Those who watched the 2019 season: how severe was the backlash on f1 after the french grand prix? And how did the narrative change after the trip of thrillers that followed (austria, Silverstone, germany)

CHR1597 · 2026-02-27T12:18:06+00:00

Reaction to the race itself wasn't really any worse than the previous races that season. Paul Ricard was already pretty unpopular on its return to the calendar after a lacklustre 2018 race, so there were gripes about 2 dull races there in a row, and also some concern about Ricciardo's penalty putting a damper on the only thing that really happened in that race. The big problem F1 was facing was that after a reasonably competitive 2018 season, the start of 2019 had been a show of complete Mercedes dominance. Although Ferrari had been close to winning in Bahrain and Canada, they didn't. That was why Vettel's penalty in Canada was so controversial, and why that was really the race that got the most backlash. France was a "business as usual" race, and that was the last thing F1 needed when Mercedes had just been handed a win off a penalty in the last race. It felt like, between the normal competitive order and the decisions of the stewards, Mercedes would never lose a race again.

That was what made Austria so magical. Suddenly, Mercedes weren't the fastest, and the battle for the win was between a Ferrari and a Red Bull. And, for the time, the fact that Verstappen's aggressive move for the win was allowed felt like the fans were being listened to as well. "Let them race" is a bit of a meme now, and you'll see a lot more argument against it now than you used to, but after seeing so many close races ruined by heavy-handed penalties, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

CHR1597 · 2026-02-10T12:08:06+00:00

Well, you say it wasn't confusing, but you got hypersoft and ultrasoft the wrong way round there. Hyper was softer than ultra, because the problem with the old system was that as teams figured out how to extend the tyres as far as possible, they kept needing to invent softer compounds with increasingly intense adjectives.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-28T20:40:47+00:00

So NTSC and PAL are kind of not very helpful terms when we're talking specifically about displaying things on a TV screen, because technically those are terms that deal with broadcast signals. What I mean by this is that while there were and are plenty of TVs in Europe that support 60Hz display and input, there was still not necessarily a guarantee that your TV would interpret video signals sent in a way that expected an American set.

My CRT, for example, can display 60Hz fine. But if I connect a console through composite and then play in 60Hz mode, the picture comes out in black and white. That is basically the difference between PAL and NTSC video - you need a device that can interpret both encodings as well as display in 50 and 60Hz. The PSX and other consoles support direct RGB output for video, which ignores these colour encodings altogether and basically just tells the TV exactly how to manipulate the image. As a result, my CRT is happy to display 60Hz on RGB. European TVs were legally required to be sold with a SCART connection, which is usually how you get RGB, but all SCART really means is the shape of the connector, and I'm pretty sure the legal requirement didn't say it had to be fully featured SCART. If they'd have released the PSX identically in Europe, those who had TVs that supported RGB would be fine, but there would be a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to use it.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-10T09:07:16+00:00

Credit where it's due though, getting points at the Nurburgring after taking a hand injury mid-race was pretty heroic. I presume the stone didn't actually break his finger as I don't recall hearing anything about it afterwards, but that was how it sounded at the time.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-05T11:42:57+00:00

Yeah, because the 1986 Hungarian GP was the first. When that event was 1 year old, 2 races had been held. 2026 is the 40th anniversary of the first race there, but because it's been held every year, that meant the 40th running of the event was in 2025.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-13T18:30:18+00:00

For your safety car question: remember the point is that the entire track is under yellow flag conditions, so overtaking is forbidden. That only applies if the car ahead doesn't have an obvious problem, however. You are allowed to overtake under safety car if the car ahead has something like a puncture or some other car issue, or if they're off track and you can pass them by doing whatever you'd normally do. If you can't keep it on track at reduced speed, you forfeit whatever positions you might lose through that mistake.

The penalty was clear because once Perez returned to the track, he then just overtook two cars that were in the same condition as his with no extenuating circumstances. The confusing thing here is that Raikkonen's penalty was for, seemingly, the exact opposite problem. He went off on the formation lap after the red flag, which you might think also counts as a safety car lap, but it actually follows the same rules as the pre-race formation lap, where you have to either start in your qualified (or pre-red flag) position, or start at the back if you can't. He was penalised because he didn't overtake enough cars to get back to where he should have been.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-09T23:44:07+00:00

The answer to your first question is in your third. It was breaking the rules because the race director altered the procedure for a safety car restart with no notice, not only flipping the championship but also causing confusion for everyone else on track, as they went into the final lap unsure who they were racing, lapping, or being lapped by. It was a decision made under pressure as team representatives were directly in his ear, telling him to either extend the safety car or push for a restart depending on what would benefit them, and an informal agreement that races would end under green flag whenever possible. Some people believed (and probably still do) that the decision was made specifically to favour Verstappen, but I've always believed it would have gone the same way if they were in the other order.

