RaceFans Round-up: F1’s ‘dirty air’ effect is much worse than I imagined

What they say

Latifi was asked how far becoming an F1 driver matched up to his expectations:

There’s a bit two sides to look at it. When I signed with Williams last year, I was very well aware that I wasn’t going to be in a top car and a top team and experiencing the same kind of racing that I was in the previous year, racing up at the front in Formula 2. But that’s part of it. So my expectation. my mind was already prepared for that.

So at that point of view, it is quite different. There’s many, many other things you have to manage, the blue flags and things like that, which do change it quite a bit.

But if you take out the performance of the car, just the actual experience of racing, it is quite a lot different than honestly I expected it to be. The dirty air effect at the start of the race, just the amount of grip you you lose, is far more that I could have ever imagined. It’s been difficult to explain it to someone unless they could actually experience it.

So from that point of view I still say it’s more fun than I initially thought it was going to be just from how lively everything is at the start, the racing action, how much quicker you have to be to react to certain things in racing actions. I’m still learning how to deal with those things.

Lando loves lockdown life.

Budapest restrictions for British visitors don’t bother the McLaren driver.

(He later added: “I didn’t say I eat burgers, specifically! A bit of pizza sometimes…”)#F1 #HungarianGP pic.twitter.com/XhulOrri5W

— RaceFans (@racefansdotnet) July 16, 2020

I go to Eindhoven for a meeting and what do I see parked up at a charging point but the clearest indicator yet that the city is angling for @FIAFormulaE round… pic.twitter.com/upoxIWsdr4

— Fritz-Dieter Rencken (@RacingLines) July 15, 2020

Links

More motor racing links of interest:

‘One in three people born today will die of dementia if we don’t do something different’ – Stewart (ITV)

“I think Lewis has been a great example to an awful lot of people. He’s a wonderful driver, he’s got an enormous number of victories behind him and he’s quite vocal about all these elements. I don’t think there’s as big a problem in that as there might be seen. For example Cranfield university in England starting having women get more interest in engineering and motorsport. Now suddenly we’ve got a huge number of women in Formula 1 because they’ve gone to good universities and been well educated, etc… In Lewis’s case, the colour issue he refers to can change very rapidly. There’s no resistance to change in Formula 1.”

‘Digital has become the free-to-air platform’ F1’s Frank Arthofer (Sport Business)

“We’ve almost quadrupled our social media followers since the beginning of 2017, and that’s almost entirely through organic social growth. We’ve doubled our video views each year, we’ve doubled the page views of F1.com and of our app each year. Equally, the market is changing, so I think the move to pay-TV in 2020 is different than the move to pay-TV might have been in 2005.”

Berger admits DTM may need to be ‘wound up’ after 2020 (Motorsport)

“To put it in a nutshell, the time has come to think about winding-up the DTM. If none of the German manufacturers are willing to support this platform and series anymore, things will get tight.”

Jean Todt za HRT: Viđam Schumachera i dalje, kad god mogu (HRT)

FIA president Jean Todt describes howw he still visits Schumacher regularly.

Behind the lens with BT Sport Moto GP as racing resumes (Motorsport Broadcasting)

“Not being in the paddock is always going to be a disadvantage, however Dorna have been brilliant throughout. They understand that we’re not going to be travelling and they’ve done their best to help us with that.”

How the Hungaroring has changed (RaceFans via YouTube)

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