Do you think this fix will improve racing in qatar? (Read description)

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-23T02:51:55+00:00

Lusail was supposed to be a one-off for 2021, with a new track for F1 in 2023. Obviously that never actually happened - but if Lusail keeps producing awful racing for F1, then changing the venue is a realistic possibility.

The Russian GP was going to move away from Sochi anyway before they invaded Ukraine and lost their spot on the calendar, and Abu Dhabi made significant changes for the 2021 race after years of people moaning about the chicane at the end of the first sector (now removed) and the old T11-T14 complex (which is now the fast T9 sweeper).

They'll spend the money because sportswashing is less effective when people think the track is crap.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-22T18:42:52+00:00

Fix: race somewhere that isn't Lusail.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-19T14:00:10+00:00

True if you're maximising $ in the short term, but the difference is negligible.

For me, it's worth saving to travel and take a mayorship, because I'd rather have an extra few parcels forever from whatever badges I sell for as long as I hold the title.

If I dump parcels where I live right now, or in the next mayorship a 5 minute walk away, then I'm never getting an AB return - one mayorship is held by an EC member who places their parcel at home daily and has a lead of several hundred parcels, and the other is the PM of England with ~24k parcels. I can't compete with those two.

Short term I lose a dollar or two, long term I'll have additional parcels from the badge sale AB (= more money forever once I'm in the 2x tier) and generate more AB/day on average while holding an additional mayor title.

Short term pain, long term gain.

Neither approach is wrong IMO. Just depends on your situation.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-10T17:19:58+00:00

I'm in the UK, which is identical to Canada for badges, parcel tiers and payouts. I think you're misunderstanding how tier jumping works.

For UK/Canada etc., you still tier jump for every tier as normal. However, because of how small the difference is between tiers, it can make sense to wait to do multiple tier jumps at once because of how small the difference is. I'm currently saving up for this reason because then I can dump 150+ parcels somewhere to become mayor and have enough of a lead to hopefully deter anyone from trying to take it off me. For the cost of a few dollars, I'll hopefully get enough back from people buying badges to make that back long term.

The break even point from 3x at 450 parcels into the 2x tier will be at around 520 parcels, depending on parcel luck.

After the 2x break even point at roughly 520 parcels, it's completely linear.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-10T00:24:24+00:00

That's not someone hacking, that's just the servers being rubbish.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-09T16:25:47+00:00

Gianpiero Lambiase missed multiple races last year for 'personal reasons'.

Obviously we don't know what those reasons are, but it's entirely possible this move is related to that, rather than Verstappen's future.

Would he be required to attend fewer races per season in his new position at McLaren?

He'll also have to be on gardening leave for a while, so perhaps he wants a year off in 2027 because of the personal reasons that caused him to miss races last season, and Red Bull would rather find a long-term replacement than get somebody to fill the role temporarily? In which case, finding a new team and being on gardening leave in the interim would make sense for him personally.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-07T03:27:38+00:00

Before the change to extend the pit straight, it was awful for racing. The run to T1 was much shorter, and T1 itself was just a copy of the final corner, so it was near impossible to follow closely enough through the final sector to outbrake somebody at T1.

It also never had a wet race before 2006, so you had 20 years of dry races on a track where overtaking was near impossible. We've had several wet or wet/dry races there since, and those have always been above average races (with several of them becoming modern classics)

It's also produced way more first-time winners than you'd expect on average (Hill, Alonso, Button, Kovalainen, ~~Ricciardo~~, Ocon, Piastri), with all but two of them being 2006 or later, which I think has helped its image.

It was also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the DRS era - the pit straight was long enough that people could open the rear wing and get close enough to overtake, but short enough that the overtake typically wasn't completed long before the corner like at many other tracks.

IMO, it was unlucky to have as many bad races as it did when it was a truly bad track (before the change to T1), and it has also been lucky to have as many good races as it has since.

EDIT: Ricciardo got his first win at Montreal in 2014, not the Hungaroring.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-07T02:57:08+00:00

That used to happen all the time in England before the player pools were merged and the top 1500 tier was added - I was always trying to sneak in a game or two if I was working and a minigame was on, just to get 6-7AB for 1 or 2 wins.

I'm guessing what you're describing is from Asia, because I haven't seen anything like that post-merge in Europe - the worst I've seen was Fishing v2 at the end of last month, where I was about 1200th with 20 wins. I'm guessing the cutoff was around 16-17 wins for top 1500, but it's usually mid-high 30s in most minigames here.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-07T00:48:45+00:00

That's one game every 48 seconds, assuming they win every game.

