[music] Hello everybody and welcome to Shift F1, a podcast about speedy race cars. I am Drew Scanlon. Joining me we have Danny O'Dwyer. How are you Danny? I'm good. I'm excited to prime the season. I feel like there has never been a season that required priming quite like this one. Yeah, certainly not in the history of our podcast. Joining us also we have Rob Zagney. How are you Rob? Still trying to wrap my head around some of the changes to how these things work. So it will be a learning primer for the first time in a number of years. Fantastic. Well, welcome everyone to our preseason primer episode. This episode is designed to explain everything you need to know to enjoy Formula One. Even if you've never watched any motor sports before. We're going to talk about the cars, the rules, the teams, the drivers, everything. It's going to be a beefy one this year especially because as Danny mentioned, this season is bringing the biggest change to the sport in over a decade. I mean we've been doing this since 2014. Yes. That was the last big regulation change. And this is probably the biggest one since then. Yeah, and I would argue this feels like fundamentally bigger than the turbo hybrid era. Like this is, this is, we are fundamentally changed this sport. It seems like from what we've seen from testing so far. No, I'm with you Danny. I was thinking about that too in terms of the scale of changes. The big changes have historically been like we've overhauled arrow regs and there's new rules about engines. And this year it's like, well arrow works different than it's ever worked before. We've also changed the engines. And also now there's new driver modes that we've just introduced. So this is a pretty sweeping overhaul of a sport that usually big changes feel more incremental than this. Yeah. Hey, we'll just stick a new team in there too while we're at it. Why not? Yeah, so I know before we begin, this is going to be a lot of information, especially if you are new to F1. My advice is that trying to remember everything might be a little overwhelming. So instead, just kind of let it wash over you. And when you actually start watching races, that's when a lot of this stuff is going to fall into place. You'll hear commentators say something and you go, right, I remember that. That's how that works. And we're going to be right here with you all season. We do weekly episodes where we dissect what happened in each race and then talk about the next race coming up. Our kind of policy is that we don't dump anything down, but we do try to be accessible and keep things in context. So if you like what we do here, you can support us over at patreon.com/shiftf1, which also gets you access to our discord server where there are tons of other friendly folks who are there to answer any of one related questions you have. And you can also email us. Shift F1
[email protected]. We usually take emails during pre-race shows and love hearing from newbies and veterans alike. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll do some housekeeping at the end and also list at our title sponsors. But I want to quickly also mention to people if they're interested in signing up that we are doing 90% off the first month. So if you sign up now up until the end of the first race weekend, which is March 8th Sunday, March 8th, if you head over to the Patreon, there should be a 90% off your first month for most of our tiers. The code you can use if you want is multi-26, but I think that actually is superfluous. I think you can just go to the page. MULTI26, a nice call back to Red Bull days of past for those F1 aficionados. Yes, many F1 in jokes that you will become aware of through this podcast. All right, well, like I said, there have been a lot of changes since last season, but we're going to start with the basics here. Formula One is the world's fastest, arguably the most prestigious, and certainly the most watched motor racing championship in the world. It's been around since 1950, and it works like a lot of other sports. There are teams that compete at events over the course of a season, and at the end of a season, a champion is crowned. So to break that down this year, there are 11 teams with two drivers each, meaning that there are 22 drivers in each race. Good math. Yes, right. That's why the pay me the big bucks. The season takes place from March into December. This year there are 24 races each at a different track across 20 different countries, and we will get to exactly where we're going later in the episode. At each race, drivers earn points based on how they finish, and the one with the most points at the end of the season wins the championship. There are technically two championships, one for the drivers, and one is for the teams, which is called the Constructors Championship, and the team's points are made up of their drivers points. That usually means that the driver, the winner of the drivers championship is on the team that wins the Constructors Championship, but not always. Really though, what we're all watching for is the drivers championship. That's what the fans really care about. Yeah, exactly. That's the sort of crux of it. The Constructors is a nice sort of the English football league equivalent would be like winning the Premier League and winning the FA Cup or something like that. It's like a side part, but all of this stuff is super important, especially the Constructors for the teams because there's a decent prize pass that comes with that one. Yes, the teams care the most about the Constructors Championship. They're ranking there has a direct effect on the amount of prize money that they receive from F1. Is it the heart of a lot of sports and it's no different here? Interestingly, the drivers themselves do not get a prize posh from F1 or the FIA for winning the drivers championship, but they may have something in their contract. That means if they were smart enough, they'd have something in their contract that says they get a bonus if they win it. Or if their teammate wins it, a lot of people have that in there too. Yes, so the bonuses for the teams can sort of lead to a feedback loop that keeps the top teams at the top, but that makes it all the more exciting when another team does well out of nowhere. That's also why we pay so much attention to tiny little car tweaks because you never know, each one could give that team an edge. I remember having the revelation when I was first getting into F1 that it can be really exciting to see someone come in third because they're an underdog. I mentioned that to illustrate that the more you know about a team's capabilities and indeed have the entire sport works, the more exciting it can be when you watch them exceed those capabilities. That's really the whole point of this podcast because the more you know about F1, the more interesting and the more fun it is. Most sports are sort of binary. There's usually two teams in many sports and then one winner. I think the or even in tournaments, you'll eventually have a winner in golf or tennis or something. Motor sports are kind of different. You're sort of looking at the spread across the whole thing. Honestly, there's been time where someone has crept into the top 10 and gotten their first points and it's been something really exciting for everyone to watch. Yeah, especially you know we have a new team, you know, creating a formula one team from the ground up and then getting points in their first season, that would be huge. Yes, absolutely. The first thing I like to get a point though, it'll be very noteworthy. Yes. But yeah, back to money. Like you said, drivers may get bonuses. Those are defined by their contracts which aren't public. But we do know that these guys are pretty well paid. The drivers, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton were 23rd and 24th on last year's Forbes list of the highest paid athletes at $80 million and $78 million respectively, near people like Patrick Mahomes and Neymar. Does that also include sponsorship deals outside of F1? Yes. Okay. Yeah, that's overall compensation. One is trying to, they have a mechanism to sort of curb the feedback loop a little bit with a spending cap for each team. It did get bumped up this year to account for the new car designs to $215 million but that does not include driver salaries or travel costs which are considerable. One team did breach the spending cap in 2021 and was penalized with both a fine and a reduction in the amount of wind tunnel time that they can use to develop the aerodynamics of their next car. No desires and no wind tunnel time for you tonight. Yes. We are going to be talking a lot about aerodynamics later in this episode and in general. Okay, so what will you see when you actually sit down and watch a race? For any given race weekend, as we call it, there are actually a few more events that happen. First there are the practice sessions, two on Friday and one on Saturday that lasts about an hour each. Since the cars change every year and the track conditions are never consistent, it's important for the teams to send their cars around and dial in their setups by making all kinds of adjustments. Most of that's invisible since teams tend to play their cards pretty close to the chest but you can usually get a broad sense of how a team might do based on their practice performance. It's also a great background thing to throw on and the commentators also need to fill time because practice is boring. They go deep on minutia in F1 stuff. If you really want to pick up tiny little details, watch practice. I don't know about you guys. Rob, practice sessions are like, you're just listening, you're just kind of vibing. It's like low stakes for most of it and then something exciting happens. Yeah, some sports do enter that podcast zone. Look, sometimes there's not a lot that's happening. You're going to mostly hear commentators talking about the sport more broadly and this is frequently where you get the most insight in some ways that you would not get during a close match. In F1, that often means gossip during practice sessions. Although, there are now so many technically savvy people in the commentary booths that you will often have a side about, hey, look at this cool picture of a wing we got. Especially this year where really I think there's going to be a way to innerize on practice for the first few races for sure. Because we're trying to figure the sad and the teams that drivers are too with these new regulations. The next event of the weekend is qualifying, which is kind of a misnomer. You can't really fail to qualify in the modern era of F1. Qualifying is more about determining the order that the cars will start the race. Takes place on Saturday after the third practice session and is divided into three parts each about 15 minutes long. In the first session, which we call Q1, all the cars go out on track and try to set the fastest lap time they can. At the end of Q1, the slowest six cars are eliminated and those are the cars that start at the back of the grid in positions 17 through 22. Oh, that's weird. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm weird to do different math. Yes. It's not a nice clean five and five. In Q2, the remaining cars go again and once more, the slowest six are knocked out. Then in Q3, we've got 10 cars left and again, their best times in that session determine their starting order. The fastest car in the Q3 session starts the race in front and we call that pole position. Wait, so six at the five at the first? It's six. Six are eliminated in the first one. Six are eliminated in the second one and then we've got 10 remaining. Okay. Yeah. It is important to know that it's how you do in each session that determines your starting place. It's not your overall best time. So for example, rain could show up in Q3 and make everybody slower than the cars that got knocked out in Q2, but those in Q3 would still start in the top 10. It's also important to know that despite it basically being a time trial, qualifying is pretty fun to watch. The ticking of the clock really adds to the drama and you can get some pretty amazing moments, especially if rain shows up because that tends to throw everybody's plans into disarray. Yeah, and there's a thing called track evolution, which I'm sure we'll get into, but the more of the cars are driving on these tracks generally, the faster the cars can go because the track is getting a bit warmer. It's laying down little pieces of rubber from the tires on the driving line. So oftentimes it is the last lap of a qualifying session that determines the fastest lap. Not always, as Drew said, sometimes it's rain, but it means that the qualifying kind of like the race has a sort of an interesting build up and culmination that's fun to watch. Yeah, I'd say most importantly for me, qualifying is really the first chapter in the story of the race. I feel sort of incomplete if I don't watch qualifying because I just turn on the race and you go, "Hey, how's that guy starting in third?" And track position is so important as well for races. Yeah. Sometimes it's hard to overtake in these races, and especially if you're first, you get to sort of dictate the pace a little bit. So yeah, it's very meaningful qualifying in F1. Yeah. F1 does put highlights of every session on YouTube, so if you don't have an hour to devote to qualifying, you can still get the gist in about seven minutes. Yeah. And the practice is too. Yes, that's generally how I watch the practices. Okay, the races, each of which is technically called a GromPri, which is French for a grand prize. Big prize. The races are on Sunday and last a maximum of two hours during which drivers race over 190 miles. The number of laps varies because each circuit is a different length, but the total mileage is about the same. The total races feature at least one pit stop, which we'll talk about in a bit. And at the end, as we mentioned, the drivers are awarded points that contribute to their championship standing. Crucially, only the top 10 finishers get any points. First place gets 25 points, second place gets 18, third place gets 15, and it sort of decarments down to one point for 10th place. And if you're wondering, it is pretty brutal. If you finish just outside the top 10, you get zero points for doing a whole race weekend, but that is just one of the many stories that you as a viewer are following because sometimes, like you said, Danny, it is a huge achievement if an underdog driver or team gets a big hall of points. Okay. Now that I've thrown all of that at you, there is one more kind of confusing event that only shows up occasionally. There are six sprint events sprinkled throughout the year. The sprint is basically a short race that happens a day before the actual race. It is one third the distance of the normal race, and there are no pit stops. The top eight finishers in the sprint earn points with eight points for first place down to one point for eighth. On the weekends where there is a sprint, we get one practice session on Friday, followed by sprint specific qualifying, which works like regular qualifying, but the sessions are a little shorter. On Saturday, the sprint happens, and then we do qualifying for the actual race. And then the race is on Sunday as usual. Yeah, this was also a little bit confusing for us when they brought it in a few years ago. They messed around with the forum out a few times. And every year, they sort of change which locations, which race weekends, which countries that these sprints happen in. It is purely an effort to get more people to watch races, but it's been more. Well, largely successful. I mean, this is in keeping with another thing that's really important to know about F1, which is they do love money a lot. They do. And they are looking for ways to increase revenue