Car threads and performance discussions

[trinidefender]

This TECH thread is about the car's physical elements
NOT the performance, NOT expectations, NOT results or timings, NOT its drivers

For whichever that doesn't fit here, one of the following may be suitable:
Honda Power unit - the engine's technical topic
2016 Pre-season Testing - timings go here, as well as pre-season filming day talk
McLaren Honda Team thread - for less technical items, such as livery, people movement, sponsorship, etc

Note that I have gone through some effort to move a bunch of posts from here, but keep in mind that our policy is that we can delete posts without notice if they are unsuitable for the technical threads.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcEbrlqWoAQIHCf.jpg

PS: That pic was taken by me and properly stolen by f1writers and f1grid (to name a few).

I've asked this question before and never gotten an answer. What if a poster or multiple posters want to discuss the performance of a particular car. It is really impractical to sift through the mass of posts in the testing thread and for those that want to discuss a particular car. You'll also end up with multiple cross conversations when different groups of people are talking about different car.

What about if a forum member wants to try to compare new parts or whatever else to lap times or general performance? Before somebody says you can't compare lap times to changing parts because of other factors blah blah blah , this is supposed to be a forum for open discussion. By telling members that they simply can't post about changing parts (or whatever else) and correlating performance or lap times with it defeats the purpose of having a forum like this. Let people present their evidence and let it be discussed.

Telling people not to post about performance here only fixes the symptom of a problem, it's a bit like a law telling people that they can't say racist things in public (or whatever else), it goes some way to stop these this being said but it does not fix the root of the problem, people will still believe what they think is true. I believe the root of the problem is that forum members simply don't want to talk about lap times and performance etc in the testing thread simply because it would get to cluttered up and cross talking about different cars.

Let's work to fix the root of the problem and not a symptom of it.

*edit* I'm honestly not trying to cause trouble however I am just expressing my frustration openly and hopefully trying to explain where I think part of the problem lies.

[ME4ME]

I agree with Trinidefender. Structure is a good thing, but please don't overdo it.

This TECH thread is about the car's physical elements
NOT the performance, NOT expectations, NOT results or timings, NOT its drivers

The whole car is about performance. Part A vs part B. It's all about expectations, expecting part B to perform X tenths better than part A. It's all about time and results as well, since it's a function of the car's performance.

I agree that it's more appropriate to discuss drivers in the team thread.

[adrianjordan]

I've suggested it before. Why not have a Testing sub-forum in which we can have individual threads for the testing of each car where people can discuss times etc.

[mith]

I've suggested it before. Why not have a Testing sub-forum in which we can have individual threads for the testing of each car where people can discuss times etc.

But what after start of the season? People would still want to discuss in season performance of the car. Couldn't it be done the other way round? Why not create car subforums with few separate threads, one strictly technical, one general and possibly few other. That way people interested mostly in one car could freely discuss it's performance/drivers/colors/owners/whatever and wouldn't bother those only interested in parts evolution and also wouldn't be bothered by discussions about other cars.

[RicME85]

why not be so anal and just have all the information in one place?

[Steven]

First of all, having everything in one place is a mess, impossible to find anything back after half a day of discussion. We can just have one testing thread and put everything in there, but then quite a few people won't like that too much either.

Secondly, if you want to discuss a particular item, a certain car's performance, why don't you just create a new thread?
Some of you may remember that early last year we suggested to have seperate threads for particular car developments, but then, people were going crazy, saying the entire mod-group had lost their minds. I (and not only me) still think this would be a good way to structure things.

So, by all means, if you believe there is enough interest to have a seperate thread to discuss McLaren Honda's performance, AND if you have facts to start a discussion, then feel free to start a new thread.

[nevill3]

I thought the Team Thread was the place to discuss performance, so discussions about the cars performance and new parts could be discussed there.
Perhaps a new performance and development subforum could be created listing each teams car e.g. Performance of McLaren MP4-31 Honda. That would allow comparison of lap times and modifications to the cars, especially once the season starts and teams bring upgrades that are only run in free practice to start with.

[bhall II]

To that, I wonder if it might be a good idea to give each team its own sub-forum to be populated with threads like:

• "[Year] General Discussion" for team-related matters
• "[Year] Comparative Performance" for testing/race-related matters
• "[Year] [Car name]" for general development
• "[Year] [Car name] [Car feature]" as needed for specific developments

The result would be a near-archival documentation of each team/season that's relatively easy to navigate.

[rscsr]

I would pretty much like bhall's idea.
As I thought a bit longer about it, I think that it would be best to have everything for a car in one (or just a few) thread. But with the addition of tags. It is certainly not possible in the short term and would have its own caveats, but I think a folder system(threads) is worse to find something than tags.

[turbof1]

I'll revive this specific topic as we were confronted again by it:

I've asked this question before and never gotten an answer. What if a poster or multiple posters want to discuss the performance of a particular car.

Create a new seperate thread in the general chat topic. To avoid confusion, the title should be like "Car Performance Discussion: [car name]". The moderator group will not do this pro-actively given so far only a few cars attracted this kind of discussion, so it would be silly to create for each and every car a separate performance thread. Posts in the car hardware threads resolving around performance discussion, will be removed even if a performance discussion thread is open. There will be linked to a performance discussion thread if one is open, in the first post of the car hardware thread.

We discussed this yesterday among the moderators. Each and every moderator stated good arguments and good concerns:

-Such topics are vulnerable. Because of ultimately their subjective character, they can attract fanboyism and bickering.

In an attempt to counter this, I emphasize to put down strong rules:

• Each posts has to handle emperical data or anything objective at the very least.
• Unless backed up by emperical data, discussion about drivers are not allowed.
• It has to resolve around the specific car. Discussions how race A would have looked like of car 1 would not have hit car 2 and if car 3 did not have a bad start, are race thread discussions.
• None compliance will result with removal of posts.

-We feel the underlying issue is simply a lack of technical updates. Rules are very strict in the present, and cars are not going to receive a lot of updates other then PU ones (and the PU's have their own topics) because of next year's technical changes. The result of that is that discussion will probably inevitably float towards performance topics. My personal take this is only temporarily, and we can solve it by shifting focus to WEC and generating discussion pro-actively.

-Finally, the car hardware threads are basically holy ground and stay that way. We have always openly communicated we enforce rules there very strictly. Yes even in times of low amounts of updates.