Self isolation classic races to watch.
Discussion
ajprice said:
sandman77 said:
I watched 1997 Monaco yesterday. What a great race. If you have forgotten just how good Michael Schumacher was or never believed it in the first place watching him display his talent in this race should remind you.
Sliding the car round Monaco in the wet 5 seconds faster than anyone else is one of the best things I have seen in F1.
Is 1997 Monaco on YouTube?Sliding the car round Monaco in the wet 5 seconds faster than anyone else is one of the best things I have seen in F1.
Edit...found it https://youtu.be/mYNcI-xxxyY
Edited by ajprice on Friday 3rd April 13:10
Monaco 96 was great drama too. It's funny how you don't necessarily thing that much has changed until you see 20+ years ago footage. Seems so bizarre now seeing marshals on the track or cars left parked up where they conked out. It's interesting too seeing how poor communication often is between pits and car. I thought (maybe wrongly) that there were 2-way radios in use back then but with so much confusion around pit stops etc, maybe not. And I guess all of the processing power available now would never allow the whole field to be unwittingly still running wet tyres when a dry tyre would be over 10 seconds quicker. With all that and cars seemingly more robust and reliable now, some of the jeopardy seems to be gone that could throw up real surprises from time to time. I'm well aware we had plenty of processions too though!
Eric Mc said:
A lot of the randomness of previous decades has gone. Could Panis win at Monaco in a second rate car today?
Honest answer is no but of course that was also a freak result at the time. Wet weather can still stir things up and the safety cars in Brazil '19 provided some entertainment but the utter reliability, run off areas and better modelling of strategies etc probably has taken away a significant random element. Germany 2019 was very wet and had cars spinning off left, right and centre but still ended with a Red Bull winning and Ferrari second. It seems like freak results now are more likely to be a mid fielder sneaking onto the podium and even that is very rare. It feels to be like an entirely predictable outcome for a sport that has gradually been polished and 'improved' in almost all areas that eventually you end up with something that might be considered less interesting as a result.
But it's not necessarily a complaint from me as I do remember that 90's era having some very tedious races. In fact maybe more so than now and I guess also because I can't really see any remotely realistic way to change things back. For want of a less crude way of putting it, it's quite difficult to engineer in a bit of crapness which is really how that Panis result came about (though granted, he drove the socks off that car). Knowledge is very good now and it's not really possible to unlearn things.
1997 season finale, full replay, this evening on the F1 channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0SxjsnWXOI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0SxjsnWXOI
coppice said:
I have long thought that Panis 's win , his only , and the last for Ligier, was a pleasing echo of Jean Pierre Beltoise's solitary GP victory in 1972 at Monaco , also the last for BRM .
It was also something of a vindication. According to Malcolm Folley's book "Monaco" it was a perfect storm for the car that weekend. They'd got the car setup and strategy, they thought, just right for Monaco and were expecting a good result.. perhaps not a win but they knew they were going to do well that weekend if they made the finish.That, and a lot of good fortune, gave them a good result in a difficult season.
Sandpit Steve said:
That was brilliant, the race no-one wanted to win - and the guy who did, didn’t realise until he got out of the car!
And then they didn't have the right three on the podium 
1982 was a bit before my time, I would have been 6...
Other stuff -
V8, V12 and turbo engines in the same race.
Cars looked different to each other.
Cars ran out of fuel.
The cars with broken bodywork still racing.
No safety car.
No wet tyres? (Were there no wets at that time or was it too late in the race for the teams to think it was worth losing position and kept the cars out?)
Completely different thing compared to modern F1. I know it wouldn't happen but I would like to see the rules more like 'make the car fit inside these dimensions and do what you want'.
Edited by ajprice on Thursday 7th May 12:06
Eric Mc said:
That's what I've thought for years. We can't "forget" all the science and engineering that has made the cars more perfect.
But for me it has removed some of the uncertainty and fun of racing.