without making costs change very much. And so all those nice things that Drew just mentioned about the structure of a race weekend, the same way that there's something practice going to be a little bit boring, F1 knows that, but they want to sell three day passes. And so they want people to have reasons to show up all three days. And so the sprint weekend promoters like it because it brings more people out and gives people more racing action to see, but doesn't require staging an entire new race because F1, the calendar is already expanded in recent years. And there's kind of soft agreement that they're not going to add more races. So a bit like where NFL football is. If you're stuck to, you just have this many race weekends a year, how can you get a little more sporting action that people care about? And so the sprint weekend has been the answer to that. The pursuit of ticket revenue will also explain why some courses also have an elusive characteristic now and appear like rare Pokemon sometimes as F1. Because the way courses are selected is the people pay F1 fees to host races and they need to make that money back. And so that is another factor that counts for a lot of the structure of F1. Yeah, we'll go through the whole calendar later, but just so you know, we might as well talk about it here. The six sprint races we have this year are happening in China, Miami, Canada, Britain, Holland or the Netherlands Apologies and Singapore. Okay. Yeah, I mean, F1 basically, they're relatively new, the sprints. Sometimes they're fun, sometimes they're boring. Some people like them, some people don't. I tend to think that they sort of add a little bit to the race fatigue that I get after seeing a circuit so much over the weekend. But they are sometimes fun. All right. Well, speaking of earning money, we are going to take a quick commercial break, except for the people on Patreon. So if you don't want to hear ads, you can go sign up for Patreon. That is an ad free version of the show. But we'll be right back and we're going to talk about the cars. Great band. Okay. Well, we've discussed the format, which we've had for many years now. But let's now talk about the cars, which as we've said are pretty different for this year. And for this, I'm going to hand it over to Rob. Yeah, huge changes with the cars this year. So I guess where to start things off is we still often talk about F1 engines. This is now kind of a misnomer. And you'll hear official commentators talk less in terms about engines and more in terms of power units. And that is because an F1 engine is no longer a simple internal combustion engine. It is a hybrid engine. And this year, the big change introduced to Formula One is that they now require half the car's power is produced by internal combustion engine. And half of it is produced electrically from source from battery that is recharged over the course of a lap. So when they discuss the power unit, it's all the various components that go into comprising the things what make car go. And as is, as anyone has sort of looked at hybrid prices versus internal combustion engine cars, there's more going on with hybrids. That remains true in F1. And so you have a lot of different parts that can wear out at different rates and break down differently. So when we're talking about the power unit, we are talking about the internal combustion engine component. We're talking about a battery system. And crucially, we're also talking about what they call the MGUK, Motor Generator Unit Kinetic. That is the thing that harvests waste energy from most typically breaking. But with the shift in, how much the car has to be powered off the battery, they are now doing some of the things that you see more in electric cars, where it's trying to sneak in ways to harvest energy even when you're not breaking. And so there'll be times that will sort of spin the motor a little harder to basically wind up the battery over the course of a lap. So this is a big shift. They also discarded a piece of the hybrid unit that they've had for an over years, the MGUH, which used thermal, like waste of thermal output to power the car. That was really complicated and breakage prone system. Nobody liked it. And as you'll hear this term a lot, it's not road relevant. The manufacturers don't get useful data off an MGUH because electric cars aren't going to have a lot of exhaust gases being pumped out from them. So that's not relevant to designing for electric cars. So that system is gone. I'll just mention it here because it's already come up. It turns out that that was also a vital system for making the turbos work really smoothly in the previous generations of one. And so unintended side effect of eliminating the system that nobody really liked. The car's response to throttle inputs and sort of the power curve of the engine really different than in previous years. And apparently also the car has a much higher chance of just kind of borderline stalling out at the start. So keeping that out for that because there's a lot of drivers who've been used to, there's always the thermal system that's like powering the turbos by cycling air back through the engine. That system's gone. And so the turbos can't really run until the engine itself is running. So that is just a thing to keep an eye out for. Now they've also introduced a whole bunch of stuff that is happening with the car dynamically across the lap. This is a time up power units already. We'll continue talking about that. The drivers now have access to boost, which they can basically deploy the full power of the engine at the push of a button over the course of a lap. They can't, the way F1 makes it so that teams can't effectively like destroy the power unit in seeking efficiencies is that the teams are always limited in how much charge and recharge the engine is allowed to do over the course of a lap. Boost doesn't let you break that formula. So if you've sort of run down the battery, the boost isn't available to you. Now crucially, there's also something else, overtake mode. In previous years, because F1 has always struggled mightily to guarantee that cars can actually pass each other on track, which is kind of an important thing in a racing series, they introduce something called DRS, the drag reduction system. That would cause the rear wing, which creates a lot of downforce, but also creates a lot of drag, it causes a flip open. And it was like, you see sprinters training with a parachute. That was the equivalent of cutting the parachute off and just go sprinting that straight away. They got rid of that system. It lives on in a form. I'll talk about that in a second. They got rid of that system though, but the way it worked was when you were within one second of a car you were following, you would pass a detection point to determine whether or not you were in that zone. And then you had access to the DRS system. They have gotten rid of that and they replaced it with overtake mode. There's one detection point across the lap, but then you get access to an overtake mode, which is distinct from boost. And the way is distinct is that that does allow you to break the rules basically around harvesting and deployment. So everyone with boost, they're limited to, you have to stay within this bound. If you're in overtake range or someone, now the car is allowed to harvest and deploy more energy per lap. It basically allows the engine to operate according to a different formula. You could say the engine goes super-san. Yeah. That's, I mean, that is the theory they are hoping for. We will see how it works in the practice. That's the title I went for. I know I'm not a huge fan of overtake mode. It sounds like something you'd get in like a Tesla, you know what I mean? Like it sounds like you press the button and it's like self-driving mode. It does it that I don't know. I mean a Tesla view like based mode. Epic Windsor, like that kind of, yeah, that I think is sort of a challenge. It did used to be called manual override mode or mom. Oh, mom. And they changed it to overtake. I can't, oh, okay. There you go. I guess, yeah, better than that. I don't know, but that would have been pretty funny. He's activated mom. Yeah, people like sort of anthropomorphizing the system. That's our version of funky boy could have been mom mode. I like it. Yeah. Anyway, so this is how that system is going to work. But there's other things happening across the lap too. DRS is gone, which allowed the rear wing to be adjusted live over the course of the lap. But really is it gone or is the whole car now DRS because they moved to active aerodynamics, which is kind of what it sounds like. You have a lot of aerodynamic elements, wings, winglets, things that create downforce, which increases grip and cornering performance, but also generate drag and slow it on the car and make it a little bit less efficient when it comes to how it uses power. Well, now when the car detects its entry corner, the wings pop out basically and they take more active role because they go into a higher drag higher grip configuration. And then when the car is in high speed zones, the wings kind of like tuck themselves away a little bit and move into a lower grip configuration. It's kind of the F1 equivalent of like the old F14 Tomcat, like swing wings type thing. It does feel very like flaps and ailerons or something. I think it's kind of cool. Like we're not to get ahead of ourselves. So a lot of these changes, the drivers are really conflicted about them, but this day I think you got to know about the F1 drivers. Personically bunch, really conservative. You're basically dealing with like first-chair classical violinists or cellists in terms of their skill, like the greatest orchestras in the world. And then every few years it's like, oh yeah, we just smashed your instrument. It's pieces. You can't use it anymore. Here's the thing you're going to do right now. So drivers have really hyperbolic reactions to a lot of changes like this and that's happening this year. Some of this stuff is not super popular. We'll see the proof will be in the pudding, all that. We'll see how the racing is. But I'm kind of with you, Danny. Seeing these cars zipping around the track and kind of breathing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they go into corners and the wings come out and then like, as an excellent aerobatic, it's like a real aerobatic. It's like a real aerobatic. The car is just in that until the driver, and I think it's manual, the driver switches to straight mode. And they can only do that in designated parts of the track. Because if you allow the driver to change to straight mode in a corner, they might try to do that and to overtake and fly off the track. Right. New new evolutions creating gnarly car accidents. So the F1 generally starts with tries to avoid. And so they would try to, that would be a real shift in direction if they were now creating modes that generated more awesome and cinematic, like cars flying off the track. As in the F1 movie. Especially the speed these cars go as. There's sort of a fundamental thing I feel like when you first get into F1 that you start to understand. Because all this stuff about wings, like you might, you know, what's a wing? It's, you know, it's like when you see a spoiler in the back of a car or something like that. Road cars don't generally need these things, but when these cars, these cars are so sort of comparatively light when compared to the speed that they go at. That essentially they are like aeroplane wings turned upside down. They are pushing the car down into the ground. And I guess when you're going fast, you don't need as much of that. But when you're driving these cars slow with the amount of like torque, you know, like acceleration that they're able to generate and the lightness of it, they need help sticking to the surface in those sections rather than when they're on a straight. The sort of the speed is pushing the car down a good bit more. The other big change to this car, and to me visually I can see it. They've made the car smaller. Yes. The car's the wheelbase has been shortened. So I think we reached our peak like two or three years ago where literally the length of an F1 car knows to tell was comparable to a stretch limousine by all accounts. So in that made for cars that it sounds weird. That made the cars faster on these tracks that kind of limited where you could run these cars. But on on F1 tracks that made the cars faster, but also less nimble, less capable of dicing it up again, like trying to try and create more passing. So this year they shrank the cars down a little bit. The active arrow came into play, but the flip side of that was they made aerodynamics much simpler. You know, but under the theory that if you have less sophisticated aerodynamics, you're generating less wake turbulence and being easier for cars to chase each other down and follow. And they also shrink the strength of tires. Was it just the rear tires or is it all the tires? Either way, the tires have gotten smaller. And they have hubcaps now. And tires are. And really F1 is, it's all about the tires. In terms of in terms of races and strategy. Mostly we are talking about how drivers are using the tires. How are those performing? So we should probably get into that next. Yeah, strategy. The F1 tire is solely produced by Perrelli. Perrelli was given a brief again because tires are critical to F1 and because the strategy around tires is a lot of the action. They were told to make tires that were good, but not too good, basically. If you have no constraints, you know, tire technologies in a place where you could make really grippy, really hard tires that, you know, pretty much last the length of a race. You do not have to waste time in the pits, changing tires. But what probably were told was create tires that will sort of provide a lot of grip but also wear out and forced drivers to force teams and drivers to sort of make calculations about, you know, how they're going to run the race strategy. And to amplify that, the teams have to each car has to run two compounds of tire over the course of the weekend. So you have to run two different tires with two different degrees of hardness in the race if you are if you're going to stay within the rules. Rule of thumb is harder tire, more durable, less grip, softer gets, you know, sort of follows intuitively. It's going to be a little, a little, a little grip here, but it will also, you know, shred apart a little bit faster. This year, do you see that we have a new graphic for the, on the timing and scoring pole on the left hand side. So they now, so the tires are identified, they're color coded, red is softest, medium is yellow, hardest is white, white striped tires. But that changes weekend to weekend because they bring different compounds, probably makes five different tire compounds to each track. Some tracks have a more brace of service, some have a smoother one. And so what is hard, what is medium, what a soft might change depending on the weekend. The compounds themselves are the C1 through the C5, the C1 compound is hardest and the C5 is the softest now drew the display shows. It's color coded, but they also tell you what compound they're using. So you will see yellow, you will see like yellow C2 there in the race weekend. So you'll be able to tell like, when we say medium, what do we mean? A yellow C2 would still be a pretty hard tire, pretty durable, maybe a little bit less grippy than you might normally expect from a medium tire. Every week and we still will only have a hard medium and soft. Yeah. But now the real ones will know what compound is that the C2, I know that one will. So all the tires I just described are what's called slick tires. They're tire, they're treadless tires, which in dry conditions is the absolute