#4 - The cats have become uneconomical in most uses as a result of rising fuel costs. They're not quite giving them away, but you can basically pick them up for scrap value now.

I hadn't heard that one before. Sounds a bit odd to me, but anything's possible. All these general principles are broadly correct, but in practice things can turn out very different to how we expect. I just realised I'm doubly confused because I'm not sure if you mean open-down closed-up or the other way around.

Please Mercedes. Do it. Send them all to the States. Or China, Russia, Australia, wherever you like as long as it's nowhere I have to see them or be annoyed by you pretending an impractical estate is a shooting brake.

Vortex generators are intended to prevent BLS. BLS is bad. The boundary layer is what keeps the air stuck to the car so it follows it down the back - no suction. Failure to keep the airflow attached creates back-suck. The amount of back-suck will be in proportion to the cross-sectional area of the car's wake, hence…

We'll have to wait and see, but if Alonso's dropping nearly two seconds a lap to Vettel in quali despite having the faster car, then it's hard to see him putting in a decent performance. He seems to be struggling with this track.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolwich_Ferry

That's fantastic - can't believe I'd never heard of it before. It's effectively a high-tech version of this:

To be fair, whilst Porsche clearly have something of a captive market and exploit the hell out of it, the difference in cost between paint-jobs isn't just about the cost of the paint. It would clearly be cheaper to build every car with the same paint than to paint each one a different colour, because exceptions to…

Could be, that would make some sense. I can't immediately think of anything bigger - I guess it's only really motor racing which can compete in terms of having a very large, private, area for crowds - whatever you do you can't fit 400,000 people round a basketball court. Maybe horse-racing and golf as well, I suppose.

It's only because of restrictive rules. Even in the 70s the cars weren't as fast as they could be, just as fast as the regulations allowed.

"It was, and still is, the largest attended single day sporting event in the world — around 400,000 people enter the gates on race day."

Weight shifts make a significant difference to how the car behaves, yes. That's why, for example, the most common wheel to lock up under braking is the inside front. It's also why a rwd car will oversteer if you lift-off in a corner - weight shifts forwards as you stop accelerating, leading to less weight on the back…

If a car masses twice as much, the force needed to accelerate it will also double. The mass terms cancel.

Who says Ferrari were unhappy? At least some of the time they've had the fastest car. Arguably, they've had the fastest car most of the season and Alonso and Massa have both underperformed - as shown by Massa's recent improvement.

Asking who was the greatest F1 driver is a bit of a silly question. There is such a difference between the way the cars Fangio drove handled and the way today's cars handle that the skillsets needed simply aren't comparable. I'm sure great drivers would do well enough in any car, but it's perfectly possible that…

I don't understand all the Alonso hype. It's not even obvious he's in the top half-dozen in the world. Sure, he was the fastest for about a year at a time when there were no decent drivers around, but since then he's shown absolutely nothing. Of course it can be hard to tell, but I can't remember seeing him put in an…

If you see a man driving a four-seater convertible, he looks a bit ridiculous. Does it matter which one?

Oh yes, so I did. I'm not usually that camp, honest. :)

wiziwig.tv - you may want to get on there an hour or so early to download streaming software if you want to use any.

The outside of the nut is a bit weird - google F1 wheel nut for plenty of pics. The 'fingers' mentioned in the other reply are what grips the nut. Basically the idea is just that instead of having say, a hexagonal nut, which would have six degrees of rotational symmetry (and hence ways it will line up), they have a…