Entries in F3 (13)
Le Tour
Saturday, July 2, 2011 at 11:04AM
The Tour de France kicks off, or should that be rides off, today. One of my most favorite events and this year should be as interesting as ever. It is not only a long race for the riders but also for us viewers with three weeks straight of TV coverage for several hours a day. Good job I'm not working full time!
Some predictable pole positions today with Stoner capturing the MotoGP at Mugello, Marquez the Moto2, and yes it is still raining on and off. Rossi continues to struggle down in 12th. Puts Stoner's performance on the Ducati in some perspective doesn't it?
It did rain in Imola yesterday, the results from FP2 were slow in being posted. Peugeot are on pole by a slim margin from the Audi, with Peugeot and the McNish Audi locking out the top four places. The Oak racing Pescarolo-Judd are 3 seconds off pole, but only 1.5 behind McNish, so at least they may catch a glimpse of them. The BMW's were quickest in the GTE class with three Ferraris hard on their heels.
Vergne took pole in Hungary for the FR3.5 and went on to win the first race, while Kevin Magnussen took his first British F3 pole, two in fact, following nicely in Dad's footsteps.
So, off to watch the Tour.
Some predictable pole positions today with Stoner capturing the MotoGP at Mugello, Marquez the Moto2, and yes it is still raining on and off. Rossi continues to struggle down in 12th. Puts Stoner's performance on the Ducati in some perspective doesn't it?
It did rain in Imola yesterday, the results from FP2 were slow in being posted. Peugeot are on pole by a slim margin from the Audi, with Peugeot and the McNish Audi locking out the top four places. The Oak racing Pescarolo-Judd are 3 seconds off pole, but only 1.5 behind McNish, so at least they may catch a glimpse of them. The BMW's were quickest in the GTE class with three Ferraris hard on their heels.
Vergne took pole in Hungary for the FR3.5 and went on to win the first race, while Kevin Magnussen took his first British F3 pole, two in fact, following nicely in Dad's footsteps.
So, off to watch the Tour.
So it's Saturday
Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 01:02PM
And there is still not much going on. Sounds like a fun FR3.5 race at the Nurburgring with Canadian Wilkins just beating Australian Ricciardo, with American Alexander Rossi going out on lap one on a damp track after qualifying on the front row. The usual suspects you might say.
British F3 at Brands Hatch looks set to be just as fraught with the top ten all within half a second between Svendsen-Cook and Magnussen. Spengler continued his domination of qualifying in the DTM for this weekends race at the Lausitz circuit.
Over in Spain the WSBK are at Aragon with Melandri on pole for a change, and Biaggi and Camier on their Aprilia's in front of Checa, I wonder if they can keep it up in the race?
With that, see you tomorrow.
British F3 at Brands Hatch looks set to be just as fraught with the top ten all within half a second between Svendsen-Cook and Magnussen. Spengler continued his domination of qualifying in the DTM for this weekends race at the Lausitz circuit.
Over in Spain the WSBK are at Aragon with Melandri on pole for a change, and Biaggi and Camier on their Aprilia's in front of Checa, I wonder if they can keep it up in the race?
With that, see you tomorrow.
Bits and Pieces
Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 11:56AM
After my "foot in mouth," or is it keyboard in mouth, comment about Ricciardo just keeping his hand in he goes and sets fast time, only to have it taken away because a bolt was found loose on the car after qualifying. This sort of thing sounds a bit over the top, like last year when a piece of tape was found on a car. Daniel was philosophical about it though, confirming he was there for the race experience. He did well in the first race, coming through the field from last to sixth, but with another potential problem as he and a few others are under investigation for possibly passing under a yellow. American Alexander Rossi finished well down, let's hope for a better finish in race 2.
Jan Magnussen's son Kevin won his maiden British F3 race with a couple of great overtaking moves. Let us hope Kevin can catch the breaks better than his father did. Somehow to me F3 is still the class to be in and win. We have F2, GP3, FR 3.5 etc, but this still seems the best finishing school. Many top drivers went straight from here to F1, while it almost seems that with a few exceptions classes like GP2 are for guys who will not quite make it. Still, not everyone is going to be world champion and at least they are living their dream and hopefully having some fun. Speaking of F2, another son of a famous father, Alex Brundle, took pole at Magny-Cours.
Also in France, at Le Mans, Casey Stoner continued to dominate practice and qualifying from Simoncelli and the rest of the Honda gang. Fifth is Lorenzo in front of the two Tech3 Yamahas, with Ben Spies eighth. So four Hondas, four Yamahas, and then the three Ducatis with Rossi and Hayden, who could not repeat yesterday's form. Are we loading an Ark here?
Grand Am is at VIR today, and DMG bikes are at Sears Point, but I don't think anyone is noticing.
