Tag: Formula E

Races Watched (2019 Week 11): Hong Kong, Melbourne & MotoGP

A comment on some of the races I’ve been watching. A return to an occasional and hopefully now regular series with the Calendars all updated.

I usually catch one or two live races per weekend and spend time in the week catching up on other things. This time I didn’t see anything live – I had other plans – but I did focus on two events. I’ll be catching up with “Super Sebring” WEC & IMSA another time.

Week 11:  11-17 March 2019

Formula E – R5 – Hong Kong ePrix

A lot of cars in a narrow, tight space led to contact and red flags and safety cars. It wasn’t the cleanest race in the world.

At least it was close for the race lead. Bird and Lotterer went flat out all the way. Bird made a lot of stout attacks, Lotterer repelled them with a lot of stout defences. For the most part this was close, hard street racing. Possibly an argument that FE ought to have been a silhouette touring car series so they could have a bit of contact! These two were the class of the field and pulled away from the rest.

Sadly right near the end there was contact between them, which put Lotterer out. He was angry, he was right to be angry. He even dragged the damage car around until it went no further. There was obviously no malice involved, Bird didn’t plan to drive Lotterer out of the race, he just misjudged his braking – or his aim – and his car’s nose punctured Lotterer’s tyre. It was marginal, very marginal. But he took out the race leader and that’s a penalty. Sure enough, though it took several hours, Bird was later penalised enough time to lose the win.

That gave the win to street-specialist Edo Mortara, which leaves him tied with Lucas di Grassi for 3rd in points with the top four covered by 2 points. It also gave the Venturi team their first ever FE win.

Must mention Oliver Rowland who took the lead at the start and was fast until he hit the FCY limiter button accidentally around the tight hairpin, losing him many places.

A heck of a lot else happened, a mix of contact retirements and good old-fashioned reliability problems knocked some out of the race too. Some tight battles at the hairpin. I don’t have space to mention it all.

Attack Mode didn’t seem to do anything at this track, perhaps drivers lost a lot of time activating it.

Next up is a new race in Sanya, China on 23rd March. You’ll have seen it by the time this piece is published.

Highlights are embedded above or you can watch the full race HERE on YouTube.

Points Car Name Team
54 2 Sam Bird Virgin
53 64 Jerome d’Ambrosio Mahindra
52 11 Lucas di Grassi Audi Sport
52 48 Eduardo Mortara Venturi
47 28 Ant Felix da Costa BMW Andretti
43 4 Robin Frijns Virgin
34 66 Daniel Abt Audi Sport
34 20 Mitch Evans Jaguar
30 94 Pascal Wehrlein Mahindra
29 36 Andre Lotterer DS Techeetah

Formula 1 – R1 – Australian GP

As ever a promising build-up lead to a slightly underwhelming Australian Grand Prix. The track just isn’t very good for close racing with cars this fast. At least it was better than the turgid ‘race’ served up last year. The atmosphere looked as good as ever though and it seems a great relaxed place for a season opener.

Okay it was mostly because Giovanazzi stayed out on worn tyres too long, but passes were made. Like I said in the F1 Preview the middle of the pack is going to be something special this year, especially when we get to more open tracks. Norris in particular had a good debut though not the end result to show for it.

And Kvyat really showed up an underperforming Gasly, who shouldn’t have failed to make it out of Q1 qualifying thus totally screwing up his Sunday, at a track where you can hardly pass.

Bottas really laid down a marker, taking Hamilton at the first corner and going on to dominate the race. There was damage to Hamilton’s floor. But I got the feeling Hamilton, being older and wiser these days, decided to bank the points for 2nd. He still beat Vettel and Verstappen and he knows – he thinks – he can handle Bottas later. I also think this is the case, but I also think Bottas won’t quite be the pushover of last year.

Ricciardo screwed his day by driving on the grass and hitting an access road, very unlucky that was there, he’d probably have got away with it otherwise. I’m sure if he’d held to the edge of the tarmac Perez would’ve given him space but it’s all very tight.

I was surprised how seriously the teams took the new point for Fastest Lap. I thought the drivers would like it and the teams would reign them in, but Mercedes encouraged Bottas to go for it while leading. Interesting!