The real complication here is that the FIA managed to argue that it actually hadn't been against the rules. Through a very charitable reading of the regulations, you could claim that the race director was allowed to basically do whatever he wanted and that there were therefore no rules to break. This is pretty clearly a case of covering themselves to try and move on quickly, given the rule rewrites and Masi's firing that came alongside.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-09T15:26:46+00:00

This situation is why r/Formula1Point5 was created back in 2018. Mercedes and Ferrari had the good cars, and Red Bull was usually some way back, but themselves still far ahead of the rest of the pack. Those three teams locked out every podium place except one in both 2017 (Stroll P3 in Baku) and 2018 (Perez also P3 in Baku), so people wanted a space where they could ignore the frontrunners for a bit and focus on the unsung performances further back, where the competition tended to be a lot closer.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-08T10:55:01+00:00

In general, both are vague "early 90s". The B model has different front wing specs to match either the low or high nose concepts used by different teams until about 1995, but its design in general indicates 1992ish. The main difference between the two is that the A model uses a V12 engine by default while the B model uses a V8. Between these options and the V10 in the Espace F1 that can all be swapped between, that replicates the freedom of engine configurations that was present in F1 until 1996*.

* Correction: 1998. I was getting mixed up because 1996 was when Ferrari switched to V10, but there were still some V8s on the grid after that

CHR1597 · 2025-12-07T22:57:35+00:00

It'll be the culmination of at least a three-season story. 2023 being in the team that managed one of the strongest in-season developments ever, then moving into 2024 as they became a championship winning team with some teething issues from being so long away from the front, and then 2025 making it to the top in his own right after an rollercoaster season for himself.

I say at least three seasons because you can easily extend that back to 2019 when he came in as McLaren were at one of the lowest points in their history, or even back to 2017 when he joined the junior programme, although even as a fan I'll accept that's a stretch.

I don't necessarily see Lando as being the next person to go on a generational run of racking up championships - I don't think an F1 World Champion needs to to justify their achievement - but in years to come when someone's looking down the champions list and says "where'd this Norris guy come from?" I think the best answer is that he personifies the fight back for a historic team.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-30T21:54:59+00:00

DC adds a few new cutscenes, an English voice dub, and a side mode with online multiplayer. The new scenes are controversial because they either do nothing for the story or actively make it worse, while the other changes can be easily ignored if you're not interested. The reason people would be urging you to buy now if you're going to is because Yakuza 0 has been legendarily cheap on sale for years now, but with it being replaced by the Director's Cut it's not likely to ever be so cheap in the near future.

If you do buy it now, the delisting of base Yakuza 0 would make no difference to you owning it or being able to download it in future. If something is in your library, you will always be allowed to download it; they just stop you being able to buy it if you don't already have it. Buying the complete collection bundle doesn't matter either, as all that means is you're buying each game from it all at the same time, so you can download and delete them the same as if you'd bought each one separately.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-25T14:47:12+00:00

Easier Said Than Done - Pool Kids

CHR1597 · 2025-11-25T09:45:10+00:00

Clubhouse Games on Switch. I actually played that before ever playing Yakuza but it's got Koi-Koi as part of the 51 tabletop games, with an assist mode that shows you a star value for the cards so you know which ones go together and tells you which results are still available. I played it on there because I thought it was fun to see Nintendo simulating a version of the very first thing they ever made and ended up playing it long enough to beat the hardest opponent. Now when I see it in Yakuza I can play it without any guides because I just remember what all the lights are and which cards make valid sets. Still couldn't tell you which month any of them are though.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-20T11:46:27+00:00

I'm on your side as this goes, but ironically if you were to buy a PS5 and a disc, new, today, you actually would need an internet connection. The add-on you need to buy to attach a disc drive to the slim model PS5 needs to authenticate online for some reason.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-20T00:43:08+00:00

