Singapore Heroes and Zeroes

[Monty]

Zeroes:- Perez, Perez, Perez plus a mention of Ferrari/Vettel who as a team ruined their own weekend.
Heroes:- Hamilton, Hamilton, Alonso and (begrudgingly) Verstappen

[guest3164]

Heroes-

Hamilton- He is the best driver out there and racing at his peak right now.  Incredible form from him.

Verstappen- Given his engine issues, second place was a brilliant finish.

Alonso- I didn't hear him say it himself which is unusual, but I am sure it was an incredible drive and he drove the skin off the McLaren. 

Sirotkin- Raced hard (and seemed quite clean from what I saw) and gave Williams some airtime which I appreciated! 

Zeroes:
Perez- Ocon into a wall?  Foolish.  Turning into Sirotkin after moaning for multiple laps about not being able to overtake a car several seconds a lap slower than your own?  Idiotic, deserved more than the drive through. 

Ferrari- They are getting close to throwing away another title.

Grosjean- I know he was in a battle with the might Sirotkin/Williams, but come on, blue flags!  Although, it did make the end of the race a little more lively.  Until Hamilton drove off again.

[John S]

Heroes:-

Lewis - took the fight to Ferrari and beat them with a 'Stardust' Q3 lap for pole and a perfect run in the race.

Max - for keeping his cool in the first lap and not squeezing Seb, and then putting in the times to jump Seb.

Perez - for livening up a very processional race, for all the wrong reasons I know but it kept TV viewers awake more than perhaps should be necessary. 


Zeros:-

Perez - Sneaky but perhaps inevitable shunt with teammate, Red mist moment with Sirotkin and general bad, bad race - apart from keeping us all awake.
Only saving grace is the biggest neg of Singapore GP (listed next) affected Checo especially.

Tyres:- anyone apart from the big 3 teams were on a loser if they got into Q3 as they were doomed to pit earlier than the cars in the 2nd half of the grid, with it almost impossible to pass they lost time in spades. In fact 7 thru 9 at the end were all Q2 cars, the Hulk only managed 10 because Perez took out his frustration on Sirotkin allowing some others an easier pass.

Max - what's all this crap about driveability????  Your paid to be a top line driver mate just get on and drive the thing stop trying to blame Renault's engines for everything.
Last time I looked false neutral issues has more to do with gearbox gremlins, unless I've got it wrong RBR do their own gearbox.
Shut up and drive Max - leave the snidey political comments to Marko & Horner.     


 
 

[Alianora La Canta]

Heroes:

Hamilton: Kept his cool while others lost theirs.

Red Bull strategists: Notably with Verstappen, for leapfrogging him past Vettel on the pitstops using good strategy.

Ocon: for not throwing anyone under the bus despite having every reason to do so.

Honourable mention: Leclerc for breaking his five-race pointless streak.

Zeroes

Perez: Warning! Rant alert!

Checo, you're better than this. Did you leave your brain in the hotel?

I initially thought Ocon might have had a significant role to play in the intra-team collision that took Esteban out and gave Sergio his first bit of car damage (also wrecking Sirotkin's race for good measure). Then I saw the 5th replay of the race (there wasn't much else worth replaying for much of the event), where Sergio had a weird right-hand jink shortly before the crash. I struggled to see any justification for such a jink. Either Sergio failed to spot a big bump as well as the fact a car was alongside... ...or there was intention in that hit. If the red mist wasn't already down before that strike, it certainly was afterwards.

Being stuck behind Sirotkin thanks to wearing out the tyres excessively and unusually early was not good either. Both cars were damaged, which gave us the prospect of a no-chops fight. After several laps where I thought I could see steam coming out of Sergio's ears (and where, if the commentators are anything to go by, we were not given his radio messages simply to spare our ears), he darted left on a straight, seemingly surprised when this resulted in him colliding with the driver he'd been infuriated with since his last pit stop. If Sergio hadn't swiped his team-mate, neither of them would have been there in the first place.

After that, I was nervous whenever I saw a pink car near any other. Somehow Sergio managed to avoid hitting anything else. Credit to him for apologising afterwards, but he had better been wearing his earplugs in the debrief. You don't lose that many points for the team and get away with it. So bad was the drive that I was openly wondering to Dad whether he might be benched for a race by his own team to let Lance Stroll have a trial run...

/end rant

Liberty - for making the F1 App completely useless. The timing doesn't always work, only half the runners are visible at a time, even on huge screens, and the audio cut out at the worst possible times (including the last minute of qualifying).

Grosjean - While I can excuse Sirotkin's bad driving on a damaged car, Grosjean does not have such an excuse for getting in the leaders' way during a lapping manouever.

Dishonourable mention: Ferrari - That strategy was... ...not good.

[Monty]

^^^^ Perfect summary ^^^^

[cosworth151]

I was away all weekend. I didn't see any of Quali & missed the first part of the race. That said.....

Heroes:

Hamilton - Even after Max caught up with him in the "blue flag" incident (more on that in the Zeroes) Lewis just walked away from him.

K-Mag - I don't know how he ended up at the back but he did get FL for Haas. Even more miraculous than that, the stewards didn't take it away. They must not have seen what team it was.

Zeroes:

Perez - Another game of bumper cars. Force India really should get rid of him & keep Ocon.

The stewards - I can't think of any kind of auto racing where cars racing for position are subject to a blue flag. Absolutely ridiculous. It goes against everything that racing is supposed to be about. Liberty seems to have the attitude that it's all about the first few cars and the rest of the field doesn't matter. If I were Carl Haas, I would have been tempted to call both cars in, load up and leave. If you aren't allowed to race, why continue to make laps?