most mechanical grip you can get from a car. But obviously if there's no treads, if it starts to rain, suddenly that tire stops working with the dam and you need something a little closer to road tires like you have on your car. And so that is where enters intermediate tires and wet tires come into play in practice in recent years, you're going to see them continue to race on the intermediate tires, which is designed for as the name implies mixed conditions. It's not like a torrential downpour, but it's steady rain. The track is damp to wet, but it isn't like so. It's like there's big puddles forming everywhere. And so that is what you're going to see the most of because when the rain is heavy enough to make it advisable to run cars on full wets, even though everyone does historically like tend to run in the rain. The issue that's cropped up in recent years is that the wets are so efficient at throwing water into the air, basically that's what the tread is doing is channeling water out of the way of the tire and out of the way of the car. And then the wheel spin throws it into the air as a mist full wet tires make it possible for the car to still have like good grip in rainy conditions, but they tend to create a fog bank that nobody can see. And so when the visibility gets sufficiently bad, they tend to bring out a red flag, which you know you'll come across. There's unsafe conditions you can't continue to race that sometimes brought out by by an accident, but it is also brought out for the rain is heavy enough visibility obscured. We never went to come into the pits and we were going to wait this out so you might see a little bit of racing on the full wets, but chances are that the full wet is the harbinger of the end of the race day intermediates are what you're going to see the most. The intermediates also have some interesting characteristics and this is where I want to get really interesting when you have mixed changeable conditions it's not fully wet it's not fully dry. The wet tires with their tread are optimized for a track service that has water on it. If there isn't enough water on the track, the tire will get very hot and begin to wear away very, very fast when we talk about what makes the tire work and what makes the tire last longer shorter usually we talk about tire temperatures. All compounds have a preferred operating range of temperatures part of the driver's job and the engineers job as well as to like make sure the car can run within those ideal ranges as possible to get the most grip in the least where possible. Intermediate tires will the second there's not enough water on the track they begin to overheat and they begin to wear away. Now it can get very funny if they wear away sufficiently the normal grip tread they start to operate like a slick and sometimes you'll see people decide well now it's a slick tire and I don't need to come in to the pits I will just run the remaining main part of the race on the on the inters because the tread does make less grip and dry conditions. So when you have like a track that is a little bit damp but it's just entering that phase where like maybe you could run a slick on it that's where you see teams making real decisions about how are you going to run the rest of this race to we want to risk risk it all and have someone drive on a slick tire on a wet track. That's where things get very very exciting and the stakes are very very high because tire strategy is you know really where you can win or lose a race a lot of times. The car has to come to a dead stop obviously to change tires but for safety reasons the pit lane also has a speed limit and so the entire like there's the concept we call the delta there's a normal race pace and then when you come in for a pit stop. When they run the stop watch you know for what that lap is that's going to be much much slower lap because in addition to the time you're stationary you also have the speed limit that comes into play and so you're you're very very slow for that lap that can massively change your position in the race. And so teams are trying to optimize for one of the best times to to make a pit stop and in mixed conditions you know if you're deciding if you can skip a pit stop or or have someone just just avoid that cycle entirely that is how some teams that have a lot to like you know a lot of incentive to risk it all that is how teams can can have a huge strategic win by by taking some risks maybe pitting or or not. Depending what they think their rivals are going to do the pit stops are very very fast this is a place where the F1 teams invest a lot of money and research in creating the fastest equipment possible to to change the tires the teams have bespoke wheel guns that that remove the nut on the on the tire every teams is different so the teams have these things like they operate so fast they practice so much that a three second stop is like table stakes that is a competent pit stop two seconds is really kind of the gold standard some teams have been able to get it to a little bit under two. They had to put rules in place to make it you couldn't go faster they they have tried to they have tried to make it slow down because sometimes teams were we're shaving a little too much off the safety margins for the pit stops for for F1's taste but that is that's the that's the scale at which we're operating if you see like a car come in for pit stop and it's like a four second stop that's a disaster that is a you'll see mechanics walking into the garage you know looking looking like they just you know kicked their dog like it is just it is it is pure misery so that that's a lot of the stakes around the pit stops all of it hinges on tire wear and like tire strategy you're going to hear people talking about as tires wearing down they are a factively throwing little chunks of rubber off the off the the body of the tire on the on the side of the track as the track as the races run the racing line the fastest the fastest like path the cars can chart around the lap will remain clean because the cars are all running in a row and so the rubber this car there's immediately picked up and most of the cars are throwing it to the side off the racing line as the race goes on will become increasingly covered in what they call marbles these tiny little chunks of discarded rubber rubber that act like ball bearings if the car drives over them and so as a race goes on if you go offline say to pass somebody you're effectively taking your car out on a nice ring and that's not so you can't do it but it will be a slower line it'll be more dangerous but you know no risk it no biscuit and so that is a that is a thing that sort of looms large in in the minds of drivers they're contemplating like how to how to attack and how to defend across a across a lap you also hear about tire graining which is effectively tires is supposed to tires is supposed to a braid very smoothly and very naturally like they shouldn't look too different as they as they wear down they should still have a nice smooth surface basically much like they did when they came out of there their tire blankets where they kept in the garage to keep them nice warm toasty in that optimal temperature range when you hear them talking graining effectively the tire is not in an optimal temperature window and the way it is abrating is well kind of looks like it's coming apart in grains you will see the you see the tire surface be like kind of pock marked and it's losing rubber kind of in chunks not ideal but some tires pass through a graining phase before they sort of resume optimal performance so it's it's tough to say whether you know graining is going to be a problem with how the tire is working or if it is just a thing the tire has to pass through to continue operating well but it does mean that when a tire is graining things are a little more vulnerable as tires wear down they do get slower they produce less grip and so drivers have to break earlier take less speed through corners but usually this is a very slow process where lap by lap there's there's not much change the tire the cars a little bit slower it's very minuscule but there is something called the tire cliff where if you've gone through all the tires optimal operating window and you're now running it way too long suddenly that degradation stops being a gentle incremental curve and it becomes a cliff performance just falls the way it would look on a lap time chart is it would be like a vertical climb and suddenly each lap is taking much much longer because the tire is so slow you want to avoid the tire cliff you will a tire that has gone over the cliff can sometimes be 2-3 second slower per lap maybe more as a driver is nursing it around you are a sitting duck with on a tire that's over the cliff but things being what they are sometimes there's incentive to risk hitting it because if you can save a pit stop that will be hugely advantageous to you so they will run it as close that cliff as possible obviously part of the drivers art is proper care and feeding of the tire keep it in those nice temperature windows don't do don't drive it like you stole it don't drive it like it's a video game you know have have good habits with breaking and cornering don't abuse the abuse the tires but two areas two areas human one of those common things you encounter are lock ups as you're approaching a corner you hit the brakes and rather than arresting the role of the tires so what ends up happening is the axle basically just ceases and the tires stop rotating and they start skidding along the surface this is actually much slower for slowing down the car that doesn't work the car is not breaking effectively if that is happening but also as you imagine so you just take a plane and you're just like squaring off part of a part of a circle that is a flat spot when that happens and when you flat spot a tire you will feel that for the remainder of the tires life the tire is no longer perfect circle and so there's a part where you're going around corners that will that will make that that is something you will feel through you know through the steering through the grip the tire has been significantly compromised by getting flat spotted that is a disaster if someone comes straight out of the pits and immediately flat spots the tires that they're supposed to run like 30 laps on that's not good because now you still have to do 30 laps but you've kind of screwed up the tire flat spot is also incredibly likely to happen on fresh tires because they are still kind of coming into their their full effect and so it's easy to misjudge these things as as a driver just to close the loop I think on pit stops drew do you want to tell people about the undercuts and the overcuts yes so like you said pit stops are very costly in terms of time when the car is stationary the team is moving really quickly and can sometimes get the car going again and you like you said Rob two or three seconds but the whole process of a pit stop can take upwards of 20 seconds which is a lifetime when you were talking about laps that are like 90 seconds total so timing your pit stop is crucial and you've got to take like you said the tire cliff into account the healthier tires how fast your car is going when it is worth it to come in and do that pit stop but you also have to take into account where your you know the other drivers on the track are so one thing that a the driver behind a car can do is to try what's called the undercut so if you are chasing a car an undercut means you pit first before them and you have the advantage of knowing that they've ahead of you past the pit entrance so you can say okay they're not pitting on this lap now I can you pit first and even though you are now 20 seconds behind them your tires are new and therefore you're going faster than them and you know that eventually they're going to have to pit so when they do pit you have made up time on them and they take their 20 seconds but because your tires were faster and at the time that they were still going they come out behind you now that doesn't always work and there's a lot of like math involved you know the teams are constantly they've got you know computers handling all this in fact one of my favorite parts is that you've got your your onsite team but then most teams have back at the factory like you know many countries away like mission control where they are watching screens and running you know predictions that then they you know call the team at the pit wall and say like you need to pit now it feels very like Apollo mission to me yes the undercut is when you come in first get new tires and by going faster by the time your opponent pits you've they come out behind you there is a reverse of this called the over cut where you stay out longer on the theory that you have faster laps still in you and so after overtaking them during their stop you will gain enough time on your old tires to have a safe gap did I make does that clear did I make the set that right I think it's it's one of those things where it makes more sense in practice once you see like once you see it in action you will see the choices teams are making around this stuff but it can be a little bit it can be a little bit squirrely in the abstract yeah um Danny did have to drop because because the internet died we'll get it back in a second but while we're on these sort of lingo e things let's talk about some other things that you're likely to to see and hear that to a new viewer may sound unfamiliar I think something we might see a lot this year compared to last year is flashing lights on the back of a car these if it's a wet race they will always these lights will always be flashing because they want to make sure that the cars are easy to see but in a dry race condition a flashing light generally means that the car ahead of you is recharging their battery and the light flashes because that means that due to the nature of the kinetic energy recovery recharging means that the car might be slowing so you want to let the driver know behind you that that your car is going slower um you might see the cars uh usually this happens or it doesn't happen during a race it does happen during qualifying sometimes that a car will be in the pit lane uh gestured by the uh the track officials to a way station where they actually way the weight of the car um further rules the car has to be a minimum weight which includes the driver and they weigh the car and the driver separately so actually you will see this after the race they they say hey great congratulations you won the race now please step over here on this scale we need to weigh you they weigh everybody after the race because they have the weight of the car and driver they subtract the weight of the driver and they make sure that the car is not under weight it's just logistically easier um rather than making them all stay in the car and queue up at the way bridge um it's also useful for their the drivers trainers to know how much they've uh lost in terms of their own weight in the race which in a hot race like Singapore can be up to eight pounds like in in water weight these guys are athletes um thankfully they do have a drink system that they can use uh during these races to replenish their water so like warm gatorade yeah yeah I mean this is because these things are not I mean this is the nature of open wheel racing in particular uh is that these things are not there's no creature comforts uh with these things so yes they have a they have a drink system is little there's a little camelback built into the uh built into the car but the only place to put it is by where the power unit lives the battery and the motor both generate tremendous amounts of heat and so what they put into the car is usually like a frozen brick of gatorade uh it is the