Official 2011 Formula 1 Pre-Season Thread

settler said:
Sadly Kimi is now out of the picture.
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That's Boulliers own damn fault...all that yapping and attention whoring wasn't going to be good.

Personally I'd let Senna have a go in Bahrain. At leaste give him a chance to prove himself, one race can't hurt it.
 
Red_Bull said:
I thought Hulkenberg was quite impressive at Williams last year and the only real reason he was dropped was because the team needed more cash. If I was his manager I'd be making enquiries. A race seat at Renault would do more for his career than a reserve seat at Force India.
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The big question there is Hulk's deal with Force India and whether there's a clause there that would allow him to leave the team for a race seat elsewhere. Or whether Nico has the money to buy himself out of that deal...
 
: (

I'm sooooo bleak about Kubica's accident.
 
That's one eery video to look at... from my little italian I can understand the driver asking "Is he hurt?" the navigator replies "he's hurt" ... "ok ok park it..." or something like that and then the driver saying "I don't know" but you can hear the adrenaline in their voices.

Get well Robert :(
 
The spoken parts are:

D=driver
C=codriver

(translation is free to take into account obvious intentions - starts after the pause when RK's car is in sight)

C: ok, ok, move and get out of the way.
D: he got hurt
C: yes, he got hurt, he got hurt.
D: F*** G** (moves on)
C: ok, ok, ok, stop there, stop there.
D: (stops) Oh God, no... I don't know... I knew he would take it fast...

---

It's not that useful, because the driver is clearly shocked, has a terrible accent and speak some northern slang I'm not that familiar with. At the end he's probably speaking of the bend and how he thought RK was going to drive through it.
 
Latest Autosport news on the subject: Kubica to undergo second surgery
Eric Boullier is quite optimistic actually, he is quite sure Kubica won't need a full year to recover. Let's hope that's true.
 
another picture to show how lucky he's actually been :shock:

http://img715.imageshack.**/img715/1926/kubica3.png
 
The crash barrier failed to do what it was designed to do, or just that conditions were just right for it to work that way? This gets me wondering on how well WRC cars are protected, perhaps there'll be mandatory footwell protection from now on?
 
Hope Kubica makes a swift recovery and look forward to seeing him back in an F1 car sooner rather than later. As for Renault picking up either Hulk or Heidfeld I don't see that happening, Renault already chose Brunno over either one of them and I don't believe they will change their minds until he's at least had a fair chance in the car.
 
Goondu86 said:
The crash barrier failed to do what it was designed to do, or just that conditions were just right for it to work that way? This gets me wondering on how well WRC cars are protected, perhaps there'll be mandatory footwell protection from now on?
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Those barriers are not designed to be hit from the end, it seems they are just cut with pretty much no protection in the end. If you hit that in anything resembling a straight angle at any kind of speed it acts like a tip of a knife. It's an inherent safety issue with these kinds of unprotected barriers, there are similar cases on normal roads every now and again. Looking at the in-car video posted above there were loads of similar barriers on that road, it's amazing that they don't have more of these kinds of accidents around central europe...

The comments from the codriver got the little engineer inside my head thinking about what they could do to the cars to make them more safe in this kind of ituation but short of a eight inch thick block of solid steel or breaking the laws of physics I can't really think of anything. The main reason for the severity of this accident was the barrier itself, that's what needs looking after.
 
Well I hate to bring it to you but if you made rally stages totally safe not many people would be that interested in them. Most of the fun of watching a skilled driver comes from thinking "wow, he's really good, anyone else would have totaled the car in that bend at that speed"
Also prohibitive costs of course, putting such kinds of barriers through tens of km...
 
mpicco said:
Well I hate to bring it to you but if you made rally stages totally safe not many people would be that interested in them. Most of the fun of watching a skilled driver comes from thinking "wow, he's really good, anyone else would have totaled the car in that bend at that speed"
Also prohibitive costs of course, putting such kinds of barriers through tens of km...
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I wasn't saying they should go and try to eliminate every single risk on every single rally stage, that is obviously impossible since it's all done on closed public roads, not on race circuits. My point was that there's no real way to change the car's construction so that it could survive that kind of an accident and what made the accident as bad as it was in this case was clearly construction of the barrier. Similar accidents happen in normal everyday traffic so it's not just a risk to rally competitors.
 
[video=youtube;t-Q2MFkiaj8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Q2MFkiaj8&feature=player_embedded[/video]
 
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