LNERandBR

And where exactly would the reserve fuel tank be positioned on these very tightly packaged cars? These are supposed to be the fastest race cars on the planet yet you'd have them lug around another fuel tank and fuel they may or may not use? If anything it swings back to the Safety Car procedures. We need consistency, therefore rather than the open ended and interpretable ruleset we have now they should be outlined in the rules as a 'do A then B then C'. Either that or get a Race Director who applies the rules exactly the same way every time. Like we did with the late Charlie Whiting. We had no issues with Safety Car restarts and the like when he was in charge. He just interpreted the rulebook the same way every time and did so consistently. Once consistency is restored you can then say 'it takes X number of laps to restart the race after an incident has been cleared'. That then tells you that if the safety car is still out with less that that number of laps left you should red flag the race and buy time to finish clearing the incident. You can then restart the race from a rolling start and get a few laps of sprint till the end.

Another way around it, if the Safety Car is out and there are 5 laps left to go then call a red flag and allow a short 5 lap sprint to the end. You can't increase the number of laps as cars are limited to the amount of fuel they carry. Not only by the fact more fuel means more weight but also physical tank size is limited to 110kg. I suspect the longer races like Spa will need nearly that much for the normal race distance let alone a sudden extra 3 laps.

I think it's clear the running of the sport needs to be looked at. The Race Direction needs looking at again as it's too slow now.

Both, increase the longevity of the engine and you reduce how many are needed. That's why the number of parts has been reduced from when the engines were first brought in.

If F1 isn't interesting you then there are plenty of other motorsports out there that could. Leave us to natter about F1 in peace 😆 Back on topic, I will agree that the Power Unit rules aren't working as intended. They are supposed to increase the reliability of the cars but clearly the push for more pace over longevity is too great. If every car in the field has to take additional parts at some point then they should increase the number of allowed parts in a season. Then, if the teams are still breaking that rule then would a better way to dissuade them be a massive fine which should be included within the cost cap?

As lamps are removeable and could technically be swapped between engines. It makes sense that they wouldn't therefore be as dirty as the engine they are currently attached to.

What about fastest lap? Or are you giving that to other drivers to make the maths easier 😆

It's the same everywhere. Many happy people say nothing whilst others don't say much. Meanwhile, those who are unhappy resort to social media to complain about whatever issues they've found. People then respond on those negative posts and push them up the feeds. You get a skewed perspective on things.

So, does that mean there is more space available to grow the show should all other factors allow for that?

Had a really enjoyable day at the DEMU Showcase today. Excellent quality layouts and enjoyed that the show wasn't rammed with people. I managed to keep my pennies in my pocket but it was very hard given the trade options on offer. In terms of location of the show, the first car park I tried was full but the second had plenty of spaces so that was all fine. Someone mentioned above some comments they overheard about why travel by car when the show is right next to a station. Well, I checked that out and there would have been many changes for me to make it by train and no chance at all on a Sunday due to how late the service starts from my home station. I think the catering might be limited by the venue, the bar certainly seemed to be operated by the Town Hall staff who didn't provide food but food was available to order. I presume the latter was DEMU organised. I normally bring my own pickup anyway but my friend was able to get a bap and cup of tea so was happy. I'm sure the DEMU team will have a good debrief over the coming days and find ways to improve the show for future years. It's always difficult to move to a new venue and I bet they've got a long snagging list from visitors and exhibitors alike 😅

Admittedly I do like the whole 'how would they do in X discipline' debate. F1 driver's are often touted as being the best drivers on the planet. However, in truth I think they are just the best at open wheel circuit racing. Personally I'd like to see them all thrown into Rally Cars on some fast dirt roads in Finland and see how many end up in the trees 🤣 Of course, the same can most likely can be said of Driver's of other categories too. Many would flounder when given a F1 car to drive.

Track limits needs a better way of policing it. It's a continuous thing now at some tracks and even then they only choose certain corners to watch it on. That whole area of the rulebook needs looking at. Maybe some way of using technology to police it and provide a deterrent. Personally, make the kerbs less than a car's width wide and then part of the racetrack. A strip of gravel or grass straight after them so that if you go all wheels off the racetrack you'll have much less grip.

Pedel cam can be interesting in Rally where the Driver is alternating between Brake and Throttle to control the car as it's sliding round a gravel corner between trees at high speed. However in F1 you want to be either full throttle or full brake so I can't see any real interest there.