temperature of like lukewarm soup after just a few laps basically so like yes there's drink system uh and drivers will be happy to have it but uh it's it's it's pretty gnarly and yeah it's it's also like you are especially in hot races you're like approaching limits of like human endurance uh like famously I think it was last year of the year before uh George Russell uh basically had heat stroke after after a race um so like these things can creep up on drivers fast yeah and um I think it was last year that a a rookie a young rookie driver retired like could not finish a race um because he was uh cooking in his car basically um one thing we we didn't mention yet is the the top speed of the cars these things will do there is no uh regulated top speed but you will see them go above 220 miles an hour um some other lingo here that you'll hear uh box is synonymous with pit or pit stop so you'll hear over the radio instead of pit they'll say box or box box um speed trap is another phrase you'll hear that's just the section of the track where they go the fastest that they like to highlight for viewers it's not like there's no regulations around that there's no rules it's that the detection point right yeah um boost mode yeah back marker um means someone who is uh typically being lapped so in like the back the rear of the field um and this is something that that Danny will get into when uh he talks about flags but you know even though these cars are very close in performance over the course of a two hour race um the front runners will encounter the rear of the field the back markers and pass them uh Rob you want to describe over and under steer uh yeah so uh this is actually you're gonna see a lot more of this so in previous years the cars were so heavy and the tires were so tricky to get in optimal ranges that they tend to have major problems with understeer which is most what most of us are familiar with because road cars are generally tuned to have understeer where you're turning the wheel the car can't respond enough with enough grip to sort of follow the line you're giving it the you you want to take a sharper turn but the path the car is actually traveling is a much shallower turn uh that is understeer the the car is under steering that was one of the big problems that one for the last several years uh it is a thing associated with like a less uh high performing car again there's a reason road cars are tuned to have this uh through going in air in one direction oversteer is the opposite where the back end uh will sort of make a very exaggerated snappy motion and so you are trying to corner certain rate and the car actually wants to bring it to those sharply uh it like into that turn and now wants to cut a a far sharper turn than you intended uh and if you don't catch it that is how spins happen the cars this year appear to be much more prone to oversteering uh routinely during testing you saw drivers have to you know midway through a corner uh like basically wrestle the car uh you know out of an oversteer moment in a way that a lot of them have not really had to contend with in number of years F1 cars always understeer an oversteer uh you know and it's certain corners certain points part of drivers like knowing how to handle those moments but in general F1 cars had problems turning in recent years um and oversteer was not an encounter not a problem uh that you encounter as much and they properly set up F1 car suddenly this year that's happening a lot uh so you will you will see cars uh the way oversteer looks a lot is like it will look like the back end is wobbling uh as as a as a car is coming into or exiting a corner um and that's especially likely because uh the rear tires are where all the power comes from and so you know if you think about it the rear tires are also trying to provide grip and cornering speed but they're also trying to put power through uh it's a big it's a big assignment and uh sometimes those those those those power that that power coming off the back end uh can can easily cause a car to spin out that's what you're going to hear the most often is like when you see a driver spin the car put it into a wall following like not making a corner usually they will go back in the analyze oh he just started accelerating too fast he was on the power too soon uh and caused a spike of oversteer and put himself out of the race so that is a thing to keep it out for another thing you'll probably hear a lot is uh especially in qualifying purple sector or going purple this refers to uh the the on screen graphics um in qualifying you will see times that the cars put up if they are if the if the font is in yellow that means they haven't improved if it is green that means that they're they've improved on their personal best and if it's purple that means they are overall best um and that color can refer to either the overall best lap time or the best just the best time in that segment of the track and typically they're divided into three different sectors so that's what that means um the other thing so purple is something to especially watch out for during the race because purple sectors often indicate like how is the track performing so like again those mixed conditions where like should we be on wats or should we be on slicks teams will be watching to see is someone now like someone like someone is trying to try a strategy to come out or are they setting purple times if someone is on the right tire strategy the the course is now appropriate for being on an intertire and everyone also still on slicks but they weren't sure about it the second someone who's on inters like start setting purple times that is an indicator that like oh it's time to it's time to change tires so in the race like purple time should be happening regularly because the cars are burning off fuel and getting lighter and getting faster but sometimes the purple sector is also an indicator of course conditions and that's a that's a neat thing to look out for during during tricky conditions yeah uh another um f1 erasing specific word you hear a lot is chicane this describes a uh a part of a circuit that is a quick left right or a quick right left turn two sharp turns very close in succession uh another phrase is pit window this again is is not a regular you'll see on the graphics like pit window lap 20 to 25 that's not a requirement for the cars to pit that's just when we expect a car to or the cars to start to start pitting uh and the last one here I have is is park firme this is closed park in French um it's basically a physical area and a designated time of the weekend where technical checks are done by officials to make sure that the cars are within regulation um for example after qualifying the cars will go into park firme and during that time no performance adjustments can be made to the car because they want to make sure that the car that qualified is the car that raised yeah they used to uh they used to allow a lot more changes to happen across the weekend but now it is very much a um put your pencils down it is time the exam is the the engineering side of the the exam is over now it is time to go racing with what you brought and as you might imagine uh there are many more rules and indeed penalties so Danny what can you tell us about what you can and can't do yes there is no referee standing in the middle of the track throwing up yellow red cards uh Fernando Lonzo likes to imagine he's one that's yes that's what he's going to do when he retires uh there's no there's no NFL you know throwing flags although is there no I think it's not on the field but there's a lot of sports has many flags but yes let's talk about flags shall we so um yeah so there's uh you know there's a bunch of marshals all around the track who are basically you know um usually local employees and they are sent um you know they're there for the race and they are sent messages and information from a smaller group of people who are essentially there to adjudicate over the race itself watching it up in a little box and watching replays and things like that we're all downstream from this so we're sort of in the same position of the drivers lots of times where something happens and then you're like oh I wonder how the stewards are going to react to this one and some things happen on track you know if there's a crash or an incident and there's usually in a lot of these cases there's a sort of textbook wave approaching them but the devil's in the detail that when it comes to the actual penalties themselves so let's let's talk about the flags first of all and whenever you see a green flag waving that just means the track is you know normal racing conditions are happening you're good to go and everything is normal and fine and yellow flags much like yellow cards or those little flags in an NFL that they throw on and this usually that this means that oh there's something happening that you need to be aware of like a yellow light and at the traffic yeah you're right actually that's a that's a better one yeah yellow light at a traffic light and essentially it always means like sort of be a bit aware and no overtaking at this part of the track you can get a yellow flag in a section of the track or corner or two and you can get one across the entire track as well and the drivers are sort of made aware of that via not just the waving of the flags at the circuit but also nowadays they're you know digital displays on their wheels often highlight this is well we like them though yes exactly and so if if there's a single stationary yellow flag this means and no overtaking because there's a danger somewhere near the track and somewhere on the track sometimes but it's like not you know maybe it's a piece of debris or something like that and double the yellows is a more serious version of this is which basically means again you're not let overtake but there could be something in the middle of the track like you need to really slow down and really be aware so that happens if you know cars crash somebody breaks down and and they're stuck in the track and it's obviously a way of stopping a car going at pace hitting something that is stationary which can be incredibly dangerous and the most serious of the flags the red flag which means that the session has stopped it's basically the the the whistle that says stop we're done we're not we're not doing anything and in a red flag the cars essentially should crawl around the track and come back into the building and that can happen for a number of reasons it can have because a particularly bad crash you can have because some damage happened to the circuit itself either from a crash or for some other reason it can also happen if you know weather conditions get to a point where the stewards feel like it is just increasingly dangerous to drive that can be the torrential downpours of weather can also be lightning for instance of storms coming with lightning there's one element of the race that they have to be aware of which is that for the safety of the drivers they have a helicopter on site at all times there to medevac essentially people out if weather conditions get to a stage where that helicopter is not a safe position to be able to take off they will also red flag the race because that obviously takes the you know the safety element away there so in general you're going to get some wave flags during the race it just happens because cars break down or you know piece of carbon fiber comes off someone's car because they touched red flags are rare but you know there will be a half dozen to a dozen red flags during a season for one reason or another usually because of a big crash or because the weather just got too crazy and but yes generally we got some we got some green flag green flags green flags the game quick Danny came out no we're not playing that one f1 quake mod and we all love and now let's talk about the weird flags some of these you'll see some of these you won't see some of these maybe I've never seen or seen once or twice and so there is a yellow and red striped flag which means specifically there is like some debris usually like oil or some type of you know element on the ground that maybe they might not be able to see you know in that area but it's like trust us there's something here you need to be aware of and if it is a piece of road kill which has happened in f1 over the years they rock the flag from side to side so if you ever see a yellow and red striped flag getting rock to side to side in Australia for instance first race at a season could be a one back you know you don't want to hit that thing going 150 there they might do it also if the animals still you know walking around on the track we get this with Canada that's true we get it in like Singapore Singapore giant lizard there's always Liz create giant lizards yeah are the thing at Singapore which is always bizarre and yeah - The drivers will risk life and limb to avoid hitting an animal. If that's true, you will see, like in general, the drivers live in horror of striking a critter. - Probably for empathetic raisins, and also because they sort of drive around massive ice cream scoops. Which directs the animals into their faces. I mean, the halos exist now, but it's like hitting an animal in the back. - Well, it's like hitting a deer, you know what I mean? - Also the aerodynamics are not, guts are not going to the end. - True. - Yeah. - It's like, really? - That might actually have more to do with it. Like, that's so much of the car used to be breakable or down-opable by, like, a little bit of matter. And with simplified arrow, maybe we'll see who the real monsters are. - Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's hard to do. - Yeah, that's true. That stuff, and you got chunks of rabbit ear. - Rabbit foot though, maybe lucky. - So, keep your eyes peeled. - Other ones that are sort of, you know, outside of the norm, the meatball flag, as we call it, which is a black flag with an orange circle in the middle. - So, this is to let the driver know that they have a mechanical issue and that they need you to come in and have it rectified. Generally, this will be communicated via the radio, but if your radio has a mechanical issue, for instance, that might be tricky to communicate. If you don't heed to that flag, you're going to get in trouble. Oftentimes, it's the stewards telling you that, look, this is a piece of your car, it's going to fall off. And your team is, like, happy for you to stay out, but we need you to come in. Because, you know, it might fly off. There is a half-black, half-white flag, which they use for on sportsmen, like, conduct. Honestly, this one is, you know, kind of rare. I can't remember the last time I saw this. It's basically the one that they show if you bust the track limits more than the allotted amount of time. So, if you go outside of the track limits, I think it's twice or three times, you don't get a penalty, and they'll show you the black and white flag, saying, like, you're on the bubble. If you do one more time, then you do get a penalty. And generally, well, the stewards will tell the teams, and the teams generally tell the driver. There was one incident last year where they said to Lewis, like, "Oh, we've had three strikes, or two strikes." And he was like, "When do we get one?" Yeah. You know, they didn't update them, but that's more to do with Lewis. And his ex, a compatriot on the pitch, because they've actually swapped out that engineer there. He's not his guy anymore. And then there's the black flag, which often has a number associated with it. This is a disqualification, so it's going to be because you did not heed the black and white flag. It can be because, you know, some serious unsupportment like conduct, lots of different reasons. So you can get black flagged in a race, and that