Formula 1

[Ozanne]

Sporting integrity should matter, if it does and RBR have cheated then there should be stripped of all titles. How many titles another driver does doesn’t factor into it. 

[Crazyfool01]

5 minutes ago, Barry Fish said:

I don't think anyone said boring ? 

I mentioned the 30 seconds but it had nothing to do with boring.  There is a real question mark over if 2021 and 2022 was operated on a fair basis.  Max seems to have been given a 0.2 / 0.3 second per lap advantage he shouldn't of had.  Going off Ferrari comments.

I really hope the FIA publish how much Red Bull cheated by...  So we can all start to pick the bones.  If its tens of thousands then it will be "nothing to see here" but if its millions - well...  

wasn’t you 😛… and yeah I agree on punishment for massive financial breaks but I don’t believe any of this favouring red bull bollocks that’s being pushed by some … 

[Ozanne]

I’ve said it before but the other aspect that sucks is that other teams had to make people redundant, for Mercedes it was 40 people. Yet RBR were going over the cap which just makes it worse in my view.

This will only add to the view that the FIA is heavily biased towards RBR if they don’t clamp down hard on them. Of course they won’t though. 

[squirrelarmy]

The issue is the integrity of the sport. I’m not the only long term fan who finally had enough of the constant controversy over if a race or championship was legal or not and the ambiguity from the people in charge isn’t helping the situation. 
 

I suppose it’s good for ratings and the drama brings page clicks so the advertisers are happy. I haven’t watched a single race this year or purposely gone looking for information about a race. It’s all over social media every week so you can’t avoid what’s going on. 
 

This is what happens when you have a media company running the show. 

[charlierc]

On 10/10/2022 at 9:48 PM, DareToDibble said:

If nothing else, we’re getting some great memes out of this.

I mean, for some sections of the Internet, this is like fucking Christmas

 

[charlierc]

6 hours ago, squirrelarmy said:

He’s got a point though. Do you think we’d have this shitshow if Ecclestone, Mosely & Whiting were still around. 
 

They had their flaws and their own share of scandals but they wouldn’t be standing for any of this crap.

Yes, I do think we'd have something similar if we still had Bernie and Mosley. Mainly as something in this ballpark actually happened.

In 2009, they tried to introduce something like a cost cap on much financially harsher terms than what we have now and at a time when manufacturers like BMW and Toyota were walking away due to it being too expensive in the midst of the financial crisis (Honda did as well but they seem to walk away from F1 after a few years each time). What ended up happening is that they ended up forcing Mosley out as a compromise in agreeing a cap without teeth, then all the teams duly blew through the limit anyway and the budget cap was quietly dropped in about 2012.

[charlierc]

5 hours ago, Ozanne said:

I’ve said it before but the other aspect that sucks is that other teams had to make people redundant, for Mercedes it was 40 people. Yet RBR were going over the cap which just makes it worse in my view.

This will only add to the view that the FIA is heavily biased towards RBR if they don’t clamp down hard on them. Of course they won’t though. 

The thing is Red Bull made people redundant too. Mercedes have clearly been more vocal about theirs: Red Bull long-term staff redundancies 'painful' | PlanetF1 : PlanetF1

I'm aware this has the air of another credibility issue for the FIA, which has absolutely taken a kicking on that score this year, not least after Japan with assorted antics from the recovery tractor to the full points loophole to the fact team radios suggest half the grid thought the race ended one lap early.

I think you were only going to get Max's title stripped if it was found Red Bull acted in bad faith and deliberately hid massive overspends way beyond the 5% figure, maybe even spends close to the £300M+ figure they were spending in 2018/19 in the final years of unrestricted spending.

Even then, would have to be a lot to meet such a barometer. Hell, the FIA let Alonso keep Singapore 2008 when a big influence in that race win was his team ordering Piquet Jr to crash the other car on purpose, while they let Hamilton and Alonso continue their 2007 fight despite McLaren being thrown out of the constructor's for stealing Ferrari's confidential data. The bar for revoking the title looks super high and would need some kind of enormous smoking gun to bring that into the equation that, so far, doesn't have to been reached.

