You’re over-complicating this thing. It basically comes down to the NBA needing China, and China not needing the NBA. Silver has no leverage here.

The spoiler alert should’ve come with the trailer. It’s my biggest gripe with this movie: it doesn’t really surprise in any way because the trailer showed us so much of the story already. Which is a shame because I actually liked the film.

Wrong. Red Bull has given Honda carte blanche to get on with their upgrades, grid penalties be damned. Having said that, ever since Canada, when Renault finally was able to turn their power back up in qualifying without the whole ‘blowing up’ issue, Honda’s been back in 4th in terms of outright power. But they’re…

Yet with Red Bull, Honda has turned back to the 2016 design, so you’re argument doesn’t quite hold up.

I’m probably one of Alonso’s biggest fans in the world, but I’m objective enough to see that McLaren should’ve publicly fired him and shown their commitment to Honda.

Google ‘2005 Japanese Grand Prix’ if you want to see the closest thing F1 has ever had to something like a reverse grid race. Though some quick guys started out front, the quickest guys started in the back field. No rain, no DRS, refueling allowed and very little tyre management.

Just because there was little overtaking then, doesn’t necessarily
mean this had anything to do with refueling . As I mentioned elsewhere, the overtaking ‘downward spiral’ actually stopped after F1 introduced refueling.

Sure, I’d love to have the pleasure of getting to the climactic stage of qualifying and seeing Robert Kubica setting a lap time. It’s a silly format.

and tell automakers to fuck right off

‘Underdog’ Brawn, not so much. Honda threw a ridiculous amount of money at developing that car at three sites, it’s widely known to be one the most expensive cars ever to run a GP.

That graph is a bit deceiving. Refueling came back in 1994, partly because the number of overtakes was sliding as F1 was shifting to more of an aero dependent series after the turbo-era ended. As you can see, that slide almost immediately stopped and overtakes remained fairly stable (though -admittedly- extremely low)…

The dip in overtaking had been started before, end the slide actually ended when refuelling was allowed again. Refuelling may have some impact on overtakes, but not nearly as much as aero regulations.

How does it make F2 better? I don’t really agree with that, to be honest. They also don’t have a full reverse grid (top 8 only) and have been doing this for over a decade, so it’s hardly a trial for F1 implementation.

Sebastian Vettel is a racer too, arguable faster given the same equipment

It’s great. The scope is amazing.

It also doesn’t make any sense. Why would I want horns? Makes wearing a hat much, much more difficult.

The gap would be smaller, I’ll give you that. But Mercedes have nearly three years worth of data and experience with him. Bottas is occasionally super quick and able to beat Lewis on merit but he has too many weaknesses to keep that up over a full season.

The whole reason why Mercedes is handing out blatant team orders is because they know Bottas can’t give Hamilton a run for his money.

The in-laps were actually pretty similar, but right after starting to push the tempo, Leclerc had two very bad laps before his in-lap (49.0 & 49.6) and Vettel’s outlap was really quick.

I think you nailed it on every single point.