Summary:  Decent first third of the race, then fizzled out as the midfield traffic got in a line and couldn’t race, then it got a bit boring.

On to Bahrain on 31st March. It should be more representative for the rest of the year, both in pace and race-ability of the 2019 cars.

Points Car Driver Team
26 77 Valterri Bottas Mercedes
18 44 Lewis Hamilton Mercedes
15 33 Max Verstappen Red Bull
12 5 Sebastian Vettel Ferrari
10 16 Charles Leclerc Ferrari
8 20 Kevin Magnussen Haas
6 27 Nico Hulkenberg Renault
4 7 Kimi Raikkonen Alfa Romeo
2 18 Lance Stroll Racing Point
1 26 Daniil Kvyat Toro Rosso

Catch-Up

MotoGP

I’ve been been binge-watching recordings of last year’s MotoGP. I did a terrible job keeping up with it. After Jerez I stopped. I’m not sure why, since it is one of my favourite series. Maybe just overwhelmed with live stuff.

Anyway I made the choice to drop BT TV in favour of Sky (see my previous post), partly because I wasn’t using it to watch MotoGP live any more, which means I need to delete everything on my BT Youview box before Monday 25th March.

Of course after I made that decision the highlights rights got moved. Instead of BT Sport’s excellent highlights on Channel 5, we now get generic Dorna highlights on Quest. I haven’t seen it yet but reports suggest it isn’t as good. I have feelings of regret. However there is talk of a BT Sport deal on Sky coming this summer.

Due to the box filling up – the stupid series link recorded endless hours of free practice and started deleting old stuff and I didn’t notice – I had to go to the YouTube highlights for Le Mans, Mugello and Catalunya.

During this week I watched the following:

Assen, Sachsenring, Brno, Spielberg.

Assen’s Dutch GP (July) was magic, such a great race, really close all the way between Lorenzo and Marquez and then Rossi and Dovizioso rode their way through and Rins got in there too. This lot battling was just outstanding.

Sachsenring’s German GP (July) a bit less interesting, Dovi dropped back leaving Marquez to win with a gap over Rossi and Vinales, a slightly better result for Yamaha this time.

Brno’s Czech GP (August) was all about saving your tyres until the last few laps. That meant a big group circulated together but they weren’t going flat out, although it still looked pretty quick to me. When they pulled the pin it was Dovizioso on the Ducati and Marquez on the Honda, with Lorenzo on Ducati close behind, who made the gap. It would be Dovi, Lorenzo, Marquez to give the red team their second 1-2 of the year, Dovi’s 2nd win.

Spielberg’s Austrian GP (August) had a fun start with a big pack. Marquez pulled into a lead with the Ducatis chasing. This is a power track and the Ducatis have it, but the Honda isn’t far off. The was a duel. Marquez and Lorenzo trading blows with Dovi not able to stay with them. Another outstanding battle! Lorenzo took his 3rd win of the year.

And of course Silverstone (August) was cancelled due to torrential rain and a track that didn’t clear water.

Check out these short highlights videos. They aren’t like the F1 and FE videos, they don’t cover as much on track and the edits are a bit jarring, but if racing is most of all about the people, these clips get that across really well.

Next Week

Monday 18th to Sunday 24th March, I’ll be watching the rest of last year’s MotoGP and the Sanya E-Prix.

My plan is to publish these weekly recaps every Tuesday so you can expect this on the 26th, but they may jump around until I find the right day.

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2019 Race Schedules for Google Calendar & iCal

In order to watch too much racing you will need to know when it happens.

Keep up with your favourite racing series by adding my Calendars to your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, or other service which supports ICAL or HTML format.

Just click the link for the race schedule you want to import and it will appear in your calendar in your browser or on your phone.

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Go here for details:

www.toomuchracing.com/calendar

Lastly, I would like to say a huge thank you to the people who have kindly donated!

I have a Paypal tip jar on the top right of the blog which is aimed at covering my site hosting fees and domain name registrations for the year. Though these aren’t big, just a basic WordPress.com blog plus some domain names, they are sometimes a bit of a pain after some other financial headaches personally in the last few years. And the time sink of entering the calendar dates is quite considerable.

I’m pleased to say thanks to you I’ve covered my fees and enough to keep me in cups of tea for the year as well!

I’m astonished people pay at all, let alone anything more than £2, I know acutely there are far more worthy causes than this. It does encourage me to put in the work through a dark dingy autumn and winter, so thank you.

[This is a pinned post on the main blog to direct traffic, please click through to the Calendar page for more.]

Ten Years Of Too Much Racing

On August 5th, 2018, I reached a milestone:  10 years of blogging!

There have been periods of downtime along the way. On and off, I have been writing words about motor sport for a decade. And soon it’ll be 20 years since I first joined a Formula 1 newsgroup, at age 18 at the end of December 1998, which is where it all began. Now I am 38 and I feel very old.

The Changes Over A Decade

A lot has happened in the last decade. The blog was set up to look at F1, IndyCar, Le Mans and other endurance races, plus whatever else took my fancy.

For one thing the original version was on Blogspot and is still there.

First Blog

In 2008’s Formula 1 season, on the face of it it looks familiar:  the young upstart Lewis Hamilton in a Mercedes-powered McLaren racing the Ferraris of defending champion Kimi Räikkönen and his team-mate Felipe Massa. It would be Hamilton’s first title – and Massa who would take it to the last race and win a legion of fans for his sportsmanship in defeat.

There the similarities end. It was the era of multiple manufacturers:  BMW were still with Sauber with Robert Kubica finishing 4th in points (including a race win). Honda and Toyota both still had their own full F1 teams. Fernando Alonso had gone back to the works Renault team after the “spygate” scandal – and this was the year the “crashgate” scandal would unfold. Tyres were grooved and V8 engines screamed and a lot of us complained it wasn’t as good as slick tyres and V10s.

In IndyCar the reset button had just been pressed. “The Split” of the CART/IRL war was over, the two factions had come together for the 2008 season. As it happened late in pre-season with very little time to prepare, the Champ Car teams had to adapt to the IRL cars in less than a month. They looked hopeless at Homestead-Miami as the IRL teams dominated, then just a week later Graham Rahal won at St Petersburg for Newman/Haas, giving hope to those of us who were on the Champ Car side of the fence.

It was a long road to recovery for IndyCar racing after that and it took a lot longer than I think anybody expected. They’re still travelling that road today. It took arguably until 2016 to really make traction. Now though, you have to say that after 10 years the series is in excellent health and has a bright future. The peak of quality was never in question all along, what’s changed is the depth of quality of both drivers and teams is the highest seen in 20 years. In some neat symmetry, Scott Dixon won the 2008 and 2018 titles. Dare I say this year he’s driving better than I’ve ever seen him. And the current cars are cool too, which wasn’t the case in 2008.

In sports car racing, the continual cycle of boom and bust is never far away from throwing in a curve ball.

In Europe we had the Le Mans Series, five races of 1000km with the Le Mans 24 Hours itself being a non-championship race. Audi and Peugeot went toe to toe in LMP1, a healthy field of privateers scoring podium finishes all year long when any of the lead quartet fell off. LMP2 was dominated by the Porsche Spyder which brought LMP1 engineering and reliability to a class previously renowned for cars breaking down.
We still had the glorious GT1s, Corvette C6 vs Aston Martin DBR9 vs Saleen S7-R. And GT2 was the Pro/Am Porsche vs Ferrari class with cars that were much closer to road-relevance than today’s GTs.

There was a defined route from ‘upgraded road car’ to ‘really mega road car on steroids’ to ‘baby prototype’ to ‘fast prototype’. Today we have ‘a prototype that looks like a GT’, then ‘fast prototype’ to ‘even faster really expensive prototype’. It feels like we’ve lost something along the way. I suppose that’s why LMP3 and GT4 now exist.

The good thing is we now have a World Championship – and we kept the European LMS underneath it so we’ve gained a load of racing. We had a great mini-era of LMP1 Hybrid in the WEC which was a joy to watch. The new era though, it all still needs work. Whatever happens to the WEC and LMP1, down at continental level, I’d argue the ELMS should adopt IMSA’s DPi as its top class.

