Wonderduck's Pond

August 21, 2018

Summer Break Is Over... Get On The Bus, Kids

Yup, Formula 1 is back for the second half of the 2018 season. As has become tradition, the first race back will be at Spa-Francopants, the longest circuit on the calendar and the race with the highest percentage of the track being on Belgian soil.

While it's yet another race, it's also going to go down in history as the start of the Fernando Alonso retirement parade. Yes, the LeMans winner announced during the break that this will be his last season in F1. Exactly what he's going to be doing is still unconfirmed... he might stay in the WEC with Toyota, he might race IndyCar full-time, that's not announced yet.

I expect he'll be in IndyCar... he only needs the 500 to win the Racing Triple Crown, after all... at which point I'm afraid I'll have to start writing his obituary for future use. There was yet ANOTHER major crash-and-injury in IndyCar, this time last weekend at Pocono. Robert Wickens got tangled up with Ryan Hunter-Reay and was launched onto the top of the outside barrier. He was nose-high, however, and it took only a few moments for him to hit one of the support posts for the safety fence. Cue rapidly disintegrating car, the pieces of which wound up taking out a few others. Wickens suffered broken legs, one arm was broken, bruised lungs, and most seriously, a broken spine and spinal cord damage. The severity of that is as of yet unknown. This is the same track where Justin Wilson was killed back in 2015, just as a coincidence.

In slightly more positive news, Pierre Ghastly was officially named as the Red Bull replacement for Smiley Ricciardo. Nobody was surprised.

So yeah, race this weekend. I'll be watching, we'll see about a writeup. See ya then!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 What still gets me excited about F1 is thinking about what *might* be in a year or two or three. So many good, young drivers just getting started.

If they could just make the constructor part a bit more competitive. It would be nice if they could do that by opening up restrictions, but it seems like the assumption is that F1 would actually have to *increase* restrictions so as to limit the racing to drivers' skills.

Posted by: Ben at August 22, 2018 11:41 AM (osxtX)

2 It's supposed to rain at Spa this weekend, so maybe that makes things interesting...
There is a new set of engine rules for 2021, so hopefully that will make some changes. I'm also curious to see what comes of the new rule for next year about ballasting all drivers to a minimum weight of 80 kg. There is no way a shrimp like Vettel weighs anywhere near 176 lb. So that will reduce his advantage over HÃ¼lkenberg, Ericsson, etc.

Posted by: Mrs. Will (Kathryn) at August 22, 2018 06:32 PM (JPRju)

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