[Alianora La Canta]

F1 has had mandatory blue flags since 1993. It's a holdover from when backmarkers truly were hopeless and often piloted by people who deliberately impeded the race leaders. That's not really the case today, and I'd like the blue flags to be voluntary. However, the rules one is to race to are the rules in the book on race day, not the rules one would like to race to.

(Magnussen was at the back for a sub-optimal pit strategy; midfielders who went for a two-stop strategy tended to suffer for it, which is part of the reason Perez, Sirotkin and the Haases were running together).

Sportscars have blue flags, but they're voluntary (once, someone got black-flagged obstensibly for ignoring blue flags, but that was due to ignoring them so thoroughly they forced a leading car to crash into them).

[cosworth151]

I understand about blue flags, but not that they apply to cars actively racing for position. I've never heard of such a thing. After all, the whole purpose of being there is supposed to be about racing.

FYI, in circle track racing over here, they are blue with a white stripe.

[Alianora La Canta]

I understand about blue flags, but not that they apply to cars actively racing for position. I've never heard of such a thing. After all, the whole purpose of being there is supposed to be about racing.

FYI, in circle track racing over here, they are blue with a white stripe.

Ever since F1 has had mandatory blue flags, they've applied in all circumstances one car laps another, subject to marshals (or, latterly, the computer gap system) noticing. I think Magnussen's been essayed a penalty for ignoring blue flags due to excess focus on the car he was racing earlier in his Haas career (back in the middle of 2017).

[lkjohnson1950]

I gotta go with Cos on this one. (Wait let me sit down, check for a temperature. No, No, all is OK.) Back markers should not be forced to stop racing to let the leaders through. In fact, NASCAR allows cars to fight to keep from going a lap down. That would be significant at a track like Singapore where a yellow/safety car could happen at any time. The real problem here is, of course, aero. A car that's 2 or more seconds a lap slower should not be able to block a faster car from passing. It was mentioned that you needed to be 8 to 10 car lengths back to get clean air. Ridiculous! Even so, a 5 second penalty OK, 2 points on your license, equally ridiculous.

Oh Yeah, H's/Z's

Heroes Hamilton. I think he's gotten into Vettel's head, like Schumacher used to own
           Hill.

           Mercedes. Toto Wolff said the factory worked very hard to close the gap to
           Ferrari and I think they at least somewhat succeeded.

           Alonso. For once he had enough car to race the mid field and he made the
           most of it.

Zeroes The track. Like most recent street circuits it almost prohibits passing.

           The rules. I know the teams want to produce huge downforce, but it's killing
           the racing. The cars have to be able to run closer together.

           Perez, Of course.

           Ferrari They have really been off their game. They botched qually for Kimi
           at Spa; they botched his race strategy at Monza; and they botched qually
           and race strategy for Vettel here. I think Merc is in their heads.

[Andy B]

Most of what I think has been said already but I will say I was at Spa in 2004 when Schumacher took his seventh title with a third place and said at then that I will not see another driver like him in my lifetime and LH is proving me wrong. I also think that as he gets older he has matured as has SV but it shows in LH's driving too.

VB has said in the past that as LH's teammate he is beatable and I wonder how he feels about that now?

An example needs to be set on driving standards and should have been taken when SV drove into LH so now we have SP doing the same and CW saying "I don't think it was deliberate" where as it looked like it to me as did putting EO into the wall so will they wait till someone is injured before they clamp down on it?

[rmassart]

Some random observations:

How on earth have Mercedes managed to get everyone else believing that Singapore is their bogey track. They've won 4 of the last 5 Singapore GPs!!!

It also looks like Vettel learned his lesson from last year. Instead of crashing into Verstappen on lap 1 he waited a couple more turns and then overtook him. 

I wonder whether Ferrari's choice of tyres were based on the hope of seeing another safety car. I'm not enough of an F1 strategists to understand if in such a case their tyre choice might have been advantageous. I'm thinking it probably wouldn't have helped much?

[Jericoke]

...I was at Spa in 2004 when Schumacher took his seventh title with a third place and said at then that I will not see another driver like him in my lifetime and LH is proving me wrong. I also think that as he gets older he has matured as has SV but it shows in LH's driving too.

I remember thinking we'd never see the like of Schumacher again, that the sport had been changed to prevent a single team dominating like Ferrari did.  And then we had both Vettel/RBR and Hamilton/Mercedes, contemporaries of Schumacher, being as dominant.

It's pretty amazing to be able to compare them directly as spectators and fans.  Schumacher was of a different era, where an F1 team would improve by relentless testing.  Vettel and Hamilton are much more limited in how much car time they have (I honestly don't know how much simulator time they do, and how effective the simulator truly is.  Anyone have an opinion on that?), so they are winning with a different skill set than Schumacher had.  Hamilton seems to understand the psychological element of F1 better than anyone racing today though.

[Alianora La Canta]

An example needs to be set on driving standards and should have been taken when SV drove into LH so now we have SP doing the same and CW saying "I don't think it was deliberate" where as it looked like it to me as did putting EO into the wall so will they wait till someone is injured before they clamp down on it?

Yes, I think that's exactly what they are waiting for. Can't see any other reason why they've waited so many years to act on this.

[Andy B]

Some random observations:

How on earth have Mercedes managed to get everyone else believing that Singapore is their bogey track. They've won 4 of the last 5 Singapore GPs!!!

They only won last year when SV took out himself and the opposition.