The Motorsport Thread 2013

This is why I love you Sleeper. No matter how much I comb the net you always have more racing stuff already in your brain. Like a human racing encyclopedia! 

JJLehto wrote: Wow. The 24 hours of LeMans has been won by Tom Kristensen, his 9th win. He may very well hold the record forever. Of course congrats to co drivers Allan McNish on his 3rd win and Loic Duval on his first ever. Must be a strange feeling to win such a major race that had a tragedy in it.

Big news, Webber has announced he'll be leaving Red Bull and F1 at the end of the season and joining Porsche's LMP1 team.

Favorites to take his seat are the Torro Rosso pair and Raikkonen.

If Kimi gets the second Red Bull seat, watch out Vettel.  

Storming lap from Lewis to take poll by 0.4s from Nico and almost a second clear of Vettel. Di Resta starting 5th should be interesting and Ricciardo starting 6th is making a good impression to take Webber's seat for next year.

Bad news for Di Resta, he loses his best career qualifying after his car was found to be 2kg underweight and will start last..

Well, that was nuts. Too much happened to fit into one post but great drives from Hamilton, Webber and Alonso and good win for Nico.

ture

Edited by Vompatti - June 30 2013 at 11:47

Well, it was sloppy but when they did race that was some of the best so far.
Kudos to Nico. He ran a clean race, obviously didnt over use his tires or run any curbs that helped cause issues, and when Webber came charging he upped the pace enough to keep him safely behind. Good win

Superb drives Webber, Alonso, Hami and Massa. Shame about Kimi. You would think he would've been no lower than 2nd if he did change tires, that hurts.
Helluva race.

Pirelli have anounced the causes of the punctures at Silverstone. Basically it was a combination of teams running extreme cambers, low tyre pressures, swapping left and right tyres over (apparently they're designed asymmetrically and all the tyres that failed were right hand tyres fitted to the left side) and the backs of certain kerbs being rather high (like that at turn 4, Aintree). Though they didn't mention it, I suspect this is in conjunction with the higher running tempretures of this years steel belt construction.

For the Nurburgring this weekend Pirelli will be bringing in the new kevlar belted rear tyres that were briefly tried at Montreal that several teams were against having introduced and they'll be laying the law down on pressures and camber use. They'll have an all new tyre which will effectively be a 2012 construction with 2013 compounds for the yound driver test, of which race drivers will now be aloud to take part in, to be introduced from the Hungarian GP onwards. Pirelli are also asking the FIA to have greater controle in mandating minimum tyre pressures and maximum camber angles that can be run as well as their engineers being given real time telemtry from all the teams regardign their tyres.

I expect these changes will solve the problems. As for Pirelli's suggestions, I'm surprised they dont have the telemetry already, but as for the rest I say it's up to the teams to do what they want with them and if the tyres fail then it's their own fault.