2017 rule changes

Rear wings are gonna be lower too aren't they??

yep, something like we used to have until 2008.

Regarding what Gav said, now that he mentions it, something i still dont have clear is if the sidepods width is gonna be increased. The cars will have a 2m width but I dont know if that implies only having a bigger floor.
On the other hand i think the tyre dimmensions are more or less ok (certainly they make the front wing to be in proportion to the rest of the car). the 13" rims and that configuration makes the car look a little cartoon-ish, though. I bet 18" would look nicer.

I've no idea whether the cars will look any different. I suspect where possible they'll try to keep a lower centre of gravity, and as such the height of the sidepod edges may be a little lower, but it's going to be hard to change too much as the PU and radiators are still going to be quite bulky.

It's possibly a step in the correct direction (which may be ruined when the halo finally comes in) but it probably doesn't go far enough.

Let's face it... F1 cars have simply had all the excitement engineered out of them and it's going to take rather more than a slightly funky shaped rear wing and slightly wider tyres to fix that.

I showed my mum a poster of the pics I recently took at the Silverstone test and she said that the cars look like tractors... yes that's right, tractors. But you know what? I can't even refute that cheek for they even sound a bit like them... only a whole lot quieter.

Personally... I think the whole bloody rule book needs turning upside down.

J i m Wrote:
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> It's possibly a step in the correct direction
> (which may be ruined when the halo finally comes
> in) but it probably doesn't go far enough.
>
> Let's face it... F1 cars have simply had all the
> excitement engineered out of them and it's going
> to take rather more than a slightly funky shaped
> rear wing and slightly wider tyres to fix that.
>
> I showed my mum a poster of the pics I recently
> took at the Silverstone test and she said that the
> cars look like tractors... yes that's right,
> tractors. But you know what? I can't even refute
> that cheek for they even sound a bit like them...
> only a whole lot quieter.
>
> Personally... I think the whole bloody rule book
> needs turning upside down.


Agreed. 2008 was the last year that F1 felt like F1 to me, although I think the V8 engine freeze formula was quite terrible, and the aero was getting a bit overboard. Then came the 2009 aero regs, KERS, Pirelli's, DRS, 'relevant' V6 hybrids, halos... Its just not a sport anymore. The commentators at sky sports just talk gossip and pump up their egos, no one cares anymore. Its a soap opera now.

Thankfully we still have MotoGP where the culture is about racing, its kill or be killed, the TV package is excellent, and the commentators on the world feed actually commentate on the RACING instead of talking about where they had dinner last night or who they bumped into on their way back to the hotel room.

@#$%& halo. The only incidents it would have had any effect on in the sport in the last ten years that I can remember is Massa's spring-to-face incident in Hungary - and how often does THAT happen?

If I hear one more person telling me it could have saved Bianchi I will throw them in the @#$%& sea.


The aeroscreen looked much better to me. If we have to have anything, I would have gone with that.

Henry Surtees, Justin Wilson, Dan Wheldon and Jules Bianchi were all killed through head injuries, as well as Massa being seriously injured. The halo/canopy wouldn't have saved Bianchi and it almost certainly wouldn't have saved Wheldon, but that's still 3 deaths or injuries that would have been prevented or the effects minimised had a device been in place.

The only time an an accident is described as freakish is when someone gets injured. It's highly unlikely that a driver will suffer from getting hit on the head by anything in the near future, but why leave it to chance?

They will introduce something which will give the drivers some protection and the only reason people dislike it is because it looks @#$%&, and 'looking @#$%&' isn't a valid reason to stop it being introduced. As Imola 1994 so vividly showed you can't leave it up to chance or odds by being lax with safety.

Imola 1994 seems like such a distant memory now and F1 has done a remarkable job and be very fortunate to only have two fatalities since that terrible weekend. But you only have to look outside to realise just how dangerous Motorsport remains.

Surtees, Wheldon, Wilson, Bianchi to name but a few lost to head injuries.

I hate the look of the halo... But it's aesthetics are simply not a justifiable reason to reject it.

In one form or another better head protection is going to happen. It has to happen, there's no way it won't be ultimately implemented considering the degree of legal litigation in modern society.