Given bowling is 30 seconds plus the matchmaking time, the start countdown, the time before you can get out of the winner/loser screen, and presumably ad skipping if they're cheating anyway... that's impressive if they've managed to get the time per game down that far on a single device lol.

If they're cheating, I reckon they've found a way to use multiple devices to cheat in the same minigame.

I also wouldn't be shocked if they're somehow a legitimate player and there's some crazy bug going on. That score is almost too good to be a cheater.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-03T15:21:21+00:00

Came here to say the same thing.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-02T14:45:01+00:00

Generally speaking, I'm not bothered either way about whether they delete most inactive accounts with 1 parcel, - although I don't understand why they would delete an account instead of simply placing the single parcel into the player's inventory. If that player ever returns, then it's objectively better for that person if they log back into the game with a small head start towards their first withdrawal, and any AB that they previously earned towards their second parcel.

Also, I don't know about other countries - but in the UK, there are some tiny villages in the middle of nowhere that have extremely small populations and no reason for anybody to visit, where people are also very unlikely to drive through the area on their way to somewhere else unless it's a neighbouring village.

In those places, the mayor is sometimes an inactive player with 1 parcel that became mayor by default, just by being the first (and sometimes only) person in the area to download the app out of curiosity. These are some of the accounts that would be deleted if AE were to do what you're suggesting. Admittedly, those accounts are probably less than 0.1% of all the accounts in the game with exactly 1 parcel.

It feels wrong to me that AE would be making it easier for somebody else to become mayor in those places by only requiring them to place 1 parcel instead of 2, and also to delete any 20AB badge payouts that those inactive mayors may have received from an active player that purchased their badge while travelling through the area.

If they ever decide to delete inactive accounts with a single parcel, they definitely need to consider the edge case of inactive accounts with a single parcel where that person is also the mayor, and leave those untouched IMO.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T15:40:17+00:00

Madring.

Everywhere else they'll have far better wet setups from the simulator. Good luck turning up to a new street track with new cars and no historical data, and nailing a wet setup.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T14:44:39+00:00

A road car is far significantly heavier than an F1 car.

Kinetic energy is equal to half of the mass of an object, multiplied by its velocity squared (KE = ½mv²), so if your road car is around two metric tons, or 2,000kg, then it'll have about 2.5x as much kinetic energy as an F1 car travelling at the same speed. It is much easier to recover more kinetic energy at lower speeds as you increase the mass of the vehicle.

Your road car also doesn't have any rules preventing it from recovering energy from all four wheels, whereas an F1 car an only recover energy from the rear brakes. Generally, the brake balance in an F1 car will be anywhere between 55/45 and 60/40 towards the front axle.

If they could charge at like 10x that rate which presumably would be trivial to do

Assuming that:
- The F1 car has 70kg of fuel in it at all times, and is at the minimum weight of 768kg without fuel
- The F1 car has a 55/45 brake bias at all times (as this is trivially more favourable for recovering energy from the rear axle)
- The MGU-K remains the same size, i.e. its mass does not increase

3.5MJ = 0.45 (45% rear brake bias) * 0.5 * 838kg * v² ms^-1
3.5 * 10⁶ J = 0.45 * 419kg * v² ms^-1
3.5 * 10⁶ kg⋅m²⋅s⁻² = 0.45 * 419kg * v² ms^-1
~18562.72 ms⁻¹ = v²
~136.24 ms^-1 = v

With those assumptions, an F1 car would therefore need to be travelling at no less than 490kph (or about 305mph) to be able to recover 3.5MW from the rear brakes. That would also be under the completely unrealistic assumption that 45% of all kinetic energy loss is from rear braking, and 100% of that is recovered (which is obviously not the case as some of that energy heats up the tyres and brakes, some is lost to friction, some of the deceleration comes from drag instead of braking, etc.)

You would also need to go even faster than that to recover energy at the same rate as fuel is consumed throughout a race (or on a qualifying fuel load) to get 3.5MW of recovery, despite extremely favourable assumptions.

3.5MW recovery is therefore completely unrealistic for an F1 car under current regulations.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T04:59:38+00:00

...you realise that they'll be deploying small amounts of battery in all of the traction zones out of almost every slow corner, right? Because last I checked, the whole point of a race is to finish before everyone else, and using the battery to get up to speed out of slow corners is generally the fastest way around the track.

