the-cost-of-f1-2019-team...

[3] https://www.racefans.net/2020/01/02/the-cost-of-f1-2019-part...

The budget cap was revised down after Covid hit (down to $145 million from $175 million), to stop the midfield from going broke, and Ross Brawn says they’re going to lower it further in the coming years [0].

You can’t figure out exactly what teams that’s going to hit, because publicly available finances don’t have enough detail. But it’s either going to bring spending more or less in line with Haas or Racing Point, who are both pretty close in terms of spending anyway. The reason McLaren (a relatively big spending team) are so publicly in favour of it is that they’ve had some pretty serious financial trouble going on recently.

[0]: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.breaking-news-f1-...

That means those teams will have to fire a majority of their workforce, no?

Yes. Ferrari has said they’re looking at entering other racing series (maybe IndyCar), but nothing confirmed.

I wouldn't call Bottas an average driver. His temperament and consistency of top performance is commendable. He has played second fiddle to Lewis for a long time, which is a shame. The car does give him an edge but I would bet most teams would hire him in a flash if he decides to shop around.

I agree completely with all points, though it's nowhere nearly as entertaining as it was up until ~2007. I mean there have been only a handful of GPs that were interesting over the last few years. Coincidentally yesterday's GP was definitely one of them. I mean it's not often you see almost half the cars break down.

There have been some boring seasons, but you probably haven’t watched much recently if you think this weekend was one of the best in recent years.

Hockenheim 2019 for the lols.

I have watched almost all of them actually. And while I was ~10 in the late 90's and not interested, I have recently watched GPs from that era and none of the recent GPs can stand up to the Schumacher vs Hakkinen races. Many of the drivers these days lack character if you ask me, with very few exceptions. And some shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a race car imo. The Austrian GP was interesting simply because of all the mechanical retirements which is relatively rare these days. The only race with similar record in recent years was Hockenheim last year(also incredibly interesting) but it was mostly due to crashes.

Fair points. I enjoyed the Schumacher era. But Hakkinen gave us just 2 years as double champion. Where as up until 2018 we had 3 multi champions racing against a new generation of highly talented drivers. 4 championships wasn’t enough to save Vettel a seat at Ferrari with the depth of talent we currently have on the grid.

It’s also getting tighter at the front. Knock Mercedes down a peg or two and 2021 could be a 4-way fight, with Maclaren joining Ferrari and Red Bull to challenge the Mercs.

Like many other drivers, Hakkinen was a bit short on luck. Similar to Raikkonen for that matter who missed out at least on a second championship because of an unreliable car. Don't get me wrong, I agree that today's cars are much faster, safer, yada-yada.

But I did mention Hakkinen-Schumacher for a reason - though they were direct competitors and had very different driving manners, you could see how they had immense respect for each other and acted like true sportsmen off the track. Whereas now you have a ton of spoiled brats (some multiple world champions at that) who cry like babies every time the wind isn't blowing their way, others who have seats only because they have rich daddies, while people like Hulkenberg are sitting in front of the TV at home... I mean look at teams alone - there are only two teams with solid relationships between drivers inside of them - Norris-Sainz and Raikkonen-Giovinazzi(I suspect because Raikkonen simply does not care and is only there because he enjoys driving).

And I don't see how this will improve in the future. What I'm trying to say is that I'd much rather watch a real race as opposed to a soap opera, which is what today's F1 resembles more. Not just from drivers' prospective but from teams themselves.

Try to go a bit earlier in the Senna, Prost, Mansell, Piquet era. Character was much more present and some funny stories from the backstage. [0]

[0] https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/december-...

Part of why I find F1 boring when I've tried to watch it in the past is that the camerawork is so technically orientated. They pan with the cars so perfectly that there's little sensation of speed. You could be watching RC cars on an indoor track.

With the ubiquity of drones nowadays there would seem to be a lot of options for more exciting viewing.

This comment doesn't make sense. F1 uses onboard cameras extensively- look up the Halo HUDs which overlay speed, throtte, brake and g-force on the Halo device in the cockpit camera view.

Although the speeds those cars move at isn't possible to convey on camera- what looks like 60mph is usually a three-digit speed. Drones wouldn't be able to keep pace, which is why they're used as static cameras rather than chase cameras.

Are you sure it's not a case of selective memory? I remember old F1 races to be quite boring compared to today, if you don't care about who is going to win the constructer championship.

It's perhaps not the best metric, but the number of overtakes over the year may remind you that before 2007, most GPs did look like Monaco. https://old.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/2charb/the_number...

It's not just about overtaking through - previously, strategy relating to fuel and tyre changes was a big part of a race, now this strategic element is all but gone.

Refuelling actually hinders the importance of team strategies as once the car is fuelled, there's a fixed point at which a pitstop has to happen by. Without that, and with the degradation of tyres offering a similar performance hindrance as higher fuel levels, there's far more freedom in strategy, with similar consequences for the wrong call costing a race (or the right one sealing it).

Here's a current strategist's thoughts on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/go6c9m/im_an_f1_e... (TL;DR fuel restricted racing is more deterministic)

Tyre changes are still absolutely critical. Case in point: yesterday Albon's last stint on softs would have likely pipped an otherwise-dominant Mercedes to P2 and possibly even P1, had Hamilton not "touched" him out of contention.

I personally didn't like fuel changes, probably because I started watching F1 before they were introduced and it made me mad that a less efficient, less-reliable engine could now win over more solid ones. They are also spectacularly dangerous for drivers and crew - as Jos Verstappen can attest.

Overtakes shot up because of DRS, which was introduced because reliability had gone up so massively that races had become too predictable. Before DRS, the 2000-2010 decade was ending up producing "Monacos" on most weekends.

