Driver Performance Analysis - The Sleeping Dogs

@hrt "They can't afford many more weekends like this."

You're not wrong o furry one far as i understand it. Teams recieve prize money from FOM for qualifying position and race position at 1/4 1/2 and full distance. Hrt only just made it to melbourne qualy this year thanks to the prize money from last year. If they fail to make a few more starts not only do they have the very real problem of the car likely breaking down mid race because it hasn't been tested. But they may not even have a car or indeed a team next year maybe even this year, money is clearly very tight. There is no other reason for being present at the last test of the year and the entire first race weekend and only managing to get 2 cars built in time for qualifying. If parts being held up were the reason (that is what the team said) for not testing in barcelona then what possible excuse could they have for missing two days of practice sessions come melbourne. Lies.

"Princess Nico meanwhile was doing as good a job as ever"

Translation= Nico drove an extremely boring race not attempting a single overtake, until rubens mercifully showed him what action is by mating his williams with nicos mercedes at 80 mph. That lap back to the pits spraying coolant on to the track was more exciting than an entire typical rosberg season.

My 2 pence

"It was the first great shock of the 2011 F1 season when Hispania's untested, underdeveloped car failed to qualify for Sunday's race, despite Narain Karthikeyan's best efforts behind the wheel"

For me the first great shock of the 2011 F1 season was Hispania getting out on track i the first place!

I feel that the 107% rule should be dropped again. Some justify it as preventing too great a spped difference between fastest and slowest but to me that is nonsense. To quality racers should be able to cope with that. They certainly do at Le Mans where speed differences a huge and there they manage it in the dark as well.
If the rule isn't dropped, the slow runners won't get any track time so won't develop and will therefore be certain to disappear - drop it now!

Le Mans is totally different - it's an enduro with mixed classes, so huge speed differentials are built in to the drivers' mindset. Karthikeyan was nine seconds off Vettel in qualy. That's just too great a gap to allow heading in to a race.

But jimmy all the fastest race laps for each driver were within 3 seconds of fastest lapper felipe massa something like 10/16 or so cars that finished all had fastest laps of 1:30. it may have been a big spread in qualifying but preserving tires and different engineering solutions to the lack of down force seem to have equalised most teams race pace. Surely hrt would have the slowest laps by quite a margin, but no driver really pushed during the race. Not in the way we were used to seeing they only did one or two really fast laps at a time. But for a totaly different reason i agree with you and the 107% rule.

That reason is that hrt were just scrapeing inside the 107% last year. So if they now consistantly find them selves outside it then they have lost even more ground on the main teams than when they arrived at bahrain last year and put the cars together just in time for qualifying. Having had a car built for them by dallara which they then spent the entire season bemoaning how poor it was, It seems that now after an entire season and winter getting to know f1. (and thinking up terrible gimmicks.) They have managed to make a car worse than a company who haddn't been involved in f1 for 18 years.

For that reason I say keep 107% and punish them the management of that team is a joke there far more concerned with their paint job which is just a cover for their lack of sponsers. They need to realise that formula one is about competing it's not a money making enterprise

Liuzzi was shedding bits of bodywork in practice; I know it's nothing to do with 107% but it suggests they shouldn't have been allowed to race. And though the general gap was less during the grand prix I think their gap would have been maintained due to their total lack of running. The car would be in alien territory after five laps.

The car Dallara built was sound, but it was a long way from being a finalised design. They got to a certain stage of development and stopped getting paid. Being a professional company they stopped working when the money stopped coming in. The way the team slated Dallara last year was ridiculous, because it wasn't their fault. Indycar/GP2/GP3 don't commission Dallara to build cars out of sympathy. They're a quality operation who'll deliver you a quality car IF you pay for it. HRT haven't actually built a worse car than the Dallara, they've just added a few bits to it and called it a new car. It's basically still a half-finished Dallara.

And I'd question whether F1 is about competing. It is, ultimately, more driven by money from the teams' sides. There's a competitive element too, but I don't think Mateschitz, for example, would have put the Red Bull brand in F1 if he didn't think it was going to help him sell more cans of energy drink. I guess it's a mix really, and one pretty well summed up by Virgin: you've got Branson in there who's doing it to push his brand but also John Booth who's an old school racer, focussed on competition rather than cash. It's not a bad mix - the best we can hope for!

I'm not of the modern mindset that "everyone deserves a chance". Formula 1 is a professional sport and if you turn up on Friday and are completely unprepared for the racing, then you don't deserve to race.
The teams have known what date the season was due to start, and it was the same for everyone. In fact Hispania being unprepared for Oz was utterly ridiculous being that the season started 2 weeks later than planned, quite what would have happened in that garage had Bahrain gone ahead is anyone's guess. It might have been a good laugh for some of us though.

I agree with Jimmy that the Dallara chassis was decent, on the higher-downforce tracks it was right in the mix of the new cars. There was nothing particularly wrong with the car, it just suffered from a 'green' team and inexperienced drivers.

And it's silly to judge on fastest race laps, yes the Lotus's and Force India's did put in the odd decent lap on Sunday, but only after they were over a minute down on the front-running cars. By that stage of the race the HRT's would've been 4 laps down and have been in the pits 5 or 6 times.
Would people be fighting their corner if an HRT had elected not to let Webber by 'just yet' (all the teams do it when being lapped) and in doing so knocked the Australian out of the race? Or pick your favourite driver and have him taken out by a team using the race as a test session. How would you honestly react then?

The 107% rule is just what F1 needs to sort those who want to succeed from those who are there for the wrong reasons.

I'm going to have a go at Virgin too one of these days.
Today i will simply say this:
The term 'flogging a dead horse' is apt for that team. Get that darn car in a wind tunnel, because at the end of the day computer simulations are still guesses.