Jan Magnussen's son Kevin won his maiden British F3 race with a couple of great overtaking moves. Let us hope Kevin can catch the breaks better than his father did. Somehow to me F3 is still the class to be in and win. We have F2, GP3, FR 3.5 etc, but this still seems the best finishing school. Many top drivers went straight from here to F1, while it almost seems that with a few exceptions classes like GP2 are for guys who will not quite make it. Still, not everyone is going to be world champion and at least they are living their dream and hopefully having some fun. Speaking of F2, another son of a famous father, Alex Brundle, took pole at Magny-Cours.
Also in France, at Le Mans, Casey Stoner continued to dominate practice and qualifying from Simoncelli and the rest of the Honda gang. Fifth is Lorenzo in front of the two Tech3 Yamahas, with Ben Spies eighth. So four Hondas, four Yamahas, and then the three Ducatis with Rossi and Hayden, who could not repeat yesterday's form. Are we loading an Ark here?
Grand Am is at VIR today, and DMG bikes are at Sears Point, but I don't think anyone is noticing.
Back to the Future
Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 01:04PM
So the World Council approved the new engine and a raft of other changes which sound less cutting edge and more like historic racing. No team orders, so back to pre 2002, and presumably teams can do almost anything except go back to changing drivers during the race as long as no one notices. 1.6 liter turbo engines with revs limited to 12,000 rpm, they could almost go back to using valve springs. Movable rear wings as we had in the sixties, except they can only be used when the car behind is within one second, is that on both cars? An odd rule change is the reintroduction of intermediate tires for 2011. I thought we had intermediate tires this year? A clean up of the under body rules to outlaw the double diffuser, but as we know you cannot "unlearn" something, so I am sure the boys are already working on that one. Oh yes, and the gearboxes have to last longer and the number of engines per year are reduced, so we are on an endurance/fuel conservation schedule, with biomass additives for 2012. Why not make one set of tires last a race weekend while you are at it, or are they still nervous there will be no overtaking and have to have pit stops? Why not just leave it to the teams to choose whether to start on a hard compound and not pit, or a soft one and gamble on making the time up? That is how all this started anyway when Gordon Murray I think it was worked out he could build a smaller, lighter, car and refuel and still make up the time.
At the awards ceremony the Korean GP received the Promoters Award! What for, giving away more tickets than anyone else has achieved, just finishing the track before the Friday of the race? That now devalues anyone else who has won it.
On a brighter note the new Audi R18 looks stunning, like the Peugeot but more menacing. Not sure how the driver sees over those front wheel arches though. I like the way they have incorporated the mandated rear fin, does not look like an add-on like some I've seen. So do we think that is the color it will race in?
Interesting that the FIA approved the F3 International Trophy at a time when the regular series are struggling to gain enough entries to keep going. The Trophy includes Macau and Pau, two great street races, but not ones that all the competitors choose to do, one estimate is that will cost an extra $100,000, or was that Pounds. It includes the Masters at Zandvoort, and the Korean F3 race which was cancelled this year. Why not just run one F3 series so we have enough cars on the grid. They all go to each others countries after all. F3 is a great series and needs to survive, but not sure this is the way to do it. Barry Bland, the promoter of Macau, is the new FIA single seat chief, so no surprise this got approved.
At the awards ceremony the Korean GP received the Promoters Award! What for, giving away more tickets than anyone else has achieved, just finishing the track before the Friday of the race? That now devalues anyone else who has won it.
On a brighter note the new Audi R18 looks stunning, like the Peugeot but more menacing. Not sure how the driver sees over those front wheel arches though. I like the way they have incorporated the mandated rear fin, does not look like an add-on like some I've seen. So do we think that is the color it will race in?
Interesting that the FIA approved the F3 International Trophy at a time when the regular series are struggling to gain enough entries to keep going. The Trophy includes Macau and Pau, two great street races, but not ones that all the competitors choose to do, one estimate is that will cost an extra $100,000, or was that Pounds. It includes the Masters at Zandvoort, and the Korean F3 race which was cancelled this year. Why not just run one F3 series so we have enough cars on the grid. They all go to each others countries after all. F3 is a great series and needs to survive, but not sure this is the way to do it. Barry Bland, the promoter of Macau, is the new FIA single seat chief, so no surprise this got approved.
tagged Audi, F1, F1 engines, F3, Korea, Macau, Motorsport, Movable wings, Pau, Peugeot, Team orders, Zandvoort
Audi, F1, F1 engines, F3, Korea, Macau, Motorsport, Movable wings, Pau, Peugeot, Team orders, Zandvoort Electric Vehicles
Monday, October 18, 2010 at 11:24AM Earlier this year I posted a question on Facebook, how many new power stations do we need if we move to electric vehicles. Someone knew the answer, 100. How many have we built in the last twenty years? Not that many, in fact very few apart from "peaker plants" running on natural gas to provide top up power at times of peak load. Now California is thinking of, or may have done it, restricting the power consumption of big screen TV's, so how are they going to handle electric vehicle demand, which is probably going to be higher in trendy California? In a similar vein this article was on Fox website yesterday asking how the grid is going to cope?
