As if Formula 1 couldn’t get more commercialized, it’s become a night time spectacle in selected countries in 2008. Bernie Ecclestone, the commercial rights holder to F1, decided it would be a great idea to turn on the lights and let the drivers duke it out in artificial lighting. Is this a good idea? In my opinion, no.
Racing, aside from endurance racing such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, 24 Hours of Daytona and the like, belong in daylight. Formula 1 is the most empirical form of motorsports possible - machines and drivers focused on one thing: performance. Exorbitant budgets, expensive materials and sky-high drivers’ salaries are the norm. But it all translates into pure performance. So why would anyone want to put these machines and drivers into an artificially lit race course, with dangerous dark spots and glare from the gazillion-watt lights?
Now we all love the subaru Impreza. It has AWD, crap-tons of horsepower, and it beats the pants off of all other rally cars in WRC. There has however been a dispute in the car community as to whether the Impreza could be better suited as just a rear wheel drive car instead of an all wheel drive car. Toyota and Subaru have decided to make this possible. There are pros and cons to doing that, a few of the pros are it would be lighter since it didn’t have the extra pieces for all wheel drive and you could replace the inherit understeer with oversteer.(Which could be a con depending on who you ask) Autocar has the full story with their own mockup of what they think it will look like.
Formula DRIFT kicks off their 5th Championship season on April 12, 2008 for Round 1: Streets of Long Beach. Tickets for this event and the other rounds are available for purchase online.
The Formula DRIFT Championship presented by Circuit City begins with Round 1: Streets of Long Beach on April 12. Online ticket purchases for this event will guarantee you a reserved seat in the grandstands. Discounted pre-sale tickets are available through Ticketmaster and on the Formula DRIFT website at.
“With pre-sale reserved tickets for Round 1: Streets of Long Beach, you will never lose your seat and can comfortably browse the paddock and vendor village and not miss out on any of the action,” said Jim Liaw, president and co-founder of Formula DRIFT. “Drifting season is upon us and we look forward to another exciting year of Formula DRIFT.”
Tickets for the rest of the Formula DRIFT Championship season are available for purchase online.
There it is. It’s Honda Racing F1’s new car for the 2008 Formula 1 season. Gone is the tree-hugging livery of the RA107, replaced with this semi-tree-hugging version.
2007 was a dismal year for this squad. They regularly finished behind Super Aguri F1, which is essentially their bastard child team with an older chassis (read: RA106). For a team that finished high in the Constructor’s Championship in 2006 with regular podium finishes, it was a year to forget. Both Jensen Button and Rubens Barrichello deserved a better car, as they are both capable of winning points at every race.
So here’s to better performance in 2008. Ross Brawn’s arrival at the squad should help things and with engine development at a freeze in line with the FIA mandate - which makes absolutely no sense to this author - aero is going to be more important than ever to turn up the wick in performance.
As if the GT-R needed a tune up to become a race car, the new GT-R race car has been announced. This car will be competing in the 2008 SUPER GT series and you can bet that it’s going to be a major contender. Our guess is that it blows away the competition like the New England Patriots. Read the rest of this entry »
A few years ago who would have thought that electric vehicles would be viewed as a viable alternative to fossil fuel powered vehicles. Tesla Motors has a roadster that does 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds, gets an equivalent 135 mpg, has a 220 mile range and costs two cents per mile cost of operation!
People speculate as to what an electric car race would be like. Can you imagine Formula One in electric cars? Does it matter that they don’t make engine noise? Well, from the perspective of the racer, I don’t think it makes a difference whether there is engine noise or not as long as you are going fast enough and have good competition. Anyone who has raced an electric go kart knows what I am talking about. Hit the jump for the story of the WebRiders Grand Prix held today at MB2 Raceway… Read the rest of this entry »
The BMW Sauber F1 team launched their new F1.08 challenger for the 2008 FIA Formula 1 World Championship. Supposedly the result of everything BMW has learned over the past 2 seasons, the new racecar is predicted by their drivers to competitive for the upcoming season - of course they say that… would they ever say the car is going to be crappy?
Scuderia Ferrari F1 won the FIA Formula 1 Constructor’s Championship after the FIA found McLaren guilty of possessing 800 pages of proprietary data from the former team. McLaren was fine $100 million and excluded from the Constructor’s title - which incidentally landed them at the end of pit row for the 2008 season and leaves them out of TV revenue shared by FOM (Formula One Management). McLaren also agreed to freeze certain aspects of development of their 2008 car and let the FIA scrutinize it with a fine toothed comb. Even after that decision, Luca di Montezemolo, Chairman of the Fiat group which owns Ferrari, went on and on about how right his team was, how wrong Ron Dennis and McLaren were and so on.
So you figure that after Kimi Raikkonen won a rather miraculous Driver’s Championship at Interlagos in Brazil, Mr. Montezemolo would shut up and get on with the business for the 2008 season.
WRONG.
Toyota’s rather pathetic Formula 1 squad launched their TF108 challenger for the 2008 FIA Formula 1 crown today. Considering that their performance has been bottom rung as of late - I suspect the car more than their drivers, as Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher were more than capable of challenging for podium spots - ANY kind of progress and ANY kind of design plagiarism would be a good thing. Even their engine customer team, Williams F1, outpaced their factory counterpart during the 2007 season. As readily visible, Toyota F1 has adopted the “bridge” upper element in the front aero section pioneered by McLaren last year. The sidepod vertical element is reminiscent of the Honda F1 RA106 chassis. The bargeboard design appears to have evolved as well.
All this author can say is, you can sell millions of cars and be known as a quality manufacturer, but their F1 programme sucks.
Here you have it. McLaren’s 2008 challenger. Immediately, you can see that they’re left out the “bridge” upper front element, heavily revised bargeboard and sidemount aero, and deeply curved rear lower element. They’re sticking with the horizontal element in front of the rear spoiler section. Wonder if any of these developments came from the drawing board of a certain other Formula 1 team… Hmmm… And look at Heikki… so happy. We’ll see how long that lasts.
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