So while I was on vacation I marathoned the majority of the 2007 season of F1. Holy cow. I wish F1 was that good today. The cars seemed so much quicker than today (even though they technically aren't). It was such an insane season. So good! This was the season Kimi Raikkonen came back from a substantial point deficit and won (He won the last race with from a biggish point deficit, and the only way he could win the championship was if in the last race Alonso got third or worse, and Hamilton, who was a rookie, got sixth or worse. Hamilton fucked up and Alonso couldn't keep pace with Massa, who ended up being the rear gunner for Kimi, so Kimi won by a single point), and that the huge McLaren debacle happened in. It was pretty interesting watching that whole controversy unfold. The videos I watched had all the pre-race stuff so all of the entire spying thing was there. At first it didn't seem that big, but it was crazy how quickly it escalated. The races themselves were also really really good, with 2, sometimes 3 teams (BMW Sauber was intense! Robert Kubica was amazing) all fighting against each other. There were at least a couple battles per race, and usually they were pretty good. The McLaren in-team battles were among the best, and it was easy to tell how much Alonso despised Hamilton. The whole awkwardness of "Alonso gave the FIA evidence McLaren was cheating" thing was perhaps the craziest part since he was still with the team at the time.
One of the sadder/funnier things was how ITV followed Jenson Button around as Honda was having its worst season ever. At first he was cautiously optimistic but by the end he was making references to burning the car at the end of the season. On several occasions they introduced new components that made the car worse, to the point of being undriveable according to Jenson. To put into perspective how bad Honda did that season, they barely scored any points (Rubens Barrichello was the other driver, and he didn't score a single point. It was supposedly the only season he never scored any points) and frequently finished behind Super Aguri (best F1 team name!), who were running the previous year's Honda car modded to fit the rules for 2007.
Also, if you think Sky is bad for how much they talk about Hamilton, ITV during his rookie season was about 50 times worse. For the last half of the season they had a fairly lengthy interview with Hamilton pretty much every race, and James Allen basically commentated only about Hamilton for like half of each race or more. For the last race, the entire pre-race was about what Hamilton would do when he won the championship (there were literally a few points were they talk about when he would when, not if he would win), and after Kimi won the race and championship they cut to Hamilton's car and followed him for a good part of Kimi's victory lap, before finally saying that Kimi was a worthy champion.
I also watched a bit of 2010, which, after 2007 felt like F1 running in slow motion. I did notice how much more overtaking there was (and without DRS too, this was pre-DRS but with the current car style), but at the same time, the cars seemed so much slower that it was kind of a bummer for me.
One thing I do think now for certain is that I'd like to see refueling come back. The same "gotta use both types of tires" rule we saw up until this year still applied, but most races had to be at least 2 stops because of fuel so it didn't matter much. I think fuel's a much more interesting battle than the tire battle, because it seems like nowadays drivers are getting so much better at taking care of their tires that it's not as much of a factor anymore (think Hamilton making ultra-softs last as long or longer than supersofts). One-stopping with refuelling is a huge deal, because the penalty is so much more because of how heavy the car would be compared to the others. It seemed like much more of a "Hail Mary" type strategy in many cases, whereas it's now just the best, often low risk, strategy by far if a driver is good enough with their tires. It seemed to add a lot more variance than the current tires and no refueling, and it was easy to tell that the drivers were going at the limit. Because people were driving so much harder (because they didn't have to conserve fuel and tires), there were more mistakes made, but also much more intense overtakes. The overtakes Verstappen gets heralded for were much more common since people didn't have to worry about caring for their tires nearly as much.
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