re: F1 Car Reveals 2017

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I've never been but I'd very much like to. Gonna have to get serious about trying to make that happen.

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It's been fun every year, even in 2015 when the weather sucked but the racing was incredible.

That's the view from Turn 1 in my avatar picture.

I've never been for the F1 race, but I went to COTA for a concert. Place is beyond incredible. The day before the concert we were walking around the facility and I asked one of the workers if me and my buddies could go to the top of the tower. He's like "hell yeah" and called a supervisor over. He gave us the elevator code and said "y'all have fun."

Snapped this pic. They were setting up for the X games

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Place is beyond incredible.

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I believe it. A guy I work with races in endurance races several times a year. Last year he got a chance to go to COTA for a 2-day event with an 8-hour race each day. He said everything there was first class....which you'd expect given that it's an F1 venue. [Plus he's used to facilities like High Plains and Midlands so he must have jizzed all over himself when he got to COTA.]

I'm not a fan of most of Tilke's tracks but I think he did a great job at COTA. It's got everything.

I met the CEO of the Nurburgring yesterday. We're staying in the same hotel on Isla Mujeres. Guy has one cool job.

Can't wait for the season. Really hope Haas takes another step forward in their development. I'm glad they dropped Gutiérrez. I think K Mag and Grosjean are going to provide a solid team for them.

I was never a Gutierrez fan either. I hope Haas is at least in the back of the mid pack instead of the front of the back markers. I hope they got their brake problems sorted out in the off season too.

Speaking of Haas.

I'm cautiously excited for the new season. While a part of me enjoys seeing Mercedes make this look easy, a bigger part of me would like to see a far more competitive season. Too many of the races, in reality, are snooze fests because Hamilton (or now Bottas) will just jump out and we never see him again until the end of the race.

The team turnover in the offseason certainly made good storylines and I am dying to see how the young guys all pan out (Wehrlein, Ocon, Stroll, etc.). Just hope there's enough of a chance for them to succeed.

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It appears that the new cars are indeed faster. Vettel ran a 1:22.791 on mediums. That's just off the best lap from last year's testing (1:22.765) set on ultra-softs.

In other news, McLaren had some problems in the oil system and Alonso was only able to run an installation lap. Haas also had a couple of issues. Magnussen's car died on pit exit but they got it fixed. Then later in the day he spun into a wall and damaged the front wing. Ricciardo was only able to log 4 laps; he had some sort of sensor problem.

Bottas on softs was 3 or 4 tenths slower than Vettel on mediums but I'm sure Mercedes hasn't turned their engine all the way up yet. Still this is encouraging.