MJB

13 hours ago, damhausen said:

I'm curious if anyone's done a breakdown of when championships have been "decided" with regards to point in a season. Assuming the % of races is the same regardless of season length you're running the risk of those end-of-season "marquee" races turning into boring formalities.

30 have gone down to the final race, 43 haven't. I've put 2022 in this list assuming Max takes the title in Suzuka. 

This one kicks me right in the balls.

Heartwarming to see so much respect and love for an incredible competitor. Even after his playing days, he was supremely fair and enjoyable to listen to as a pundit and commentator.

Massive shame and especially sad for his children and the rest of his family and friends. 52 really is no age.

Today was unacceptable. Lewis deserved that race. Forget the championship for now. 

Masi is a joke.

Imola and Zandvoort are stupid ideas.

Bahrain, Baku, Silverstone, Monza, Austin and Interlagos should be the six. Actually, there shouldn't be any at all, but if there has to be six, it should be those. 

Sir Frank Williams has passed away, aged 79.

Considering his accident in 1986, it's a remarkable achievement to make it this far but still terribly sad.

Edit - nevermind.

So happy for Schmeichel. What a career he's had.

Red Bull paying the price for only having one driver in the fight. A repeat of Hungary 2019.

Turkey in June is going to be hot.

Henderson definitely offers us something different. Very much on the front foot and even the second goal came from a positive take and then a good throw out to Shaw.

Lewis Hamilton has officially signed a contract to race for Mercedes in 2021. 

Nothing confirmed past that, let the speculation for 2022 begin!

Newcastle are currently two down inside six minutes. Someone should probably check on @Gazz

The 'offside' for the second is a particularly shite call from the assistant, especially considering he's about 6 yards behind the play when he puts his flag up.

To me, Monza was not a great race. It was a great result but not a great race.

The best driver in the race was Sainz and he deserved to win when Hamilton got his penalty. Gasly drove well when out in front but he was only in that position because he was pulled in for an early stop after holding up his teammate in the opening part of the race. Before the red flag, Lewis drove away and nothing was really happening behind. Then after the restart, again nothing really happened after the first lap or two, apart from Lewis making his way back through the field. 

I'm absolutely against reverse grids. It's a bandage, a bit like DRS. It doesn't solve the problem, it merely covers it up for a bit. With DRS, the cars need to be able to follow closely and hopefully 2022 will see that. To stop reverse grids, the field need to be closer together, and hopefully 2022 will see that aswell.

F1 has been dominated by one car in more seasons than not. Remember the MP4/4 for McLaren in 1988? The FW14B for Williams in 1992? Then you have the Ferrari's in 2002 and 2004 along with the Red Bull cars in 2011 and 2013. I'm not saying that these are more dominant than Mercedes is this year but let's not get carried away and believe that F1 has always had 6 teams who could win every weekend. 

2012 is certainly the outlier in recent years, but even that was pretty much dictated by Pirelli. Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari, Lotus, Williams, Sauber, Force India and Mercedes were all quickest at one race or another but I'd still say that was more tyre related than car-performance related. When all teams got the hang of the tyres towards the end of the year, the big teams pulled away at the front. 

I wouldn't change qualifying much to be honest. However, I would look at maybe mixing it up at specific tracks, like Monza and especially at Bahrain on the outer loop this year. Send them out one at a time, reverse championship order, just to stop the slip streaming fiasco that will inevitably cause an accident at some point. I do like the three-part qualifying though. I'd maybe shorten the sessions, as even in Spa, 12 minutes is more than enough to get two runs in. The super-pole is an interesting idea, maybe the top three just having one lap at the end to get pole.

Yeah pretty much that's what happened. Lewis had such a lead that he was first one in for a while, Sainz and the rest also wanted to pit but their engineers realised. Mercedes realised just as Lewis came in, meaning that Bottas was told to stay out. 

He is expected to pick up wins when Lewis doesn't though. Instead he's now got the same number of wins in 2020 as an Alpha Tauri.

3 hours ago, Katsuya said:

I think the big problem with comparing Lewis is that so often he's been in the best or second best car on the grid, so you can never really compare him to the likes of Senna who had to fight his way through early on in his career, or what Alonso managed to do at times at Ferrari.

At best, you could say he had no right to be in the fight for the title to the final race in 2010, but then you look at 2011 & 2012 and he really wasn't anything too special those years from memory. Jenson even beat him in a fair fight in 2011 which is the one year that always really stands out against him.

He's easily the best driver of the last decade regardless, but if he had been in the Red Bull and Max in the Mercedes, then Verstappen would be a 3/4 time champion right about now.