Pre-2000, reliability was more on par to what we saw this weekend (45% of cars not finishing), which made it much more exciting on average.

Early/mid 2000s were still pretty unreliable; it was only with the introduction of parc fermé and the car not being allowed to be touched between qualifying and the race that we started seeing the vast majority of cars finishing. It was definitely processional, but that wasn't really down to the reliability.

I agree with your general sentiment. I have stopped watching lately but the last great season I remember was the one when Lewis Hamilton won the championship in the last corner of the last race over Felipe Massa due to some other driver not finishing. I think it was in the late 00s.

IS THAT GLOCK!?

EDIT: for reference https://youtu.be/XHSeGou-pCI

> e.g. this year, one of the teams has a steering wheel they pull toward/push away themselves to change the geometry of the front wheels

The Mercedes dual axis steering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX0Laaj9_RA

Allowed this year, but already banned from next year.

And reportedly not particularly significant except in a few specific circumstances (i.e. to warm tyres in qualifying outlaps or behind a safety-car). Didn't seem to make much of a difference this weekend.

DAS might make more of a difference at circuits like Spa and Monza.

There are a lot more safety car's in F1 now so that makes sense

Do u really feel an average/top driver can strategize during the race?

The race engineer has X10 data, X10 mental bandwidth, and X10 domain practice (that's his day job!)

There all these radio moments (Hamilton "how r we behind them?" after spinning out in Germany etc) .. which really makes it clear that the driver focus is very local (both spatially and temporally), as it should be!

Vettel called his pit stops in one of the last seasons and Schumacher was said to pull all the strings and that this was the reason for his success.

His racing antics and desire to win at any cost aside, Schumi was brilliant. There were way less real time metrics of pit stop strategies, more variables like refueling and less sensors in the car. He was a master strategist and now with each team having dedicated teams around data and strategy, I doubt we will see a complete driver like him.

Calling your pit stops makes sense, sort of, for drivers. Top drivers like Vettel (well pre-Sbinalla Vettel) have a better "feel" for the tires and can gauge how they are doing. But this often times is risky and breaks down in races because the human brain, especially under the pressure of F1 racing, is not going to be tracking thousandths, hundredths, or even tenths of seconds off lap times over 4-5KM of traveled distance. You can hear frustration in engineers voices when trying to convince a top driver they need to get new tires after ignoring previous calls to "box" (come in for a pitstop).

Everybody has their off moments, but I’d say the top drivers strategize pretty heavily (even if your only counting pit strategy as strategy). Even then I’d say driver called pit strategies have about as much chance of working out as team strategies (which are mostly guess work). The only strategy the driver can’t really contribute to is the mechanical preservation strategy, because they can’t see nearly as well what the condition of their engine is. But even then, that strategy is the same all the time - make the engine and gearbox last the required number of races.

This is all true, but personally I find it so boring to actually watch. The cars go around.

Maybe they need to improve the way it is filmed and presented?

In-car cameras make it a lot more interesting.

I still enjoy watching F1, but something the way the cameras were back in the Senna era were just... raw and guttural. You could feel the speed and the closeness of the drive to the track. Perhaps it was because they were imperfect/shook or whatever

This is certainly a true point. A lot of the shots now are cars racing towards a stationary camera; hard to gauge distance (and thus speed) and the background is static.

If you sometimes see spectators phone recordings of F1, where they try to pan their phones with the cars, you can clearly see the insane speed.

Example of F1 broadcasting angle that makes the sport a lot more exciting:

https://youtu.be/RmvZyC6s_Wk?t=187

Don't forget politics too. F1 has a long history of banning innovation due to politics;

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/10-craziest-technologies-...

Hmm, I guess there's some level politics in every situation where humans have power over other humans, but I don't understand why that would make F1 compelling to watch.

> Technological developments (e.g. this year, one of the teams has a steering wheel they pull toward/push away themselves to change the geometry of the front wheels)

I’ve fallen out of love with F1 over recent years. Could you kindly expand on this tech? Does the push/pull change the toe or camber of front wheels, or something else?

It's the toe - the primary "advantage" is that they can warm up the tires on formation / restarts without having to scrub back and forth. That scrubbing motion wears especially hard on the rear tires.

My understanding is that it changes the toe of the front wheels, and is used to slightly increase speed on straight sections.

There are rules limiting what can control the steering / suspension components of a car, and that's one of the reasons why this is controlled by pushing/pulling on the steering wheel rather than something else.

It adjusts the toe of front wheels and it's called DAS (Dual Axis Steering). This is only currently being used by Mercedes in F1. In simplest of terms and from what I have understood, it can reduce friction and tyre wear on long stretches by having 0 toe (parallel front wheels). And achieve better grip on corners by moving the front wheel outwards.

This is a nice video explaining all this: https://youtu.be/TxKhi6Qsrog?t=67

Interesting! Many thanks for the info/video.

The team funding balance makes it a lot less interesting, watching the same team almost always win.

- The fact our planet has enough pollution to deal with already, I'm not saying Formula1 is extremely polluting, but whatever it adds is quite unnecessary for just an entertainment purpose (my opinion of course)

There's always Formula E...

I didn't think about the gas consumption really. I'd have said the same about a cycling race (and I love bike, but practising, not watching). The pollution comes from all the surroundings, transports, materials, organizations, services, broadcasting, littering, ..

I believe Formula 1 has been carbon neutral for quite a while.

By pollution I meant all the transports between races, all the services, products, material needed, all the people (spectators, staff, etc..) coming to races, their transports, food too, the transport and products for their food. It can go deep, those are all the hidden costs in terms of pollution, that people easily overlook

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