Yeah, it’s a bit too difficult to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to technology. What’s most astonishing nowadays is the mechanical reliability and the fitness of the drivers - Lewis had one DNF in the last three seasons, and scored points every single time he finished. A little more unpredictability probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. But for me it has removed some of the uncertainty and fun of racing.
ajprice said:
And then they didn't have the right three on the podium
1982 was a bit before my time, I would have been 6...
Other stuff -
V8, V12 and turbo engines in the same race.
Cars looked different to each other.
Cars ran out of fuel.
The cars with broken bodywork still racing.
No safety car.
No wet tyres? (Were there no wets at that time or was it too late in the race for the teams to think it was worth losing position and kept the cars out?)
Completely different thing compared to modern F1. I know it wouldn't happen but I would like to see the rules more like 'make the car fit inside these dimensions and do what you want'.
I was ...err.. 29 and had been able regularly to watch F1 from track-side since 1971 . Whatever year you see F1 , it is the greatest show on earth , as it still is. But there is stuff to miss from then, especially the diversity in engine lay out , aspiration and (especially) noise. I've heard IL4s , V6s , V8s , V10s , V12s, Flat 12s and even a W12 in F1 and it is a shame we have pretty close to a spec formula now , even if it can create close racing ,1982 was a bit before my time, I would have been 6...
Other stuff -
V8, V12 and turbo engines in the same race.
Cars looked different to each other.
Cars ran out of fuel.
The cars with broken bodywork still racing.
No safety car.
No wet tyres? (Were there no wets at that time or was it too late in the race for the teams to think it was worth losing position and kept the cars out?)
Completely different thing compared to modern F1. I know it wouldn't happen but I would like to see the rules more like 'make the car fit inside these dimensions and do what you want'.
Edited by ajprice on Thursday 7th May 12:06
Safety cars weren't used , and if they had been ,they would have been used very rarely, as crashed and broken cars were far commoner then , but a very relaxed approach to risk was also taken .
Wet tyres were used , and had been for many years before 1982. And back then , we had qualifying tyres too - which meant a slow out lap , a banzai lap and a slow down lap , with the tyres being totally shagged by then. Qualifying ENGINES too , on some turbo cars, massive power for 3 laps, if you were lucky , huge boost meaning huge power and lots of grenaded engines. It was a helluva sight , sound and even smell when you were experiencing it yourself .
Edited by coppice on Thursday 7th May 12:26
Not a specific Grand Prix but I did come across a very good documentary last night on Netflix about Juan Manuel Fangio. There is lots of rare footage of his early career in Argentina and lots of interviews with people who worked with him in period and later generations of drivers such as Prost, Stewart and even Nico Rosberg. Indeed, it is Rosberg I found the most insightful about Fangio.
The only grating aspect is the fact that they have created false "live radio commentary" to go over some of the old footage - which is something that shouldn't be done in a documentary in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vm_qMDn-I
The only grating aspect is the fact that they have created false "live radio commentary" to go over some of the old footage - which is something that shouldn't be done in a documentary in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vm_qMDn-I
Eric Mc said:
Not a specific Grand Prix but I did come across a very good documentary last night on Netflix about Juan Manuel Fangio. There is lots of rare footage of his early career in Argentina and lots of interviews with people who worked with him in period and later generations of drivers such as Prost, Stewart and even Nico Rosberg. Indeed, it is Rosberg I found the most insightful about Fangio.
The only grating aspect is the fact that they have created false "live radio commentary" to go over some of the old footage - which is something that shouldn't be done in a documentary in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vm_qMDn-I
Netflix managed to do the ‘fake commentrary’ thing on half of last season’s races for their documentary about that - obviously the original commentary (of which there’s three or four choices for English) didn’t give them quite the right ‘narrative’. The only grating aspect is the fact that they have created false "live radio commentary" to go over some of the old footage - which is something that shouldn't be done in a documentary in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vm_qMDn-I
Will check out the Fangio doc none the less, thanks for the heads up.
Gassing Station | Formula 1 | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff