Allow me to explain why most comments you read about the Singapore start are wrong...

Hi, I'm back.

I had to jump in, for what it's worth, to explain why the response to the first lap crash at the Singapore GP was an even bigger clusterfuck than the clusterfuck itself.

I think peak bullshit came when the collective British and Dutch twitter contingent clutched their pearls after Ferrari put out a tweet containing a simple, if not fully grammatical, statement of fact:

VER took #Kimi7 out and then he went to #Seb5 #SingaporeGP

— Scuderia Ferrari (@ScuderiaFerrari) September 17, 2017

Yup, Max did bump into Kimi who then hit Vettel.   That is how the incident played out, mechanically.   Heavens forbid anyone describe the sequence of events.

What's more interesting is the WHY it happened.   And here, the Spanish fans, pining for Alonso blamed Vettel,  Italian Kimi haters blamed the Finn, the British mostly remarked on Hamilton's skill at being on the other side of the track while tisking at Vettel's "Schumi chop",  a move Lewis successfully pulled off at Monza two weeks ago.  The Dutch? They mostly showed class by blaming Italians for having better food that they ever will.  And Vettel fans, they pretty much blamed Max.

In short,  everyone just saw their bias. Is it worth it to assign blame?  Sure, but it was a racing incident firmly in the "shit happens when you point a bunch of cars into a corner you all have to get to first to win" bucket.

Two points, before we start

1) on a wet track, the "dirty" side has more grip.
2) Singapore, like Monaco, is a track you where, to win,  you have to lead out of the first corner.   Even more so in the rain.

OK so, to the start.  Vettel on the "clean" side has a poorer start than Verstappen and Raikkonen on the "dirty" side.  In fact everyone but Bottas has a great start on track left. Look at Alonso, Wow!





Verstappen, at the start, is pointing towards the right, hoping no doubt to cut off the Ferrari.

Vettel, for his part does what any driver in his situation would have done and is, by the rules, allowed to do, move to cover.






At this point Max realizes Kimi smoked him and and turns left to block him.   Notice how much room there is between Max and Seb,  the notion the Dutchman changed direction because of Vettel is not very likely.

Vettel cannot see the other Ferrari so it's plausible he though Max was going for the inside and increases the angle to cover more.

A-HA! you say...  Wrong.

That Vettel actually timed the "chop" on Max to perfection is demonstrated by him not hitting the Red Bull at any time.   By millimeters, yes but fully ahead of the blue car when Kimi bangs into him.

















Of all three, the one who is certainly blameless is Raikkonen, you can look at the clip and you can plainly see he is 100% straight up until the contact.

Vettel played a legal. but risky game and paid for it, no doubt. But you don't win a championship against Lewis and Mercedes by playing it safe,  Not in F1 and not on a track where you have to lead from the start to win. (unless you have Nelson Piquet jr.)

Max, as he has been known to do in the past, changed plans in the middle of something and shifted his attention from Vettel to Raikkonen.    He's aggressive and he has a lot to prove after the terrible season he's had so far.  That is part of his attraction but also something he has not quite worked out (see Hungary).

More interesting might be speculating if Vettel would have run into Raikkonen, had the contact not happened.   That might have been a possibility but, that's also science fiction and in the end, the stewards made the only possible call:

"Shit happens".

Meanwhile, in Brazil, 17 year old Pedro Piquet...

Pedro Piquet will race F3 in Europe in 2016

Nelson Piquet's youngest son Pedro had a hell of a scare when he was punted off the track during a Brazilian Porsche GT3 Cup race at the Autodromo Ayrton Senna in Goiania, Brazil.

The car was dug into the dirt sending young Piquet for a washing machine spin cycle.     Pedro suffered cuts to his hand and bruises everywhere, including his face but nothing deemed too serious, which is astounding considering the violence of the crash.

Sortudo!



(via ItaliaRacing)

That's going to leave a bruise....

Two huge crashes on the first laps of the Formula Renault 2.0 race at Silverstone.

Reports are of no serious injuries to the drivers who surely will require new underpants.

Spa chewed up and spit out a few people on Saturday.

De Jong was a lucky boy to escape without major injuries

On Saturday, Spa did its best to disprove those who think Motorsport has become too safe.

Fortunately for those involved,  fate and modern safety standards won out and none of the drivers involved suffered serious injuries in what, not that many years ago, would have been fatal crashes.

You could successfully argue that in more dangerous times nobody would have been crazy enough to try an outside pass into Blanchimont as Daniel De Jong did.  Given the choice however, I'll take the modern safety standards and the crazy drivers any day.



GP3  saw Jann Mardenborough spit out by Raidillon after losing it on the climb up from Eau Rouge.

It's the second huge crash for the Playstation GT Academy graduate this year,  the other being the tragic flip at the Nürburgring in the Nissan GTR.



Porsche Supercup was not immune.  Here, Michael Ammermueller inexplicably understeered off the track, again at Blanchimont, destroying his 991 GT3 Cup.



It wasn't just the drivers, circuit organizers had the bright idea to put ridged curbs on the outside of Raidillon.  The intent was to punish those who exceeded track limits but I'm pretty sure they miscalculated...



