Car launch week!
Renault pretty much the same as last year:
I hope Toro Rosso and Red Bull are coordinating so they don’t have the same livery, as I couldn’t tell you which team this car is without thinking real hard:
Haas have gone for the darkest F1 car I can think of in many years:
Williams… new main sponsor, new colour scheme. We won’t be mixing up Sauber and Williams this year!
More to come.
Red Bull… and yes, different enough from Toro Rosso to reduce confusion. I like this new livery a lot!
Edit: it might just be a paint job for testing, and we’ll see the new colours in Australia. Red Bull have done that for the last few years.
Mercedes. Looks like a Mercedes. Ho hum:
McLaren. I really like the mix of orange and blue.
Alfa Romea/Sauber not officially launched but photos from a test drive look pretty fun. I like the patterned look, and the single large sponsor is super classy compared to the logo sticker spam on the other cars. It helps that the title sponsor is a car brand too.
Racing Point keep the pink from last year as Force India, but with added blue. I’m into it.
What the hell is going on with this front wing? I don’t know enough to know if this is weird or not!
Consider the one heart as applying to all your paint job posts.
Last up: Ferrari. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I actually prefer the white fin with the Italian flag colours from last year’s car. The black section at the back, the greyish MW thing, the black halo and the black section at the bottom just make this a dull car. I’ve never liked how the sponsors were just pasted on the side, without using the sponsor’s colours or shapes or anything… so why change that now for this Mission Winnow thing? The car just looks dull.
Actual Red Bull revealed. Boring!
Also the Haas livery on an actual 2019 car, not just showing off the paint job on last year’s car. Might as well just be black.
The Alfa Romeo livery from last week was also a one-off. Which is a pity, because it looks much better than their real livery:
Even so, I think Alfa Romeo actually have one of the best looking cars on the grid. I don’t hate any of the liveries this year, though a few are a bit boring.
My ranking!
I like:
McLaren
Alfa Romeo
Mecedes
Williams
Racing Point
Meh:
Renault
Toro Rosso
Red Bull
Dislike:
Haas
Ferrari … the “red” mostly looks orange on the TV footage. How can you fuck up “A Red Car” design so badly?
The Haas reminds me of the Lotus cars from a few years ago, minus the red accent.
The Netflix F1 show is pretty good for someone with moderately-interested-American level of knowledge about the sport.
Daniel Ricciardo’s PR team is much better than Max Verstappen’s.
I’m really enjoying it so far. It works for someone like me who watches the races and follows the news and gossip and politics. I know how all the stories are going to end, and who will crash in each race, but it’s great to see the focus on the moments behind the scenes. Reading about the driver rivalries and backroom politics is one thing, but seeing the moments between the Red Bull and Renault bosses is soooo great.
I didn’t know F1 has these press conferences where they make guys from different teams sit next to each other! Awkward and awesome. I can’t imagine LeBron and Kevin Durant sitting at the same table postgame and taking questions about what team the other is playing for next year.
Race 1 Melbourne here we go!
Here’s the thing: Sebastian Vettel isn’t good enough to be a Ferrari driver. He’s just weak. In five races last year he cracked under pressure from Hamilton and others, and fucked up his own race.
And he’s back at it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq95z3Pbjs0
Last year, if Alonso had been in Vettel’s car, he’d have won the championship. Verstappen too. And probably a few others on the grid who would kill for a Ferrari drive.
This is super clear now, because in the first two races this he’s already been shown up by Charles Leclerc, who was told not to try to overtake Vettel in Australia when he could have given it a go, and in Bahrain overtook Vettel and just disappeared into the distance. His car was better than Mercedes enough to pass Bottas and keep ahead of Hamilton, so he is the driver a dominant car deserves. Vettel was as far behind Leclerc as Bottas was to Hamilton.
Leclrec is obviously a world class talent, and I’m super excited to see him do well this year. Vettel is already showing that he should be a Bottas-like wingman, at best. The real battle this year is between Hamilton and Leclerc. I hope it’s a good one, because Vettel and Bottas and Raikkonen haven’t been up to the challenge these last few years. Again it just makes me think more and more highly of Nico Rosberg.
Everything I know about F1 (what little that is), comes from the Netflix show. I wish that Ferrari and Mercedes had given the TV people permission to cover them more, because while I liked the show a lot, it felt weird to have the two best teams not covered at all. I did like the little sub-plot about Charles Leclerc wanting to drive for Ferrari and was happy to see him get the job.
Hopefully Netflix does another series for the 2019 F1 season.
As an F1 fan, I liked that the main story wasn’t Hamilton vs Vettel, as it could concentrate way more on smaller stories I didn’t know so much. For more distant viewers, it’s a big pity.
Are they doing it again for another season?
Kimi is my guy, so I was grumpy he got demoted, but Leclerc really does seem like some new hotness.
I thought I saw at the end of season 1 that they’d be doing a season 2.
Apparently for season 2, F1 is trying to get all the teams involved:
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/brawn-teams-second-netflix-season/4348843/
Here isn’t a video so targeted at the Geeknights audience it’s kind of crazy. The argument being made is probably not a shock to anyone here but I almost never see it laid out so matter-of-factly in the world of F1 media coverage. I think there should be lots of discussion about this singular topic before any new mechanical or aerodynamic rules are decided upon.