I don´t like how it looks but I think we´ll forget about it 2 or 3 races later. I think its gonna be one of the biggest aesthetical changes in the sport, along with for example when they started to place the radiators in the sidepods. (I´d like to know what did the people think in 1970 when the Lotus 72 was first presented...)

Though I agree it has to happen, what concerns me is the visibility issues it could have, mostly in circuits with big height changes like Spa, and also in the starts with all the cars packed together. I don´t really know if that variables have been properly tested

What point is there in a head protection system in F1 if the FIA aren't going to mandate it for every open cockpit category it sanctions?

The FIA need to decide what the hell F1 is. Is it cutting edge sport, show business, entertainment, theater, a pseudo test-bed for future road car technology, the political scapegoat for all the immoral injustices of the industrialised world, the pinnacle of motorsport, or a platform for manufacturers to advertise that these highly complex 1.6T V6 Hybrids may resemble the cubic capacity and cylinder configuration of small FWD buzz boxes which could be seen as 'relevant' to road car sales.

Bianchi was a freak accident. Surtees accident wouldn't have happened in F1 thanks to wheel tethers, and any accident that happens in indycar isn't indicative of the dangers that F1 drivers are regularly exposed to. I can't think of any F1 track where cars are going through a concrete canyon at 300+ kph average speed for 400 miles. So if wheel tethers could have prevented death why haven't they been mandated for all FIA open wheel series? Its all just BS..

Seriously, its all gone way too far. We need a breakaway series...

They are trying to introduce it for the lower FIA formula too. That is one of the reason why it has been delayed.

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GP2tifoso28
Bianchi was a freak accident.

No it wasn't. I've said this time and time again. He aquaplaned on exactly the same piece of water that Sutil lost control on, and once he lost control he was always going to end up in roughly the same barrier as Sutil. Bianchi shouldn't have been going as fast as he was under a yellow flag, but he wasn't the only one. The blame for that one lies squarely at the feet of Charlie Whiting for not throwing a safety car to stop the drivers going as fast as they were in an obviously dangerous area of the race track. Remember in 1994 exactly the same thing happened on that Dunlop corner so there was even precedence.

It was not a freak accident in any way, shape or form. As I said, there are no freak accidents, only accidents which injure people and accidents which don't. Safety standards have obviously massively improved but there is still plenty of scope for drivers getting hurt.

And we've seen wheels come off F1 cars since the wheel tethers too - I'm sure Buemi wasn't too impressed at his front wheels simultaneously falling off in Shanghai.

No guarantee the halo would have blocked the spring from hitting Massa, or even, albeit less likely, the debris that hit Wilson.

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X (@ed24f1)

Quote
SchueyFan
No guarantee the halo would have blocked the spring from hitting Massa, or even, albeit less likely, the debris that hit Wilson.

The halo perhaps not, but it would have given them a chance. The canopy obviously would. Why would you not want that protection?

Today in Pocono Helio Castroneves literally took Rossi's indycar in the face.





Are these all freak accidents? The only freak here is that Helio Castroneves wasn't seriously injured.

Quote
Brad Keselowski
I don't want to lose anymore friends and colleagues to accidents we know how to fix.

Halos please.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/22/2016 08:39PM by gav.

Good thing the pitlane is that wide, there's a good number of circuits where they would have mowed down a couple of pitcrews in the process. The crash itself reminds me a bit of the Wurz/Coulthard incident Melbourne 2007.

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used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld

Bianchi was a freak accident. The combination of no safety car being deployed, Bianchi entering too fast, a foreign industrial vehicle being placed on track, dangerously low levels of light to accommodate ideal European TV ratings, and Bianchi sadly entering the danger zone at the speed and angle in which he did, all effectively combined to create a worst case scenario.

The halo in Massa's case frankly terrifies me. If an object of that mass had deflected off the halo and into Massa's torso it would be disastrous. So what's next? They might as well just be done with it and close the cockpit off completely.

