Do you want Refueling back?

[komninosm]

delete

[Giblet]

You are going a little too deep in your arguments, and forgetting what we are discussing by posting such a long novella.

I was merely talking about purity of racing, and akin booster rockets and refueling as the same thing. The analogy is sound, I prefer racing cars, to race on track, and not be fuddled with outside influences like fuel strategy and/or booster rockets.

Again, this is all opinion, there is no right or wrong answer to the very question you posed: "Do you want refueling back?".

For me the answer is no, and I have stated why. So have many others.

Your answer is yes, you do want it back.

There can be good racing with or without refueling, some prefer it, others do not.

The thing about opinion threads, is it does not matter how many times you repost your opinion, it is still an opinion.

[Giblet]

komninosm, report your own posts and the mods will delete them if you ask them to.

"Your new found writing style" was simply in reference to you discussing the topic, not your perceived shortcomings in people and frequent act of getting personal when it serves no purpose and is in direct disregard to our forum rules, and my signature there to remind people this is never, ever, ever, personal.

It's never about you, or me, it's about a discussion of something in Formula 1.

[mep]

I don't know what komninosm wrote here but some people should be very carefull to blame him because they ain't much better.

[Giblet]

Discussions can get heated, but they never need to escalate to realm of name calling or badgering.

[mep]

True.
One good way to make a discussion going to escalate is producing a underling feeling that the other guy is stupid. If I just check the last page I can find some flowers of speech aimed to generate such a feeling.

However this topic is a strange one because it really divides people without even having any fanboy favourism in it. I didn’t expect there would be such a hard discussion as for me its pretty clear that refueling is a essential part of racing. I expected most other people to share this opinion because the strategy implemented by this brings some demand of brain to the sport. It’s not that the one wins who can run fastest it is that the one wins that is smartest and still can run. It’s like mixing chess with 100m sprint. How can you not love this?
Now it’s just 400m fast walking.

[Giblet]

I read a lot of Motorsport magazines, like um, Motorsport mostly. I enjoy reading about races from before I was alive, or before I had discovered my love of motor sports.

All the great drives you ever read about throughout the sport, refueling is never mentioned once. Racing was conceived with no refueling, and some of the greatest racing ever was produced before.

The drives like Senna at Donnington, Stewart at the Nurburgring, Manesel at Silverstone, etc, none of them were great because of refueling being there or not. There were some wins attributed to fuel calls, and also some heartbraking losses when the team got it wrong, and a title was lost on the last lap. A great drive is always going to be a great drive.

I liked refueling, it was quite a spectacle, but arguably, and this is the main sticking point of discussion, it contributed to the races being more processional. It turns the race into separate segments, or sprints. A driver who pulls another half second from his arse lap after lap is amazing, more so than a driver who is staying out for three laps to jump his competitor who has just refueled and turns 1-3 amazing laps to jump him 'in the pits'.

Some people like sprint racing, but a driver who can manage his engine, tires, and fuel over a whole race is a more complete and talented driver IMO. The long game is as much a part of racing as the short game.

I can truly see the arguments from both sides, but I don't see either as better or worse, just preferred or not.

[mep]

Schumacher in Hungary and France.
Especially in the Hungary race refueling has to be mentioned otherwise he could not have beaten the McLarens.

[Giblet]

So again, it comes down to opinion. If you like 'passing in the pits' then it was a great drive, but if that race was run without refueling, then it would have been a totally different race.

Just so I can look it up out of curiosity, which race are you talking about?

[lolzi]

The Hungary race has to be 1998.

[mep]

It was Hungary 1998 Schumacher made 3Stops and Magny Cours 2004 Schumacher made 4 stops. Both races got famous because of the strategy used.
So this statement is simply not true:

All the great drives you ever read about throughout the sport, refueling is never mentioned once. Racing was conceived with no refueling, and some of the greatest racing ever was produced before.

Those 2 just came out of memory If I would check some races I could tell you many nice drives from every year. You just have to look carefully what happens. Very often some unpredictable things happen or there is a decision by a margin.
Without pitstops and strategies there is not much to expect after the start.

[myurr]

Without pitstops and strategies there is not much to expect after the start.

Surely that is a problem with the forumla and not something to be addressed with refuelling? If there was more variance between the cars quali pace and race pace and the cars were able to race wheel to wheel then wouldn't that be a more 'true to the spirit of the sport' than trying to address it via introducing refuelling strategies that are often set the day before and are usually out of the hands of the driver come race day?

[Giblet]

It was Hungary 1998 Schumacher made 3Stops and Magny Cours 2004 Schumacher made 4 stops. Both races got famous because of the strategy used.
So this statement is simply not true:

All the great drives you ever read about throughout the sport, refueling is never mentioned once. Racing was conceived with no refueling, and some of the greatest racing ever was produced before.

Those 2 just came out of memory If I would check some races I could tell you many nice drives from every year. You just have to look carefully what happens. Very often some unpredictable things happen or there is a decision by a margin.
Without pitstops and strategies there is not much to expect after the start.

OK, I stand corrected.

There have been some great drives when the pit strategy helped win the race of course. The fresh tires would have also been a major factor in those stops as well.

Even though they gave him the strategy, I'm guessing he still had to drive his cheeks off to make it work, fair game. I don't like passing in the pits, but you have to be able to extract the full performance of the car to make 3 and especially 4 stop strategies work. Rubens got burned on that call with Brawn, getting short field for a three stopped and just not having the pace to make it work.

The handful of races like this though, for me, do not make up for all the processional racing it has also caused.

Racing never used to be non stop passing, I still don't know people expect it in modern formula 1.

If you don't have the pace to qualify near the front, you probably don't have enough pace to cut through the field.

[Giblet]

Without pitstops and strategies there is not much to expect after the start.

Surely that is a problem with the forumla and not something to be addressed with refuelling? If there was more variance between the cars quali pace and race pace and the cars were able to race wheel to wheel then wouldn't that be a more 'true to the spirit of the sport' than trying to address it via introducing refuelling strategies that are often set the day before and are usually out of the hands of the driver come race day?

Ya know, Max's two tier series idea with the people under budget having KERS and whatnot might have been pretty damn interesting.

[myurr]

Racing never used to be non stop passing, I still don't know people expect it in modern formula 1.

If you don't have the pace to qualify near the front, you probably don't have enough pace to cut through the field.

Whilst this is true, my personal beef with the current situation was ably demonstrated by Hamilton and Alonso in Abu Dhabi where they were clearly in much faster cars but could barely even challenge for an overtake let alone make it past. I rate those two drivers as probably the two best overtakers in the field, so I don't think the problem was with the drivers.

Overtaking shouldn't be easy or happen every lap throughout the race or anything like that, but certainly when you have a car that has even similar pace to the car in front (say a couple of tenths faster) and you've been able to close right up to the tail of the car in front, then you should at least be able to hussle the car in front and try to force an error or try a bold overtake and see if you can make it stick.

From memory, after Kubica pitted in Abu Dhabi Hamilton was able to immediately go around 1.5 seconds a lap quicker. With that kind of pace difference he should have been able to get past Kubica relatively easily instead of being held up for so many laps despite his best efforts. Part of that was the way the cars were set up, part of it was the circuit, but the major problem is with the cars themselves.

I honestly don't think the movable rear wing is the answer, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong. The trick will be to balance the advantage so that the car behind has the chance to challenge into the next braking zone rather than simply breezing past on the straight.

Either way I don't think that refuelling provides any kind of solution or improvement to this situation. We would still have seen both Hamilton and Alonso held up in the same way, so the root cause of the current problems with wheel to wheel racing would still be there (as they were in previous refuelling years).