F1 - 2021 Begins

General Discussion Sports
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Anyone catch the season opener? Looks like it’ll be an exciting season! Hoping to get to the Singapore race this year, we’ll see.

Some of my thoughts below, tagged for spoilers

What a final few laps! Hope we get a lot more of Verstappen and Hamilton tussling like this for the lead. Truly exciting.

It looks as though Red Bull have finally surpassed Mercedes with their car. It’s tough to judge since Perez had problems on the formation lap, but Perez managed to fight through the pack pretty well.

Verstappen… his Achilles heel is still his temper. I think they told him he had to swap positions with Hamilton and he just saw Red. His driving was totally changed after that moment. I honestly don’t think he could have overtaken Hamilton after ten laps let alone two, once they told him to swap.

Great to see Mclaren at the top of the midfield. Surprised to see them come out so strong after their PU supplier change. That’s a tricky thing to get right. Not really convinced this car suits Ricciardo’s driving style though. We’ll need to see him on some tighter circuits.

Predicting Alonso loses interest with Alpine before the season is over. Looking forward to snidely radio calls and passive aggressiveness towards the team. The stench of Cyril will hang over them all year. Maybe they’ll be able to overhaul for the new regs in '22, but for this year I don’t think we’ll see much from them.

Ferrari… nope. Another team waiting for '22.

Mazepin? More like Mazespin! Everyone’s least favorite driver, managed to get a Russian flag literally painted on the only American team in the sport :pensive:. Kinda think this was the best possible outcome for him, he managed to crash out on lap 1 without taking anyone else out. I’m sure he’ll be responsible for another driver’s DNF at least once this year and then we’ll see sparks fly. Haas is another team waiting for '22.

Tsunoda will be a driver to watch. Saw him take some fantastic risks in the battle for P10, specifically against Raikonnen. At one point he closed his DRS before the car was settled, not sure if he did this on purpose or not but he managed to keep the car facing the right way - wow! Serious car control.

Overall great start to the season. If anyone is interested, an F1 journo Peter Habicht runs a US focused F1 Discord room. I usually hang out here during the odd hour races since bars aren’t open at 6 am :grin: - https://discord.gg/NHuf5Gfcd7

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I can only agree with everything you say, it was a great race, especially the last few laps. So glad that mercedes don’t look like they are going to run away with it.

Mazepin needs to get over his nerves, I think he went off in every session. Tsunoda was at the other end of the scale - shows real promise.

Ferrari - I don’t want to write them off on the 1st race, there have been definite improvements since last year so let’s let them settle in bit…

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Totally fair. I’m ready to jump all over Mazepin because he’s a rookie pay driver, but Schumacher spun too so maybe that car is quite unbalanced. Grosjean and Magnussen made comments indicating so in the past.

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To be honest, I am a Nascar fan but F1 seems like something I really want to watch, I just have to find time for it.

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Have you watched any of the Netflix Drive to Survive docuseries? Great place to start, it’ll get you familiar with the different teams and personalities. They roll tape in the background of each season and put out ~10 episodes prior to each season chronicling the previous season. Great production.

I don’t typically watch NASCAR but that mud race at Bristol was wild!

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I will definitely try to watch that. Also I loved that dirt race. Joey Logano is my favorite driver so you know how I probably felt on that final lap.

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I used to watch NASCAR quite a bit back in the 90s and early 2000s.

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Us there a good app to keep track of racing stuff? I know that F1 and Nascar have their own apps but are there good apps that aggregate schedules and does race alerts?

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Following motorsport can be tricky, especially in the US. I don’t know of any app that aggregates all race series, but all the series I follow publish calendars that you can integrate into whatever solution you use (Outlook.com/Outlook app for me). I use reminders in my calendar app for live events.

For news updates, I use Twitter lists as all the major series and a good number of teams/drivers maintain a robust presence on Twitter. It’s way better than any official series press department since you’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth for the most part.

Finally, familiarize yourself with good independent journos who cover the series’ you’re interested in. For F1, I 100% recommend Dieter Rencken over at racefans.net. I love his prose and he gets lots of exclusive scoops.

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This is not specifically about racing, but the majority of the video is focused on how the F1 racing feed gets to market “7 seconds after it happened”.

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So cool, love seeing “behind the scenes” stuff like this.