F1 is Going to be Awesome – Part Five: This Video
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7JCJQjovz8
Damn.
F1 is Going to be Awesome – Part Four: Ross Brawn
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It might seem a little ridiculous to give one man his own entire reason for F1 being awesome this year – I mean there are lots of great people to watch this season. For example: Flavio Briatore may have recently
Bernie
threatened to kill Bernie Eccelstone (who is a living representation of a Bridge Troll). Bernie immediately retorted that Flavio’s gun better be loaded and intimated that if Flavio were to miss, he was already making a bouillabaisse to simmer Briatore’s dead body in.
Of course there is always Max Mosley and his ongoing legal blitzkrieg to try to cleanse his name after being exposed re-enacting girls gone wild Auschwitz edition. Not that that has anything to do with racing, but naked girls and Nazi sex always get the good ink.
Pubetastibeard
And that’s not even touching the driver’s side of the sport. Each driver has a cliche story that has been following him around during the off season: After being hit by a car in a bicycle race he himself organized, will Mark Weber ever catch a break? Will Hamilton be able to overcome the new McLaren’s crappiness or will he jump ship to drive the whiny bus all season? Will Kimi continue to be an incomprehensible, alcohol-powered, sleep factory? Is Kubica’s head really made out of cabbage? Can Massa even drive a car, like at all?
Team Beard GP Team Principal and Cheif Beardy Beard
Only time will tell (time is a gossipy little so-and-so), but the biggest story this season surely must be Ross Brawn and his “new” team Brawn GP. After the dismal failure of Team Honda (the F1 team) these past few years, Honda (the car company) afraid of the current world markets, backed out of F1. Ross Brawn along with Nick Fry (former Honda team principle and general idiot at large) managed to buy out Honda to form Brawn GP.
Normally this wouldn’t be much news, just another team doomed to failure with no budget. Except that Ross Brawn has a glorious beard, rivaled only by the teen heart-throb, pube-chin, of Brawn GP driver Jenson Button. Add to that the latest rumor circling F1… circles… that Beardy Branson himself is about to announce Virgin sponsorship of Team Beard GP. The sheer volume of dapper, luxurious, man-fur on this team cannot be held at bay. No amount of italian tight pants and bug-eye sunglasses will ruin the throbbing machesemo of Team Brawn. Not to mention the fact that Brawn is the man cheifly responsible for the car that helped Schumacher completely dominate F1 for the better part of a decade around 2000. Mostly though, it’s the beards.
Daddy Money-Beard
The critics, however, have been saying “Pfft – what can one guy do? Spearheading a team that has sucked for years, with no sponsors, and no engine? They’re going to get their assess kicked with big European boots.” Despite the long odds, Beard GP managed to secure a deal with Mercedes for an engine and in only 6 weeks, showed up to practice in Spain with a running F1 car. Brawn then proceeded to comb his lustrous face-rug up and down the pit lane and spanked every single person who has had anything to say about Team Beard – beating the fastest times set by anyone else by more than 2 full seconds per lap.
That is a huge margin in race terms, and if these times keep up during actual races, Brawn GP would easily walk away with the championship and would probably lap the slower cars 2 to 3 times per race. That’s Club Vandersexx levels of spanking. Of course practice times are about as valuable as a sweat suit made out of bacon, but all of this drama and talk about beards breeds excitement, which is awesome. Post hoc ergo propter hoc – so is F1.
F1 is Going to be Awesome – Part Three: KERS
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KERS is an acronym that stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System – which means, loosely, that F1 is going to use physics to fuck some shit up.
The new rules this year stipulate that a certain amount of a F1 car’s forward momentum (kinetic energy) can be stored up for release during the race, at the discretion of the driver, to the tune of around 80 horsepower for 6 seconds per lap. Now this doesn’t mean that it will gain the driver 6 seconds on the lap, it just means he can hold down the button for 6 seconds. Normally I’m not a fan of these “Push to Pass” systems, but the coolness of what KERS is outweighs the lameness of “push to pass”.
Washing Machine Parts of the Future
So what does KERS mean exactly then? Welp, normally when a car brakes all of the kinetic energy it has is turned into heat by the brakes and the car slows to a stop. In the case of an F1 car equipped with KERS, the cars are going to have some of the energy turned into heat by the brakes and some of it stored on board the car. Possibly in a stylish, Italian, snakeskin, attache case next to a pair of $4000 sunglasses and a bottle of Pinot Noir.
More than likely the teams are going to use electricity to store this energy, much like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Toyota Prius. The wheels will spin a motor that will generate a current (Bizorts) which is going to be stored in a battery or in a supercapacitor (a battery). Later on, this energy will be used to turn that same motor, giving the car more horsepowers. How much electricity the car will generate is unknown but I’ve heard numbers such as 50,000 Volts being thrown around. That ain’t no AA battery.
The other option is using a flywheel to save the power up, kind of like those little toy cars that you had when you were a kid. As the car brakes the extra energy from the transmission is used to spin a hockey puck sized wheel to some absurdly high speed (estimates have the speed as high as 90 – 100,000 rpm) which is a lot of damn energy. When the driver pushes the button the little flywheel will take that energy and spin it back into the transmission adding horsepowers right back into the driveline.
Like a Boss
This is whole KERS thing is going to be awesome for a couple of reasons. First is the danger aspect. The technology to do this, whichever method the teams choose, doesn’t yet exist. The teams are essentially inventing as they go along based on whatever they can dream up (I hear one team is reenacting Die Hard, and has Alan Rickman on retainer).
