www.motorsport.com
Surprising as hell, honestly.Absolutely moronic.
AlphaTauri F1 team retains Tsunoda and Ricciardo for 2024
Not a fan of this at all. They’re trying to set up Ricciardo as the Perez successor in 2025, which is just ridiculous. He got washed by Norris last year, but is going to be more competitive with Max?? If anything, give Lawson until Ricciardo’s hand recovers, give Ricciardo the end of the season afterwards, and make a decision then.Absolutely moronic.
AlphaTauri F1 team retains Tsunoda and Ricciardo for 2024
I think it's Tsunoda's seat to lose for 2025-26. Maybe, Danny's a placeholder, idk what to think at this juncture.
I just don't get it. They're a Junior Team ffs.
With Red Bull switching to Ford in ‘26 I wonder how committed they really are Yuki.
Honda seem pretty committed to him, I think he's a likely candidate for Aston in 2026, hopefully alongside Palou.
I’m curious to see how the dynamic changes with Aston becoming a factory Honda program. Lawrence has no one to answer to right now…but Honda will probably want two big hitters in the car come ‘26, and Lance could be SOL.
I've been a fan almost my entire life. I didn't come into this last week and I've never even seen a single episode of Drive To Survive. Has F1 post Concorde Agreement always been a sort of cartel siphoning money off from various governments to make a buck? Yes. I don't deny it. But Liberty has optimized that to the stage where it resembles the worst aspects of both European club soccer and American team sports simultaneously. At least the NBA is saying "We'll expand to Seattle and Las Vegas and maybe two more cities" instead of what F1 is doing now. Every team seems to be matched with a specific manufacturer except a trio of scrub squads (Williams, whatever Toro Rosso will be named next year, Haas) that permanently have For Sale signs strapped to them with the expectations that GM, Toyota, or Hyundai buy one of them.
I give Tsunoda some leeway because he only had one season each of F3 and F2 and AlphaTauri as a whole have gone backwards since signing him. There are times where he’s still very boneheaded, times where he shows good pace, but still just needs to find his composure and gain some consistency. I understand Honda backing him as much as they do too since Japanese drivers don’t come along too often on the F1 ladder. If it were up to me, he’d be placed alongside Lawson next year and Red Bull would proceed from there. Ultimately I’d much rather see young guys duke it out amongst themselves than bring in retreads like Raikkonen and Ricciardo.
www.theguardian.com
I'm not just talking about the fact that one team has this set of regs figured out, though that is part of it. It's more about the overall package with the cars. These cars do terribly hitting curbs compared to the pre-2022 cars, and they're significantly less nimble all the way around. With the shortening of DRS zones and the current aero package, F1 has also managed to reduce the DRS effectiveness to the point where teams have strategized around it. We wind up with these DRS trains now where no one can make a pass and everyone is stuck racing 7 tenths behind the next guy lap after lap, especially at the low downforce circuits.
Marketing gagView attachment 73177
Jessica Hawkins becomes first female F1 test driver in five years
Aston Martin have confirmed that their driver ambassador Jessica Hawkins has become the first woman to drive a modern F1 car in almost five years
I don't think so at all. The new regulations have brought the field much closer together. You never know who will be second behind Max going into a weekend.
Idk about Lewis in his run, he actually had competition.
That's why I get a giggle out of people thinking pit stops are exciting. After you have seen 500 sub-three second stops, they all look the same. The only entertainment value is when something goes wrong. I also find cars going like hell to be more entertaining that having them sit still.
Max, Lewis and Vettel all had the best car during their run, as did Schumacher and Senna.
Tsunoda has shown improvement over the last three seasons. I don't see him ending up in the Red Bull but he certainly is a candidate for Aston when they switch to Honda and with the way this season has gone I believe he'd be an improvement over Stroll who seems to have regressed a lot this season.
FIA, like any org, would like to find a set of regulations that works for more than a single year. I think they saw the cost cap as their manner of making this happen, but I do have a lot of questions about how that is being followed.
I first want to preface the paragraph that will follow this and the sentence I start it with being one which has generally been ruined by the internet, and a thing where it can actually be dangerous to blindly follow "what sounds good" in terms of review of a topic for which I have minimal or no real experience. But alas, it's what I've got for judgement, OK?
It's a constant battle between the sanction bodies and the teams. The teams always find ways to go faster, so the sanction body slaps them down with more rules and it starts all over again.
I certainly agree that the cars are way too big and heavy these days. A massive surface area itself makes for big aero wakes, and loss of downforce for the trailing cars.
I understand all of this, but I want to point out that the FIA spent a lot - a LOT - of time, effort and money to create regulations which they believed would over the long term benefit the overall competitiveness of F1 in addition to hyping the new regs up like I'd never seen a series do before. The opposite has happened, and in fact we have one of the most dominant runs in the history of the sport from Red Bull. Such is the dominance that it is hurting their viewership and social media metrics. I'm not one of the people who is going to expect every season to look like 2021, but I also realize that this level of investment and effort to basically wind up with an even less competitive version of the 2002 season will not be appealing to anyone. It's honestly worse in so much as the 2002 season would be done already, but today we have two more months of F1 in which Verstappen is probably going to dominate the field and win all 6 remaining races.
And they got it as right as they could. Then the teams found more downforce and created more turbulence. The FIA did all the right things. They just didn'y go far enough and now they have to redo it.
This happens every time they change the rules. Red Bull figured it out and no one else came close, but you can't legistlate that. You leave the rules alone and let everyone else get up to speed. I'm a big fan of rules stability.
You may have been better off saving your money to go to the Petite. At least you know that's going to be competitive. 10 hours of fierce competition beats a 2 hour parade every time.
Max has put pretty much all of his teammates in a body bag by the end of their tenure. He thoroughly beat Sainz in his rookie year at Toro Rosso (and was promoted the next year in part because of the ensign that caused within the team), whipped Ricciardo as a 20 year-old in his third year at Red Bull, got Gasly demoted to Alpha Tauri, forced Albon out of the sport for a year, and is seemingly going to wind up retiring Perez. All of those guys have been well-regarded at one point or another; Perez was revered when he earned the Red Bull seat after being forced out at Racing Point, and Albon is currently regarded as one of the best drivers in the series after being labeled a bust. Max is just that good.
I've got a friend who lives 30 minutes away or so and this has been in the works since 2019. I had originally planned to go in 2021 and cancelled my flights about a week before late because the expected "Tickets are always $100 week of" not only didn't happen, but COTA sold out entirely at a level multiples of that. 2022 I had a wedding I was a groomsman in, and 2020 was, uhhh, let's just forget about that year. You can't beat it from a cost effectiveness standpoint when it's an award flight and a free place to stay and work out of at least in the post-Netflix era.
Look, they always **** it up. Right now things are pretty good so I'm going to sieze on that and remain happy.