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OT - Tennis - Why Federer is the best (long)
Posted By: Henrik Bukkjaer In Response To: OT - Tennis - Why Federer is the best (long) (Chuck Bower)
Date: Friday, 24 June 2011, at 2:45 p.m.
You may be a bit out of your comfort zone. Many sports (including auto racing and baseball) adjust the rules and/or equipment to maintain a status quo. For example, at Indy the record times for 500 qualifying (1995) and race (1990), both by Arie Luyendyk, occurred 1 1/2 to 2 decades ago. Similarly the two fastest tracks in NASCAR (Daytona and Talledega) have led to the rules requiring limited air intake ("restrictor plates") to keep the cars at "safe" speeds. (Equivalent changes in F1 and road/sportscar/prototype racing are also typical.) In racing, the tracks are basically bounded by safety, so allowing improvements in engines and chases/aero pushes the performance of the cars to unsafe levels, unless the equipment rules are modified to maintain an overall standard of performance.
It's true that if you go back far enough in time you might find a region where the track's safety margin isn't threatened, although even then the track surfaces and walls (cf. "safer barrier") at times were primitive, not to mention the car and driving practice (sans seatbelts!) so the performance/safety ratio was, even then, perpetually being tested. If you look at life expectancy for racecar drivers prior to ~1970 and since, you'll see what I mean.
This might be true for US (low-tech) racing series, but it's not entirely correct for F1.
In F1, rules had to be tightened, in order to make the economics of the series reasonable. Costs had escalated out of proportion, and different measures was discussed by different stakeholders. The result a lot of rule changes to limit development and thus expenses.
Also the competing teams are not what they used to be. They used to be a lot of privateers and dedicated racing teams, whereas after the Ecclestone/Mosley big-money turnaround, it was more of less the automotive industry running thje show, sponsored by tobacco companies and banks. Now for teams such as Toyota, Honda, etc. to justify that amount of spending, they had to get some results. Either directly on the race-course in terms of marketing and image, or in terms of technological development that could be used in their regular road car programmes down the line.
Finally the safety-issue in F1 is more than just limiting the top-speeds on the cars due to lack of track safety. The cars battle it out on track, in a pace that's more difficult to explain than a tennis playing surface. So it's getting dangerous for the drivers physically and the risk of crashes (car vs. car) is getting higher. The number of Gs pulled in F1 is not to be laughed at. During breaking, it's more than 5Gs (depending on surface and wing setup/downforce). The result is, that the driver actually cannot breathe in during breaking - due to the force from hanging in the seatbelts. And they break a lot during a GP. The neck is also under heavy strain in F1, through all the corners. All-in-all the development in F1 over the years, would mean that if no restrictions had been added, cars could go so fast so the drivers would go unconscious.
Power is down from almost 1500 HP at peaks in the turbo era, to just about 800 HP now (same as NASCAR), but they're lapping faster!
Then you have had a ton of rule changes which purpose it was to simply ease overtaking. Changes for wing position, winglets, tyres, DRS, etc. All because overtaking was getting more and more impossible, because the cars got their (corner) speed from aero-downforce (and when they closed up on another driver, they lost air stream over their wings, and thus lost downforce.
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So while Stick's idea of comparing motorsports to the size of Secretariat's heart, or a lefty in tennis or whatever maybe wasn't that best idea (because the motors today are now as powerful as those of yesterday), the idea of putting a 2011 F1 car into the 1990ies field, was an OK comparison.
http://www.motorsportsetc.com/info/spd_mon.htm
It's crazy to see the difference in Tennis comparing now to 15 or 30 years ago. Especially if you go back and watch a women's game with wooden rackets! Wow! It looks like my mother playing on our lawn with a couple of friends!
I guess it's a combination of racket technology and just better players with more strength, agility and technique?
In Wimbledon they have introduced slower balls, and a lot of the playing surfaces today are not as fast as they used to be. So I guess that tennis evolution is also triggering rule changes!! :-)
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