Making a cool million bucks on a test Friday

[Jersey Tom]

Nascar is some good racing on the last fuel stint. End of Kansas between Johnson and Edwards was fun to watch.

Rest of the race isn't terribly exciting, but it's at least interesting. Track feel changes a lot through the race, lot of shuffling of position on pitstops. Good to have on in the background while drinking a beer and making some food or something.

I don't get the Friday test money thing. On one hand I'd kinda like to see Friday stay practice. But at the end of the day, what might be interesting would be to have a 1-lap shootout session. You post your time, and the quickest gets a cool million. Would be interesting, but not particularly exciting to watch.

[modbaraban]

I honestly fail to understand why to save costs on testing they should play lotto and win prizes on friday instead of making it a genuine test day and then ban all non-GP testing during the season.

[myurr]

I honestly fail to understand why to save costs on testing they should play lotto and win prizes on friday instead of making it a genuine test day and then ban all non-GP testing during the season.

what he said

[sstanescu]

I personally consider that Formula 1 shall remain the pinnacle of motorsport.This was in the past, this is how must remain. But we must all agree that the spectacle on track is missing. Therefore:

1. Formula 1 must should open the door widely enough to show the audience why is the pinnacle of motorsports. Why such immense amount of money is spent. For me, part of the show is this excellent website and forum, part of the show is SpeedTV Chalkboard session (sorry, I can only see what's on the web, since I cannot receive SpeedTV in Romania), part of the show is sometimes RTL pre-race sessions (although my German is really poor), and others. But that's because I'm searching for it. Otherwise, is a boring race, with lousy comments, and very little insights. By rich graphics and by support of the teams, Formula 1 should open the doors before and after the sessions to show the development, to share bits of telemetry (explaining for example why somebody missed the pole for example), bits of setup, technical feedback from drivers and mechanics. How many people from the F1 audience knows how many cylinders have the F1 engines? How many pedals the driver is using? What the Bridgestone engineers are doing in the pits all the time, with notepads in hands? And so on... 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after and Formula 1 would become a technological show, educating the audience which could understand better the entire motorsport. Is difficult to force the teams to share the info, but there are some parts which are easily accessible for anybody knowleadgeble enough on the pitlane, so no big secrets there. There is thin line between public interest and company intelectual property, but this must be drawn.

2. Overtaking is difficult and small teams have hard times to keep up. But the entire engine rule, for example, is only contributing to decline. But drivers and teams must be motivated not to save engine if they failed to overtake in the first corner. Point for fastest lap? Yes, I would say so. Point for most overtakes for position during the race? I would support this as well. Small teams maybe should be "helped" by a different revenue and technology share. And most important, aero help must be killed as much as possible, as long as the benefit for the car leads to problems for the following car. Maybe, the new rules for the next year will help on this matter.

"Gold medals" and "1M prize" looks like desperate measures. And for me, none of these 2 measures are appealing. Artificial panic measures will only kill the Formula 1 audience.

Sorry for long post. I was reading the board for almost one year and thank you all for the good information share.

[Conceptual]

I personally consider that Formula 1 shall remain the pinnacle of motorsport.This was in the past, this is how must remain. But we must all agree that the spectacle on track is missing. Therefore:

I don't agree that the spectacle is missing. The fact that these teams show up and compete guarantee a spectacle, every time.

F1 oddly reminds me of a SciFi TV show named "Eureka". Every episode has the most brilliant minds in the world pushing science so hard that they almost destroy the planet. If it wasn't for the mundane Sherrif using common sense, the brainiacs wouldn't make it to episode 2.

I highly reccomend the show BTW, if you Google Eureka season torrent, you can pick up the first 2 seasons pretty quickly. They are worth every single moment of your time.

[donskar]

Welcome, sstanescu. Good post.