Originally Posted by Deschodt
Wow- this thread sank to the bottom of pelican already, sadly....
Since everything is on hold, I was listening to a french magazine's online interview of Grosjean done yesterday... Not really one of my favs but I gotta say the interview changed that. He seemed like a very nice guy, well spoken, with interesting opinions and a good head on his shoulders. Not the mad dog or subject of ridicule from Netflix... Covered the I-racing stuff (nowhere near as good as our team simulators, better graphically amusingly, but a totally different "job", he was saying kudos to the pros but it would take 10x more free time than he has to become any good at conquering the inaccuracies and taking advantage of them, and it'd be bad for him)...
Interesting points I thought, he was asked who he was friends with among pilots... as president of the GPDA he said all of them are actually pretty good friends with each other, and often travel together and rotate rental planes at times, it's way closer than TV would have you believe in terms of getting along, the one exception seems to be Hamilton who apparently does his own thing and has very little contact with the other guys... not saying he disliked him at all, just saying he's the only one that doesn't really make the effort to join...
Another Q was about performance and passing. He made the point that the glory days of the 80s-90s were *not* all that glorious in his mind (mclaren domination among others), results varied because cars broke down or ran out of gas, or physical driving and exhaustion allowed more errors, but nowadays cars do not break, do not run out of fuel, driving is in some respects less physically demanding but in others more (conditioning for Gs, pedal pressure), but overall pilots are top flight athletes now so nobody on the grid is gonna make a mistake due to fatigue...
He pointed out that DRS was not all that evil in today's aero problems, the issue with passing is that on a modern F1 at Barcelona's Turn 1, you brake at 55 meters. The car is, say, 5 meter long. You'd already need a 10% error in judgement from the guy in front just to get alongside if your nose was in his gearbox (which it cannot be due to aero issues). So say you need 10 meters of advantage, really, a 20% of braking distance error, modern drivers are NOT gonna **** up that bad. So no passing.... If you want passing, reintroduce crap steel brakes and manual shifters... More stuff but I didn't write it all down.. all in all it's nice to see the human side of the guy, I have more appreciation for him now... (if there are any inaccuracies they are mine, due to translation)
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