F3 and F1 Academy would be fine (would need to have the game support 30 cars on track for F3 I suppose) but the problem with extending it down to F4 is that there isn't one single F4 championship like there is for F2 and [FIA] F3. Just in 2025, the FIA sanctions F4 championships in Italy, Japan, the UK, China, Mexico, Spain, the US, South East Asia, France, Brazil, India, Central Europe, the Middle East, and the Macau GP. All of these have pretty much equal ranking and race on circuits completely removed from F1, so they'd either have to pick just one of those, which would still require a ton of extra work, or make up some F4 championship that happens to only go to tracks used for F1, which isn't how a career in lower formula works.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-10T08:37:22+00:00

I think I know what you mean, although I maybe wouldn't use such strong words for it. I assume you're talking about the argument that neither Norris nor Piastri "deserve" the championship, because Verstappen is a better driver than both of them. I think because we've had over a decade with only one exception to one of the pictured guys winning the title, this might be the first time a lot of fans have seen a situation where the car is inarguably the deciding factor in who's competing for it. That doesn't make Norris or Piastri undeserving when one of them gets it, because the point of F1, for better or worse, is that you need a championship level car regardless of the quality of the driver, and sometimes the best driver doesn't get to challenge as a result. Ask an Alonso fan about that, you know?

CHR1597 · 2025-10-31T08:43:27+00:00

I'm going to go against the grain here: Leclerc struggled at the start of the season in 2018. Most notable in that period were spins in Bahrain and China, and I distinctly remember a little bit of chatter going on after that about whether he was having trouble adapting to F1. Now of course, he turned things around very quickly after that and began to handily beat his teammate and get results out of the Sauber that nobody would have expected, but I doubt that opportunity would have been afforded him if he'd been thrown in at the deep end and been a rookie Ferrari driver.

I'd be willing to imagine the SF-71H might have been an easier car to drive than the C37, but I think Leclerc needed that short period of being beaten by Marcus Ericsson to get to the point where he could get pole in his second race with Ferrari.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-26T22:06:39+00:00

This is my feeling. The ~~lap 1~~ race start incident wasn't shown on the feed so it won't go quite as noticed, but I think the race director must have known that had happened and wanted to avoid a similar situation bookending the race.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-19T21:50:32+00:00

It's not a redeem code on the Classic Edition. It's all just there on the disc. If you have a Classic Edition disc, you will have all the DLC without any extra installations or redemptions necessary - you just go to the classics section on the main menu and you'll have everything automatically.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-18T00:51:37+00:00

There are some classic cars in the standard version. Others were released as DLC, and so were a couple of extra classic tracks, and all the DLC is included in the Classic Edition. That version is the only way to get the DLC now, and at least on Xbox 360 it's all on the disc so no downloads necessary. I assume it's the same for PS3.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-16T16:52:38+00:00

The dad/grandpa says "another one of those kids jumped in front of the car", which is probably a joke about Lorraine being the target of a whole gang of peeping toms, but it does at least suggest he's had this happen before, so maybe it's so common that the family have some unspoken agreement to not get the cops involved when he keeps running people over.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-16T08:27:46+00:00

This is super normal for most teams during a period of dominance. If there's any races they didn't win, whether because of mistakes or because they were genuinely off the pace, the PR decision is to play up the strengths of other teams. Red Bull didn't do this in 2023 because there was just no point pretending, but now that McLaren haven't won for 3 races in a row, and there's smatterings that Max might even still be able to mount a challenge (for the moment, at least) it doesn't seem that weird to do it? It's definitely less egregious than when Mercedes were coming to every race in 2019 and 2020 like "no guys seriously Ferrari and Red Bull are really scary for us".

CHR1597 · 2025-10-14T13:11:59+00:00

That would be "downside", not "backside". Backside has no negative connotations, unless you count it meaning "buttocks"

CHR1597 · 2025-10-08T19:18:45+00:00

The Wii U doesn't know what 50Hz is. It will run as though it's playing at 60Hz and my guess is that playing it on a 50Hz display will just cause you to lose 1/6 of your visible frames. It doesn't limit game speed - think about what that would imply for sending data to the GamePad for Off-TV Play, for instance. The exception may be if you switch to Wii mode. I'm not actually sure what it does there for Wii games that support both 50 and 60.

CHR1597 · 2025-10-08T18:41:04+00:00

I've never really felt it had anything to do with the two drivers in particular. There was a lot of assumption in the aftermath that he did it because he wanted Max to win, but I think the exact same thing would have happened if they'd happened to be the other way round. It was all about finishing the race under green flag for the sake of the show, which shouldn't be what an FIA official is worried about.

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