I don’t think they have any other valid options currently, who could they sign at the moment? RBR has made Max their number 1 to such an extend that nobody could compete in that team. So the pilots that can compete with Max seem to rather stay at their own teams, hoping that they will close the gap sooner or later and actually fight with Max. The drivers that aren’t able to compete know that it is career suicide as they will compare badly against max and moving back to a back marker team might be a very cold shower after driving a race winning car. And RBR has all but ended their driver academy, so no new talent will be flowing in from that pool either (and looking at the last 3 guys sacked by Marko, who would want to).
The only possibility seems to be Ricciardo, but he might not be back up in time.
Can’t blame him really, hope they can build on their current form. But from what I’ve been reading here McLaren got a bit lucky with their upgrade, fingers crossed.
There have been other proposals to allow each driver a limited number of DRS uses per race. The driver can choose to use it wherever they please, in attack or defense, but after x times used it is unavailable for the rest of the race.
Coupled with a penalty increasing the higher up you qualify, I think it would be great to level things out a bit.
I’m afraid that’s not going to change anything. The downside of the budget cap is that other teams can’t spend enough to catch up to the team that got it right. Red Bull being able to shift their focus to next year this early on just means that the budget penalty for winning doesn’t effect them. Where others have to spend on upgrades to stay competitive in this year, they just get a chunk of money to spend outside of the 2024 budget.
By the time the other teams have caught up, FIA will have changed the rules again and the cycle starts over.
I feel this gets overlooked too easily. Also, there was a recent article reporting that the study that proofed talc was responsible for the asbestos exposure, was fundamentally flawed and ignored major historic exposure to asbestos in its participants.
Shit on J&J all you want, they deserve a fair bit of criticism, but the talc ruling is just plain ignorance by the jury.
No, but they can’t penalize 2022 anymore, can they?
That’s my main concern with the enforcement, it shouldn’t be a fixed amount of money or seconds on track or so, but should be a percentage of that teams advantage
Max will be ahead by t2 and sainz and leclerc crash into eachother
One can hope they take Verstappen with them, so we have an interesting race, but don’t count on it