F1 2014

In reply to Advan046:

I was interpreting your comment that the safety car was deployed due to the conditions, not due to the accident. Outside of Masa, most of the drivers thought it was ok. The beginning of the race also had the DRS disabled, and they raced with that bad rain, too. Since we don't know why Jules crashed- it's still hard to say that the conditions warrented a SC period. To me, the speed that he hit the vehicle tells me that something went very wrong- either broke or WOT or something like that. Which has happened this season to other drivers even in the dry.

And current rules would deploy the SC for Sutil if he was on the racing line. Otherwise, a yellow and the marshals would move it. Perhaps in bad conditions they amend the rule to have a SC for marshals on the track... not a bad idea.

I know there will be a lot of second guessing, but at least the suggestions can be used to change things in the future.

Well check this Google Maps image of the site the tractor has just pulled the car back to the tarmac so was just upstream of the #12 tower so the green flag was supposed to be waived at that point.

gmap of suzuka crash site

alfadriver wrote: In reply to Advan046: I was interpreting your comment that the safety car was deployed due to the conditions, not due to the accident. Outside of Masa, most of the drivers thought it was ok. The beginning of the race also had the DRS disabled, and they raced with that bad rain, too. Since we don't know why Jules crashed- it's still hard to say that the conditions warrented a SC period. To me, the speed that he hit the vehicle tells me that something went very wrong- either broke or WOT or something like that. Which has happened this season to other drivers even in the dry. And current rules would deploy the SC for Sutil if he was on the racing line. Otherwise, a yellow and the marshals would move it. Perhaps in bad conditions they amend the rule to have a SC for marshals on the track... not a bad idea. I know there will be a lot of second guessing, but at least the suggestions can be used to change things in the future.

NP. As you said I agree that maybe for the future bad conditions = SC for Marshal safety (of course it is dependent on location of the car on track. Front straight or somewhere very certain to be out of the way then no need for SC.)

The speed doesn't seem super high but the grass and small section of tarmac were not going to help him slow down. I think it was just aquaplaning.

Flyin Mikey J wrote: http://www.marussiaf1team.com/news/1035/

Family Statement Jules remains in the Intensive Care Unit of the Mie General Medical Center in Yokkaichi. He has suffered a diffuse axonal injury and is in a critical but stable condition. The medical professionals at the hospital are providing the very best treatment and care and we are grateful for everything they have done for Jules since his accident.

Wiki: Diffuse Axonal Injury

Ugh, doesn't sound good. Thoughts with his family on him coming out of this OK.

-Rob

Since it's wait and see for Jules, how about something on a lighter note?

Massa crashes an Alonso interview at Suzuka:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPQkYxxftfU&feature=youtu.be

-Rob

Safety cars can actually create unsafe conditions at times. If the safety car does not keep a steady "quick" pace in the rain, the tires of the F1 cars will cool off and create even less grip when it is time to race.

I think the yellow flags just need to be enforced.

wvumtnbkr wrote: Safety cars can actually create unsafe conditions at times. If the safety car does not keep a steady "quick" pace in the rain, the tires of the F1 cars will cool off and create even less grip when it is time to race. I think the yellow flags just need to be enforced.

Indeed. Most people think that contributed to Senna's fatal crash.

Fair enough, but what else are you supposed to do. They have professional race car driver Bernd MAylander who is an ex DTM racer driving a modified AMG Merc. So fast driver in a fast car. I think we all agree that safety cars are needed. I would make an argument that the silly 13” wheels with comically tall sidewall tires are just as much an issue as rolling radius is going to be affected much more with such a volume of air than with a 16-17-18” wheel. I would also assume that the pace delta is going to be less between the F1 cars and the pace car in the wet than in the dry. Let’s not try to Monday morning quarter back this too much until we know all the facts. Having said that I’ll be a hypocrite and immediately jump in. Monaco has cranes to lift cars off track, they could be outside the tire barriers / fences. Why not mandate those. That still doesn’t answer the fact that marshals need to be on the scene of the accident, and let’s face it, it appears to be a miracle that no marshals were killed, that car could just as easily have hit two marshals as hit the crane. Also many people, me included have been bemoaning the pacing of run off areas saying it takes away skill, and that there should be a penalty for going off. How might this have been different if there was high friction asphalt run off not grass for him to go over? Could he have slowed down enough to steer away from the impact of at least lessened it to be non-critical?

I hate to bring this up, but I will. Who will replace him for (hopefully only) the rest of the season? Rossi or will someone else walk in with a bigger checkbook? FP1 for Russia is in 3 days.

Because Monaco is much narrower and compact, so a crane with a relatively long boom can cover much larger sections of track than say China, or COTA, or, or, or.......

From what I read on his injury, something 90% end up in a permanent vegetative state......ugh.

