Race to perfection

[Polite M135 driver]

Watching this F1 documentary (first episode of seven) on sky. Every Saturday at 9pm for the next few weeks.. Lots of nice clips but it doesn’t really seem to be a very good documentary programme. No narrative arc, no story, no points being made. They made a big point of building up the rivalry between senna and Prost, then skipped straight from 88 to 94 and death of senna. Immediately before that was Alan Jones and Williams. Previously they’d been talking about the brabham fan car. And then before that, hesketh. It may as well have been a series of 5 minute clips.

[Polite M135 driver]

Weirdly they also included the death of Jim Clark without talking about any of his history with lotus, as team mate to graham hill, or even the fact that we was a world champion.

[LaurasOtherHalf]

Thoroughly enjoyed it, fantastic footage but as you say a completely baffling narrative!

[carl_w]

This is only the first episode so maybe it sets the overall scene and then they go into the detail in subsequent episodes.

Not sure about Jonesey's assertion that someone had a "qualifying car" -- surely you have to race the car you qualified.

[n3il123]

carl_w said:

This is only the first episode so maybe it sets the overall scene and then they go into the detail in subsequent episodes.

Not sure about Jonesey's assertion that someone had a "qualifying car" -- surely you have to race the car you qualified.

Certainly not in the 80s mansell started the 86 brands race in one car broke that at the start, race wss stopped for another crash so he started the restart in the spare car...

[carl_w]

n3il123 said:

Certainly not in the 80s mansell started the 86 brands race in one car broke that at the start, race wss stopped for another crash so he started the restart in the spare car...

That was the T-car, but I don't think you could qualify in your race car and then start int he T-Car unless your race car was broken in some way?

[Sandpit Steve]

carl_w said:

n3il123 said:

Certainly not in the 80s mansell started the 86 brands race in one car broke that at the start, race wss stopped for another crash so he started the restart in the spare car...

That was the T-car, but I don't think you could qualify in your race car and then start int he T-Car unless your race car was broken in some way?

Back in those days it would have been straightforward to ‘find’ a ‘problem’ with the car, that necessitated a switch to the spare car. The rules were much less restrictive than today, with no Parc Fermé and use of qualifying engines, which were replaced with race engines on Saturday night. The setup between qualifying and the race could be quite different, even for the same car. To find a team running a totally different car on Saturday wouldn’t be surprising, but they’d probably need to look close enough to each other, or be nominally the same chassis design number.

[anonymous-user]

carl_w said:

That was the T-car, but I don't think you could qualify in your race car and then start int he T-Car unless your race car was broken in some way?

You could race either. Even the first choice race car had a different qualy and race config, for example during qualy the wheel bearings had the nilos seals removed to reduce friction.

Modern day F1 is far easier on the mechanics than the old days, where the workload was immense.

[anonymous-user]

Also, in the early days you could even take over your team mates car mid race if you wanted to. World championships were won doing that.

[anonymous-user]

as to the program, it was all over the place and mostly a collection of previously shown clips, it's edited for the millenials and their goldfish attention spans.

[The_Nugget]

Episode 1 was odd. Whistle stop tour of some moments and drivers from history.
It’ll be interesting to see what they do with the next episodes and if they deep dive into anything.

In any case it inspired me to re-watch Senna which is fantastic.

[Daston]

Whilst I watched it all I did wonder where it was going and what the other episodes will cover. I thought each episode would cover a decade not jump from the 50's straight to modern F1.

One thing it did highlight was how many people still in F1 or around F1 that Schumacher raced against.

[HustleRussell]

Agree with everything that has been said. Personally I enjoyed it despite, but couldn't recommend it to my friend who is less 'into' F1 than me even though he recently told me he would be interested in a bit of a chronology.

[CanAm]

jsf said:

Also, in the early days you could even take over your team mates car mid race if you wanted to. World championships were won doing that.

The last time was the British GP in 1957, when Tony Brooks and Stirling Moss shared a Vanwall to become the first British drivers to win a Championship F1 race in a British car. Brooks had been seriously injured in a recent (sports car?) race and did brilliantly to be close enough for Moss to take over the car and win. I believe it was pre-arranged that he would hand over to Moss should his car break down, as he wasn't sure he was actually well enough to finish the race.

[poosemon]

jsf said:

as to the program, it was all over the place and mostly a collection of previously shown clips, it's edited for the millenials and their goldfish attention spans.

agreed, hoping this was sort of setting the scene for the rest of the series. I'm glad I wasn't the only one feeling this. Saying that, will take all the F1 coverage and some nicely restored F1 historic clips I can get.

You sort of had a load of stuff about legendary drivers, then a segment dedicated to the fan car shoe horned in whilst other F1 innovation wasn't really covered elsewhere in the episode so felt out of place.

Will see how the rest of the series pans out!