re: Are F1 drivers athletes?

This thread is pretty entertaining. We got dudes who would get winded driving a K1 cart at the back of the pack thinking that an F1 driver isn’t an athlete. This is the OT I love.

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Since this thread is a clusterfrick I'm gonna bite. If you were a team principal you would choose Senna if you wanted the most electric driver ever to don a race suit. He would be the choice for getting the absolute maximum out of a car on Saturday (qualy). You would not want him if you intention was to maximize points and win championships or a driver with even an ounce of mechanical sympathy. The man was the epitome of checkers or wreckers. The best example of his flaw was Monaco in '88. He took pole over his teammate Prost by something like 1.5 seconds, absolutely unheard of. He built up a near 1 minute lead over Prost by the 67th lap of a 78 lap race but he just couldn't help himself. He kept trying to lay down qualy lap after qualy lap and binned his McLaren into the wall at Portier. While he was walking back to his house Prost won the race and collected the 9 points and stood on the top of the podium while Senna was taking a shower. If you wanted one of the best drivers at racecraft and always in touch with the bigger picture bringing points home while also being wicked quick you want Prost in your car. If you wanted a driver that could develop a car like no one else (including sleeping at the factory), could respond if you told him you needed 10 qualy laps to make an undercut work, had off the charts racecraft, was one of the fastest drivers ever, and could process information in the car like a supercomputer then you want Schumacher. It doesn't hurt that he was superior at team building and had the ability to rally people around him so that everyone from the team principal to the janitor would run throw a brick wall to help him. As an analogy you could toss Michael or Alain the keys to you car and ask them to drive you the long way home. If you negated the G-forces and avoided noticing the surrounding countryside has turned into nothing buy a multi-colored blur you would never realize how fast you were being driven. Do the same with Aryton and when you pulled into your driveway 20 miles later the tires would be down to the cords, the car would be puking fluids from every orifice and every warning light in the car would be flashing like a strobe light in a 1970's disco. The upside is you would have gotten home 2 seconds faster, the downside is that is the last 20 miles that car would ever be driven because it is now mechanically totaled. There would be a massive grin on your face though.

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Agreed as to the robotic nature of someone like Schumacher - who is my favorite after Senna - but Senna was one of the last classic F1 drivers. His battles with Prost were legendary. Senna was a racer like Surtees, Stewart, Graham Hill, Lauda, Hunt, Mansell, and MANY others. I think Prost - le professor - was the first of the technical racers. It became all about downforce and passing became a rarity afterwards. That is why I gave up around 2005. I had been a RABID fan in about 1984.

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They’re closer to male models than athletes

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I don’t even know what to say about that except in a thread with some shite takes it might be the worst.

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No. They’re drivers

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They don't even call themselves drivers. They call themselves pilots. Rolleyes
They're akin to glorified Jockeys

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It probably requires more athleticism than the average person realizes but it's not comparable to what we see in the olympics or the Super Bowl.

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Current Olympic sports include:
- Archery
- Equestrian show jumping
- Sailing
- Shooting sports
- Bobsledding
- Curling
- Luge
- Downhill skiing

If the participants in these sports are athletes, so are F1 drivers.

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This is actually a great example of why they're not athletes. Would the top athletes in any other sport lose to an athlete with no legs It's not that's there isn't a physical component to f1 racing, it's just the machine is doing the overwhelming bulk of the work.

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I knew I would catch at least one fish on that line. The difference between Superturismo and F1 is like HS football and Superbowl Teams in terms of physical requirements.

This thread still going