Tom_Spangler wrote:

wvumtnbkr wrote: Safety cars can actually create unsafe conditions at times. If the safety car does not keep a steady "quick" pace in the rain, the tires of the F1 cars will cool off and create even less grip when it is time to race. I think the yellow flags just need to be enforced.

Indeed. Most people think that contributed to Senna's fatal crash.

Senna's crash has been blamed on a lot of things, I hadn't heard the safety car one.

I really hope this doesn't mean we get more parking lots outside turns in F1 tracks. This was certainly a worst-case scenario for the impact with nothing more than wet grass between the track and the tractor - but if he was aquaplaning off the track, then he would have continued to aquaplane on a painted paved surface as well. I doubt it would have made a significant difference.

Thank goodness it happened in Japan and not in a country with a lower level of medical care.

The way I heard it "blamed" on the Safety Car was the lower speeds, allowed the tire pressure to drop, which lowered the ride height to the point it bottomed out and he lost control.

Sounds spurious at best to me.

or a country with a higher level of ambulance chasers

z31maniac wrote: The way I heard it "blamed" on the Safety Car was the lower speeds, allowed the tire pressure to drop, which lowered the ride height to the point it bottomed out and he lost control. Sounds spurious at best to me.

Doubt it. If the car's starting to drag on the ground you'll notice it and take action accordingly. If your underbody wood plank gets worn too thin you'll be DQ'd (IIRC) so you'd do the warmup shuffle to get the tires hot again and gain ground clearance. Driving fast would do little for tire temperature and would wear the plank down more - on top of being dangerous.

Sutil has been quoted as saying the reason he went off is because of hydroplaning, and that he saw Bianchi's car do the exact same thing at the same place as him.

GameboyRMH wrote:

z31maniac wrote: The way I heard it "blamed" on the Safety Car was the lower speeds, allowed the tire pressure to drop, which lowered the ride height to the point it bottomed out and he lost control. Sounds spurious at best to me.

Doubt it. If the car's starting to drag on the ground you'll notice it and take action accordingly. If your underbody wood plank gets worn too thin you'll be DQ'd (IIRC) so you'd do the warmup shuffle to get the tires hot again and gain ground clearance. Driving fast would do little for tire temperature and would wear the plank down more - on top of being dangerous.

Hence why I called it spurious at best.

GameboyRMH wrote:

z31maniac wrote: The way I heard it "blamed" on the Safety Car was the lower speeds, allowed the tire pressure to drop, which lowered the ride height to the point it bottomed out and he lost control. Sounds spurious at best to me.

Doubt it. If the car's starting to drag on the ground you'll notice it and take action accordingly. If your underbody wood plank gets worn too thin you'll be DQ'd (IIRC) so you'd do the warmup shuffle to get the tires hot again and gain ground clearance. Driving fast would do little for tire temperature and would wear the plank down more - on top of being dangerous.

I think it's pretty well established that it is what caused Senna's crash, the other drivers seem to agree. It's not like it was permanently grounding out, it just grounded out momentarily at a critical point near the apex and he lost control. There is a British documentary somewhere that goes through the on board and off board footage and shows where he lost control, the brain time to react, his reaction and the crash. I call the other 'theories' far more spurious like the steering column coming loose (disproved) and my 'favorite' he was assassinated by a gun shot.

It would be interesting to see the telemetry from the first time through the corner and the 2nd time through after the caution when he wrecked.

You'd think after a full lap of more heat in the tires it would have built some psi vs the first time through.

(Did they monitor telemetry back then?)

Yes, they had telemetry. However, it wasn't constantly uplinked to the pits. The Williams telemetry box did not survive the accident but the renault box did.

Getting back to this situation... I don't remember who it was, but they asked Charlie Whiting over the radio to get the safety car to go faster at the beginning of this race for EXACTLY this reason. I think it was Hamilton.

This tire warm up situation is also why there was no safety car in F1 until the mid 1980s (around then iirc).

The safety car situation is not just when it is wet. This is also the case when it is dry.

For the record, the book "Senna" and the book "Senna vs Prost" both give some crediability to the slow pace of the safety car contributing to Sennas air pressure being down and then the car bottoming out. However, this is refuted because the lap BEFORE he wrecked at Tamburello he set the 6th fastest lap of the race OVERALL. Kinda hard to do that on tires that aren't up to pressure.

GameboyRMH wrote:

z31maniac wrote: The way I heard it "blamed" on the Safety Car was the lower speeds, allowed the tire pressure to drop, which lowered the ride height to the point it bottomed out and he lost control. Sounds spurious at best to me.

Doubt it. If the car's starting to drag on the ground you'll notice it and take action accordingly. If your underbody wood plank gets worn too thin you'll be DQ'd (IIRC) so you'd do the warmup shuffle to get the tires hot again and gain ground clearance. Driving fast would do little for tire temperature and would wear the plank down more - on top of being dangerous.

