Right hand drive should be interesting. Can't wait to read about this next year's experiment.

It's top mount. More and more race cars are moving to top mount because it disturbs airflow under the wing less so the wing is more effective.

Manufacturers would be very happy if every new car was a lease. They make more money off of leases than loans. Additionally, while everybody negotiates the price of a new car purchase, a LOT of people looking for a lease will walk into a showroom ready to take the advertised deal they saw without realizing that…

If a manufacturer is setting up deals where new car buyers are upside down in their loans for 7 years, that's going to impact the pool of new car buyers down the road. If you can't sell your old car except at a loss, that's going to impede your ability (and perhaps your eagerness) to buy a new one when you otherwise…

They really take the notion of aspirational purchases to an extreme there.

Waze is definitely better for traffic-influenced routing and alerts, but as a tool to find anything in an area it sucks pretty hard. Heck, even when I search for someone who is in my phonebook Waze will often put them way below seemingly unrelated distant results in the list. Too many times to count, I've had to…

Hopefully they'll stop with the crappy street circuits. Beijing was just atrocious. It had no flow to it whatsovever and seemed designed to make the fanboost nonsense more important to the outcome.

Sure, Honda could do whatever they wanted all through 2014, but then so could the other power unit suppliers. They weren't allowed to make changes to their 2014 power units during the season, but you can be sure that the development they were doing for 2015 was constantly changing as they gathered more data (i.e.…

If Ford is now "officially the McLaren of tin-top sportscars", what is McLaren?

Re: your first point. You are aware that the same factories that make those Apple products also manufacture for many other tech companies, right? Foxconn has done work for Microsoft, Motorola, HTC, HP, Sony, and pretty much any other company you can name. Samsung has their own factories in China, but they have also…

I imagine that the residual value of each would probably make leasing rates for the two about the same, so the Porsche would be a no-brainer.

The last two times I purchased cars (events separated by a 8 year gap), VWs were in the running. In both cases, every VW owner I knew made a point of telling me to buy anything but a VW. To a person, they complained not only about the problems their cars had, but also the amount of time they had to wait to get those…

Yes! Except, you know, with a regular suspension, not that pneumatic bullshit.

Well, at least those distracting niche products haven't been aspirational halo cars that spread their reputation and desirability to other products with the badge. Nope, they are pretty much of interest only to the handful of people that actually want Eoses, CCs, and Beetles. Who am I kidding? Nobody wants a new…

The "ess" appended to steward is clearly there to diminish it by feminization, but aside from that the term steward has always been of higher rank than attendant. Steward implies some degree of managerial responsibility whereas attendant is just a helper, so it's strange that the language went with that rather than…

You're right, of course. I understand that's not going to happen either. I just don't like the current situation where we're pretending that there are 22 cars in a race when there are really 10 cars racing and another 12 cars on the track for ambience.

Ah, now that I re-read it, I see you're right about that.

400km! That's not even a full tank of gas. Just last week I did 1800km in 1 1/2 days. When you've got legitimately long distances to cover, people tend to be reluctant to spend 15 minutes in a cafe wasting time.

I want small teams to be relevant as much as you, but as it stands now things are a complete mess. Marussia is out and Caterham likely will be. Sauber is so weak they can't be terribly long for the world and Lotus (their money problems have definitely put them in small team category) has become just sad. Force…

If small teams only exist to provide back marker rides for pay drivers, then I won't mourn their loss. F1 needs to figure a way out of its current situation and there's no point in smaller teams if they have no chance of winning and are just around to fill the grid.