Sanity prevailed and those rumble strips have been removed.

You be the Steward: Track Position

Let's put you, the reader, in race steward shoes again.   This time it's four rather than two wheels and the consequences of the on track action,  spectacularly more severe.

Challenge Car Racing is a independent racing series with no affiliation with Ferrari, it is high end club racing for owners of Challenge cars of different vintages, from 355 to 458.   Round four of the series took place at Road America as a support to Pirelli World Cup.

The Ferrari 458 driven by Jim Booth and the 430 of Steve Hill touched on what on a track map looks like a straight but in reality is a significant left kink approaching the turn 5 braking zone.

The resulting video is both one of the most spectacular and graphic depictions of a crash ever recorded thanks to the multiple cameras on Booth's car and a testament to great engineering at Maranello: the driver walked away from a 150 mph crash, the 458's front and back windows still completely intact.  

But now you make the call:  would you rule against the black 430 for blocking or the red 458 for sticking its nose where it should not have been?

And they walked away from it....

the amazing thing is that both of the drivers were able to walk away from this massive wreck.    

Final lap of the Euro GT4 Series race at the Red Bull Ring in Austria, Jörg Viebahn in the Aston Martin is racing Bulgarian Rosen Deskalov in a Sin R1 for position.      They touch and hit the retaining wall right where there is an access point and  the wall is more angled.     The impact appears brutal yet both drivers escaped serious injury.

How?

The slow motion shows how the Aston digs into the dirt and flips before the two hit the wall.  this possibly helped disperse a bit of the energy.

Still,  I would seriously consider playing lotto if I were one of those drivers,  this has to be the luckiest day of their lives.

Face it, rally is just like NASCAR

the only time you really pay attention is when there is some insane crash video like this one where Yoan Droumenq's Citroen C2 met with a medium sized tree at the recent Rally Ronde de La Durance.

Droumenq and co-driver  Gabriel Durend were beyond lucky:  the car flips in the air and hits the tree with full force, completely crushing the rear of the car,  the tree did not so much as shake.   50 cm forward and it's not clear the two would have been able to walk away.

Ooh la la indeed.



So that makes the news but in reality most cars managed to negotiate those tricky switch backs... even if just,  much to the delight of the crowd.

Darwin and Lamborghini

Just because you can afford a Lamborghini Huracan and said Italian marvel can go 200 mph it does not mean you should be doing multiple 200 mph pulls on an open public highway with an 80 mph speed limit, especially one flanked by guard rails and ditches.

This video was posted by Hungarian Police presumably as a warning.  The results of the crash are not  good,  essentially a plane crash.    Why it happened is not clear, there's a slight bend on the road but at that speed, an over heated tire or even a gust of wind might be a factor.

But it seems Darwin has failed here as I see Jalopnik's article explains how the driver and the passenger both survived!    Score one for intelligent design...of the Lambo's survival cell which survived long enough before self immolating.  

In any case, we'd recommend that:

A:  you don't just press the pedal and go 200.
B: Never, ever, ever be the filming passenger as your buddy shows off his brand new 200 mph car.

Miracle at the Dakar?

Unbelievable new amateur footage of Canadian Matt Campbell's crash at the seventh stage of the Dakar in Bolivia.  

Thanks to modern safety standards and a car that spent so much time spinning in the air rather than hitting things, none of the three man crew was seriously hurt but, considering the crowd that was helping recover a previous wreck, a different bounce, a few meters over this way and it could have been a massacre.

Fenders are there for a reason.

There's a reason for fenders and fender flares beyond just keeping mud from flying about.

Yes, there is the question of aero but the main reason why in most racing series I'm aware of don't allow  tires sticking out beyond the fender lip is one open wheel racers are well aware of.

The contact in this amateur race at Padborg Parkin Denmark is minimal and the speed,  about 80 km/h,  50 mph, not huge.  Yet look how high the rear of the yellow Volvo is launched.

Think of the physics: the downward pushing front half of the Volvo  tire makes contact with the upward pushing half of the BMW's rubber.  You can have fun calculating the finer points of force, speed and angular velocity (CG? ) based on what probably are 18" tires but the result,  one ballistic Volvo and at least one very messed up e36,  show how you cannot take safety gear  for granted, even at club racing level.

Physics does not discriminate.



(thanks @Mikvest )

That moment when you realize you have no brakes...

It's the ultimate nightmare, you're fully committed when reach for the middle pedal and find nothing there.

Unless somehow you managed to shear your brake lines, this does not happen just out of the blue, you get clues, a mushy pedal at least to ignore at your own risk.

There is only one way to prevent it:  make sure your brakes are in order, that you have the very best possible fluid and that you have bled the lines properly.

Amazingly, nobody was hurt in this crash at the Rallye Haute Senne but yeah,...putain les freins all right !

This Ferrari crash probably deserves a medal

Not huge fans of posting gratuitous crash pictures here but, sometimes you come across one of such implied dooshbaggery that it deserves the ridicule.