means you need to come in, you're out of this. The checkered flag, which the black and white sort of checkered pattern, you know, like a nice table cloth. That is obviously the end of a race or practice or qualifying in the session itself. And they cross the line for the final time. And then the flag that you will see a bit more, even though it's sort of, you know, it's not necessarily to do with the rules or a threat on the track or anything like that, is more of a heads up the driver is the blue flag. So obviously, you know, F1 races are long. Oftentimes people are in different pit strategies and you get into situations where over the course of these very long races where they're driving for, you know, accumulating dozens upon dozens of road miles essentially. And where the drivers at the front of the race, you know, the top five, top 10, will often catch up with drivers at the back of the track. And then if that happens, you don't want the driver who's in first battling with position with the driver who is in 20 second, 21st, 20th. And so in those situations, the driver who is the back marker, as they're known, is showing a blue flag to let them know today car that is ahead of them is not racing them for position is coming up and they are basically required to make space for that car to be able to get around them as quickly as possible. Not just on the track, but also often slowing down to even allow them to do so safely. And you're essentially required to just not make it as much work for that other driver to get past you. And it's just sort of taken, you know, culturally within the, you know, elements of fair play within the sport as a known quantity that if you're at the back, you're going to have to just get out of the way and see position and slow down a little bit to do that. So the blue flag is shown to them to let them know that somebody is coming up. Yeah, it is. It's a little counterintuitive because you know, you think, well, are isn't everyone racing everyone all the time, but at this point, if you're being blue flagged, you are about to be a lap down. Now, you may also be battling with other people who are back markers. So the tricky part is moving over to allow the front runner through, but at the same time, not allowing the guy you are actually racing through. Totally and hoping as well that maybe for something in front of you that like you can slow down a little bit less like in a good position, like on a straight maybe and let them pass there. And that's maybe the next driver up will have to do it in a more complicated place and has to slow down a bit more than you had to and you can catch up. So yeah, it's that there's a whole sort of arch onto itself when it comes to blue flags. And then the last thing with the flags is the safety car, the virtual safety car. So safety car, let's say that one first, because it's the easiest. If for instance, something happens on the track that requires the race to be neutralized, but as in stopped, but they don't want to red flag the race. And so let's say a car is stricken, you know, somewhere near the racing line and they have to get on, you know, either marshals have to run on and pick up debris or they have to bring a truck on to lift that car off. They don't necessarily want to red flag the race because then everyone has to come to the pits. Everyone has to like restart the race again. It just takes a long time with thinking. Yeah, it's going to take like two or three, especially with these new restarts, which we'll talk about. But you know, it may be it's going to take two to three to four laps to clear all this sort of stuff. They basically send out a safety car, which looks like a road car. It's not an open wheel car. It's actually like a very, you know, souped up sports car. But you know, and so we can actually set a pace that's similar to these cars. And essentially this will lead the pack. It'll become like a follow the leader thing where this car drives around at a decent clip, but like nowhere near race. It looks like it's going as fast as it can. But right behind the F1 cars look like they're going extremely slowly. It's really funny. Yeah, it looks like they're crawling, but they're probably doing like 70, 80 miles an hour or something. So the safety car will come out. It has big flashing lights on it. And when safety car comes out, when safety car pops up, the race is basically like slow down. Yeah, don't pass anybody's car. Yeah. And it bunches up the pack. So you know, if you were 10 seconds ahead of the person behind you, then once the safety car comes out, you're going to be, you know, a second less half a second ahead of them. You all get bunched up. At a certain point, the safety car drives in and people essentially start racing again from that backed up position. And there is another thing that they added now that we have this sort of, you know, better networking and communications that modern technology affords. And they have something called the virtual safety car, which is introduced to essentially do the thing the safety car does, which is slow everyone down. But instead of again, having to create this scenario where we have to wait for the safety car to go out first and we have to wait for the safety car to get in front of the pack leader and then it has to come in. And there might be a situation where there's an area of the track that has something on it, but we're going to get it cleared. They do something called the virtual safety car. And essentially what it does is it sets a sort of speed and speed requirement for the drivers to slow down to and they have to retain the delta time between them and the car in front of them has to be within a certain window. So essentially, it's like, okay, we are we're letting you all slow yourselves down. Don't try and overtake. Don't try and cut some time in front of the person in front of you. You have to slow down so we can safely fix this thing and then hopefully after a lap and a half or two laps of this, we will turn off the virtual safety car and you can go racing again. So it all depends on the sort of scenario that the race steers are attempting to think about the virtual safety cars. It's designed to maintain the gaps that you have as the driver have eaked out from your rivals versus the real safety car, which illuminates those because you have to back up. So it's a fact that we like everyone slows down together and then when it's done, we lift it back up and it's like the race just continues the way it was. Yeah, exactly. Yes, if you don't follow the rules, then this is where you get a little slap on the wrist. Panels are again sort of open to interpretation, you know, like so many penalties and sports, you know, maybe you know a red card tackle if you see it or is that passing her foods? Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of that. And F1 is no stranger to this, of course. So let's go through them sort of in order of severity and I'll try and give examples of what would constitute one or the other. So, you know, the simplest one you get is like a five second penalty. So this could be added to essentially your position at the end of a race. And or which is usually the case, and we'll talk with stop goes and stuff in a second. So this can be for again, like cutting corners too much things like that common small infringements and stuff that you know you need to get a you need to get a slap on the wrist for it, but it's not the craziest thing. And the 10 second penalty is for essentially the same thing except the higher degree of severity when it comes to what you did. So, you know, what do we think about a 10 second penalty that could be hitting another car maybe like diving up the inside. Yes, you can agree just stuff. But again, that was in the detail here interpretation, right? They've also these things are sometimes being under view a lot among the drivers because the five second penalty used to be the standard. The standard fare for most minor infractions. And then people realized, well, you just don't serve that in the five seconds is trivial. So you cut a corner and you could stiffening the penalties to make it so that you can't get an advantage because it turns out five seconds is very cheap if you end up with favorable track position. Which is why we have ones that are even more more serious in that such as the drive through penalty. So obviously there are, you know, pits in the in an F1 race pit stops where drivers come in change their tires. Whenever you do that, it obviously takes a chunk of time, not just the time that they're sitting there, you know, getting lifted up tires coming off tires going on, but also the time lost while in that pit lane because you obviously have to slow down to a certain speed limit for everyone safety and also to stop the car and start the car. So oftentimes, you know, there's like a 25 to 30 seconds loss in time while going in and out of the pits. Maybe even more for some of them. So one penalty they have is a drive through penalty, which essentially is you have to come to the pits, but you can stop your car. You just got to drive through. That's it. You got to go through the Denys take out window. The Denys was the wrong choice. They don't have they don't do that McDonald's Burger King. You have to drive through you cannot stop and get your food. You got to just keep going. And this is for again, like sort of constantly cutting corners, cutting chicane skipping track limits, which is like driving outside of what we have deemed is the actual race track itself. Things like that where you are perhaps gaining an advantage on time, slap on the wrist. We're going to take some of the time away from you. The worst version of this is the stop go penalty. And this is like the drive through except you have to go into your pit box and you have to stop for 10 seconds. You got to sit there, no one can touch your car. If you want to change your tires after that, that's fine. And that's generally what happens as people go. Oh, well, I know for a stop go penalty, I don't think you can touch your car. I think if you get a 10 second penalty, you're going to serve it in your pit box. Then you can. Sorry, you're right. I think with a stop go. I think you have to park and then leave. And if you want to pit, you have to come in again. Yeah, that's true. Sorry. Yes, the five in 10 second penalty sometimes people. Yeah, we'll like add them into a pit stop generally. Yeah, so if you if you're handed like a regular five second penalty. And you don't have and you don't pit again in the race, they just tack it on to the end of your end time. If you do pit after you've received a penalty, you have to serve that five seconds in the pit box. And that's where no one can touch your car until five seconds to wrap. And this is really fun. Like you'll see someone on the pit wall has a stop watch. And then they all hear in the radios, okay, go. And then everyone bounces on the car. It's really funny. Yes, and there has been instances where people have accidentally touched the tires and then invalidated that stop and then they had to come back and do it again. But yeah, sorry, thanks for clearing that up. The stop go itself is one where yes, you can come in stop. And then you got to go out and it's because of the severity like you end up losing like a minute or most of time doing this. Yeah, this is this is yeah, this is something like, you know, you've you've done something that is a massive benefit to you like jumping a start at the start of the race or doing something egregiously, you know, unfair or dangerous like speeding in the pit lane, ignoring overtaking blue flags, things like that. Or doing like insanely egregious version of blocking cars, you know, in breaking zones or multiple movements on the straight of some is trying to overtake you stuff like that. So it's pretty much the worst one they can give you. There's also a grid position penalties that you can get for like five spots, 10 spots. This generally tends to happen when people break park firme rules, which is essentially they have done some sort of modification to their car. At a period during the race weekend, which is deemed a time window where you're not allowed change stuff and teams will sort of tactically do this, you know, they'll be like, well, look, we're going to loosen grid positions on this. We're going to have to start from the back, but you know, this engine or this part of the engine is is not working properly and it's going to basically, you know, tank our race. We're just going to take the hit on this. We're going to, you know, do this and then serve the grid position as a result. The other only situation is if something sort of again on the more serious side happens at the end of a race, they may decide to punish you for the next race rather than just sort of, you know, giving someone in 14 to 10 second penalty at the end of a race is really not going to move the needle in anyway. They're not going to get any points or yeah, if you two put another car and you both go out. Then a time penalty is not going to do anything so they might hand you a grid drop. Yeah, if exactly if you were the one responsible, they want to be able to make sure obviously that you take some sort of penalty for it. Then there is the, yes, the 10 place penalty, which happens after you get five, what do we call these are they they're not points. Yeah, they're on your list. Yeah, they feel similar. They can do it can hand you a reprimand, which is like a, you know, hey, we saw that we're not going to give you a penalty now, but if you keep it up and they accrue, then we're going to give you a grid penalty. Same way like race bands work the same way. If you accrue in these these come in the form of points on your license. So, you know, if I, if I crashed into somebody, they're going to say, that that one was bad. You know, not all, not all incidents are intentional, but if they deem that this was an egregious error on your part, they're going to hand you a couple points on your license. And if you accrue 12 points in a calendar year, it's a rolling window, then they'll hand you a race ban, which we've seen relatively recently. And the penalty points exist in the UK for sure. I think Ireland, we might have them, but you don't do that here, right? Oh, for normal drivers. Yeah, on your license. No. So if you get like, if you get involved in like a crash or you get a speeding ticket or something like that, you will get a penalty point out of to your license. And then you do lose your license if you get a certain amount of them with certain time. Yeah. So it's basically the same law applied to this port. And then yeah, so, you know, or you could, you could, yeah, race bands can, you can also just be handed out of something crazy happens as well. And we don't tend to see that stuff, which, which says more about the quality of the driving at this level than, you know, probably anything else, but that is thankfully the case. But the issue here again is that, you know, a lot of the time you can tell why someone's getting a certain penalty or why a certain flag is getting waived. But there are elements of this sport that are a little bit open to interpretation. We are going to run a foul of this. The early stages of this new regulation change season, I suspect quite a lot, especially with the way in which the, you know, power is deployed on straights, you know, and also how harvesting is done on corners for energy. I suspect that this is going to be a little bit tricky. So let's give us sort of a broad and overview position as to what is kind of constituted fair defending of your position into a corner. So we've talked a lot about, you know, blue flags, you know, somebody is a back marker overtaking the most of the over, well, not most, but like the exciting overtakes