Going fast in a straight line does nothing. Swerving back and forth does almost nothing. You need pace THROUGH the corner to heat up tires. Something the safety car is not really capable of in the wet. (Some say not capable in the dry either)

I have read the Prost V Senna book, but it was years ago so I can't remember the full details. Just becuase he was very fast on the prior lap still doesn't mean the tires were fully up to temp, or that the accident couldn't have happened of fully warm tires. Don't forget how stupidly low these cars were running inthe post active suspension era. Here's a snippet on Adrian Newey's views on the Senna crash taken from the 'trial' section of the Wiki entry.

In May 2011, Williams FW16 designer Adrian Newey expressed his views on the accident: "The honest truth is that no one will ever know exactly what happened. There's no doubt the steering column failed and the big question was whether it failed in the accident or did it cause the accident? It had fatigue cracks and would have failed at some point. There is no question that its design was very poor. However, all the evidence suggests the car did not go off the track as a result of steering column failure... If you look at the camera shots, especially from Michael Schumacher's following car, the car didn't understeer off the track. It oversteered which is not consistent with a steering column failure. The rear of the car stepped out and all the data suggests that happened. Ayrton then corrected that by going to 50% throttle which would be consistent with trying to reduce the rear stepping out and then, half-a-second later, he went hard on the brakes. The question then is why did the rear step out? The car bottomed much harder on that second lap which again appears to be unusual because the tyre pressure should have come up by then – which leaves you expecting that the right rear tyre probably picked up a puncture from debris on the track. If I was pushed into picking out a single most likely cause that would be it.

Back on (the up to date) topic.

Here's an unfounded idea/rumor/speculation that we will now never know. Bianchi was (is?) in the Ferrari development program, in fact they are making just as many announcements as the Marussia team about his health. Alonso is leaving Ferrari to be replaced by Vettel. What about Kimi, he's hardly shown his old form this year and many have been calling for his head. Was the plan to replace Kimi with Bianchi for next year had this not happened?

racing in a berkleying TYPHOON??????? Really???

just goes to show you how important profit actually is.........

Adrian_Thompson wrote: Back on (the up to date) topic. Here's an unfounded idea/rumor/speculation that we will now never know. Bianchi was (is?) in the Ferrari development program, in fact they are making just as many announcements as the Marussia team about his health. Alonso is leaving Ferrari to be replaced by Vettel. What about Kimi, he's hardly shown his old form this year and many have been calling for his head. Was the plan to replace Kimi with Bianchi for next year had this not happened?

I'll admit to being a Kimi fan. Perhaps because I see him as a bit of a rebel in bucking the modern image of an F1 driver. I think him calling out James Hunt as a hero is very telling in that. (* see note below).

I'd hate to see him get the boot because that's probably the last time he'd be in F1, or racing in any series I'd be able to watch here in the states. However, I think his struggles with the car are, in some ways, more valuable to Ferrari than Alonso. Alonso would be fast in anything you put him in, but when you're trying to make a car faster, having the driver adjust rather than the team adjusting the car would be a detriment. I could see Alonso going (as I don't think he wants to be there anyway), Vettel coming in and Kimi there as driver who can give good feedback while still scoring points for the team.

But, I wouldn't be surprised if Vettel has a new teammate at Ferrari next year.....

*My son and I were talking about Kimi just the other night. When he speaks in his native tongue, he's actually quite talkative. I wonder if much of his deadpan and simple responses are simply because he still isn't comfortable with English. I need to find some post race interviews from Finnish media.....

-Rob

oldeskewltoy wrote: racing in a berkleying TYPHOON??????? Really??? just goes to show you how important profit actually is.........

A typhoon was coming, it wasn't actually a typhoon at race time. Most of the drivers (except Massa) are saying conditions really weren't that bad out there and that without the benefit of hindsight that the FIA and Charlie made the right calls. In fact most felt they were over cautious at the start of the race and held them behind the safety car too long as they immediate started changing on to inters once the safety car came in, they didn't even need wets anymore. Even at 3/4 distance pit radios were saying the rain would hold off for the rest of the race, it was only after that that the radar indicated it may arrive earlier, which it did. if they had postponed the race a day they still couldn't have guaranteed good weather.

Remember only GW Bush can control when, where and who bad weather strikes.

In reply to rob_lewis:

Kimi is in the final year of his contract and this probably suits both him and the team very well. Ferrari would be hard-pressed to find a better driver and Kimi is likely looking to retire after next year.

Bianchi's accident puts the team's plan in disarray but there will never be a shortage of drivers who want to drive for Ferrari - no matter how bad the car/team is.