"Kimi" Sulks

#31

On Tue, 15 May 2007 22:27:26 +0100, Graham Hodgson <ttgmh (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>
wrote:

Quote:

Mark wrote:
Graham Hodgson wrote:
Luigi Topolino wrote:
On Mon, 14 May 2007 08:02:16 +0200, address (AT) in (DOT) sig (ric zito) wrote:
Luigi Topolino <tifoso (AT) mindspring (DOT) com> wrote:
Bzzzt. Not the case. It broke, all on its own. And judging by the
panicking going on in the Ferrari pit just afterward, The Chimp was
lucky his didn't break too.
Electronics don't 'just break'.
Putting aside the fact that they very much do "just break" (you own a
PC, right?),

No, they don't. Components fail due to thermal or mechanical shock,
unsecured connectors back out due to heat cycles, device structures
fail due to radiation, but they don't "just break".

So the engineers either haven't properly measured the loads in testing
(whether they be thermal or mechanical, we'll assume acoustic isn't an
issue) or if they have, then they're unable to design a car to
withstand them.

But F1 has never been about building something as reliably as possible.
It is easy to do this, they just need to make it out of a great chunk of
steel. The challenge in F1 is to make something that is strong enough to
stand up to an F1 race, but no more - if it is stronger than this, it
was overengineered - meaning that it would have been unnecessarily heavy
and reduced performance unnecessarily - a good way to not succeed in F1.

If drivers differ in the loads they place on a car, then the ideal
solution would be to build two different cars taking into account the
driver differences. On the other hand, you certainly wouldn't want to
build a stronger car for both, as the gentler driver would then lose
performance with no advantage - and the reason the gentler driver would
need a lighter car would be to compensate for them nursing the car
rather than being more aggressive.

In short, F1 represents tradeoffs and it isn't a simple matter to solve
these tradeoffs without erring too far in one direction.

So you pay one driver $25m+, and the other $15m and design the car
around the $15m driver? Sorry, but Ferrari got Kimi to win the
championship because they felt Massa wasn't up to it (rightly or
wrongly). So why would they then design the car around Massa - they
wouldn't. It'd be Massa who has to compromise with a "heavier" car, if
he is indeed lighter on the equipment than Kimi. The point still stands,
they've not worked out how to design a car for him yet. Either the
management cocked up in getting Kimi, or the engineers are cocking up in
not engineering a car that can withstand his style.

Well, he didn't break the car in every race so far, did he ? And

electronics can fail due to many reasons, so that one is very iffy.

At this stage i'd say that Ferrari did not design the car with Kimi in
mind and more than likely not with Massa in mind. They simply designed
a car and each driver's "team" within the team is working on their own
to make it suitable for their driver.
Kimi was always expected to take a little time to settle into a new
car, while Massa had oodles of time in that chassis(as it evolved)
over the last 3 years. I'd expect Kimi to be up to speed by mid
season, but if not, he may have made the wrong choice and the Ferrari
is simply not suitable to his driving style.

--

Regards, Frank

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"Kimi" Sulks

Formula 1 Formula 1 motor racing discusions (rec.autos.sport.f1)

Re: "Kimi" Sulks - 05-15-2007 , 04:49 PM