Hi I have some questions about F1. These might sound like jokes but they are very much asked in good faith from someone who has, I think, only seen gifs of F1 races.
Is Ferrari a human or a car? Or, like, is it a human named like the car?
In a Formula 1 race is the primary goal to just go real real fast? I have learned in baseball there are like a thousand stats beyond the main score. Do F1 racers have any other goals aside from "go fast and don't die or explode my car"?
It is my understanding that F1 is different from NASCAR in several ways, most of which currently defy my understanding. Do you think if you saw a short, silent video - or even a picture - of an auto race, you'd be able to determine if it was an F1 rather than a different kind of race? How?
Is there shame attached to enjoying the work of Ferrari? What has Ferrari done to warrant that?
I just searched up who Ferrari was and found a news story about Leclerc claims "three out of four of his breaks weren't working". What the fuck does that mean?? Why's he got so many breaks in there?? And why did he think 3/4 not working is only "borderline dangerous"?? That seems VERY bad to me???
Ok, take three, switching to a different browser, hopefully tumblr doesn't eat this one.
Ferrari is actually both! There was a guy named Enzo Ferrari who started a racing team back in 1929, then later on that team started building the racecars themselves instead of buying them from another company. This makes the Ferrari team the oldest and most successful team in Formula One, and that prestige attracts a lot of the best drivers to ever race. So you end up with a team that has long list of former championship winners and all time greats driving their cars, nearly a hundred years of racing experience, and one of the most recognizable sports car brands in the world funding them, and you get to watch them spectacularly fail to win a championship for nearly the 20th year in a row.
Cheering for Ferrari is like watching somebody juggle handguns. Really impressive until they inevitably shoot themselves in the foot.
Backing up a step, Formula One is actually two competitions running at the same time. There are currently 10 teams, each of which designs and builds a pair of cars from scratch for a total of 20 drivers in each race. The teams are all competing to see who can build the best car, and the drivers are all competing to see who can win the most races. I'm a big fan of the two Ferrari drivers (Leclerc is my favorite) so I cheer for Ferrari to actually build a good car because if they build a shit one my favorite drivers can't win. Unfortunately, even if they build a good car they're still Ferrari (screaming crying gnashing of teeth) and they are really good at finding some other way of fucking it up.
Ways Ferrari has managed to fuck it up: engine explodes. Brake failure. Not putting the tires on right. Putting the wrong tires on. Putting the right tires on too early, changing to the wrong tires, then back to the right tires losing time the whole way. Just baffling tire strategy in general. Not telling their driver to change tires until they're past the pit lane so they have to do another lap before they can change. Crashing. Both drivers crashing into each other (Vietnam style flashbacks to Singapore). Spinning. Getting caught cheating. Not getting caught cheating, just mysteriously getting way slower after the officials clarify one of the rules. Completely failing to tune the car for the circuit that week so they're just slow everywhere for no reason. Putting the wrong amount of fuel in the car. Etc. Etc.
In short, they're one of the most simultaneously entertaining and frustrating teams you can cheer for. The fact that the first thing you found when looking them up is them fucking up again is absolutely hilarious. But also, three of the brakes weren't working!? The fuck!? I haven't been keeping up with the current F1 season so now the only thing I know about it is my favorite driver got screwed over by mechanical problems 😭 (*shakes fist at sky* FERRARI). The brakes are a part mounted to each wheel to slow the car down so 3/4 failing means the car?? Just won't stop??!? The only reason I could see that being called "borderline" dangerous is if it happened somewhere that Leclerc had a safe path off the track so it didn't cause the problem it could have, or because modern F1 cars are so safe that a failure like that almost made them dangerous again.
Ok Ferrari rant over, let's talk about what drivers have to do other than just going fast. So, the goal of a race is to finish faster than the other competitors which is subtly different than trying to finish as fast as possible. Often times you can actually do better relative to your competitors by slowing down a bit. I mentioned tire strategy earlier and that's a great example of that so let's go a bit more in depth.