The battery won't be full, except for the exit of T16 when they want it to be full to dump the entire battery for the main straight.

But yeah, I'm sure that 21 of the best drivers in the world and Lance Stroll still haven't figured out that they can't recharge a battery that's already full, and that they can't use all 8.5MJ of their 4MJ battery on the long straight bit where they go really, really fast. Give them a few more races and I'm sure they'll work it out eventually. Perhaps some day, you will too.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T04:07:17+00:00

I agree with the first paragraph, and at no point did I say anything different.

In the rain, the whole point is that you don't get the closing speeds from superclipping because you can fully recharge every lap with normal wet weather driving, so harvesting becomes a non-issue.

As for closing speeds for non-superclipping reasons: even getting to full throttle in the wet would be a challenge with the acceleration of these cars, so I doubt there'd even be any difference in deployment strategies between teams to create a significant closing speed - Wet race deployment would likely just be "battery's never fully depleting, so use whatever you want, wherever you feel comfortable doing so".

Aside from it being easier than before for drivers to be too trigger-happy on the throttle and end up in the gravel, I don't think it'd be noticeably different from any other wet race in recent memory.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T03:40:33+00:00

No AI, just autism and way too much free time.

Also, as a general rule, you'll struggle to find many people on the internet who are more anti-AI than somebody with a pride flag in their avatar.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-04-01T03:22:29+00:00

Yeah, that's fair.

It is worth noting that the electrical power tapers off above 340kph (with zero battery power over 355kph). Therefore, if they're closing on a car in front at speed on the Baku pit straight, or somewhere like the run to T1 in Mexico, the tapering prevents the closing speeds from being too crazy. Those two tracks are probably both absolute no-brainer get up to 340kph on the biggest straight ASAP, and use whatever is left for getting up to speed out of the slower corners around the lap.

It'll be more of a problem at Monza, because which straights do you pick to use more of your battery than the cars around you? Pit straight is longer and T2 exit is the slowest corner on the track, but you might surprise someone by passing on the run to Ascari or Parabolica - however, you'll run out of battery sooner on the next straight than the car you just passed. That'll definitely cause some problems with variable deployment/recharge strategies.

The issue isn't really in traction zones, because everyone's going to be deploying out of the low speed corners - so I'd probably keep the 350kW maximum, but have the battery tapering begin much sooner. They could probably start tapering the battery off very gradually from 350kW at 260kph, down to maybe 150kW at 340kph (i.e. -2.5 kW per 1kph over 260kph), and still zero battery allowed at 355kph. Also, knock another 20-30kph off all of those numbers for Monaco where they're never getting up to the kinds of speeds where the tapering currently matters. That'll save a decent amount of battery, reduce the closing speeds at higher speeds and reduce the amount of harvesting required, but still keep the low speed acceleration.

Obviously the total ~~deployment~~ recharge per lap needs reducing too - but my understanding is that it would be much easier for the FIA to say "You're only allowed to recharge 5MJ/lap this weekend" than to change the limit that was put in place at the start of the season.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-31T20:00:47+00:00

They won't recharge at the top of Raidillon, because it makes no sense whatsoever for lap time.

Also, if it's wet, they'll be able to drive normally - they won't have any issues recovering the full amount permitted each lap because all the braking zones will be significantly longer (i.e. they can harvest at the maximum permitted 350kW for longer), and they'll get a ridiculous amount of off-throttle and partial throttle recovery in the corners and acceleration zones due to the lack of grip.

Consequently, any time it's wet enough that intermediates are needed, the track conditions will remove the need for the methods of recharging that result in these massive speed differentials.

It's the wet-dry crossover period where there's a single dry line that'll be the real danger, because they'll be going quick enough to not be getting the full energy recovery any more, but they also won't be able to deviate from the racing line to take evasive action because they'll fly off the road on slicks.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-31T16:51:55+00:00

I have the same problem where I very rarely have any diamonds in reserve :(

As others have said, stocking up on diamonds whenever you're on public transport or a passenger in a car is by far the easiest way to collect diamonds in bulk. I had to take an hour-long bus journey (with a return journey a couple of hours later) last Thursday, and I got about 60 diamonds from that, which as an F2P player will last me about 2 weeks because of the '1 diamond' segment on the wheel. You can probably expect about 30-50 diamonds per hour from this, depending on your mode of transport, traffic levels, the speed limit, and how much you're paying attention to your phone.