I've seen it suggested that greater reductions for their 2023 budget could end up being a way to go. But then again, this is part of the issue - there's so many fucking claims and counter-claims about what it is that lead to the FIA and Red Bull's auditors coming to different figures, and what a punishment may or may not be.

Least the procedural breach that they, along with Aston Martin, are facing seems more straight forward, given Williams got fined in June for submitting things late.

Edited October 12, 2022 by charlierc

[squirrelarmy]

14 minutes ago, charlierc said:

the budget cap was quietly dropped in about 2012

They knew budget caps wouldn’t work then just as they don’t work now. Teams will always find a way to break the rules especially with creative accounting. 

[charlierc]

Just now, squirrelarmy said:

They knew budget caps wouldn’t work then just as they don’t work now. Teams will always find a way to break the rules especially with creative accounting. 

Well as I said earlier in the thread, I had an issue for the feasibility of this given there were so many exemptions and exclusions allowed, making me think you'd be better off having a higher budget cap but with way fewer exemptions. Indeed, the early version was meant to be around $175M but smaller teams wanted it cut further, hence the $145M figure (going down to $135M next year, assuming inflation doesn't bump it as happened for 2022).

[Ozanne]

1 hour ago, charlierc said:

The thing is Red Bull made people redundant too. Mercedes have clearly been more vocal about theirs: Red Bull long-term staff redundancies 'painful' | PlanetF1 : PlanetF1

I'm aware this has the air of another credibility issue for the FIA, which has absolutely taken a kicking on that score this year, not least after Japan with assorted antics from the recovery tractor to the full points loophole to the fact team radios suggest half the grid thought the race ended one lap early.

I think you were only going to get Max's title stripped if it was found Red Bull acted in bad faith and deliberately hid massive overspends way beyond the 5% figure, maybe even spends close to the £300M+ figure they were spending in 2018/19 in the final years of unrestricted spending.

Even then, would have to be a lot to meet such a barometer. Hell, the FIA let Alonso keep Singapore 2008 when a big influence in that race win was his team ordering Piquet Jr to crash the other car on purpose, while they let Hamilton and Alonso continue their 2007 fight despite McLaren being thrown out of the constructor's for stealing Ferrari's confidential data. The bar for revoking the title looks super high and would need some kind of enormous smoking gun to bring that into the equation that, so far, doesn't have to been reached.

I've seen it suggested that greater reductions for their 2023 budget could end up being a way to go. But then again, this is part of the issue - there's so many fucking claims and counter-claims about what it is that lead to the FIA and Red Bull's auditors coming to different figures, and what a punishment may or may not be.

Least the procedural breach that they, along with Aston Martin, are facing seems more straight forward, given Williams got fined in June for submitting things late.

None of that is good enough. It will result in RBR just taking more chances, they’ll just cheat their way to another world title. To get other teams on board and if the FIA genuinely want people to view them as impartial then they will strip points off RBR in 2021.

We all know they won’t because their sole aim is ensuring Max Verstappen is World Champion. 

[Ozanne]

 

[DareToDibble]

9 hours ago, Ozanne said:

None of that is good enough. It will result in RBR just taking more chances, they’ll just cheat their way to another world title. To get other teams on board and if the FIA genuinely want people to view them as impartial then they will strip points off RBR in 2021.

We all know they won’t because their sole aim is ensuring Max Verstappen is World Champion. 

Honestly, you make a lot of good points, but you lose me completely with these comments. They are inept, but they don’t have a preference for Max. I think your bias towards Lewis is blinkering your view here.

Sure, they got a new champion last year, big news.

I’d argue Lewis breaking Schumacher’s record would be even bigger news, it would be groundbreaking for the sport.

