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Originally posted by 280nosler:
I mean seriously??

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But, in the race they'll be listed as Hard, Medium, Soft, regardless of which compounds they are.

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Originally posted by P250UA5:
2018 Highlights



Link to original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqnFMDHshEc

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Originally posted by P250UA5:
Toro Rosso performance with the Honda was better than McLaren's & Tost said that the STR chassis was holding them back, not the Honda PU.

I think they'll still be at the front with MB & Ferrari, but still behind them. The RBR chassis should be sorted enough to not hold back the Honda PU.

71 days to FP1 in Australia

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Originally posted by cfiore:
According to a couple F1 sites, Arrivabene is out as team principle of Ferrari to be replaced by Binotto.

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According to reports in Italy, it appears a wind of change is sweeping through the halls of Maranello with Ferrari opting to overhaul their management structure ahead of the 2019 F1 season…

Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport reported on Monday that Team Principal Maurizio Arrivabene will no longer lead the team, with Technical Director Mattia Binotto drafted in to replace him.

It is believed there were tensions between Arrivabene and Binotto last season and these grew as Ferrari's title challenge evaporated. The chances of a leadership change increased when John Elkann took over as Ferrari president, following Sergio Marchionne’s death.

Binotto has risen through the Ferrari ranks over the last two decades with many crediting the Italian team’s power unit gains to him, after he took over as power unit Chief Operating Officer ahead of 2015.

The reports come after Ferrari again lost out to Mercedes in the battle for both drivers’ and constructors’ championships last year, despite having the best package on the grid for the opening half of the season.

Ferrari lost their way with development after the summer break, allowing Mercedes to pull clear in the constructors' race and Lewis Hamilton to beat Sebastian Vettel to clinch a fifth drivers' crown.

La Gazzetta dello Sport said official confirmation of the move could come as early as later on Monday.

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Niki Lauda is back in intensive care.

The Formula 1 legend and Mercedes team chairman had been vacationing in Ibiza following his long recovery from a life-saving lung transplant operation. But according to Kronen Zeitung newspaper, the 69-year-old had to fly back to Vienna after contracting a serious flu illness.

The newspaper cited sources who said Lauda caught the flu because his immune system was weakened following his medical ordeal.

"There was an influenza case in his family, and he is treated in an intensive care unit with us," a spokeswoman for the AKH hospital confirmed.

Osterreich newspaper said Lauda should be able to leave hospital in three to four days.

"He had to go back to Vienna because there were no specialists in Ibiza familiar with lung transplants," the report added. "The situation was serious in the first days of the new year, but Lauda is already doing much better again."

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Part of the first test for the 2019 F1 season will be broadcast live.

Sky UK has announced it will broadcast five hours of live coverage for each of the first four days of testing at the Circuit de Catalunya from February 18th to 21st. The live coverage will air between 1pm and 6pm each day.

The channel has exclusive live broadcast rights for every round of the 2019 F1 season, apart from the British Grand Prix, which will also be shown on the free-to-air Channel 4.

Further details of testing coverage by broadcasters in other countries is yet to be confirmed. However as Formula 1’s direct streaming service F1 TV uses Sky’s commentary team for its English coverage, the feed could be made available to its subscribers as well.

The opening test will be the first of two four-day tests for the team ahead of the season-opening race in Australia on March 25th. So far four teams have announced details of their planned launches ahead of the test.

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When ESPN said it would show the rest of the 2018 Formula One season without commercials after its catastrophe of an opening broadcast in the U.S. last year, it seemed too good to be true. Surely, it was just a way to apologize, and wouldn’t carry over into 2019. Surely, we were getting spoiled to a temporary thing.

Well, we were all wrong. Once again, ESPN will broadcast this F1 season in the U.S. without commercials. Sports Business Daily reported the news earlier this week, and a spokesperson for ESPN confirmed it to Jalopnik on Friday.

This is when we all do a goofy celebratory handshake that someone will manage to screw up two moves in, because, for yet another year, we won’t have to miss a second of dominant race leaders or team orders the whole season.

The almost necessary move to commercial-free coverage in 2018 came one race into ESPN’s new reign as America’s F1 broadcaster. The network picked up the F1 contract before the 2018 season and the series moved there from NBC, which, at the time, had the rights since 2013. Rather than doing its own broadcast like NBC did, ESPN decided to pay for the rights to air Sky Sports’ coverage.

It sounded easy enough, until it wasn’t.

See, Sky Sports gives its European viewers commercial-free F1 broadcasts. Given that this is America and everything is an ad, ESPN wasn’t going that route.

That led to a disaster of a season-opener broadcast of the Australian Grand Prix in the U.S., because ESPN tried to force commercial breaks into a broadcast that didn’t break for commercials. ESPN cut out during key moments in the race, and even breaks during less eventful times were unnatural, because the U.S. version of the broadcast was going to commercial while Sky Sports’ commentators were in full swing.

ESPN apologized for it all, and later announced that the rest of the season would go commercial free. It was a good way to try to keep viewers around, especially with the F1 streaming service launching soon.

Usually, though, things like this are short lived—a band-aid to make everyone happy until they’ve forgotten about how mad they were. It was only natural to assume that someone at ESPN would figure out how to make commercial breaks seem more natural during Sky Sports’ commercial-free coverage, and that the ads would resume after the 2018 season ended.

But ESPN didn’t do that. We’re going another year without any commercials during F1 in the U.S., and that’s cool.

Now, if only the stewards would call a few more safety cars during the races. Some of us have to go to the bathroom from time to time.