you will see on television will be ones for position. Where somebody who in second is trying to get into first, where somebody in twelfth is trying to get into tenth, no matter what it is. And obviously if you're the card defending that position, you want to make it as difficult as possible for that person to try and overtake you. And generally that means picking a certain part of the track that you are going to occupy. And then picking a certain direction of travel around a corner that you're also going to occupy. And so the only other available option is the part of the track that you're not on. What I'm getting towards is that you can't just swerve around in front of the car in front of you to stop them from getting past. You also can't just randomly change direction in a corner or break too early or like this or you know, break check somebody. There's things that you're not allowed to do within the sort of sporting code. And a lot of this has got to do with safety because these cars are super expensive, super fast cars and they're made out of cheap plastic. They're made out of very expensive carbon fiber. But when they hit each other, they fall apart, they crash and then you've got somebody sitting in an open container with a helmet flying through the air into a barrier. So they have to establish some sort of rules about defending. And of course, because this is a competitive sport, people are going to try and skirt around those rules or stretch those rules as much as they can. So some general points to understand about this. You're not allowed to make abnormal changes in direction if you were the defending car. So that means you can't just like I'm drifting over to the right of the track and then I'm going to come back over to the left. That type of thing, you know, that type of sub diffuser or whatever can create bad incidents, right. So again, you're already imagining this new head and thinking, well, you know, shouldn't she try and smart the car behind you? Yes. What's an abnormal change in direction? Exactly. This is the problem with any sport and F1. This is this is the issue they run into and making like double movements. So if you are, if you are, you know, on a straight and somebody's going to try and dive up the inside, you know, let's say the right side of the track, you are allowed to block them. You are not allowed to block them a second time. You can't just keep swarving back and forth. Similarly, if you're in like a breaking zone and it looks like you are the one that instigates the movement, you know, into the inside of a turn. But then you you cut back over to the other side because of the nature of how cars break in F1 like generally cars in F1, you know, you watch like you play like drifting video games, you watch action movies. You hit the brakes and you turn. If you hit the brakes in an F1 car, it's basically going straight. So if you are, you know, weaving in the breaking area and then the car behind you hits their brakes and then you go back in front of them, crash is going to happen. So you got to be careful about that as well. So you're not led like do that. You're not led block super late. If you were entering a corner and you've decided which part of the corner you're going to be breaking into, you can't just suddenly decide to change at the last second when everyone's in their breaking zone. And then the other thing is when cars are side by side into turns, you know, they're trying to overtake each other. They're on a straight. You can't just run the other car off the track. You can't instigate contact between people. You have to leave a gap between the cars. It is crazy how good these drivers are about leaving the smallest gap. Sometimes the wheels are sort of like inside of each other as it were, you know, like somebody's front wheel is between the other two. Yeah, interlocked exactly. That's all fine. A gap is the smallest demand of space. You can imagine in F1 and incidents often happen because somebody's breaking a little bit too late or turning in a little bit too much. And oftentimes cars will hit each other and take each other out. And they'll just put it down to a racing incident. This is not something we need to punish one of you for. It was fair racing, but you both, you know, you both fell a cropper of just the rules of the game. And it'll take some watching, but I think, you know, it'll become apparent. You'll, this is something that you'll get better at after watching a lot of racing is sort of identifying. So there are a bunch of factors all over the place. That is, that is the thing. If you're familiar, for instance, with American gridiron football and the perennial debates, but what really is a catch? That is kind of what happened. Oh, yeah. Was driving standards football and move. Yeah. Yeah, because there's a lot of this is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, you're allowed to regain the racing line heading into a corner. So you can make your blocking move down the straight. And then as someone is trying to maybe move around you, but there's a corner coming up, you can regain the correct line for taking the corner. And that just happens to block someone else. And that introduces ambiguity that is frequently adjudicated by a rotating cast of racing officials who try to figure out what's fair racing and what's outside the rules. And then the drivers themselves are frequently on the radio, lobbying, they're talking to their race engineer complaining about what has just happened or what they, what they read on the incident. But it is clearly meant for the consumption of racing officials so that it is, it is sort of like loudly proclaiming one's innocence that you cannot imagine that you would be penalized for something or that someone else would would not see the other guy was at fault. So this is a thing where you will, you will get, you will see these things in practice and you will internalize more of the logic of these roles. You will never fully feel confident about how those rules are being interpreted and applied because the drivers aren't either. All right, well, how do you actually watch these races? And this is something that's also changed this year in the US, you have one option, you must have a subscription to Apple TV, which is $13 a month or $99 a year. My advice is once you've gotten that subscription to watch using F1's official app, which is called F1 TV. And it's available on basically every kind of streaming box or smart TV. But you will need to link it to your Apple TV account. The F1 TV app will give you access to live sessions on demand replays. They've got 30 minute highlight edits of the races, which are convenient if you're in a hurry, as well as historical archive of hundreds of old races and sessions for the F1 feeder series like Formula 2 and the F1 Academy, which is the development program for female drivers. There's also the official F1 YouTube channel, which provides highlights of each session with the races being edited down to about seven minutes, same with qualifying. That's usually how I consume practice sessions is on YouTube, though I know many of our listeners just watch the YouTube race highlights and then listen to our podcast to get the full picture. You've got some options. And speaking of commercial rights, let's take it to one more commercial break and then we'll be back with an overview of the teams and drivers. All right, so we've found that a lot of newcomers to F1 were introduced to it by watching Drive to Survive on Netflix. And I'm sure now the F1 movie will have done something similar. So if you're coming in after watching one of those Brad Pitt is not an F1 just I want to get that out of the way. That was that was that was Hollywood match. Yes, there are no people in their 50s. We have some some 40s in the field. Fernando's. Yeah, he's trying it. He's going to get that. I guess if you're wondering we I think we generally gave a thumbs up to the F1 movie. We have a whole episode on Patreon where we talk about it. If you want to hear that. It's popcorn flick. It's kind of silly, but it's yeah, it's not surprising that those are effective on ramps because they do a great job of showing the human drama of the sport. And it's just like it pays to understand the technicalities of the sport knowing the people really adds to the experience. So with that we're going to go through every team and driver on the grid. Like I said, there are two drivers per team. The concept of teammates in F1 is a little weird. They do sometimes work together. For instance, if two teammates are on track one behind the other, the car behind. They're in order to defend against another attacking team. But that is only if the driver listens to their team's orders. Usually they do not always. Every driver out there thinks that they are the best. And they all especially want to beat their teammates because they are the only ones with the same machinery. So it's a pretty poor reflection of your ability if your teammate beats you every time in effectively the same car. Before we get to the teams and drivers, a quick note about how to tell them apart on track. Each team has a different paint job, which we call a livery, but the cars within the same team look almost identical. The major difference between them is the color of their camera pod, which is sometimes called the T bar because it looks like a squat letter T sitting on top of the car just behind the driver's head. One driver will have a black T bar while the other will have a fluorescent yellow one. Typically it's the more senior driver with the black one, but that's not always the case. So be on the lookout for our official spotter's guide as we get closer to the first race that we'll put out on the shift of one social accounts. And then as you will get we go through this, you'll also hear what engine each team has in their car. This can get a little confusing. A lot of the teams will have names that you've heard of like Mercedes and Ferrari in addition to being F1 teams. And then those teams also make their own engines, which are called works teams, and then sell those engines to other teams, which are called customer teams. So with each team breakdown, we'll mention the engine manufacturer and we do it not just because it's a piece of trivia, but especially this year, engine performance can really affect how good your car is. So we're going to go in championship order from how they finish last year, starting in the constructors, in the constructors championship, starting with Danny McLaren McLaren won the constructors championship last year. They did so the year before that, which was kind of cool because the previous year is it was Red Bull Red Bull Red Bull Red Bull Red Bull for a long time. So yes, they came first last year. They are the orange car or papaya as they like to call it. But yeah, you can't miss them. Big old orange car. Of course McLaren founded by Bruce McLaren, famous not just former one driver, but many different teams, a great engineer as well, New Zealand born driver. The team has been around since around the 80s. They're generally a sort of luxury car brand in the UK. They make high performance, very expensive cars, you know, not your street cars, your grandmother is going to buy. They make Ferrari's look affordable. Yes, it is a ridiculously high end brand. Yeah, so you've hear about the coolest granny in the world and richest or yeah, you will never step foot in one of these cars. I think I saw a P1 one time in London or something. They are based in the UK. They run a Mercedes engine. They are the nationality of the team is also UK. The team principle is Andrea Stella, who moved over from I'm blanking. He was at Renault, right? Don't remember prior to here. I'm trying to remember. You don't see him often because you normally just see the big American CEO. Yes, Zach Brown, the CEO is a man made famous by, well, I guess his first claim to fame was that he was on was that the prices, right? Is that really real or fortune? We have a fortune. He won some money and then turned it into a go cart in career and then did some racing and has been the CEO of McLaren and has turned it around. You know, a couple of fits and starts over the past 10 years, different driver combinations, but between the current two drivers they have, which I'll talk about in a second and the advancements they made with the car itself. He has managed to drive them towards two constructors, chapachips and now a drivers championship as well. The driver who won that championship is UK. We wasn't UK born, but British citizen, Lando Nars. He won last year. He is 26 years old. Lando has been in the sport for many, many years. He was part of a generation of younger drivers that came in and, you know, were competent drivers mentality. Lando was the thing for a while. There was a couple of races where he almost got on the podium, almost one in Russia, about four or five years ago now, but was never able to stick the landing. So last year when he did win the championship, it was a real testament to sort of who he has become as a driver and not just a skill, but his mentality because the issue he ran into was that he wasn't just fighting Max for a stop and a multiple world championship winner. He was also racing a very tricky teammate in Oscar Piazzi. Two years as senior is junior sorry at age 24. Oscar is an Australian. And last year he ultimately placed third. But he was leading the championship for a number of months last year. He, you know, forced Lando to sort of up his game as did for staff and slow encroachment back into that top three of the races. But Oscar, like I said, was was leading championship for a chunk last year had a couple of, you know, dodgy races, a little bit of bad luck as well and ultimately seated it to Lando. The season did eventually come. It came down to the last race in the mathematically it was possible for three drivers to win us, but it would have required Lando to have, you know, engine trouble or a particularly badge and final performance. As it happened Oscar drove a great final race as well, but ultimately came in third because Max Peptem. So yeah, they have a great, you know, set of drivers, they have a champion, they are champions, but ultimately this year with the new regulations, it's all going to come down to how the arrow and the power and the batteries all work. And for that, you know, I think we're going to talk about testing a little bit after this, this team run down and yeah, it's hard to tell right now between the top three or four teams who's really gosh the car. And apparently was born in the UK, his mother though is Belgium. So I thought he was born, Belgian citizenship as well. Apparently, and I'm just, I'm just learning this now. His mother has stated that or Lando, his mother gave him the name Lando, which he says was not inspired by Lando Calrugian. So not everything is a star wars reference can color me surprised. Yeah, I was sure he was whatever it doesn't matter. We was born next up Mercedes, they play second in the dry or the constructors championship last year, they are the silver and teal car. They run their own engine, a Mercedes engine, the team is technically you have the official entry is German and that's it's weird. They the team registers via an auto club of a specific country. And then that is their official entry into former L1 all their factories are in England as a lot of the factors for these teams are their team principle is an Austrian man named total wolf, who sounds exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Until 2021 Mercedes had won the previous seven drivers and constructors championships, but after that they really struggle to get on top of their car. There's kind of a regulation change that they they went down an incorrect path last year they really