How fast you can go around a corner depends massively on how much grip your tires have with the road. Softer tires can mould themselves to the road and get more grip than hard tires, but in exchange they wear out way faster. It's kind of like pencil erasers. A new soft eraser will erase way better than an old hard one, but you'll also wear it down super fast. (quick aside, those little bits of rubber that come off an eraser when you use it? That happens to tires too! In racing those chunks of rubber are called "marbles" and they end up all over the track except for a narrow strip that gets cleaned up by the cars driving over it. So trying to go around someone can make those marbles stick back to your tires and reduce their grip)
Grip is also affected by temperature! Warm tires are softer than cold tires and get better grip, but if they get too warm they can melt and start to break apart. The faster you drive the more your tires heat up (like how erasing can warm up a page) so sometimes you need to go a bit slower to keep your tires at the right temperature. Changing to new tires when the old ones wear out also costs time (F1 pit stops are insane to try to minimize that but that's a rant for another time) so sometimes you save time overall by trying to preserve your tires to stop less often instead of pushing and stopping a bunch.
To add another layer to the strategy, you're never the only car on the track. If you stop for new tires but somebody with old slow tires passes you while you do that you can get stuck behind them and be forced to drive at their slower pace anyways, wasting all the extra grip that changing tires got you. So drivers have to carefully manage when and where they're pushing hard or saving the tires to get the best possible time while also finding a big enough gap that they won't get stuck behind anyone when they stop for new ones.
And tires aren't the only thing that drivers have to manage. They're also in charge of DRS, battery deployment, brake balance, fuel mixture, engine modes, communicating all that info with their team as it changes, diagnosing mechanical problems, fixing those mechanical problems on the fly by reprogramming the car through the computer mounted to their steering wheel, all while driving at 200mph through tight, twisty circuits and trying to outsmart the other drivers doing the same thing in order to find a way around them. They pull over 5g through some of those corners they're going so fast. They have to have special training regimens specifically for their necks just to hold their head up against the forces involved, and they have to do that constantly for well over an hour. F1 drivers are insane.
F1 stats people go nuts over all of that btw. Since every team builds a brand new pair of cars for each season they're all unique and have different strengths and weaknesses. One team might be faster in the straights, another faster in the tight corners, another best in the wide sweeping curves. One team might warm up their tires really fast so they can get up to speed better after a pit stop, another might be really gentle on their tires making it hard to get them the right temperature but also making them last really long. Every track is different too. The things that one car is good at might make that team dominate a particular track but struggle anywhere else. It's really interesting to watch the teams steal ideas from each other as the season goes on, trying to close up the gaps where they're weaker. (It's also fun to imagine your favorite driver getting a better car so they actually have a chance to win. *Cries in Ferrari*)
All of the cars being unique also makes them really easy to tell apart when you know what to look for. (The biggest differences are usually in the wings at the front and back of the car) If you got a completely gray 3d model of one of the cars and showed it to the right kind of Formula One nerd they could not only tell you what team built it and in what year, but they could even make a good guess at what specific race was next on the calendar when you got the model based on how the teams adjust things for different tracks.
Telling different race series apart is a lot easier imo, but it also comes down to just recognizing the overall shape of the cars. F1 is an open wheel racing series and the only other big series like that is indycar so you can easily narrow it down to one of those two. Indycar, unlike F1, uses a standard chassis for their cars that teams can only make minor tweaks to so the cars look a lot more similar to each other overall. NASCAR is a closed wheel stock car series so the wheels are surrounded by the body of the car like a normal road car instead of being out in the open, and all of the cars use the same chassis so you only have to recognize the one shape.
from left to right: NASCAR, Indycar, Formula One
So yeah! I'm always down to infodump so if you have any other questions ask away. There are some really interesting storylines from year to year, and so much of the engineering is really cool (especially the ways teams cheat)
