Basetornado wrote:More a case of having nothing to talk about, No new teams, No teams leaving (unless you count pretty baseless rumours about Lotus), no drivers have really done anything out of the ordinary, not even a car launch yet. All ive heard is that Sauber have homologated there chassis and thats it. Hell the only interesting things have been numbers and double points.
That is certainly true, but that is what is so odd about the situation in some ways - as giraurd points out, we would normally expect to have seen something about the intentions of the teams for testing by now, even if it was something as simple as a team confirming that they've passed the crash tests (you have to presume that they've all managed to do so, but only Caterham and Sauber have confirmed anything on that point - and out of those two teams, only Caterham has produced any shots of their new chassis).
After all, given the changes in the regulations that are occurring, you might have expected, for example, some of the manufacturers to have announced new technical partnerships with companies like BorgWarner or Honeywell, both of whom have divisions that specialise in designing turbochargers. Similarly, you'd have expected to have heard something from the teams about launch dates, new sponsors - particularly for McLaren given that they have a new title sponsor in the works - or even just the occasional comment from the drivers about their training preparations for 2014.
Even the majority of Pirelli's test session in Bahrain, save the flurry of activity around Rosberg's tyre failure, has passed more or less unremarked upon - which is a touch surprising given Pirelli could have pointed out that only one tyre failure was recorded in the thousands of km that were racked up in that test.
AdrianSutil is right that, once we finally start seeing the cars in action and reports start coming through, things may start picking up - it just seems odd, given the sizeable change in regulations and rationale of the sport, that we're more or less sliding into the first test session with a substantially revised grid and shift in technical regulations with so few comments.
good_ralf wrote:Let the Marussia seat go to Maxi pls. Anyway, what I'm looking forward to about the new cars is if whether or not any teams have Brawn BGP001 style noses. It would be a disgrace if none of the teams do this.
You're likely to be rather disappointed then - whilst it seems that the FIA wanted the noses to be shaped like the BGP001 to reduce the chances of cars being thrown up into the air, it looks like what we are actually likely to get will be a much more ungainly creation. Craig Scarborough reckoned that we might see noses that look more like this:
i.e. the teams will undercut as much as possible to maximise the airflow beneath the nosecose, but retain a small section that drops down to meet the FIA's restrictions on the height of the tip of the nosecone. Of course, Craig Scarborough's interpretation does depend on the teams being able to meet the front crash test with that sort of design, though a clip that Caterham released of their crash test suggests that they might have gone down such a route with their car.
