Question about Formula 1

[Mo0o]

How come all the points are halved from the Sepang GP?

And how come Ferrari is so shitty now? I guess I never understood why the cars matter so much from year to year. Is it because they always add some new rule in so people have to change the car set up to adjust and those that do it the best have a big advantage? Seems like unless theres major new tech coming out the cars shouldn't change that much

 

[vshah]

Originally posted by: Mo0o
How come all the points are halved from the Sepang GP?

And how come Ferrari is so shitty now? I guess I never understood why the cars matter so much from year to year. Is it because they always add some new rule in so people have to change the car set up to adjust and those that do it the best have a big advantage? Seems like unless theres major new tech coming out the cars shouldn't change that much

apparently there is a new rear wing design that the leaders decided to do, which is legal by one interpretation of the rules, and illegal by another. the f1 committee ruled that they are legal, so the other teams are stuck for this season.


i'm by no means an expert, i just recall that from autoblog. i rarely watch f1.

 

[Cobalt]

Basically they restricted a lot of the aero the teams can use on their cars to level the playing field. The teams that had money to burn on tons of r&d always dominated (Ferrari, mclaren) and f1 became too stale and too expensive to compete in for the smaller teams. After watching this season I welcome the changes, seems like strategy and driver skill are at the forefront again and not tech, makes it a lot more exciting. Kinda makes me wonder if Schumacher was as great as he seemed without the cars Ferrari used to have...

 

[Lonyo]

Half points from Malaysia/Sepang because they didn't complete the minimum required distance to award full points (something like 66% of race distance, or it could be 50 or 75, but whatever, they didn't do enough laps before the race was stopped).

Ferrari are so bad because they didn't adjust to the new rules as well as other teams, and focused on development of last years car right up until the end of the season to secure the constructors championship and try and win the drivers championship.
That left them with an underdeveloped car for this year.
Brawn, for example, were developing this years car since pretty much the beginning of last year, when they realised they had no hope last year. Ferrari weren't able to commit as much to this years car, and have suffered, while others have been able to commit more.
There are also things like the diffusers which 2 of the top 3 teams are using which gives them an advantage.

 

[alpineranger]

Ferrari isn't doing as bad as points would indicate. The field is quite close, ferrari has had competitive speed at times but they have had reliability issues and made mistakes with strategy. There is much less margin for this than in the recent past and so they have nothing to show for the efforts. The same story can be said for others, such as bmw sauber good pace, but not the best luck and a minimal margin.

 

[z0mb13]

What happened in sepang so they had to stop the race?

 

[Koing]

Originally posted by: z0mb13
What happened in sepang so they had to stop the race?

Rain. It was savagely raining and undriveable.

Schumy was a bad ass driver. Just compare him to his team mate when he had a worse car then the field. The driver can make a huge difference in getting more out of his car. Sure a lot of seasons he had a bad ass car but then there were others where he had to work harder.

Koing