Features
Displaying stories 1 - 20 of 908 in total
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Straight Talk - F1 waves the white flag of surrender
Formula One's approval of trying a different weekend format in three Grand Prix later this year was more than expected, given Ross Brawn's insistence new formats had to be tried before the new technical regulations will come into effect next year, but it's still a massive disappointment for the hardcore Formula One fans that have been following the sport with religious fervor for decades.Full Story
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Sideview Cartoon - Fairplay in Monza
Fairplay in MonzaFull Story
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Sideview Cartoon - Sideview Cartoon - Albon replaces Gasly
Albon replaces GaslyFull Story
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Straight Talk - A great new crop
One of the highlights of the 2019 Formula One World Championship is the quality of the three rookies that have joined the field at the start of the year. For once, the top three finishers of the previous year's Formula 2 Championship managed to move straight into Grand Prix racing, so we have George Russell, Alex Albon and Lando Norris in Formula One this year and all three of them have already shown they belong here - and may be on their way to future stardom, at least judging by the early signs they've been giving.Full Story
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Straight Talk - The tip of the iceberg
I left Bahrain one week ago feeling Formula One had been cheated by the final result of the race. It never feels right when the driver who deserves to win doesn't and, in the paddock, I guess we all felt for Charles Leclerc, as he crawled to third place after completely dominating qualifying and the race. Yes, I know, this sort of things used to happen all the time up to 25/30 years ago, but like everybody else I got spoiled by the tremendous reliability of the modern Formula One cars, so a retirement or sudden loss of performance for mechanical reasons, tends to be a big surprise.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Double or quits!
With the Australian Grand Prix providing some unexpected results, we head into the second race of the season with even more questions than answers in our minds. Flying into Melbourne we all had about 30 hours in planes and transit airports to anticipate what was going to happen, but I bet no one expected an easy Mercedes one-two and even fewer predicted Valtteri Bottas would completely dominate the race to earn his fourth Grand Prix victory.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Exciting battles about to start
Mercedes has won all five championships held since the Hybrid Power Units came into Formula One, with Lewis Hamilton securing four championships in the same period of time, but that doesn’t mean all other teams and drivers could stay home in 2019 as if they had no chance to compete. Given the high level achieved by Ferrari at the start of 2018 and Red Bull’s performance in the last third of that season, there’s reason to believe the German team will have to work very hard this year to retain its titles.Full Story
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Straight Talk - "About F...ing time!"
Kimi Raikkonen's victory in the United States Grand Prix was one of the most popular I've witnessed in my many years in the sport. Although the huge press room of the Circuit of the Americas was sparsely populated - and with not one single Finnish journalist sitting there, as the TV crew was already out in the paddock - it erupted into spontaneous applause when the Ferrari driver crossed the finish line, to put an end to a 113 Grand Prix winless streak.Full Story
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Straight Talk - It is what it is!
"It is what it is", is a sentence you can be certain to hear every time you get to talk with Valtteri Bottas or Kimi Raikkonen. More than the other drivers, the Finns are extremely pragmatic people, who don't dwell on what should, could or might have been. What matters for them is the present and the future, because there's nothing they can do to change the past.Full Story
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Straight Talk - A spectacular meltdown!
If you would have asked me three weeks ago who had a better chance of equalling Juan Manuel Fangio's feat of winning five Formula One World Championships I would have put Sebastian Vettel's name forward, even though he was trailing Hamilton by quite a decent margin. Ask me again today and the answer will have to be different. Spa-Francorchamps apart, since the German Grand Prix, the Ferrari driver's challenge has melted in a spectacular way, through his own mistakes but also through the team's sudden lack of efficiency.Full Story
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Straight Talk - The boot in is on the other foot
Sebastian Vettel's victory in last Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix may have been the pivotal moment of this year's Formula One World Championship. The German's dominant victory finally made justice to the obvious technical advantage Ferrari has been enjoying for the last three months. As mentioned in the previous column, Vettel and Ferrari had thrown away two excellent opportunities to win in Hockenheim and in the Hungaroring, heading into the summer break with the four-times World Champion trailing Lewis Hamilton by 24 points, so another defeat in Spa-Francorchamps could have dealt a fatal blow to the German's title hopes.Full Story
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Straight Talk - The fat lady hasn't sung yet!
Lewis Hamilton's two consecutive victories in races Ferrari was expected to dominate have swung the title battle pendulum his way. The Mercedes driver arrived in Hockenheim trailing Sebastian Vettel by eight points and left Budapest, ten days later, leading the championship by 24 points, a swing of 32 points in his favour, that came on tracks where he was supposed to lose ground.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Two very different home defeats
In the space of just one week, both Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel felt the weight of home defeats, the British driver recovering from last to second place in Silverstone, where the Ferrari driver won comfortably, and then with Vettel crashing out of the lead at the German Grand Prix, to hand his championship rival an unlikely victory, after he started the race from just 14th place on the grid.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Thank you for the failures!
Formula One people tend to be quite blase about other forms of racing in many areas, one of them being the amount of mechanical failures cars suffer in Endurance, Indy Cars or rallying. You see, for the last decade or more when a driver fails to complete a Grand Prix this normally happens because of some incident, as the technical regulations have pushed the teams and the engine manufacturers to produce bullet proof machinery, the only way to avoid grid penalties for replacing Power Units or gearboxes.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Red Bull's engine conundrum solved
The chances of Red Bull retaining Renault Power Units for next year are really slim - so slim they’re almost invisible. In the paddock there were clear signs the partnership that dominated Formula One between 2010 and 2013 is as good as broken.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Has Liberty shot its own foot?
Put yourself in the shoes of a regular Grand Prix promoter. You run a circuit, a business that was very profitable until a decade ago but has suffered tremendously from the proliferation of new racing tracks all over the world, so you're already running a tight ship to make ends meet. But you also organise a Formula One Grand Prix every year, with the promoters' fee being tremendously expensive and really giving you no hope of making any profit out of it.Full Story
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Straight Talk - What future for Daniel Ricciardo?
With Sebastian Vettel sure to remain at Ferrari until the end of 2020, and Lewis Hamilton just a few details away from signing a new deal with Mercedes, the man everyone is watching on the drivers' market is Daniel Ricciardo. The Australian has done a sterling job since he joined Red Bull at the start of 2014, winning six of the nine Grand Prix the team won since then, but he doesn't seem to feel completely at home there anymore, as the management has a strong love affair with Max Verstappen that is here to last.Full Story
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Feature - Pointless luck
Romain Grosjean was asked prior to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix if points were possible in this race.Full Story
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Feature - It's never happened before
This is a first. It has never happened before. For the first time in the modern hybrid Formula 1 era, which began in 2014, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas has gone through three grands prix without a victory. This from the team that won 63 races in the past four seasons.Full Story
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Straight Talk - Going over the Max
Max Verstappen came in for a lot of criticism after the Chinese Grand Prix, where two incidents in the space of four laps took him out of contention for the victory in Shanghai, while also causing serious damage to Sebastian Vettel's chances to increase his championship lead.Full Story
Displaying stories 1 - 20 of 908 in total