Yes he has. He wouldn’t have been able to, if the rules didn’t favor that style though.

I would be very surprised if Max hadn’t work shopped the rules with RB to understand exactly what he could and couldn’t do.

Of course.

Where I do think he differs is that hes the only one whose repeatedly gone for this grey area and that this grey boundary has been work shopped as an actual stratergy.

First: I don’t think that this is exactly a grey area, but just a big hole in the regulations. But even, if I grant you that, the questions then become: Why is he the only one? And what would happen if everybody started copying that behaviour? To answer the second question: We are beginning to see this up and down the field. And usually what ensues, is chaos and penalties, because it is impossible to judge the criteria correctly from the cockpit and you need Slow Motion or even Frame Freeze Analysis from different angles to correctly judge it. As for the first question, I offer the following thesis: There is this understanding between drivers even in the lower series (maybe not the very young karting; those are ruthless), an unwritten Gentlemen’s Agreement if you will. And the written rules have become more and more distanced to those principles.

Lando used Maxs own spells against him

Exactly the problem (and solution). It is normal that you have to somewhat adjust your driving to your opponent you’re racing. Here, Lando went more aggressive on the brakes. Important to note though: While still making the corner, albeit in a sub-optimal fashion for a chicane with a straight after it. The difference in braking points can be well explained by that line. Max on the other hand went less aggressive than he did before, mainly because Carlos was directly in front of him, before then accelerating and thereby widening his line. I do wonder if Carlos wasn’t there: Would Max have kept his nose in front of Lando at the apex and then maybe even ran wide himself like during the US GP and got away with it? Because them’s the rules? Remember: The penalty for turn 8 was because he overtook outside of track limits, not because he crowded Lando off almost causing a collision and the stewards explicitly note that he would have been entitled to racing room. And for the T12 incident at COTA they write:

Car 4 was overtaking Car 1 on the outside, but was not level with Car 1 at the apex. Therefore under the Driving Standards Guidelines, Car 4 had lost the “right” to the corner. (…) A 5 second penalty is imposed instead of the 10 second penalty recommended in the guidelines because having committed to the overtaking move on the outside the driver of Car 4 had little alternative other than to leave the track because of the proximity of Car 1 which had also left the track.

As you can see, the forcing off track is only mitigating for Lando’s lasting advantage penalty, but not in itself a breach of the rules for Max, who wasn’t investigated or even noted for it, although he was only first at the apex because he couldn’t keep it on track himself.

EDIT: Spelling

Agreed, the balance isn’t easy to find, but it’s not a law of nature either. How it has (had?) been handled though, it robs us all of great racing. If you think back to the great duels this year, they weren’t because the drivers all aggressively raced to the apex, forcing off of and risking collisions with other drivers. And then there’s the old story of: imagine if there was grass or gravel out there, I assure you, that they both would have behaved very differently.

Obviously there’s a difference between being forced off and putting yourself in a silly position where you run out of track

There’s already the notion, that when locking up for example, then you aren’t fully in control of your car anymore and at least for collisions, that assigns you blame. So one could generalize that.

Yes we’ve seen a lot of this. That’s exactly the point. These problems aren’t new and the calls for change aren’t either. In fact, Alonso warned of exactly this behavior and the problems that come with it years ago.

To the point of allowing a collision to happen, I’m reminded of a somewhat different situation of 2019, but one which should have been a slam dunk penalty: Leclerc forcing off Hamilton in the braking zone of the second chicane in Monza. The implication of the stewards’ reasoning was that because there was no contact, there wasn’t a time penalty. And there was only no contact, because Lewis took to the grass to avoid the collision. So yes, this problem has also existed for a long time and yes, inconsistent ruling makes it only worse. The fact remains though, that under the current regs, you can get away with throwing your car in somewhere and counting on the other driver to avoid a collision.

Basically waving by Sainz into T1 would tell us otherwise.

Many reasons. One major factor imho is the belief or illusion to be living in a meritocracy. Which would mean, that someone who’s rich has to have earned it and therefore criticism must stem from envy or jealousy. The same belief fuels the ideology of thinking of poor people to just be lazy leeches on society.

Never have I ever watched/read anything relating to Lord of the Rings.

To be fair, business development wasn’t the main hangup for many of the people I know. The two main reasons I heard (and partly raised myself), was firstly the detrimental effect on expanding solar- & wind-energy-production. And secondly overreaching, i.e. not limiting the protection to the environment, but also include townscape protection and historical sites, essentially further restraining residential development (including changing them into more dense usage) in a time where living space is scarce and expensive.

When the pro-side has its reservations, then of course it doesn’t help that the executive (Federal Council) is dominated by pro-corporate ideology and have brought forward arguments of “damaging the business location”. But making it out to be the only reason is just dishonest.

The mistake in T16 shouldn’t have cost him that much time. It was on the approach to T18, where OCO slowed down to let him past to almost a standstill, causing a yellow to come out and Lando backing off.

Generally yes, but I believe it is best done on a case by case (meaning type of sports, level and skillset) basis.

Generally on the recreational level, the differences between the sexes are much smaller than the differences within one sex. The best example that comes to mind is Tennis. Although it is physical in that it requires a lot of high-speed strength, which theoretically should be an advantage (on average) for young men, the skill difference between a man and another is far greater than that between an average man and an average woman. Go to a public court and you’ll see a non-ignorable amount of women outplaying men (if they even dare to play each other) and what’s even more baffling, older people beating younger people. On the absolute elite level though, they seem to almost play a totally different sport. Ball speed, running speed, ball spin and variety in spin on average are very different on the WTA compared to the ATP and therefore similar but different tactics and even technical styles are employed in the two. The difference within the Top 100 ATP or Top 100 WTA is much smaller than the average Top 100 WTA and average Top 100 ATP. So on that level, imho the segregation is merited.

As some others have already suggested, there might be better criteria to judge this separation on, like with weight class for martial arts. It is not always clear where that divider should be, though. As for tennis: Is it body weight or height? Maybe your fastest or average first serve? Maybe your fastest or average ground stroke? 30m Sprint time? Wherever you put that line might change the nature of the game played in that group and not even eliminate the de facto separation on sex or age, but in turn make it unattractive for some people to engage in a competition in the first place.

Which comes back to my initial statement of judging it case by case depending on the average difference between sexes and the difference within sexes.

edit: replaced gender with sex. Didn’t think of it because in my native language this distinction isn’t made.

It probably wasn’t that powertrain in the car for FP1. Usually the new engine makes in the car by FP3 or even quali. Even on normal weekends without a new engine, and especially later in the season, teams would run an “FP1 engine” on Friday to minimize mileage on a different engine for the more demanding circuits.

As an engineer I can attest that it is also useful for quick calculations and illustrations, especially at the concept stage. We also ran process “simulations” in it for fun, but of course something like SciLab would be better suited for it. The possibility to simultaneously work in the same spreadsheet was also a godsend during lock-downs.