Thursday, 5 August 2010

Why No False Starts?

It's slowly dawned on me that these days F1 cars don't seem to jump start very often. In fact the only one that springs to mind is Alonso in China this year. Why is this? In the 90's and early 2000's every race had a jump starter. You know the one; the type of driver that predicts when the lights will go out and floors it. Even if they're still red. But nowadays nothing happens. Maybe they've lost their cojones "don't want to risk a drive tru penalty do we?". Balls to that I wanna see 24 drivers inching forward at the lights a la how we drive our own cars. Or even just one nut case who assumes that if he is to jump start then he might as well do it an obvious 5 seconds before they're due to go so as the rest of the field get going Takumo Paymyway has reached the first corner showered in glory! Seriously though it makes me wonder. "Research" into this left me without any official record of jump starts but I know they're down. Another race start feature also slipping into memory is the stalled car. This would typically happen due to a messed up clutch movement and the end result was always the same: 4 or 5 stewards rushing onto the track to push the stricken car into the pits. Stalling on the grid was scary too, note Mika Hakkinen's stall in Brazil 2000. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ-Qt9QaxYY&playnext=1&videos=eeV5j14EgFE. He cited this event as a major reason for quitting F1 that year. It doesn't look bad from the grandstand but sitting with your back to a field of car bullets shooting past must be frightening. New technology means we now have an anti-stall feature but doesn't that just make it too easy on the drivers? I don't really have a conclusion to this posting I just thought it was a feature of F1 that seems to be quietly dying out. Either that or else there's some F1 conspiracy going on. Pussies.

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