Over in the US, the IMSA American Le Mans Series was at the height of the battle between a nearly equalised Audi LMP1 and Porsche LMP2. It had a strong GT2 field. And yet a rival series in Grand-Am with its own bespoke cars and NASCAR backing. Peaks and troughs in both series led to a merger for 2014. Lessons were learned from the bumpy and rushed IndyCar merger and the new-era IMSA has worked very hard to solve some tricky problems. That 2014 season was itself bumpy. But the recovery is happening very quickly, aided by the DPi concept of upgrading LMP2 cars and tapping into GTE and GT3 resources.

There is still a risk IMSA will take the backward step of having its own rules, Grand-Am style. They should avoid this and work to share platform with the ACO – even if it means running a “dumbed-down” version of the cars. Maybe it would work as a base platform for IMSA and ELMS, then if you want to go to WEC P1 you add a Special Nifty Widget that makes the car faster. (I specialise in these highly technical solutions.)

And then a wildcard. Formula E was launched. Like a cross between A1GP and Scalextric and the Toronto IndyCar track and a good dose of FIA weirdness. I’ve loved it since it started. Not necessarily for the same reasons as everyone else. I think the eco message has a problem when you jet the cars around the world and power them with generators. The tracks need a bit more space. But the racing is fun and frantic, the talent level is top notch and the future of cars is electric so you might as well have a championship for them now. Though I can’t help feeling it should’ve been a touring car or GT series, maybe a silhouette series with a spec chassis underneath and a manufacturers’ bodyshell to make it look like their road cars.

I don’t even have space to talk about the globalisation of LMP3, GT3, GT4 – and the remarkable TCR. All this has made previously national or regional events accessible to others around the world.

I haven’t even touched on MotoGP which year after year is the best racing around.

There’s an obsession with nostalgia in racing. I happen to think we’re in a golden era right now.

The Future

I know in my head what I want the blog to be. The same as it was in 2008 – short pieces of snippets every few days, intermingled with a lengthy weekly or fortnighly column. The problem is finding the time or the motivation in the depths of the season. You’ll have noticed I stopped the latest project back in July when the summer got too hot!

The goal is to get people to pay attention outside their own bubble, be that the F1 bubble, or the IndyCar bubble, or the sportscar bubble, or even the Formula E bubble these days.

I’ve tried various formats of race report, showing points progression and including race video, but few people read race reports, and I’m wary of video now due to copyright rules. I think the future of this site is in personal comment and reflection.

The racing e-calendars for iCal and Google Calendar will continue. They are laborious at times, yet very popular and a focal point of the blog. I even considered flipping it, so the calendars are front and centre and you had to hunt to find the blog posts.

As for the future of racing? We are in interesting times. We’re going back to the future.

IndyCar has shown the way. The nail-biting close finishes are gone. Instead we have cars visibly difficult to drive. They may not set lap records compared to last year’s very-high-downforce kits, but they do allow a difference between nailing the setup and missing it. Between top driver/team and those further back. And reducing the wake so cars can get close.

F1 needs to follow suit. It can find a way to do this while retaining the fastest cars. It also needs to go back to tyres that allow drivers to go flat out in a race. Cruising around to save super-ultra-hyper-soft tyres isn’t good enough and makes a mockery of changing the cars themselves to be faster.

Sports cars among GT racing is in rude health. They just need to be careful not to spend GT3 out of existence. In the prototypes there’s a golden opportunity lying just ahead, in blending LMP1 with DPi. If they get it right… well, special things could happen.

And Formula E will be the first of many series with what we presently call ‘alternative fuels’. Fast-charging electric cars are coming. Longer-range batteries are already here, with no need to swap cars in the 2019 season. Other electric series are coming. And elsewhere, hydrogen cars are coming.

The rest of the motor sport world needs to pay attention. If Governments are banning cars powered by fossil fuels from sale, how long will it be before they ban racing other than anything emission-free? 40 years? 30? 20?

The change over the next five years could be bigger than the whole of the last ten.