Formula 1

Benson has such a hard on for Alonso

Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, often finds phrases of elegant simplicity that nail the heart of an issue.

The 6 man midfield battle was great racing. Lewis and Leclerc fighting through turns 1-2-3 was great racing. I think these regs have potential, and I like this more than DRS personally.

That being said it's true that qualifying is absolutely atrocious now and just not fun to watch. Qualy has been a highlight these past few years and I really enjoy it generally, but this season has just not been enjoyable.

But if I have to choose between qualy and race I would take a more entertaining race any day of the week. But even then I have some hope that a solution can be found that addresses the problems with qualy.

Also, on the subject of "artificiality": F1 has always been artificial. DRS was artificial. Tyre degradation is artificial. Pitstops are artificial, requiring multiple tyre compounds are artificial, refuelling was artificial. There are probably more things in forgetting off the top of my head.

It is what it is.

I'm quite happy to see how it goes, the previous change was a bit all over the place at the start as well.

if it allows for different approaches to attacking then ok, because DRS Trains sucked.

Alonso described the new season as "the battery world championship".

I'm guessing that was part of the plan. I'm hoping the R&D trickles down to consumer vehicles. It would be cool if small EVs with small, underpowered batteries could do something for an occasional boost without having to double the car's weight. It kinda sucks that a short-range city EV suffers on power like that. Imagine how cheap you could make an EV with a 75% smaller battery and a supercapacitor to boost it to 100km/h once every few minutes.

While I also would like drivers to be able to drive at the limit for the entire lap this would result in less overtaking again. For an overtake you have to drive quite a bit faster than the other driver. But when one driver is already driving at the limit you would have to drive over the limit to get past him (assuming cars are relatively equal in pace which one would also want to have).

The only way to have overtaking and driving at the limit is to have a car which works mostly the same way in clean air as it does in dirty air. So it would not be able to have sophisticated aerodynamics and would have to rely mostly on mechanical grip making it much slower than F1 has been in the last decades. And then the people would cry that F1 is too slow.

Max unhappy because he's not winning. What a surprise.

I think Verstappen really hates these regulations because if he does his normal thing and drives people off the track, it's going to be impossible to hide how much it screws over the other driver.

He's used to kicking over smaller sand castles like "battery level", "tire temperature", etc. Now when a driver sets up a move and he tries to cheat it, everyone will flip out because the battery is under a massive spotlight. Instant penalty, complaining about stewards, "don't think I'm gonna stay for much longer"

That goofy artificial "Mario Kart" stuff does make it difficult to tell how much of a difference the aero changes make in terms of overtaking, but I feel like it might be the more substantial change.