marc said:
I hate the way Vettel is being put up there as the best driver ever.
He's good but all he's doing is beating a driver who's old, not bothering with training and even said he's lost motivation. Yes he is beating the rest but none have the equipment he does.
I know you make the most of what you have and he is doing that, cannot take that away from the guy. Next year he has yet another number 2 driver I really wanted kimi, alonso or Lewis as his team mate.
So many of the people praising him are the same ones that put ms down for the exact same thing!
Anyone else see the Eddie Irvine interview on sky? It's really interesting.
This is true, and I'm glad there's at least one person on this site that is sensible and wise enough regarding F1 to be aware of this.
Don't get me wrong, Webber is (well, maybe was) a top driver deserving of his place in F1. But we've certainly seen a decline in the last few years. This is a combination of what Marc has said, but also owing to the massive change in the sport from how it was when Webber was a more dynamic part of it.
It's exactly the same reason Schumacher struggled on his return. How he and Webber (amongst others, will get to that later) like to drive is completely flat out. Stick 15-20 laps of fuel in the car, tyres that won't go off and then you can really get going. Schumacher was amazing because of being able to lap consistently to within a tenth or two of himself but also at a ridiculous pace. Webber is the same. There isn't much to separate him and Vettel on pure pace, but modern F1 race pace Vettel is more accustomed to looking after the car and plodding around at 80%.
This is also true of Alonso, Kimi and Hamilton. All three are not nearly as impressive as they were in F1 up to 2008. Alonso and Kimi are such supreme natural talents that they are still outperforming their machinery.Less so Hamilton, who, whilst still very impressive, is not the superstar he was going to become (as much as I think he's a douche, he's a very quick driver). Schumacher is brilliant, but he doesn't have this natural talent, his success came from the shere amount of effort that he put in. He was fitter, stronger and smarter by a considerable margin when he was in F1. Senna started this fashion, Schumacher took it to a ridiculous (even OCD) level. You obviously have to have the base talent there in the first place, but the way he went about taking every advantage possible and exploiting that (thus marginalising his weaknesses) was brilliant.
The Irvine interview is fabulous, and on face value hilarious. But when you look into it, like they did on Autosport, it kinda shows why Michael was so good in the 90's and 00's. Irvine is right, Schumacher was terrible at setting up the car, for OTHER people. His driving style is so different to everyone who's ever been in F1 (with the possible exception of Hamilton in 2007/08) that the kind of setups that he would have been suggesting would have been impossible for Irvine, Barrichello, Massa, etc. This is why there was such a huge disparity between him and his stablemates. The cars were, naturally, designed for Schumacher. So they had his driving style in mind, his teammates had to work around this. All three mentioned are by no means crap drivers.
Unfortunately, this didn't work in post 2010 F1. Michael KILLS tyres (same reason Hamilton was so far behind Button on pace in the first year of Pirelli's but he was new enough to the sport to adopt a new style - ever wondered why he doesn't lock up nearly as much these days? He's far less exciting now, but I think he's a much better driver). With Bridgestone in the early 00's one set of tyres would last at least 100 laps without dying, you only did a maximum of 20 lap stints. Therefore you could push as much out of the tyres as is humanly possible.
So... rounding off back to Vettel. Yes, it's a shame he won't be driving alongside a top top driver, but we can still see where he is with Ricciardo. If he doesn't completely DESTROY him next season, then he is, at best, a very good driver. Certainly a worthy champion, but nowhere near the pantheon of greats that have graced the sport. We shall have to see.
Hopefully the Ferrari is the best car next season, because a ding dong between Alonso and Raikkonen would be mouth watering and no-one would deny them deserving it. 1988 should, on paper, have been as boring as Red Bull's domination is now. But it is remembered wonderfully. Not because of rose-tinted-nostalgaspecs, but because both cars had a brilliant racing driver in them.
re fantasy league - I'll be delighted to finish 2nd, I've already pleased myself by snuggling in amongst the locked strategy and miles ahead of everyone else in our league on the green one. Only beaten by Marc would make me very happy!