| wickstad wrote: |
The results are great for the "home team" but after thinking about it a little bit I kind of wish the Ferrari, BMW, and McClaren would've been stacked up at pit exit waiting for the green light in the order they were in. (Instead of Kimi being shunted by Hamilton).
That would've been a tremendous battle on the track.
Hey F1R. What would the protocol have been for Kubica and Kimi?
Was Kimi there first so he gets to go first?
And what about that brake dust! OMG! ;) |
I just reviewed the race, and Kubica was first out of his pit and Kimi kind of bogarted (went ahead) for a moment and then drifted back and Kubica was really first but Kimi, doing a Mark Donohue "Unfair Advantage" stopped closer to the white line at the pit out. I think Kimi also was banking on the light changing just as he hit the line so he stopped pretty hard, harder than Kubica, and I think Hamilton thought the light was going to change too and since Kimi was still moving fast he followed him and was suprised when the light didn't change and Kimi slammed his brakes on. Kubica didn't think the light was going to change so he kind of made a leisurely stop short of the white line by about a foot and a half. Kimi only stopped (about six inches from the line so he was ahead of Kubica) for about a millisecond before he was hit by Hamilton. It was like a normal rear-end crash on the street when (I've never had a crash on the street myself) when someone expects someone to go and then they stop suddenly. Kubica needs to think more about the "Unfair Advantage" as that is pushing the envelope too. Kimi was taking an AU, Hamilton wasn't thinking at all (just having his fun), but Kubica was dozing there.
This review of Mark Donohue's book "The Unfair Advantage" has a few factual errors, but is worth reading and I highly recommend the book. I've had it since it was orginally published. I always liked Donohue and when I covered the Austrian GP in 1983 and went to where he crashed (Austria 1975) to look at the scene since it was a quirk that resulted in his death. A tire deflated and he went off into a big field and hit an advertising sign support, the only thing for hundreds of yards, and the post hit him in the opening of his helmet and knocked him out. Other than that he appeared unhurt, and the next moring in the pits he collapsed when an embolism (something stuck in his brain) occurred and he died after emergency brain surgery. With the death of Peter Revson in the Shadow the year before at Kyalami, American F1 ambitions were gone essentially, other than with Mario Andretti. Even Mario's F1 team, Vel's Parnelli Jones, failed at the end of the '75 F1 season. At least I went to the '75 Dutch GP and got to see Donohue in Penske's F1 car once as well as see him trounce everyone with the 917-30 at Riverside in 1973 along with taking two of the three IROC races (the first IROC) in a Porsche Carrera, the only time IROC ever used a decent car.
http://www.amx-perience.com/AmericanMotorsForum/showthread.php?t=13
"Reviews
The Unfair Advantage
-Bill McGuire
The Unfair Advantage was originally published in 1975, a bit lost in the wake of Mark Donohue's brilliant life and its sudden, shocking end.
Donohue won several Trans-Am titles, the Indy 500 in 1972 and literally destroyed the Can-Am series in 1973 with the 917 -30 turbo Porsche, a Frankenstein's monster he personally chained and mastered. Little left to win, Donohue retired from driving, but then just as abruptly un-retired to take one more challenge: leading Penske's assault on Formula One. At Austria, just two races into the 1975 season, Donohue crashed in the morning warm-up. And he was gone, just like that. Donohue's fans - everyone was a Donohue fan - were left only with their memories, and the book. They weren't enough.
Co-written with Paul Van Valkenburgh, Donohue's book was unique, and still is. It was a racing autobiography but it wasn't constructed around his life-even in his own memoir, Donohue shyly stood just outside the spotlight. The book was instead broken down into chapters devoted to his cars and the challenges in developing them: Trans-Am Camaro, McLaren M16, and so on.
So The Unfair Advantage was ostensibly a how-to book about race car preparation. At that level it was a gem, revealing how production autos and raw English kit cars became winning Penske racers. But the book's real insights were its ground level glimpses into what the racing was really like-the scene, the people, the politics-and most of all, into Donohue himself. The cars were merely his frame of reference in telling, frankly and intimately, one of the great stories in American motorsports, in one of its golden times. After his death, The Unfair Advantage disappeared from the bookstores and eventually became a collector's item, with copies selling for hundreds of dollars.
If Donohue didn't quite tell all, he told a lot. The title came from a term coined by Leon Mandel. The alleged "unfair advantage" Mark Donohue and Roger Penske brought to the track: two-story fueling rigs, brake calipers that virtually changed their own pads, any clever gimmick that gave them an edge. If they weren't exactly cheating by the letter of the rules, they were taking liberties with an unwritten code of sporting conduct. To hear some racers tell it, Penske Racing didn't play fair.
Fact is, everyone "cheated." What other teams really resented is how in every way Penske and Donohue refused to play on a level field. They refused to run the same okay equipment as everyone else and simply hope it worked. They refused to show up late, and they refused to knock off early. They refused to approach racing as a fun game played with other people's money. In fact, they refused to race with anything less than the maximum professionalism they could muster. By refusing to play fair this way, Penske Racing and Mark Donohue made life tough for everybody.
Racing technology was then the blackest of arts, with no public lore. Carroll Smith once observed that half the racers didn't want to reveal their secrets; the other half, their ignorance. Few experts were forthcoming, in either sense of the word. In The Unfair Advantage, Donohue admitted with easy, becoming openness how little he knew going in. He simply applied to racing his natural antipathy for pat answers, with great diligence. Much of the book's appeal is in simply watching the superb gearwork turning in Donohue's mind, as he sets to work identifying and solving problems.
Because his cars were so often and obviously better, the image we have now is of a talented engineer who happened to be a decent race driver.We probably have that all backward. Donohue's engineering degree from Brown equipped him basically with a handful of textbook formulas that never quite applied, and for Donohue the engineer, the learning curve was a rocky slope. But the record shows that Donohue the driver was fast from the start, quickly picking up a ride in the Ford GT program. Donohue lived in denial of his own superior abilities. It pushed him to develop superior race cars, which he then drove with extreme intelligence and nearly without error. That was Donohue's personal advantage, and to drivers of even roughly comparable skills, the results must: have seemed brutally unfair.
Donohue's sons, Michael and David, have now arranged another printing of the classic book. The new edition includes a section of color photographs, along with perceptive recollections from Donohue's contemporaries, edited by AutoWeek senior contributing editor Pete Lyons. Here is the opportunity to revisit a charmed period in American racing, and one of its most special personalities.
-Bill McGuire
The Unfair Advantage; (new edition)
Mark Donohue withPaul Van Valkenburgh Softbound, 325 pages Bentley Publishers (800) 423-4595
www.bentleypublishers.com $24.95
-----------------------------------
Read more about Mark Donohue by going to his tribute page within this site at:
http://www.amx-perience.com/MarkDonohue.htm
Info on the 1970 Mark Donohue Signature Edition Javelin is here:
http://www.amx-perience.com/1970MarkDonohueJavelin.htm
Extensive coverage of the 1968-72 Trans-Am Racing seasons. Read about Javelin's trials and triumphs in T/A racing. Special thanks to Ted Roberts, AMC Independent Trans-Am Driver of Javelin #55 in 1969, 1970, 1971, for his help in obtaining information for the Trans-Am portion of this website.
http://www.amx-perience.com/Trans-AmRacing.htm"
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