That means the potential for disaster is very high, which, in turn, means races are going to be unpredictable and exciting. During testing of the BMW’s mechanics got zapped with 50,000 Volts, so now the whole team wears comically big insulating gloves whenever they are near the car.
Second reason KERS is awesome is the trickle down effect. F1 is the ultimate research and development environment for car companies. In the 80s and 90s the bmw Formula 1 engines were the exact same engine block the used in their road car, but in F1 trim they made 1300 horsepower. Similarly, advancements in computer controlled suspension, fuel management, forced induction etc, all have a trickle down effect to industry. Maybe not to your Ford King Ranch F650 Super Duty, but to most cars.
Bizort Gone Wrong
If F1 does manage to invent something spectacular, you can bet it will be on new cars within a few years. That’s great news for consumers since none of the big car companies are going to make any big revelations in this area beyond marketing whatever crap they have now.
To sum it all up: KERS is danger and physics all bundled in an explosive hockey puck made out of pure Joules, all just waiting to go wrong. Which is totally awesome and therefore so is F1.
F1 is Going to be Awesome – Part Two: Tires
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After 11 years Formula 1 is finally abandoning the stupid grooved tyres they’ve been running. This is fantastic news because the old tires are ugly.
Painted Vomit Colour to Highlight Ugliocity
Back in the day when Formula 1 cars were using hydraulically controlled suspension systems and the teams discovered that “computers” could be used to make cars go faster, the cornering G force was getting to be dangerously high. Like fighter jet high. So high that the FIA (the people that write the rules in F1) thought drivers might pass out from lack of blood to the brain (lol bonerz) or the weight of their helmets might rip their brain boxen clean from their body.
(Un) Fortunately this didn’t happen, though it would have made for some pretty gruesome TV. To slow the cornering speed down, the rules were changed to mandate that all tyres must be of a certain size and must have 4 grooves in them, sort of like those old school tractor tyres. Effectively this means less rubber on the track surface, and less grip from the tyres. Less grip means drivers were forced to slow down in corners, thus keeping their heads attached without the aid of Popsicle sticks and string.
The plan worked to keep the drivers alive but as the focus shifted from mechanical grip to aeronautical grip the race focus shifted from totally awesome to ultra lame. Passing was replaced by not passing and people watching F1 were replaced with the sound of tumbleweeds meandering through an empty pasture.
Look at the Gs!
Now slick tyres are back! This means more mechanical grip, so even though there is going to be less downforce because of the previously discussed new aero rules, cornering speed should be balanced out by the additional rubber on the road. In theory, passing will increase in the corners and with it excitement will increase in the everywhere.
Plus the new tires are much better looking which increases, not only hotness, but also awesomeness. Therefore, via Modus Ponens – F1 this year is going to be awesome!
F1 is Going to be Awesome – Part One: Baby Why You So Sexy?
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I don’t know how many of you out there on these tubes are excited about F1 this year, but I’m excited like WOAH. Not since the Mika v. Michael era have I been this excited about Formula 1. I really haven’t been following F1 all that avidly for very long, and less since Schumacher retired, but there is so much Awesome happening this year that I can’t help being pumped.
I didn’t intend for this to be a series of posts but I realized that I have so much to talk about I’m going to split it up into sections. Also it seems I can’t work the thumbnails properly so click on the pictures to see the whole image.
2009 v 2008
First off the new hotness. The 2009 cars are sexy – much better looking than they have been for the past few years. Gone are the weird aerodynamic fins, levers, cantilevers, fulcrums, braces, scoops, diving boards, viking horns, travel rabbits and other miscellaneous chattel that clung on to the F1 cars of the last 5 years like pine needles in my socks from the Christmas tree I tried to grow in the kitchen of my condo. (Ask me about planting things in the dishwasher!)
The 2009 cars must adhere to new regulations regarding the theoretical “box” the car’s body must fit in and the amount of surface area that can be used to produce downforce. This is, in my opinion, a good idea that has been far too long coming. F1 of late has become horrible for passing – no one can do it because the goal of F1 aerodynamics engineers has been to gain as much downforce (and therefore grip) as possible with your car’s wings while leaving the air behind you as dirty as possible, thus making it impossible for cars coming up from behind to maintain any grip in the corners.
Vikings on Parade
Like a computation fluid dynamics Roger Moore, F1 aero engineers have been building in oil slicks behind the cars for years. Hence no passing. And no passing sucks. They should just make CP Rail run at 200 mph and boom that’s what an F1 race looks like (with the red cars still in the front – Oh Burn Hamilton fans).
Yeesh
The idea is that the new cars will have smaller front and rear wings, thus shifting the focus from aerodynamic grip (downforce generated by the wind) to mechanical grip (grip generated by the suspension design and tyres). Because the cars will have more mechanical grip, they should be able to maintain speed in the corners even if they are right behind another car.
There is one more aspect about the aero changes this year to look out for – movable aerodynamics. The new front wings (vings) have sections on them that can be tilted by the driver to increase grip. So if a driver feels like the car is losing grip during cornering, she can crank up the angle of the wing, and get all that grip back. This will, in theory, further increase the ability of the new cars to tuck up under another car and still maintain speed and grip, and speed and grip in the corners means more passing, and passing is awesome.
Therefore by induction: F1 is Awesome.
The New Hotness
Scuderia Bella
Lock Eyes - From Across the Room