"A new generation of vehicles powered at least partially by electricity is on the way. And the prospect of a million or more Chevy Volts, Nissan Leafs, Tesla Roadsters and others on our highways in the next few years raises a practical question: Can the nation's electrical grid handle the power surge?
The grid already is responsible for running our offices, cooling our homes, powering our TVs, keeping our food cool and doing more or less everything else a modern human needs. Now, we're going to ask it to help drive us around town as well.
That shouldn't be difficult in the next year or so, when there won't be that many electric vehicles taking power from utilities. However, boosters hope that we'll see a million of these cars on the road by 2015. So researchers and industry officials will be paying close attention to make sure that the grid will be able to adapt."
Nice to see someone else is at least asking the question. You will notice that the new plants are mainly running on natural gas, while others remain on coal, both carbon based fuels, so how are electric cars green? The Leaf advertising says there is no tailpipe, that's because they swapped the tailpipe for the smokestack. Not in my backyard though. Until we make electricity from solar or some other truly green source we should stop kidding ourselves about electric cars. And let's not get started on the batteries.
There is, as usual, a nice piece in Autosport from the MPH page of Mark Hughes. It deals with the stress of the competition off the track between designers, which is even more intense than the drivers. Quoting James Allison from Renault, "I live in a state of perpetual fear. I fear that everything is always going to be not quite good enough - and I think it is better to feel that way." It is a great piece, and could just as easily have been written about track designers. "There are so many potentially wrong answers," he goes on to say, and that is just how I feel when laying out a track. You really only get one shot at getting it right, the owner is not going to be happy at changing it, and there are life and death issues here. It goes on to talk about the intuitive approach, not relying just on the data and the number crunching. I have talked about this before in respect of Adrian Newey, that he is not a technician but an artist. Any mathematician can crunch the numbers, but it is the artists that creates something new and innovative. As they say at the end of the piece, it is Newey the other designers are most afraid of, "They say he can visualise what the air wants to do." That is how I see race tracks.
The British Formula 3 calendar for 2011 was announced and it starts in Monza. Did I miss something here, this is the British F3 series? Maybe this is the problem, there are more than one F3 series and they tread on each others patch.
The grid already is responsible for running our offices, cooling our homes, powering our TVs, keeping our food cool and doing more or less everything else a modern human needs. Now, we're going to ask it to help drive us around town as well.
That shouldn't be difficult in the next year or so, when there won't be that many electric vehicles taking power from utilities. However, boosters hope that we'll see a million of these cars on the road by 2015. So researchers and industry officials will be paying close attention to make sure that the grid will be able to adapt."
Nice to see someone else is at least asking the question. You will notice that the new plants are mainly running on natural gas, while others remain on coal, both carbon based fuels, so how are electric cars green? The Leaf advertising says there is no tailpipe, that's because they swapped the tailpipe for the smokestack. Not in my backyard though. Until we make electricity from solar or some other truly green source we should stop kidding ourselves about electric cars. And let's not get started on the batteries.
There is, as usual, a nice piece in Autosport from the MPH page of Mark Hughes. It deals with the stress of the competition off the track between designers, which is even more intense than the drivers. Quoting James Allison from Renault, "I live in a state of perpetual fear. I fear that everything is always going to be not quite good enough - and I think it is better to feel that way." It is a great piece, and could just as easily have been written about track designers. "There are so many potentially wrong answers," he goes on to say, and that is just how I feel when laying out a track. You really only get one shot at getting it right, the owner is not going to be happy at changing it, and there are life and death issues here. It goes on to talk about the intuitive approach, not relying just on the data and the number crunching. I have talked about this before in respect of Adrian Newey, that he is not a technician but an artist. Any mathematician can crunch the numbers, but it is the artists that creates something new and innovative. As they say at the end of the piece, it is Newey the other designers are most afraid of, "They say he can visualise what the air wants to do." That is how I see race tracks.
The British Formula 3 calendar for 2011 was announced and it starts in Monza. Did I miss something here, this is the British F3 series? Maybe this is the problem, there are more than one F3 series and they tread on each others patch.
tagged Adrian Newey, Autosport, Designers, Electric vehicles, F1, F3, Mark Hughes
Adrian Newey, Autosport, Designers, Electric vehicles, F1, F3, Mark Hughes