So there are arguments both ways for why they would prefer 1 driver to win over the other. The fact is, they aren’t biased to Max (or anyone else), they’re just a bit shit at the moment.

Edited October 13, 2022 by DareToDibble

[charlierc]

37 minutes ago, DareToDibble said:

Honestly, you make a lot of good points, but you lose me completely with these comments. They are inept, but they don’t have a preference for Max. I think your bias towards Lewis is blinkering your view here.

Sure, they got a new champion last year, big news.

I’d argue Lewis breaking Schumacher’s record would be even bigger news, it would be groundbreaking for the sport.

So there are arguments both ways for why they would prefer 1 driver to win over the other. The fact is, they aren’t biased to Max (or anyone else), they’re just a bit shit at the moment.

Well we saw how big a story it was when Lewis Hamilton broke Michael Schumacher's all-time win record in 2020, and the fact it was a big (if somewhat under-reported) story last year when Hamilton picked up his 100th F1 race victory. Even if honestly at the race he did it, I was more gutted for Lando Norris not winning his first race after he and McLaren got the weather wrong. It's not like F1 is going out their way to intentionally disrespect him because they really wouldn't have anything to gain from doing that.

But that's kinda it on the FIA - if we had the reverse position, where Verstappen was set to comfortably win Abu Dhabi 2021 only for a late safety car and Hamilton is on the better tyres for the final lap, the dysfunction seen with the FIA is that it is highly plausible they would've done the exact same mismanagement. They wanted one racing lap, they got one, if by doing it in a spectacularly cack-handed way. Had they let the lapped cars go earlier in the lap and not held back Ricciardo and Stroll, it might have provoked less complaints. Even then, Hamilton nearly passed Verstappen back into turn 9 on that final lap and Verstappen even nearly spun on the final corner (which, tbf, really would've been a dramatic ending).

But maybe that's the also part of the feedback loop. AD (and to a lesser extent the flat-out weird Saudi GP the week before) was such a shock factor that it seems as though that race is still clouding judgement when discussing everything that went on in 2021 and lead to some people wanting any excuse to punish someone for daring to win in such a flawed way.

[Ozanne]

1 hour ago, DareToDibble said:

Honestly, you make a lot of good points, but you lose me completely with these comments. They are inept, but they don’t have a preference for Max. I think your bias towards Lewis is blinkering your view here.

Sure, they got a new champion last year, big news.

I’d argue Lewis breaking Schumacher’s record would be even bigger news, it would be groundbreaking for the sport.

So there are arguments both ways for why they would prefer 1 driver to win over the other. The fact is, they aren’t biased to Max (or anyone else), they’re just a bit shit at the moment.

Yes I am biased towards Lewis, I’m big enough to admit that I am biased unlike some others around here…

The evidence seems pretty overwhelming at the moment that the FIA is biased towards MV, just take last season and the fact that they had to change the rules mid-race to ensure he became Champion (that was after multiple examples of letting him off with barely any punishments).

I would imagine that they don’t want Lewis breaking the record and the only way they can ensure that happens is get behind their golden boy.

F1 seems to be the only sport on the planet that treats their most successful athlete like crap. Look at other sports and they glorify their most successful yet with Lewis it’s constant doubts on his performance, rigging races to screw him or just ignoring rules for certain people yet clamping down in his nose stud. At some points it seems like they actively want him to retire. 

[pryce]

3 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

Yes I am biased towards Lewis, I’m big enough to admit that I am biased unlike some others around here…

The evidence seems pretty overwhelming at the moment that the FIA is biased towards MV, just take last season and the fact that they had to change the rules mid-race to ensure he became Champion (that was after multiple examples of letting him off with barely any punishments).

I would imagine that they don’t want Lewis breaking the record and the only way they can ensure that happens is get behind their golden boy.