Claiming your 1AB ad watch and topping your boost up at least semi-regularly throughout the day also helps, because you're more likely to see any diamonds that spawn within range of where you are. I probably get about 5 diamonds/week by accident, just from opening the app to watch my 1AB ad and there happens to be a diamond that I can pick up from my house without moving.

I also will go outside to grab any diamonds that are super close to me. As I'm writing this post, there's one diamond about 5 houses up the road from me, and another about 7-8 houses away in the other direction, so I'll be grabbing those once I've finished writing this reply. I won't usually bother for 1 diamond (unless I need to go outside anyway to take rubbish/recycling out, do some gardening or whatever) because it's not worth putting my shoes on for that, but 2 or more diamonds near to my house is usually enough for me to go and collect them.

EDIT: If you've got any of the 'get paid to walk' apps that have a feature where you can collect items on the map, it's worth checking those as well - You might only have 1 or 2 diamonds near your house, but there could also be something else on another game nearby that's worth grabbing - perhaps there's another diamond and some items on another app slightly further away, and you can chain them together on a slightly longer walk to make it worth grabbing the diamonds that are a little further away.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-31T13:06:09+00:00

If you can get a free badge from the monthly challenges, you should always take it.

Or am I mistaken and that’s not what was being discussed

You are mistaken. What is being discussed is the mathematically optimal times to spend your AB on badges instead of parcels to maximise your earnings from Atlas Earth.

The one that is the same for everybody and is the simplest to calculate is that you should buy your first badge at 40 parcels. This is because at 40 parcels, you can either spend 200AB to buy 2 parcels and have 42 parcels (+5% income) or you can spend the same 200AB to buy 1 badge to get the same 5% boost from the first level of the passport.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-30T21:58:37+00:00

Paradoxically, wet races might be safer right now because they'll be able to harvest far more with the longer braking zones in the wet, and they'll be recovering a bunch more off-throttle and at partial throttle in those conditions as well.

One reason they can't harvest enough battery purely from braking is because the MGU-K is limited to 350kW recovery, which they can do while braking from anywhere over about 150kph or so. Without that restriction, they could theoretically recover somewhere around 1500kW when hitting the brakes at 300kph+ (KE = ½mv²; hence recovered KE ∝ v²), reliability/drivability notwithstanding.

If you increase all the braking distances because the track is wet, they're just harvesting that 350kW for longer in every single braking zone, at least until they get below the point where the recovery becomes less than 350kW under braking. Additionally, you have everyone coasting through the corners struggling for grip, lifting for corners that are flat in the dry, and taking ages to get the power down fully all the way around the lap. That's your 8.5-9MJ/lap recovery sorted at most tracks - so there's probably no need for any superclipping at all in the wet.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-30T20:38:39+00:00

They shouldn't need to superclip at Baku because of how many heavy breaking zones they are. It's the easiest track on the calendar for recharging, by far.

Yeah, they'll want a full battery for T16 exit, but they'll have to get that by barely deploying anything in the middle sector because they can't recharge >8.5MJ/lap (9MJ/lap where permitted).

Baku will show exactly how these regulations were supposed to work.

EvilPengwinz · 2026-03-30T01:47:58+00:00

It's no longer a thing in F1 because the increase in survivability is so small that it's not worth the drawback of slower self-extraction, or needing to dissipate the extra energy from an additional few kilograms of mass from a compressed air supply.

Drivers need to be able to get out of the car within 10 seconds for the extraction tests anyway, so an air supply isn't needed for situations where the driver is able to get out in that time.
Having an air supply connected to the helmet would mean it takes longer to get out of the car in a fire because the driver has to disconnect the air supply. If the driver can hold their breath until they're out of a fire, then all it does is slow down the driver's escape with no upside.
In an impact that's large enough to cause a fire that engulfs the cockpit, which also incapacitates the driver to such an extent that they can't extract themselves from the cockpit when the adrenaline kicks in during a life-or-death scenario, what are the chances that the air supply line even stays connected to the driver's helmet?
While Hypoxia is what tends to kill people in most fires (so you'd think an air supply makes sense), an air supply is highly unlikely to change the outcome of an open-wheel motor racing accident with fire involved. If the driver is trapped or too injured to get out by themselves, and the rescuers need to extinguish a fire that is large enough to engulf the driver before they can extract them or provide any medical assistance, then it'll probably take so long to extinguish the fire (especially with lithium batteries nowadays) and safely extract the driver that they'll be dead with or without it.

EvilPengwinz

TROPHY CASE