bucket-of-f1

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apologies

hey all.

I said I was gonna make stuff. I’m planning to make stuff. I have that Fernando Alonso post like 97% done. Kimi Raikkonen one is like 30% done (that man did A LOT).

I’m currently failing Calculus and I need to NOT be, as well as some finals coming up and my sports season ending (for the most part). I really enjoyed running this blog and I do plan to come back to it. Just give it a few weeks. Life’s been rough recently, but F1 is something I am really passionate about.

— Bucket

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i emerge.

F1 SEASON IS STARTING BABYYYYY

its time i tear myself out of my productivity depression and start making things again!!

maybe.

no promises.

i'll try though dw i do enjoy yapping.

who was gonna tell me i had this much stuff in drafts?

[bucket-of-f1]

THAT IS THE F1 I LOVE

and I'd like to tell some "fans" that if these people battling each other the whole season can show so much respect, you might want to reevaluate your choices when you can't be respectful towards all the drivers.

F1 should be about enjoying something we like together!

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177 VOTES WHAT ON EARTH OKAY GANG HERE WE GO

Winter Holidays Poll

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I keep getting professional photography of 1950’s-60’s F1 cars as I scroll I think the world is trying to tell me something

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Winter Holidays Poll

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currently working on that Kimi Raikkonen post

and I’ve got a few others in the works, but uhhhhh

y’all wanna know anything? I’m procrastinating doing school stuff and I’m feeling fact-y

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oh yeah

Huge congratulations to Pierre Gasly for being the first driver in F1 history to go an entire season without costing his team money in repairs! And in the longest season ever, that’s impressive. Combined with Alpines improvements at the end of the season, I’m sure they’ll be glad for the consistency next season.

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WCC Update

Sorry for the late post, but: congratulations to McLaren Formula One Team for winning the World Constructors Championship!

For the first time since 1998, McLaren are Constructors Champions, and deservedly. Huge props to Norris and Piastri for consistency over the season, and the whole team at the factory for the improvements on the car.

Looking forward to another good season next year!

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McLaren Ferrari fight

At Abu Dhabi we're going to see McLaren and Ferrari attempt for the Constructors Championship. This would be Ferrari's first CC since 2008, and McLaren's first since 1998.

With McLaren's 640 and Ferrari's 619, Ferrari is trailing McLaren by 21 points. They can score a maximum of 44 points at the race:

25 for first place

18 for second

1 for fastest lap

44 total.

However, due to their points deficit, even if Ferrari managed a perfect race, McLaren has a decent chance:

McLaren has to score 24 points to guarantee a win at Abu Dhabi, no matter what Ferrari does.

if Ferrari does not get the fastest lap, McLaren just needs score 23 points to win, even if Ferrari takes 1/2.

These 24/23 points are not difficult to earn. If either Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri wins the race, McLaren has secured their position as 2024 constructors champions. The combinations amounting to those points are seen below:

24 points:

3rd place and 4th-6th place (6th would require a McLaren fastest lap for the extra point, otherwise it amounts to 23)

23 points:

3rd and 4th-6th place

And that’s under the assumption that Ferrari does extremely well (P1/P2 and maybe Fastest Lap), which we know their drivers have the skill to pull off, but would require a level of strategic readiness we have not seen from Ferrari in years. Combine that with Leclerc's penalty for putting another part in and his lap time deletion in Q2, which means he's starting dead last, Ferrari pretty much can't win the Constructors Championship, unless something goes very wrong for the McLarens.

TL;DR: If one McLaren wins, the team wins. If McLaren finishes both cars top 4, they win. If McLaren scores 24 points, they win. If Ferrari doesn't win the race, McLaren only needs 13 to win. This would be McLaren's first Constructors Championship in 26 years.

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this

some f1 fans have such a flawed logic that everyone wants or needs to be an f1 driver, and if you are not (or if you don't do well in f1), you are a bad driver.

some of you need to understand that f1 is not the be-all and end-all, because if that were true, we wouldn't have dozens of different racing series (which, btw, have so many fast and talented drivers).

and whenever i see someone saying "oh, this person should go to x series bc he's a flop", it just goes to show how clueless this person is and how little (read: none) wheel knowledge they have. if a driver is doing badly in one series, it could just mean he is in the wrong series for his particular skill set. formula, wec, indy, rally, drift, nascar, motogp (two-wheelers are category of their own but the general point remains)... they all require a different mentality, different skills. just as an example, many f1 drivers have said they could never do rally (or at the very least do as well as rally drivers). or, we can take ex-f1 drivers who struggled there only to do great in wec.

the beauty of motorsport is the diversity of different disciplines and different capabilities a driver has to have to excel in their field.