As for that Indycar incident, those guys are circulating that track at over 320Kph average speed, wheel to wheel, for 2 hours. If those guys were serious about safety they would stop racing open wheelers around ovals effective immediately. The only thing that pitlane incident proves is that there are dangers inherent in all forms of motorsport, be it on the track, in the pits, or in the crowd... just as there are dangers out on the open road. A high road toll has never stopped me from getting in my car, I know the risks and I accept it - everybody in life has a choice. No one wants to see people injured but at what cost? Surely if its too dangerous motorsport should be banned completely because it will never be 100% safe. Just look at motogp, far more dangerous than car racing yet all the riders know the risk and the ones who can't handle it usually take an early retirement. At the end of the day all these guys decided to race open wheelers.

Quote
GP2tifoso28
Bianchi was a freak accident. The combination of no safety car being deployed, Bianchi entering too fast, a foreign industrial vehicle being placed on track, dangerously low levels of light to accommodate ideal European TV ratings, and Bianchi sadly entering the danger zone at the speed and angle in which he did, all effectively combined to create a worst case scenario.

You said it yourself - it was a combination of factors, two of which made a crash highly, highly likely. It was not freakish.

Quote
GP2tifoso28
The halo in Massa's case frankly terrifies me. If an object of that mass had deflected off the halo and into Massa's torso it would be disastrous. So what's next? They might as well just be done with it and close the cockpit off completely.

If it had hit the halo it would have lost a lot of it's speed, and certainly it's angle. The halo wouldn't make things safe, but safer. Of course there's still the potential for injury - that will never go away so long as drivers continue to hurtle around the tracks at speed.

Quote
GP2tifoso28
As for that Indycar incident, those guys are circulating that track at over 320Kph average speed, wheel to wheel, for 2 hours. If those guys were serious about safety they would stop racing open wheelers around ovals effective immediately. The only thing that pitlane incident proves is that there are dangers inherent in all forms of motorsport, be it on the track, in the pits, or in the crowd... just as there are dangers out on the open road. A high road toll has never stopped me from getting in my car, I know the risks and I accept it - everybody in life has a choice. No one wants to see people injured but at what cost? Surely if its too dangerous motorsport should be banned completely because it will never be 100% safe. Just look at motogp, far more dangerous than car racing yet all the riders know the risk and the ones who can't handle it usually take an early retirement. At the end of the day all these guys decided to race open wheelers.

Of course motorsport is dangerous. It's partly why we like it and when you look at the IoM TT races, you can see why they get a massive rush from the danger too. That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to simply say "well, danger is good, we'll never make things totally safe, so let's just carry on the way we are and forget any further safety development".

In the 50s and 60s the cars had a thin aluminium fuel tank either side of the drivers cockpit, at least one of which in the event of a medium-speed crash would almost certainly rupture. Still in the 70s we had tracks with minimal barrier protection at the side of the track, where a car could simply drive into a tree at speed. It's absolutely bonkers to think that cockpit-side protection only came into affect after Imola 94. Why are you so against progress? It's such a simple option to install a canopy or halo to improve safety, whichever is deemed best, and if the looks of the car suffer then so be it. You won't stop watching just because of another safety feature being introduced, and it won't stop youngsters from wanting to race either.

Adding to what gav said: A lot of things can be done to avoid all the factors listed there (or reduce their effects). for example: virtual safety car, improving tyre barriers, improving wet tyres, etc etc etc etc. The Halo is amongst them.

Freak is when something is impossible to have under control, and Bianchi´s crash had a lot of factors involved that could have been under control and weren´t. So it is not a freak accident. Maybe a consequence of various negligences if you want, but not freak. Freak is a bird hitting the visor of your helmet.

gav Wrote:
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> [...] It's absolutely bonkers to think that cockpit-side
> protection only came into affect after Imola 94.

In fact after Monaco and Wendlinger accident the same year.


Frantic Wrote:
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> Freak is a bird hitting the visor of your helmet.

Or a spring...

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Quote
EricMoinet
In fact after Monaco and Wendlinger accident the same year.

I can't check at the moment, but I seem to recall only Sauber voluntarily introduced higher side protection in the wake of Wendlinger's crash. But you're right, I never mentioned anything about mandated cockpit sides, so it was indeed started after Wendlinger's crash.

The regulation for all teams came into affect in 1995, and was then tightened for 1996 (remember Ferrari took the new regulations too literally with the rather chunky cockpit side protection on the 310).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/24/2016 10:42AM by gav.