F1 seems to be the only sport on the planet that treats their most successful athlete like crap. Look at other sports and they glorify their most successful yet with Lewis it’s constant doubts on his performance, rigging races to screw him or just ignoring rules for certain people yet clamping down in his nose stud. At some points it seems like they actively want him to retire. 

so they treat someone who won 7 championships like crap, give me a break, the cult of Hamilton is strong! 

 

if they were bias towards Verstappen and Red bull then Hamilton would of got a penalty for the first corner incident, if they were bias then they would of looked into why or how Mercedes were developing a Hybrid engine 6 months before it was even announced, if they were bias they would of punished the illegal pirelli tyre test more. im sure they told latifi to crash as well in a secret way

 

also they wouldnt of made teams change things due to purposing which helped Mercedes close the gap! as they were the only team lobbying for it.

 

Hamilton lost last years championship because he pressed the wrong button in Baku on the restart, would of won it easily.

 

Hamilton fans just dont know how to lose, they scream when anything goes against them. i remember the Rosberg win and the outcry that they were favouring the German driver and Hamilton should leave mercedes. the most entitled bunch of fans in any sport 

 

its embarrassing.

 

when Mclaren were caught spying, they didnt take the drivers points, just the constructors, and its what they should do here which will casue them to lose massive amount of money.

[DareToDibble]

3 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

Yes I am biased towards Lewis, I’m big enough to admit that I am biased unlike some others around here…

The evidence seems pretty overwhelming at the moment that the FIA is biased towards MV, just take last season and the fact that they had to change the rules mid-race to ensure he became Champion (that was after multiple examples of letting him off with barely any punishments).

I would imagine that they don’t want Lewis breaking the record and the only way they can ensure that happens is get behind their golden boy.

F1 seems to be the only sport on the planet that treats their most successful athlete like crap. Look at other sports and they glorify their most successful yet with Lewis it’s constant doubts on his performance, rigging races to screw him or just ignoring rules for certain people yet clamping down in his nose stud. At some points it seems like they actively want him to retire. 

Not sure if that first line was aimed at me or others but I'm neither a Max or Lewis fan, I have no preference who wins as long as I get to see good racing - which has been pretty hit and miss this season unfortunately. If we were discussing Danny Ric then I would probably be biased mind 😄 

Max is not their "golden boy". They, like us, want good racing that gets the fans in. I would evenargue that Max winning by 30 seconds or whatever it was is bad for business as it becomes a precession. But all talk of them "rigging" races has got to stop as it is complete nonsense. The amount of times

I agree that Lewis doesn't seem to be heralded in the same way as other sports do with their top stars, but again, that doesn't mean they're rigging things against him. Although I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that a huge deal will be made if/when he wins an 8th title.

[squirrelarmy]

Not aimed at this thread but the online toxicity online between the two fanbases on social media just reinforces my decision to stop watching it. 
 

I don’t think it’s an accident that two separate cults have been formed with opposing views. You can’t post an independent viewpoint without one or both fanbases shouting you down. 
 

It’s just not enjoyable anymore.

[Ozanne]

56 minutes ago, DareToDibble said:

Not sure if that first line was aimed at me or others but I'm neither a Max or Lewis fan, I have no preference who wins as long as I get to see good racing - which has been pretty hit and miss this season unfortunately. If we were discussing Danny Ric then I would probably be biased mind 😄 

Max is not their "golden boy". They, like us, want good racing that gets the fans in. I would evenargue that Max winning by 30 seconds or whatever it was is bad for business as it becomes a precession. But all talk of them "rigging" races has got to stop as it is complete nonsense. The amount of times

I agree that Lewis doesn't seem to be heralded in the same way as other sports do with their top stars, but again, that doesn't mean they're rigging things against him. Although I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that a huge deal will be made if/when he wins an 8th title.

No no it wasn’t aimed at you mate. For what it’s worth I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being biased, it’s perfectly normal but it’s always worthwhile being open about it. Danny Ric is awesome btw. 
 