How this person managed to stuff a 458 Italia over the jersey barriers of the 25 mph speed limited tunnel under the Fairmont Hotel in Monaco is a mystery.    We're guessing it might involve an epic fail in creating yet another "Ferrari blasting in a tunnel" car spotter video?    It certainly deserves a medal for creativity.

Lucky that at the time nobody was on that pedestrian walkway so only egos, wallets, aluminum and some sort of firefighting station were harmed here.

UPDATE:   It was Pastor Maldonado!.....   OK no,  just kidding.


(via TuttoMotori)

Ferrari Owners vs Ferrari Drivers

Photo: Dario D'Alba

To paraphrase Il Commendatore "There are Ferrari Owners and there are Ferrari Drivers".

There is a whole category of web sites who thrive on the frequent misadventures of the first and indeed Ferrari makes a pretty penny on cars and parts. Guess what, it turns out 550hp plus, mid engine sports cars need to be treated with some respect, shocker.

Witness this pathetic example.



- Car bought that very same morning? Check
- New tires, still with their greasy compound and perhaps Armor All'd at the dealer? Not check but likely, so check.
- Wet road? Check.
- "I'm taking the traction control off because real men don't need it and I saw Chris Harris skid on Drive today"? Check.
- Prerequisite shadines of owner when car mysteriously disappears from the road before police can get there? Check.

Only thing missing it was a fire. This latest fail happened in southern Italy and as sad as it was, it's important to remember that it's really a reflection of the driver not, as some would have it, the brand. After all, all it really takes to be a Ferrari owner is money.

Truth is, Ferraris rip hard and are sublime, it's just that not everyone has the stones to do sideways at 120 mph like our tracktard buddy Manu in this classic, one of the most epic videos in the history of tracktardism, for example. Now, THAT is a Ferrari Driver.

Takes two to tangle

Photo: EFE

I'll play devil's advocate and take a different position from every other I have seen so far today.

It's easy to pile on Romain Grosjean who received a very rare one race suspension penalty from the FIA for what happened at the start of the Belgian Grand Prix today.  God knows the young frenchman has been involved in plenty of accidents this season.  Australia, Malaysia, Monaco and Spa.

But take Monaco for example,  Grosjean was hit by Alonso and then Schumacher,   In Australia he was nurfed off the track by Maldonado, and in Malaysia he spun into Schumacher in the rain.  He also had an unforced error in Hungary.

A one race suspension,  really?  Was Ralf Schumacher suspended in 2002 after his first brake zone flight? No.

Was Michael Schumacher suspended for crashing into the back of Senna in Spain? No, he was given a grid penalty.  

Was Vettel  suspended for spearing Button in 2010 at Spa?  Was Hamilton suspended for blatantly slamming Madonado into the wall in Monaco last season or colliding with Massa every other race?   Heck has Maldonado been suspended after all he managed to do this year?

What do you say as you fly off a cliff?

How many people have seen Jeremy Foley and Yuri Kouznetsov fly off the side of Pike's Peak?   My mother called me from Italy to ask me if I had seen that crazy car crash...  enough said.

Now, since both somehow got to drive another day, I don't think it's too soon to have a bit of fun.  They must agree because they posted their onboard GoPro videos ...
So what DO you say as your car flies off a cliff?  Turns out, pretty much what you'd imagine:



"Oh Shit" seems appropriate if somewhat understated considering.  "AAAAAAAAARGH" might be more what I would go with.



(Hat tip to 0-60!)

WRC Rally Finland Highlights.

It's hot and humid again today in New York, looking at cool Finland can only make you feel better.

Shocker, Sebastien Loeb won, Ken Block had to retire. The Michelin clip above is spectacular but maybe does not reflect some of the wilder moments of the rally.  We assembled a nice collection for your entertainment, after the jump..

Scary Red Flag Fail

This happened recently in a German Formula Master, which is a lower level Formula 3 series with cars powered by 1.6l VW engines. What might have been lacking in active safety was made up by passive safety of the cars, we shudder to think what a crash like this might have looked like fifteen or twenty years ago.
(thanks to Motordangerous)

Racetracks, Cars and Deer do not mix

Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia is notorious for wildlife intrusions.   A varmint chicane can appear at any time and any place but the favorite spot seems to be just before Turn 1, coincidentally the fastest spot on the track.

That annual Race, Drift, Beer and Boobs festival that is Hyperfest took place over the week end and while most had a great time, the driver of this C5 Z06 was probably not in the mood for venison.

Want to see a video of what hitting Bambi well north of 100 mph looks like?

Audi crash at Le Mans

Audi R18 Ultra, Romain Dumas too impatient and pays the price. After ripping the whole front of the car with his bare hands, he made it back to the pits and Audi managed to fix the car in 27 minutes!

Anthony Davidson also crashed his Toyota, much like McNish last year, on the back of a Ferrari.

Monte Carlo Blonde FAIL, now with video!

You remember the story from last year right? Blonde crashes Bentley into four other super cars, hilarity ensues?. Video makes it that much better.   No worries,  Monaco PD were obviously on top of it...