The feeling of the box size and weight certainly wears off after you've lifted it a few times. Had my 55005 running round at the club last night and it preformed exceptionally. Very impressed with the sound as the room was quite noizy and it effectively drowned out all other sound decoders that were in use. Think I may tweak the acceleration and deceleration values tho and I'm tempted to slow the top speed. I tried opening it up to full 128 speed steps once and was worried it would fall off on the curves! It was very happy romping round set at 80 speed steps for around 2 hours though. Pausing to spin it around so either direction got nicely ran in. For future releases, I would like a FP white cabbed example 😅

Issues with kinematic couplings not swinging back to centre are common I find. My Hornby 60, 56s and 31s are all affected and end up having the couplings replaced with goalposts. My 55005 arrived whilst I was in Wales last week. Seems all fine on the short piece of track I have at home. Really looking forward to letting it streatch its legs at the club this week!

I have them fitted to rakes of coaches of at least 10 coaches and they have no issues at all going around corners less than that. When you do want to uncouple there is some force needed to part them. There is sometimes some fettling needed to get them to fit NEM pockets correctly and I have needed to glue some of the magnets back in after they've come out. However, those things are not needed on every coupling, on the whole they are very good.

For fixed coach formations I'm finding Hunt Couplings from West Hill Wagon Works are most effective. Being magnets, it's very simple to couple up and uncouple as long as you are doing so in the Fiddle Yard by hand. Very useful for an exhibition layout as it makes packing all the stock away very simple. Absolutely no use for shunting but I feel that's not what they are designed for. There's various versions for NEM pockets and screw connection. The 'Elite' version also does away with polarity differences which makes shuffling stock into different prototypical formations a lot easier.

I presume that there are still plenty awaiting dispatch? Technically asking as I've not yet had an email about dispatch. However, the rational part of me expects the people in the warehouse will be working their hardest to get everyone's dispatched.

The total time for races to take place has reduced so that the impact on TV schedules by a race having lots of stoppages is reduced.

https://www.channel4.com/4viewers/blog/motor-racing-4 Yeah, Quali Sunday morning at 08:30. Race 11pm Sunday night.

Well, one would hope they would go though a process of checking before publication. However as Simon says it's often easy to miss things though not seeing the wood for the trees. Fresher eyes would pick these up but I doubt publishers would have the budget to send preproduction copies to lots of different people and pay them for the service. Books will always have errors, however it's only by spotting those errors that follow-up books can have them rectified.

Respectfully, I had no idea which publisher was being mentioned until now. Also, how can one improve what they do if every review they receive basically says 'it's brilliant'? If there are errors then there are errors. It might be too late to do anything about it for the current book but how can you fix it for the next one if you don't know they exist? What every book needs is a range of reviews. From a known expert on the subject and from others who have no knowledge of it. Then the buyer has a more rounded set of reviews and can make their decisions. It's ony natural for a book on an LNER subject to receive a more detailed review from Tony as thats the subject matter he knows best.

I now understand why RB didn't get penalised for going over the line on the pit exit. Turns out the rule has changed, who knew...

If we were seeing similar 'crashes' at other tracks then I'd agree a new rule is needed. However, it seems these incidents are only happening at one track, the one where there's the most risk if you put a tyre just slightly wrong given there are barriers so close throughout the track. Therefore, the likelihood that every one of the drivers having these incidents are doing so deliberately is quite low, what's more likely is they are making genuine mistakes as they are pushing too hard.

Having only seen it on YouTube it looks to me like Sainz didn't get enough warning that Perez was blocking the track and took avoiding action to prevent himself from fully Tboaning the stranded Red Bull. From the onboard I've seen, he was unsighted by the barrier on the inside so suddenly found a Red Bull in his path and did the best he could to avoid a nastier impact. Most importantly, there were no yellow flags flying on either the inside or the outside of the corner despite marshalls being there, I suspect he arrived too quickly for those marshalls to have their flags out and flying. You can just make out one flag starting to be deployed on the outside of the corner as Sainz appears. We only seem to see these sorts of issues at Monaco which is a direct result of Drivers having to thread the needle though the tight barriers. They are obviously pushing to make the best lap possible so mistakes are obviously going to happen. The only rule change they could make is to give everyone directly affected by a crash removing their flying laps time for another 'outlap, fastlap, inlap' but that's going to be hard to properly police.