Formula 1 Extravaganza

A couple years ago, I thought Max was an arrogant chump, but I have come to the conclusion that does not seem to be his personality. I root for Charles over all the drivers, but I don't think there is a driver who is a total knob on the grid. Even Lance seems like an ok guy.

I do love the relationship that Albon and Norris have. There are a couple F2 drivers I am looking forward to seeing make the jump.

Merc looking good during FP1. Red Bull facing some mech troubles. Despite the faux marina, it is a rather cool looking venue.

This seems like a really tricky track.

After all the spins and walls in qualifying, and everyone (even Horner) saying there's no grip if you're off the line I'm expecting this to be mostly a debacle rather than a good race.

Hopefully everyone comes out of it okay, but it seems like there's going to be about as much overtaking as Monaco, with the deceptiveness of looking like there's room, but the reality being that you might as well be driving on ice.

Yeah, I'm really curious about it. I think they're talking about this dust and dirt problem but my subjective perception is that this is just a hard track too. That weird up hill series of slow turns looks really tricky, and a couple of the high speed turns look perilously easy to just run out of grip on while you're flat out.

I will say we have Red Bull in 3-4 and Ferrari up top so I think we *will* see some passing attempts given how fast Red Bull supposedly are on the straights. Will they stick them since they have to get in the dirt and dust? I have no idea but they're going to try, Verstappen would never leave that on the table and sit in third.

Yeah, I agree they're going to try. IDK how it's going to turn out. Definitely a tricky track even with an ideal surface, which it pretty clearly isn't.

I'd expect some iffy overtakes to cause incidents and retirements, and a lot of finger-pointing afterward. I'll be quietly rooting for the two Chucks in the red ones to come out cleanly.

defector.com/a-brief-investigation-into-...hamilton-is-pierced/

I wonder if they're really going to try to win this head to head with Lewis Hamilton on his dick piercing. Seems... shortsighted. Magnussen and especially Vettel don't like it either.

If anyone can derail the runaway train that is F1 popularity, ironically it's the FIA. What bunch of buffoons.

It is such a dumb move even just from a $$$ perspective. The whole nice thing for F1 in the US is that like the NFL they have pretty progressive/liberal appealing on-track personalities like Hamilton *and* they have the kind of macho toxic masculine alpha guys like Verstappen. Obviously that's all image, I'm not saying I know what these guys are like in real life, but that stuff matters for keeping the sport pretty broad appealing here.

It ended up being a relatively tame affair for a brand new track. If Ferrari doesn't get their tire deg issue fixed, Red Bull will end up eating their lunch later in the season. Merc seemed to show less porpoising which is a good sign for future races. I think they have been using Hammy as a guinea pig for car setup feedback since he can give more educated information than Russell. Pure speculation though. Latifi had a drive by his lonesome in last, but he finished. Red Bull might have some looming reliability spectres, but Stap did everything right and pulled off a very clean win. My boys in red finished decently enough and Sainz actually finished, which was nice to see.

We will hopefully see some great 5 or 6 way battles at the top in coming races.

Yeah, mostly boring but fine.

This is about the time I stop caring until around the middle of September.

At the moment one car is faster than all the others. If LeClerc couldn't catch him with DRS, the rest doesn't matter a whole lot.

Clearly Verstappen is cheating by driving better.

Oh, and I thought the Miami Dolphins blue wrapped around the track looked pretty doggone sharp. Gave the venue its own space. If you see a highlight from Miami six months from now you'll know it.

I only saw part of the race and for all the well deserved grief about the fake marina, I gotta give credit to the locals/Stephen Ross for creating a track that did NOT look like a parking lot as the pundits had declared when first announced. They even snuck in some modest elevation changes. The track is still pretty tight but overall I've seen a lot worse from debut tracks/sites ( Korea comes to mind for instance ) .

This is as much an indictment of NASCAR as anything else:

sports.yahoo.com/f-1-miami-grand-prix-sc...on-151930224.html514

This could be a very intersting season . Supposedly Ferrari have a major upgrade coming in Barcelona; Harry Potter/Binotto said he thinks RBR blew a lot of their budget with their early upgrades so they'll be able to fight back. I'd think Monaco should play into Ferrari's hands as well as Singapore and other tracks with twisty sections. And Red Bull still seem more vulnerable to reliability. Bottom line this looks to be a pretty good title fight now.

Mercedes seems to be slowly pulling themselves up the grid. Russell is still 23 points ahead of Hamilton.....

Was amused to read that Brundle hates doing the grid walks and doesn't even rewatch them...I read there were some notable cringe moments when he mixed up celebrities. Might be time to put someone....younger and more "in touch" down there maybe ? It's not like Sky TV is lacking for choices, they send a veritable army to each race.

And that article doesn't include F1.com viewers.

I think that NASCAR has devolved into an odd sport, one of such heavy coopetition that isn't very interesting from a run and gun perspective. Granted I haven't watched much recently.

I did watch Daytona this year because I wanted to see the new rule changes, which were as significant for NASCAR as they are for F1. The most entertaining part was three wheels that came off at speed during the race, fifty pound bouncy objects moving at 200mph in a straight line. That was interesting in slo-mo. The new wheels are locked via a single nut like F1 and Indy and apparently no one spent the time to review how they work.

But the must-cooperate-in-two-lines structure of the sport just feels claustrophobic as hell. And I think that's part of the reason Thunder Alley works so well, and works so poorly. It really captures that dynamic on the table beautifully, but the dynamic is just not very gratifying. You can find yourself in a place where you really have no opportunity to do anything interesting, and I think that's the same thing happening on the track on Sundays. The draft is an overwhelming influence on the race.

I think both franchises have the baseball problem as well, where any individual race has so little effect on the overall season that you just don't take any of them very seriously. Above I mentioned that it's time for me to stop caring so much until September or October when things start settling in to the final. NASCAR to some extent makes it worse in the way they just rave over each win, the driver doing the obligatory spin-out doughnuts at the end like something stunning has just happened. C'mon, it's just another Sunday. If you're a rookie, sure. But if you're the guy that's out in front show some grace. You don't see baseball players rushing the mound for the win in the 47th game of the season. The sport is a marathon, act that way.

F1 does it too with the champagne. They should make that a drink that suits the venue and it should be a toast. I can't imagine Hamilton sits up at night thinking to himself "gosh, THIS time I'm going to spray it all over the 3rd place driver, THEN the 2nd place driver instead of the other way around." Serve beer steins in Germany, margaritas in Mexico, sangria in Spain. (Don't know what the Saudis would serve. Araq maybe?)

I think F1 is a more marketable product because it's so much more free-wheeling. God knows I'd recommend improvements on their coverage (and I'll mention that I watch on F1.com) but there's just a lot more detail offered, a lot more drama. At time I think some of it is contrived and I've heard that Drive to Survive is an interesting watch. But just the events themselves are more interesting.

Does NASCAR have a channel like F1 that provides technical details, post-race analysis and the like? And is it any good?

Hot tarmac in Spain with Merc, RB, and Ferrari at the top after FP2. Tire deg will be the undoing of them come race day I think. It is great to see KMag up in the top 10 after the session and I hope that goes over to Quali.