started looking better and we expect that trend to continue. The drivers are George Russell, he's 28 from the UK last year finished fourth in the drivers championship very much the British gentleman, I think Rob wants to describe him as a spit fire pilot. He had to fill up the reputation for buckling under pressure had a lot of like late race crashes, but that has changed recently he's had a string of really solid finishes and I he's hungry for a championship. He also apparently made the case to total wolf to sign him to the Mercedes driver program with a PowerPoint presentation so yeah teachers. His teammate Andrea Kimi and Tinelli they call him Kimi and Tinelli. He is 19 years old Italian last year placed seventh in the drivers championship this is his second year in the sport after he started last year with Mercedes as a rookie. There was sort of a lot of young phenom hype around him when he came in but instead of setting the world on fire I'd say he came off as capable but still a little green I expect this year a lot of those rough edges are going to be sanded off and I'm excited to see what he can do. Next up Danny. Red Bull Red Bull are a it's a drink it's got to ring it's got sugar it's got you know it's what you need to start your day of trucking and it's a you know a red bull is a red bull have obviously been in a bunch of sports over the years they invest in lots of crazy stuff. But their investment into Formula One started back in 2005 and between the period of 2010 and 2013 and 2014 even as well they were they were dominant you don't mean like they won four championships there in a row between 2010 2013 they were second either side of that. And then Mercedes were dominant for the next sort of six seven years and the shed at all of your your children who are now doing the hand movement because what I just said and then they managed to sort of get back into contention again in the past couple years they won the constructor in 2022 and 2023 which were the two central years of Max or stop and one other drivers for. And then they were championships that he won in a row between 2021 and 2024 and so they have had fits and starts of being the most dominant team they've had on and off sort of years with that and the constructors ultimately eluded them the past years because of the rise of McLaren and they ended up coming in third overall. And there are a dark blue and yellow car generally you can spot them because they have a big red bull on the side of the car and this year they are running their own engines they have built their own powertrain company in collaboration with Ford Motorsport to to essentially bring what was you know an external partner and they're bringing it in which which is risky but you know what we'll see how it works out for them. Much like the red bull company they are based in sorry they're they are an Austrian team and they actually own their own circus the old a one ring which is now known as the red bull ring or the austrite ring which just means Austrian ring and but yes as you said like everyone else they are essentially based in the UK like almost everyone is their based in UK and their team principle is Laurel Mekke's who replaced the drive to survive famous and and Spice girl husband Christian Horner during last season after you know multiple sort of so much issues ended up caught up with him yeah it's a whole lot we could do a preseason primer and Christian Horner and but we're not going to do that thankfully. So yes Laurel Mekke's is the team principle and he'll be running the show the drivers are Max first happen who is 28 years old he's Dutch his father was a F1 driver just for Max the four time world champion he is largely considered the best driver of his generation he is probably in contention for one of the best drivers of all time he is incredibly talented across multiple different aspects of motorsport smart guy very great mentality as well and he came second last year after being out of contention halfway through the season some hand managed to rest the lack car back and this has been a problem with rebel for a long time which is that Max is so good and he's able to drive the car on the limit that his teammates struggle to drive that same car anywhere near his face in fact they would probably be happier in a different car because it would be easier to drive and his teammate for this year is a young Frenchman called is that catcher eyes that catcher is being tend to call him last year he placed in 12th with red bulls sister team which will talk about in a second who are currently called racing bulls that's not confusing and listen to our entire preseason podcast on the naming convention of this team because it's just gotten ridiculous over the years and had your had a dodgy start to the last season he made some early mistakes he seemed mentally frail let's say and but over the course of last season he showed incredible race craft incredible mental acuity and ultimately found himself in getting the second seat at red bull and which you know has been a rotating cast for the past while I mean Sergio Perez was in there for a while but last year they went through Liam loss and you can see nobody could seem to handle the car so we're all hoping that he's act does a great job and doesn't fall afoul of the second red bull seats like so many talented drivers before him all right Ferrari Rob Ferrari's probably the most famous team in f1 damn nearest anonymous with the sport they finished 4th last year and it was a grim season as they often have been the team has had legendary drivers for it Michael Schumacher Michael Schumacher what is a dominant period in the late 90s early 2000s but it has been a long fellow period since then with a lot of unease unrest at the company as they try to find a winning combination they're based out of Italy and they do make their own engine that is sort of the heart of the team is is a history of racing development currently they are led by Fred Vassore while regarded team principal of a long history in motorsport we'll sort of look to as someone who could turn things around at Ferrari but things have not quite worked out that way ever since and the team also is pursuing kind of a two track strategy with its drivers for a long time there their primary driver the person they were clearly building the future around was Charles LeClair a driver from Monaco who was part of that young driver cohort that Danny alluded to they were very quick to sign him to a long term contract but then last year they brought in seven seven seven seven seven time world champion Lewis Hamilton who was dominant at Mercedes also want a championship with McLaren one of the best drivers in the history of the sport but has had some tough years lately as Mercedes form declined and he is first year at Ferrari was disastrous and the vibes I would say were bad not just for him but also Charles LeClair Ferrari is a team that probably gets more shit than they deserve because they're so famous and they're sort of known for making hilariously like ill timed errors but it does seem to have gotten into the water supply there and the vibes I would say are bad the drivers both seem to struggle with depression just from being Ferrari drivers and that's not really an exaggeration of comic fact they do seem pretty bombed a good portion of the season with what is happening at that team Williams are next last year to the best fifth which is higher than they have placed in many many years they were sort of bottom of the barrel for a little while there and the fans you know long time ago by Frank Williams and Patrick had sort of a classic British team they run in Mercedes engine and they are blue and white you'll this is they're one of the teams that are sometimes hard to pick up because there's a lot of blue and white out there on the track British team like I said their team principal not to be confused with James consonants his name is James vowels he's very interesting gentleman he speaks in a very beautiful posh British accent and if you watch drives as a vibe you're probably very familiar with him but you drivers couldn't have different more different starts and entrances into form and a one Alexander Alban is a 29 year old tie driver grew up in the UK but races under the flag of his his mother's nation and one of these very connected to obviously himself and places to ask you're in a position yes yeah yeah well I said he was tied but yeah yes and you know has a very interesting entrance story into Formula 1 his teammate Carlisign's junior is the son of a very famous largely rally focused driver Carlisign's junior is age 31 now he is Spanish last year he faced 9th so they were 8th and 9th right behind each other both very talented drivers who have never really found the car to put them sort of in contention for a championship will Williams have won this year would have to wait yeah racing bowls as we mentioned this is the sister team to red bull you there are limits about how much technical information you can share with another team but in the past red bull as we said sort of use this team is kind of a farm system for its its younger drivers this team is based in Italy they also have a factory or you know an office in the UK but they are an Italian team they used to be called Toro Rosso which was Italian for red bull which I think was a much cooler name they also use the red bull Ford engine which is new for this year they are a white and yellow car their drivers are Liam Lawson who is 24 from New Zealand last year he placed 14th he like many drivers including Alex Albon and a few more that will get to was one of those promoted to red bull to partner max for stappin only to last a handful of races before getting demoted but like many of those drivers before him he has seemed too flourish after that so hoping to see more from him this year he is partnered by I think the fields only rookie this year arvid lindblad love formula one names he is 18 from the UK he has a good history with a former or the lower tiers he won the prestigious Macal Grand Prix in formula four in 2023 placed fourth in the F3 championship a year later and came sixth in F2 becoming the youngest F2 driver in sorry F2 winner in history I personally have not seen him race but red bull tends to produce good drivers so I am assuming or I'm eager to see how he does it's you know all going to be down to how good the car is racing bulls I feel like is either an afterthought or they really impress you Rob Aston Martin oh fascinating team we haven't gone into the fact that a lot of teams have changed names over the years and have been one organization owned by multiple people that is relevant here with Aston Martin they were a team that was sort of a plucky scrappy underdog when they were force india that team sort of collapsed because the indian drinks billionaire who owned the team VJ Mali have gotten some legal issues kind of maybe sort of went on the run for a little bit trying to evade said legal issues but he lost control of the team and they became a semi independent organization as racing point before being rescued by billionaire Lawrence stroll who was brought into F1 to support his son lances racing ambitions and so ultimately was so involved in sport and so all in on a son's career that he bought an entire racing team but like Saturn devouring his children Lawrence stroll seems to have taken his son's dream and turned it into his own Lawrence took over the team and began directly running it moving it's long time team principle out of his role and bringing in his own people to sort of oversee the building of a top shelf F1 organization and he spared no expense in doing it and the results have been shit since he sort of put his stamp on the team its results have collapsed he has obviously he has a son lance driving for the team who I think is probably described as a marginal F1 driver clearly good enough to be on the grid does not often demonstrate that he is someone particularly worth keeping around if he were not the boss's son he is paired with Fernando Alonso a two time champion who may have brought a jinx to ask to Martin because Fernando Alonso's career has been spent trying to find more championships and better cars and everywhere he goes the team gets worse and then he leaves just the team is about to start turning things around there's often debate about whether or not these two factors are related and whether Fernando is quietly part of the problem but he is extremely regarded he's very smart he's a very sharp driver and so I think you'll hear the commentators extend him a lot of a lot of benefit of the doubt and give him pass on a lot of things but in particular this year is cursed for resident reasons because part of Ashton Martin turning things around was sparing no expense and recruiting Adrian Newy and F1 aerodynamics engineer who's worked for just about everyone and gave red bull so if it's most dominant cars over the over the past 15 or so years he was placed in charge of the team giving a king's ransom to develop an unbeatable car and then Ashton partnered with Honda for their engine Honda having just produced world championship winning cars again with red bull with a catch Honda was quitting F1 just as red bull started winning they stuck with that plan red bull basically hired all the people who built Honda's engine and so Honda started from scratch for Ashton Martin and the results judging by what happened at testing have been nightmarish both the drivers of the press saying the car is potentially three or four seconds slower per lap then the other teams which NF1 terms you're basically not even the same series that is a you'll be left twice before that races over so things are going really well over there and is a Ashton Martin is fun and instructive for an example of what happens when sort of a finance class actually tries to operate things as opposed to just taking credit for it and so that's it's sort of morbidly fascinating from that standpoint also somewhat fascinating the Haas team they are until Cadillac they were the newest F1 team on the grid having started from scratch in 2016 they're owned by American business man Gene Haas whose company makes CNC machines which are basically factory robots which is a little ironic because this team is famous for keeping costs down by buying as many parts as legally possible from Ferrari this has less end of it over the years they make more of the car themselves these days if you watch any of the early seasons of driver survive you may remember their former team principal goon through Steiner who oversaw a real roller coaster of an F1 team now it's headed by Aokamatsu who seems to be quite capable and basically the exact opposite of Steiner in terms of affect they are red and white they have a Ferrari engine naturally they have bases in the US UK and Italy and their drivers are all over bare man he's 20 from Britain from the UK last year he placed 13th he made his debut in an F1 car in a Ferrari when Carlos signs had to have emergency surgery for appendicitis he went on to impress last year frequently beating his much more experienced teammate I haas isn't likely going to be fighting for wins but bare man is fast and I qualify him as dependable best about Okan is the other driver he's 29 from France he plays 15th last year has been racing full time in F1 since 2017 although we had to sit out 2019 when Lance trolls dad bought the team out from under him and installed his son as a driver which must have been particularly tough because Okan is one of the few F1 drivers like Hamilton from a more humble background these are a lot there's a lot of rich kids here his parents famously sold their house and lived in a motor home so they could bring him to all of his racing events he does have a reputation for clashing