(this obviously isn't to say you have to watch other series bc let's be real, very few people have the time for even one, let alone multiple. the only point i'm here to make is that each and every series deserves the same respect and that one discipline's driver isn't necessarily overall better than another one's)

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Random Fact Time! (credit to Mr. V’s Garage for the data, go watch his videos please)

F1 has had a total of 72,570 laps raced (up to 2024’s Las Vegas Grand Prix)

Lewis Hamilton, with 5,486 laps led, has led 7.55% OF ALL LAPS EVER

If you combine the laps led by our most recent dominators of the sport (Hamilton’s 5,486/7.55%, Michael Schumacher’s 5,111/7.04%, Sebastian Vettel’s 3,501/4.82%, Max Verstappen’s 3,361/4.63%) we end up with a total of 24.04%. OF ALL LAPS EVER. The four of them have led just 1% shy of a quarter of all laps ever raced in F1. Insane.

Denny Hulme, WDC of 1967, had one pole position across his career in F1, and he earned it AFTER he won the WDC, meaning he was Champion without ever qualifying first place.

Mike Hawthorn (1958 WDC) and Phil Hill (1961 WDC) both had 3 race wins, the least of any WDC’s.

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WDC update

Congratulations to The Netherlands’ Max Verstappen on a fourth World Drivers Championship! This makes him the fifth driver in history to win four championships back to back, pushing him further into the ranks of the greats.

Alongside him in this four-championship endeavor is Sebastian Vettel of Germany (2010-2013), Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina (1954-1957), Sir Lewis Hamilton of Britain (2017-2020), and Michael Schumacher of Germany (2000-2004).

Also congratulations to Red Bull for making their eighth WDC winning car (although they’ve lost out on the Constructors Championship this year).

Another round of appreciation for McLaren and Norris for giving us a championship fight, even if it was a long shot towards the end. Looking forward to great things from them and Piastri next year.

Excited for another good season in 2025, and for the Ferrari/McLaren Constructors Championship fight that looks like it’s gonna go all the way to Abu Dhabi this year.

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please tell me it’s Vettel or Britney

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Piastri, Leclerc, or Russel. Gotta be

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TIRE COMPOUND YAP

Alright gang, it’s time y'all knew about the chaos that was (and is) Formula One tire shenanigans.

But first, some technical details (aren’t you just so excited):

In Formula One, the cars all have wheels (oooh) Attached to the wheels are tires (aaah). The tires are made of rubber, but because it’s F1, this ain’t your normal black circle that us peasants slap on our piddly little Peugeot. Nah, these things are insane.

They’re made from a combination of natural rubber and a mix or multiple synthetic rubbers of various names that I cannot pronounce without using at least 98% of my Latin root knowledge (i.e. styrene-butadiene copolymer, polybutadiene, and bromobutyl).

They’re then constructed into the actual tire, which has the three main components that you see in any tire (if I remember my high school auto shop notes correctly, don’t worry I’ll double check this before I post it):

Bead

Sidewall

Contact Patch

Here’s a diagram (of a normal tire) I edited to show these. The “tread” section is where the contact patch would be.

The bead is where the tire meets the wheel itself. Very thick, pretty inflexible compared to the rest of the tire, and has steel bands embedded to keep it strong and in-place. There’s also molded/carved ridges to grab on to the wheel (remember, a wheel is the metal bit that the tire is connected to). This acts as a sort of tire for the tire, gripping on and making sure that the tire doesn’t slip off its mount.

The sidewall is a LOT thinner, and very flexible. All rubber, made to be the part that shifts and flexes under load, which these cars experience a lot of (we’ll get to that in a sec).

Last, the contact patch. The most important part (arguably). Made of rubber and steel bands throughout, this is the part that’s actually in contact with the tarmac, as the name suggests. It has to be strong — the kind of strong that survives bouncing over kerbs at 100+ miles an hour, the kind of strong that can do miles and miles of constant strain, rolling at 215 MPH down straights and slowing to 60, 30, in the span of a hundred meters. Or, more strenuous, taking the faster turns. If you try taking any form of curve at 140, 160 MPH like these guys do, you’ll get to watch your tire explode under the pressure (shortly before you wrap yourself around a tree or telephone pole and take out my power again).

Now this is cool and all, but I can hear it already: “Bucket, what about the actual tire compounds? You know, the only part of this we’ll ever actually need to know while watching F1?” And to that, I respond: “Oh god I’m so sorry that’s what I meant to be talking about this whole time and then I got carried away sorry sorry sorry.”

So tire compounds:

When you’re watching F1, you’ll notice that the tires are color coded. You can see it off to the side of the driver’s name in the race order, and you’ll hear it called out.

There’s five basic types, but I’ll get into the nuance after the overview (image of tires for reference below).