Sorry to say it but no matter how many times someone says there isn’t an FIA bias towards Max I will never believe it. I firmly believe that they screwed Lewis out of the title in AD last year and they have had multiple chances to correct that injustice but they refuse and double down on it. You referenced the MV procession which the commentators barely had an issue with, yet when LH was doing that they regularly said things like ‘thank God for MV’ when he did something lower down the order. Where is that level of criticism now? It’s nowhere because MV is leading. 

[DareToDibble]

46 minutes ago, squirrelarmy said:

Not aimed at this thread but the online toxicity online between the two fanbases on social media just reinforces my decision to stop watching it. 
 

I don’t think it’s an accident that two separate cults have been formed with opposing views. You can’t post an independent viewpoint without one or both fanbases shouting you down. 
 

It’s just not enjoyable anymore.

Yeah, agreed. I saw some comments earlier in the season about how it's becoming more of a "football crowd", which I completely get. Some of the stories coming out about how certain fans are being treated would kinda back that up too.

[DareToDibble]

7 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

No no it wasn’t aimed at you mate. For what it’s worth I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being biased, it’s perfectly normal but it’s always worthwhile being open about it. Danny Ric is awesome btw. 
 

Sorry to say it but no matter how many times someone says there isn’t an FIA bias towards Max I will never believe it. I firmly believe that they screwed Lewis out of the title in AD last year and they have had multiple chances to correct that injustice but they refuse and double down on it. You referenced the MV procession which the commentators barely had an issue with, yet when LH was doing that they regularly said things like ‘thank God for MV’ when he did something lower down the order. Where is that level of criticism now? It’s nowhere because MV is leading. 

I don't think I'll get over Danny Ric wanting a Vegas GP for years and then when there finally is one he isn't on the grid, gutted for him!

To be fair I don't think the commentators ever said things were a precession when Lewis was winning at a canter for years either. For most years the best on track action has been in the midfield as, with the exception of 2 or 3, most of the titles have been won fairly easily with 1 team/driver dominating.

[Ozanne]

29 minutes ago, DareToDibble said:

I don't think I'll get over Danny Ric wanting a Vegas GP for years and then when there finally is one he isn't on the grid, gutted for him!

To be fair I don't think the commentators ever said things were a precession when Lewis was winning at a canter for years either. For most years the best on track action has been in the midfield as, with the exception of 2 or 3, most of the titles have been won fairly easily with 1 team/driver dominating.

My favourite was the Ham v Vettel battles, although that’s probably skewed because Vettel binned it into the wall in Germany in 2018 😂

[squirrelarmy]

4 hours ago, Ozanne said:

My favourite was the Ham v Vettel battles, although that’s probably skewed because Vettel binned it into the wall in Germany in 2018 😂

I’m wondering how social media would react now to Schumacher breaking Hills suspension in 94 after hitting the wall. 

[charlierc]

4 hours ago, squirrelarmy said:

I’m wondering how social media would react now to Schumacher breaking Hills suspension in 94 after hitting the wall. 

I suspect extremely negatively. But probably nothing on Senna and Prost fans after their Suzuka smashes in 1989/90.

[charlierc]

9 hours ago, DareToDibble said:

Yeah, agreed. I saw some comments earlier in the season about how it's becoming more of a "football crowd", which I completely get. Some of the stories coming out about how certain fans are being treated would kinda back that up too.

There has been an element of that now and again - booing Vettel on the podium during his 9 race winning streak in 2013 was a bit extreme, even if it was probably frustration as he was about to win a 4th straight title seemingly without breaking a sweat.

I had thought this year wasn't quite as extreme if only as we haven't really had a title fight, unlike 2021 when Max v Lewis got crazy. Though episodes from some race events where tracks haven't caught up with demand leading to a sub-par experience (Monza was particularly criticised for this) and where some people have been behaving like dicks and ruining it for everyone isn't welcome to see.

[Ghost of Robbie Williams]

.

Edited October 14, 2022 by Ghost of Robbie Williams