with his teammates but we haven't seen that so much recently he's sort of become one of F1's journeyman drivers with occasional flashes of brilliance but generally just a steady hand recently next up Rob we're talking about the Audi team semi new to F1 Audi bought out a longstanding team that was usually toward the back of the grid the salver team they've changed names and partners for a number of years but the salver organization has been around and that is the core of the Audi effort they are going around and it looks like an Audi right Audi's love of sort of Matt silver and gray looks with red accents that is what their car looks like critically the thing that is very exciting from the standpoint the pitch that was made at the Volkswagen group for why it was good to get into F1 is that they were going to come in and make their own engine their argument is that the Mercedes team is not a true German team the power trains the engine manufacturer for Mercedes is also a UK team Audi is going to come in and unleash German engineering on F1 meanwhile though the car is still largely made out of a base in Switzerland and then a lot of R&D is developed in the UK because F1 is such a UK centric sport that there's just a you miss out on a lot of talent and ability and if you don't have a presence in the UK job market the Audi effort has been troubled though ever since its inception there were sort of high level struggles about what the vision was for the team the Audi corporate level seemed uncommitted about things they finally had to fire a bunch of people and they brought in former Ferrari team principal and director of their engine manufacturing effort Mattia Bonato so he will see him sort of running the show at Audi but he's not there racing operations sort of sort of leader that that is Jonathan Wheatler Wheatley serving as team principal for their lineup this year they've got Nico Halkenberg sort of a really well respected driver who just never broke through to a top tier team he got his first podium in his career last year so he's sort of there they're veteran and old hands and has connections with Audi going back some years he is paired with one of the new young cohort of drivers Gabrielle Bordeaux, a Brazilian who finished 19 from the standings last year and has shown flashes of some some real ability but probably it seems like one of the weaker drivers in was been a pretty excellent cohort so that might not be a nod against him it's just a tough comparison yeah he's in this low car tough to see or it has been all right next up Alpine spelled like Alpine but it's pronounced that way because it's French this is the racing brand of the French car company Renault which is partly owned by France they've really struggled over the past five years which I chalk up to chaotic leadership and the fact that until this year they used their own Renault engine which was significantly down on power compared to the others in the field but they scrapped that program and this year will be their first as a Mercedes customer team their current team principal is Flavio Bria Torre who ran the Renault team in the early 2000s until he was banned from the sport entirely for instructing his driver to crash to help the other driver win the race but I guess we're fine with that now especially if you've seen the F1 movie they are a blue end pink car they also have bases in the UK their drivers are Pierre Gassey Pierre Gasley he's French he's 30 he last year placed 18th he's another ex red bull driver he lasted 12 races however again I'd say he steadily has earned himself a reputation for getting on top of subpar cars which is a skill he has needed at Alpine I'm hoping that this new engine will allow him to shine a little more his teammate is Franco Colapinto 22 from Argentina he had a stressful rookie season last year when he and another driver named Jack Duhin basically traded off until their team principal decided on Colapinto he failed to get any points last year but I don't think that's wholly indicative of his skill I think the microscope is going to be him on him again this year though and if the car is better he'll have to stick close to his teammate or risk getting booted and finally Rob or sorry did you have things to America's team Cadillac the new team so Cadillac is actually an American organization unless like the host team which is owned by an American has some facilities in the US but is largely again run out of a broom closet in Ferrari's factory Cadillac had a long harrowing saga to get into the sport it started with the Andredi family and particularly Michael and Dredi's quest to get Neff one team started up but the F1 for a variety of administrative reasons rules reasons about getting into the sport but also became apparent as the saga went on a lot of personal antipathy directed toward Michael and Dredi the Andredi organizations could not crack their way into F1 that culminated with Michael and Dredi selling his stake in the team effectively to Dan Tauris his long time business partner and the Andredi organization had a bid accepted to become the new F1 team and they were partnered with General Motors and particularly Cadillac which is sort of their the brand they have leading most of their racing efforts these days in addition to Corvette however the Cadillac effort is a ways off from developing its own engine they are using Ferrari engines for this year they are primarily based theoretically in Indiana a facility that the Andredi organization has put a lot of investment into but obviously they have facilities in hubs around the US and they have the pretty much required facility in the UK they are led by team principal Graham Loden and they have two returning I don't know if you call them fan favorites but two well regarded old guys coming in as their drivers first is Sergio Perez a 36 year old Mexican driver who had a good start to his Red Bull career at his last two or duty there but became one of that sad collection of drivers who was publicly humiliated week after week by Max Verstappen dominating races while Sergio Perez struggled to score points at any of them and Red Bull sort of unceremoniously dumped him and he spent a year or two I can't remember at this point cooling his heels waiting for an opportunity and that came here I do think the fact that he is sort of based in North America probably helped him with getting the spot at Cadillac he is paired with Valtteri Bautas a 36 year old finished driver who was partnered with Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes for a number of years and has become sort of a unlikely social media star as he gave up on his ambitions of being a particularly like a accomplished championship winning driver and started living living moss let us yeah yeah and just start leaning into a particularly finished brand of weird miss if you play if you play video games you're familiar with the studio remedy makers of Max Payne and Alan Wake there is an inherent finishness that's out there and Valtteri Bautas is an example of that he like sound as cycling and being bear ass naked on social media so he's a good he's a good follow it's a good time great things are not expected from this team but they also look unlikely to be the worst given how badly some things are going elsewhere on the grid and those are the teams we will I think for our next episode get deeper into what we've seen in testing but we can move on right now I think to the calendar places we're going this year one of my favorite things about F1 is the sort of traveling circus feel of the sports everyone rolling up to a new country and spinning up these crazy events Danny where are we going this year yeah a couple of changes for folks who are watching for the past few seasons so Spain this year is a bit funny because we have two Grand Prix's happening there so the regular circuit Barcelona Catalonia one is now going to be called the Barcelona Catalonia Grand Prix it is going to be rotating with spa apparently going forward and then the other one the Madrid which is the you know the street circuit that's happening in Madrid that is going to be known as the Spanish Grand Prix and Imola has been discontinued so we're never we're not going back to the middle of Romani Grand Prix and then the Azerbaijan Grand Prix is going to be held on a Saturday because the Azerbaijani government has remembered it has remembrance day on that Sunday which is connected to the 2020 the second and the Gorno Carabac War which you know I don't know get into too much into geopolitics but like Azerbaijan are largely the aggressor in that situation so it's a little bit weird to have remembrance day for the war you started trying to take over this disputed territory this is like F1 is weird money and weird politics and like that is yes just a little sprinkling that I like about this part I suspect the Armenian F1 fans won't be super jazzed about that Saturday race but anyway I digress and then the other thing to say is that the sprint weekends which you've talked about earlier and the races where the sprint will happen I will point out during this rundown but essentially it's China, Miami, Canada, the British Grand Prix, the Dutch Grand Prix and Singapore will be those so we start very soon on March 8th at the Australian Grand Prix which has become the starting race of the season over the past few years at Albert Park and Melbourne then we're to China the following week for a sprint weekend at the Shanghai International Circus two weeks after that we got the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka then the 12th of April so another little break there the Bahrain Grand Prix at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakeer a week after that April 19th the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix happens at the Jeddah Street Circuit then we have a short kind of break again and the 3rd of May the Miami Grand Prix starts with a sprint weekend at the Miami International Auto Drome also known as the parking lot of the Hard Rock Stadium a couple of weeks later we have another sprint weekend so back to back at the Canadian Grand Prix at the Fantastic Gileville Nuve Circus on the 24th of May 7th of June we are at Monaco for the Monaco Grand Prix which is one of the worst but most photogenic races in World Motorsports the Barcelona Cazalonia Grand Prix is a week after that on June 14th June 28th we head to the Red Bull Ring previously mentioned owned by Red Bull at the Australian Grand Prix in Spielberg and then we are 5th of July going to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix which is a sprint weekend this year Spa-Franco-Shamp returns July 19th for the Belgian Grand Prix the 26th of July a week later will be at the Hungara Ring which is the Hungarian Grand Prix and then we have the proper summer break we return 23rd of August for the Dutch Grand Prix in Zamvort which is a sprint weekend and I believe the final Zamvort we're having if I remember correctly 6th of September is the Italian Grand Prix a Monza 13th of September the Spanish Grand Prix at that new Madrid if they finish it this 26th of September we head to Azerbaijan aforementionedly on a Saturday racing at the Baku City Circuit in Baku the 11th of October we head back to Asia for the Singapore Grand Prix at Marina Bay which is a nighttime race in the heat it's also a sprint weekend that is going to be a rough one for them they returned in on the 25th of October to North America for a little while the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas on that 25th of October a week later first in November we head to Mexico City for the Auto Dromo Hermanos Rodriguez track and the wonderful Grand Prix that happens there a week later after that we continue traveling south to Sao Paulo and hit up Interlagos on November 8th a little bit of a gap as they travel back up north to the Las Vegas strip to race the night race at Las Vegas on a 21st of November which is the third last race of the calendar this year then we are at the ultimate race at the Katar Grand Prix in Los Ales on the 29th of November so splitting Thanksgiving there and then the final race of the season happens December 6th at the long time now home of the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi as the sun sets on Yas Marina Circuit yes it is a behemoth of a season 24 races but again we will be with you the entire time finally I just want to welcome F1 newcomers it can be intimidating to jump into something like this and the more annoying F1 fans can be pretty protective of their precious sport but racing is for everyone that is what we believe we love it and we want more people to be excited about it our goal is to keep our show accessible so that more people can learn it too like I mentioned before you can write in at shift F1 podcast at gmail.com or go to f1.co which is our website /emails we will also have an F1 fantasy league yes F1 does fantasy sports once good luck oh yeah once that gets started we will post a link to join on the socials and put it in our podcast show notes and if you want you can ask other listeners of shift F1 by joining our discord channel which is also newbie friendly people are really nice in there and it's a great time and you can do that via patreon Danny yes this whole thing is funded by patreon we've been on patreon for a long long time now and have produced a bunch of exclusive podcasts so you can go listen to primers for racing series other types of racing in the past predominantly past couple of years have 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Keyboards Jeff Keyboards Jeff Foster Troy Stammer William Rump Lackland the Mad Men Samurai Love Story and Jason Kelly You'll get used to that as you will also get used to me reading from the Nikramikhan also known as this day in F1 So every episode we will read what happened this day in the past but not today because we've talked tough All right thank you everyone for joining us here let's get some final thoughts ahead of the 2026 season Danny Yeah I mean we'll talk a lot in the first episode about what we think about these new regulations what we think about where the teams are how testing has gone It's always hard to tell exactly what's going to happen in the first few races because teams withhold you know performance they sound bang and they fix stuff and it's it's I don't know where Rob this is I know some teams are really bad this year I can't tell who's who's at the top top top it's it's just at this stage it's it's seemingly hard impossible to see and that is very excellent Rob final thoughts Yeah I know I'm with Danny there's a lot of well tell you about this more next week I'm e-groups you have this kind of conversation with you all some drivers are already been bagging on the new cars the new regulations they've been some issues but from what I saw those look like fun little race cars something that F1 hasn't had in the minute and so nothing I saw in testing made me less interested in F1 so I'm cautiously optimistic I'm optimistic for just for it being weird and that is that is what I'm excited about like it could go these new regulations we we haven't really seen you know the actual racing with them yet so it could be a complete disaster but you know F or race starts which could be great yeah however even if there is some glaring in balance things are always changing and F1 isn't incentivized to keep its product entertaining so the hope is that you know things would be addressed quickly but like that kind of stuff is just making me more excited to see how things shake out so I'm excited for it I'm excited to have all of our listeners here with us for the season and until next week have a good race weekend everyone and we will see you all next week [Music] [Music]
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