Zomboid

Would they actually go through with a threat like that? Doubtful. "Let those cars unlap themselves or we'll quit the sport", or "if you let those cars unlap themselves we'll quit the sport". I don't see it. It's right that there shouldn't be any direct team to race director communications though. The RD should have their set of rules and whatever guidance, and be left to get on with it during the race without outside pressure, for better or worse.

Nothing much, but the idea of trying to finish with racing laps is better than a slow procession. If everyone knows that the race director is working to ensure a racing finish if at all possible then that at least provides clarity. As I said, simple solutions to complex problems are always wrong. But a simple basic aim isn't, even if it's not achievable 100% of the time.

They've got a job to come up with something that'll work without grey areas for a late race safety car. I do think that finishing the race as actual racing laps rather than a safety car is a good principle to try to apply. Would be easy to say that if a SC will last into the last 5 laps then it becomes a red flag, but as they say every complex problem has a solution which is both simple and wrong. And that's far too simple and doesn't work for a crash on the 4th last lap. It needs to be looked at in a calm detached manner once the dust had settled. Whilst it needs sorting out, the level of scrutiny is more because of what was at stake (which also probably was a factor in what the decisions were). If exactly the same thing had happened in May then I don't think it would have created such a fuss, though it wouldn't have been any more right/wrong.

Well deserved, but overdue, really.

No way will Mercedes take their ball and go home. They've won 7 of the last 8 titles. This is all about one decision made by an official which didn't go their way. Max was lucky here, and unlucky in Baku. That's just how sport goes.

Unlikely in a successful Olympic year now that they only nominate six people. Saying that, Raducanu will probably win, and it's hard to say that she wouldn't deserve it.

That would have been good, though without the "flyover" and Redhill to Wokingham electrification, the boat train routes up to Clapham are actually capable of handling a 92 on DC.

It would still cost a lot to upgrade the DC route to Reading to handle 92s. And the electric spine would have introduced an AC/DC interface at Basingstoke and then either a lot of upgrades on the route via Winchester or another one or two interfaces at Southampton if they the Andover route were wired.

The DC all the way from Clapham Jn to Reading would need a lot of reinforcement to allow that, plus the air gap neutral section between Didcot and Coventry would cost a lot more than the AC/DC changeover in Reading

Farringdon is a unique case, there's a huge number of track circuits and rectifiers there to manage the changeover. It's vastly complicated.

Mercedes domination has been deserved, but it's also not made for great viewing. Most sports change the rules from time to time to ensure the spectacle remains good. I think the broad aim of not finishing behind the SC is a laudable one as that is something of an anticlimax, but the specifics of what happened on this occasion are not something which should be repeated and the rules should be changed to prevent it.

We'll see, but I think Max will want to carry on winning. He's only 24 so he could, given the right machinery, get close to whatever marker of dominance Lewis leaves when he eventually retires. Though I hope no one dominates in the way Mercedes have for the past 8 years and we get a bunch of different champions.

I wasn't thinking of 769s specifically there. But to take a different example, if City Thameslink to Farringdon was unelectrified and the 700s had some limited battery capability to get between the two, the changeover would be orders of magnitude simpler. There's no one size fits all solution of course. If dual voltage freight locomotives are part of the plan for a given route then you probably will need a changeover, but for other routes where the range of rolling stock is limited it may not be worthwhile.

The thing there is "reasonable cost". Yes, solutions exist, but for the handful of movements between the Southern and Western routes at Reading they're unlikely to be justifiable, especially when the services which would change over onward need on board power of some sort from Wokingham anyway. And not all of those examples are things that anyone would choose to repeat.

Acton Wells really should have been done for the GWML scheme. Without that, the GWML has no electrified connection to the rest of the network. I'm sure one day it will be...

I think some early/ late trains where the unit goes empty to/from the depot use the dive under from the high numbered platforms. That certainly used to be the case going the other direction to Basingstoke, and would make sense rather than a shunt into 4/5/6. If Cross Country still run to Guildford then that'll use one of the connections too. Edit - I should have read your post more carefully... Either way, it would need to be a regular Didcot to Ascot train or something to justify it, because AC/DC interfaces are very expensive and complex. If it were just a matter of fitting a few skyhooks then the BCR would probably work out, but the fact that you must always earth AC tracks and the fact that you must not deliberately earth DC tracks makes the whole thing a nightmare. Fitting dual voltage trains with a 5km battery to get from one to the other is probably a better solution.

It's not about sportsmanship or anything like that. It's about winning, and both teams would have pulled every lever they could in order to win. Red Bull complaining about the safety car lapping business is just because they were in second at the time. You can bet everything that Mercedes would have made exactly the same request if roles had been reversed. The way the cards fell, it went to RB after a car with a Mercedes engine crashed. The rules and their implementation are at fault here, not either of the teams or drivers.

No driver capable of making it to F1 would pass up such an opportunity. Certainly not when their first world championship rests on it. It's not impossible that he'll never have another car capable of winning. If you're an F1 champion you simply don't just let the other guy win, you compete until it's all over.

I can't see why MB or Lewis would take their ball and go home after that. They might feel like it for about half an hour, but Mercedes aren't going to pull the plug after dominating for so long because they wound up losing for the first time in 8 years or something. And Lewis is a competitor, not a toddler. I can't see MB pulling out soon, but we'll see about Lewis once we know who's fast and who's not in the new regs. I doubt he'll hang around to fight for 7th.

Henry Cavill (who plays Superman amongst other things) got a bit of grief on TV over his Warhammer hobby, which isn't a lot different. It does still seem to have a bit of a stigma with some people.

If it turns out that that's what people actually want to watch...

If they don't then F1 becomes a manufactured WWE style circus rather than a sporting event. I think the FIA can work that out, though whether they can get the message though to Liberty is another matter.

But what would that have been? 999 times out of 1000 it would have been Lewis, but no one can be 100% certain, and cutting a race distance down retrospectively because what happened on the last few laps is deemed "wrong" is a dreadful precedent to set. Once you open that Pandora's box then you can't close it again. There's no good way out of this mess. But the least bad (IMO) is to say "ok, that happened, it was a dreadful idea and this is how we're going to prevent it happening in future".

I just can't see how it would be any fairer for a court to decide in however many weeks time that actually the last 5 laps of the GP should be declared void, resulting in a different championship outcome. It would make even more of a mockery of things than they already have, and that's saying something.

I don't think the result should be changed in court, but that kind of a farce must be prevented in future. I don't think either team did anything wrong (it would probably have been similar if things were reversed), but the teacher director/ FIA making up the rules as they go along stuff needs to be stopped. I don't think the joke of a race at Spa made a difference in the end, but that's another situation that needs to be prevented from happening again