In 2012, he was very good. But had horrible reliability. 

Lost out in Singapore, Abu Dhabi with DNF's while leading. Was also taken out by Hulk in Brazil while leading. McLaren had some horrible pit stops and a fuelling error DQ'ed him in Spain qualifying after putting it on pole. Could have certainly been in the Alonso/Vettel fight that year.

Lewis is an interesting one for me. Without Mercedes, would he have had the titles, no. However, without Lewis, I'm not convinced that Mercedes would have won 2018 and maybe 2017 also. How many drivers would have done just as good of a job in that car in those years? Ricciardo maybe. Alonso probably, Max probably. But two of those have never been in a WDC fight and I think that counts for a lot. 

Since Nico left at the end of 2016, I do think Lewis has taken another step up. Especially in his race pace. He's always been a good qualifier in F1, even in the McLaren days. However, he struggled with tyre wear and would go missing occasionally. Nowadays, he's much more consistent. He's good on tyres and is very good in wheel-to-wheel (apart from against Albon apparently).

Max and him are certainly the top two on the grid at the moment. I can't split them. Max needs to prove himself in a title fight next though and see how he reacts to being in a real battle for the title, like Lewis did in 2018 when Ferrari looked to have just as good a car for most of the season as Mercedes.

I'm a Hamilton fan, and even I have a hard time enjoying seasons like this. I thought I liked it through 2014 and 2015 but the Ferrari/Seb battle was much more fun when Lewis came out on top. The 2019/20 interteam 'rivalry', really isn't a rivalry and is nowhere near as fun. 

The problem I have is that it's not Lewis' or Mercedes fault. The argument is - "well put someone other than Bottas in the car", and yeah but apart from Max, who? As for Max, Mercedes tried having two No1's and that just became toxic. No way they do that again while Lewis is around.

My best attempt at a Man Utd XI. 16-17 out of the 23 are fairly straightforward.

GK - Schmeichel, Van Der Sar, De Gea.

DF - Stam, Ferdinand, Vidic, Bruce, G Neville, Irwin, Evra, Pallister, P Neville

MD - Keane, Scholes, Giggs, Carrick, Beckham, Ronaldo, Butt, Ince, Kanchelskis

ST - Cantona, Rooney, Van Nistelrooy, Van Persie

From any neutrals in this thread, who's had the worse season; De Gea or Kepa?

I know it would be soft, but I think that's a foul on Van Dijk. 

He has his arm pulled, which unbalances him and leads to the poor pass.

Greenwood! Special little player. 

From a Villa point of view, what the hell is Mings doing? That's twice he's stood off Greenwood 20 yards out and not even taken a step towards him.

I'm not sure that was a penalty. Bruno kind of jumped into the defender and even trod on the Villa players leg.

I bought the Schumacher edition so I got it on the 7th.

• Time trial has been in and out with crashes when changing from track to track.
• I've been disqualified for not using both types of tyre, despite going from medium to soft.
• It's got a "podium pass" which has been broken for the first couple of days. I'm told it's like battlepass for Fortnite. You basically earn coins to unlock stuff as you progress through the game. I think it's still temperamental on Xbox. 
• The practice programs are ridiculously hard. You have to drop the difficulty probably 20-25 points just to get a green pass. If you then forget to up the difficulty again, you'll be on pole by more than 2s. 

I'm sure it'll all get fixed but yeah, not ready for release in its current form, IMO.

Early thoughts;

• It's a bit buggy, which is to be expected but probably not worth picking up for full price at the minute.
• Because the season has only just started, the pecking order is basically 2019, meaning that Ferrari are too strong, Racing Point not strong enough etc.
• No BLM livery on the Mercedes but I'd assume that's coming soon because Williams have their new livery. 
• The customisation in My Team is a little disappointing but you can earn/unlock more liveries and other options after playing for a little longer.
• The gameplay is improved, the AI now make mistakes which is good but they probably now make too many weird errors so there's a balancing act to find. 
• Zandvoort is huge fun, an absolute roller coaster of a circuit. It'll be dreadful for overtaking IRL but on the game in qualy or TT, it's incredible.

I'm pretty sure Ederson hurt his hand, he was shaking it about after the impact and took his glove off for a few minutes. There was also something on the palm - teeth marks, blood or something like that.

The new trailer for the My Team stuff has dropped and it looks pretty good. Definitely an extra mode to hopefully extend the playing time. 

I've bought the last four years on release day and played them for a while but 2019 didn't really grab me as much. Looking forward to the My Team stuff though along with the new circuits.