Slicks:

Softs (red)

Mediums (yellow, sorry there’s no yellow color)

Hards (white)

Soft tires are marked with a red ring. They are, literally, softer than the other tires. The way it works is this: the softer the tire, the more it sinks into the ground. Softs spread out more, making a larger contact patch. More tire in contact with the road = more traction. Think about it like dragging your hand down a window: soft tires are like putting your entire palm and all five fingers flat against the window, then dragging down. A lot more resistance, because you’ve got more of your hand gaining traction against the window. More contact/traction means slowing and turning faster, and it heats the tire up faster (which allows for even more traction, because a hot tire sinks/sticks to the ground better than a cold one). The downside to softs is that they degrade faster, wearing out to have less traction and a higher chance of blowing out. They may be the fastest tire to slap on that car, but you’ll only get 20-30 laps out of them.

Hard tires are the opposite of softs, marked with a white ring. They last a really long time, like they’ll go almost the whole race length without blowing out. Their downside is that they take much longer to heat up, and even once they do they’ll always provide less traction than soft. It’s like putting a finger or two on the window and dragging down.

Mediums are smack in the middle, marked with a yellow ring. Lasts longer than a soft, more traction than a hard, but not a specialist at really anything. Imagine four to five fingers, but no palm.

Grooved:

Intermediates/inters (green)

Wets (blue)

Intermediates and Wets (green and blue rings, respectively) do the same job to different degrees. They’re both a build for wet weather, but Intermediates are for when it’s not AS wet as you need a Wet tire. Basically: Inters are for a a drying track and maybe some drizzling rain, when slicks aren’t good but Wets are too slow. Wets are for when it’s anything more than that. These tires are quite soft, but they’re also grooved, like civilian tires.

Current F1 uses these five compounds, but what most people don’t know is that compounds also have sub-compounds that Pirelli, the manufacturer, decides on a per-race basis. They range from C1-C5, with 1 being the hardest most durable and C5 being the softest and fastest. Pirelli decides what C-rating range will be available to teams on the weekend: for example, tracks that put more stress of the tires, like high speed circuits and circuits with high temperatures, call for lower rankings, C1-C3. Circuits with less stress, or circuits that may require higher grip, are C3-C5. Softs can be C3-C5 (usually C5), Hards can be C1 and C3/4, and Mediums are C2-C4 (pulled all this info from Pirelli’s site so it better be right).

You can actually see the compounds listed during pre-season testing:

So yeah, that’s how it works, in way more words than you ever wanted. If you made it this far, I congratulate you. Pat yourself on the back. Go get some water. You now know how F1 tires work!

But it wasn’t always this way (history dump incoming).

Y’see, at one point, there were less restrictions. And then there were more for a while. And then less. Because F1 is always changing.

In the 50s and 60s, five companies (Dunlop, Englebert, Firestone, Continental and Goodyear) made tires. In the 60s, Dunlop had the genius idea to make the tires wider for more grip. Like, MUCH wider.

In ‘71, Firestone upped the game by introducing the first true iteration of slick tires in official Formula One racing, at the Spanish Grand Prix. From the early 80s onward, the FIA started having some fun messing with how big the tires could be, prompting companies to learn to make and optimize different sizes.

Coming out of the 1996 season, Goodyear was the only manufacturer for tires. Then, at the beginning of the ‘97 season, Bridgestone joined. [insert Spider-Verse prowler sound effect]

This sparked the first major tire war of modern F1. I guess Bridgestone won, because Goodyear pulled out for the 1998 season.

Also in 1998, hoping to reduce car speeds, the FIA required all tires to be grooved, like modern Inters. This lasted until 2008, where all tires had to have four grooves running down the center (with the exception of 1998, which had three grooves).

Bridgestone had a good run of about two years, but in 2001, Michelin joined the fray. Then, in 2005, the FlA had the genius idea of banning tire changes mid-race.

And sweet baby Jesus did this combo eventually result in one of the funniest and most boring races of all time. I'll write about that another time, but l'll tell you this: Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

If you know, you know.

Unsurprisingly, largely as a result of that race, in 2006 they reinstated tire swaps.

in 2007, Michelin pulled out, leaving Bridgestone again the sole provider. There was some fun color coding issues and solutions as rules shifted, but nothing wildly interesting other than some confusion in the first race of a season where people weren't exactly sure how hard of a compound they were using.

2009 saw a shift back to slick tires and changes in aerodynamics to encourage mechanical grip (i.e. things like the tires giving grip as opposed to the wings pushing the car down for traction).

After 2010, Bridgestone left, and the power vacuum was filled by Pirelli, who's held it since then. So far, their 2011-current run has only had a few notable moments, the biggest being the 2018 season. They introduced two extra compounds on either end of the spectrum: pink hypersofts and orange superhards.

These were dropped in 2019 in favor of our current system, to make it easier both on teams and fans to understand and work with.

So... yeah! Tires :3

As always, feel free to pepper me with asks about F1. I do love answering them. This blog is a light in my life that really helps sometimes.

Love y’all.

[bucket-of-f1]

TIRE UPDATE

IM MAKING THAT TIRE POST I just in true bucket fashion completely overdid it and like ugh but it’s okay it’s almost done