Motorsport

Michael. It's called an unemployment line.

We went redundancy making.

Yeah it feels like there's this awkward silence hanging over everything. "We're going to change aaaall these things that came up during that last race - fire people, review various rules, change some processes - loads of stuff." "So did something go wrong in that race?" "No, no. It was all fine."

So they are keeping the direct radio messages to the race director but not broadcasting them? That seems even more dodgy as we wouldn’t have known what was going on without hearing those messages.

I wonder if the teams pushed for that as the whining makes them look bad.

It does away with the - in Ross Brawn's words - "silly sort of perched on their nose and waddling their arses in the air" high rake design for one thing.

It's bonkers and I love it

I don't know how anyone could have listened to Red Bull and Mercedes freely coercing Masi over the radio across the whole season and launched the vitriol towards him he's had since the end of the championship. It was obvious the second they started broadcasting those messages that he should have been offered more protection. I feel quite sorry for the guy tbh, he's fallen on the sword for what is quite clearly a failure of the system itself.

He gets to drive a car with dem sidepods now though. So he's the real winner here in the end.

Glad Masi has gone because ultimately he made several mistakes with fairly catastrophic consequences for the integrity of the sport. The final few rounds were an absolute farce. Aside from Abu Dhabi, we had full points awarded for no racing in Spa, and we saw an actual brake test result in a slap on the wrists.

However him being replaced isn't enough. We need to see this report. We need to understand if the the race director is actually an all powerful overlord who can arbitrarily move cars around and ignore some regs and procedures on a whim.

We still don't have any clarity on what the rules are and how they are to be interpreted in so many areas.

I'll give them some more time to make further announcements. I don't see how we'll get greater consistency from alternating race directors.

Mercedes looks a bit boring and safe

The Merc looks super skinny - particularly compared to that Ferrari.

Sure the serious safety lapses were also in my mind and it's a lengthy list of mistakes, but let's be honest, he'd still be there if it wasn't for Abu Dhabi.  Prior to that, and even immediately afterwards, we were told he had the FIAs full support and that he'd done nothing wrong.  It wasn't just Masi, some of the stewarding has been pretty questionable with no consistency and reform is needed there as well.

I'd also add that Charlie Whiting's era wasn't perfect either.  The sport did need to modernise, and is yet to properly do so.  Transparency would be a start.  The VAR sounds like lip service given they already effectively had VAR - it's not like the stewards were all standing around at track side trying to decide things by eye!

I'd much rather they used rugby as the point of reference.  Have video reviews during the race where the stewards talk over an annotated replay and explain what they considered relevant and how they reached their verdict.  It wouldn't even have to be 'live' to begin with, do it to VT with the benefit of editing whilst the stewards learn the skill.  Have a citing procedure for incidents that were not picked up during the race and publish a full report with video each time.  Not everywhere agrees with every decision in rugby, but for the most part people understand it after the review, and 'experts' are able to consistently predict the decisions because there is consistency, we know what the TMO and ref are looking for.  People know where they stand.

Do the above and rewrite the regs that caused most issues last year around use of safety car, awarding points for shortened races, tyre changes during red flags etc.  None of this is especially hard to do or without precedent.  There is a great opportunity for a reset that really moves the sport forward.

Wow, Merc really going a different way on the front wing with all the downforce out wide. The cars are all so different in the front wing, nose and side pod area, it's fantastic (although will surely mean a big field spread to begin with).

Love the new Ferrari livery because it harks back to the prettiest Ferrari's of the late 80's early 90's. Proper deep scarlet always looks better, and the black wings are great. Pity it's probably the ugliest chassis underneath.

I think every team has done a great job and released a new livery that has looked better than the old thus far. My money is on Alpine to cock it up given they've got to combine Alpine blue with BWT pink.

They're not all in the same scale, but yeah, AM looking a lot 'bulkier', Merc looking ripped.
How much extra weight would that be compared to the other two?

Scale's a bit off so I'm not sure it will have as short a wheelbase as the pic appears. It looks tight as fuck around the engine though. Ridiculously so really. I wonder if successfully running Hamilton's engine the way they did in the latter part of last season has given them the confidence to do this without fear of reliability issues? I also saw some speculation from the AM launch that Merc may have cleverly moved an exhaust to underneath the main sidepod structure.