Formula 1 2012 effectively starts now. The first race is not until 18 March, but by the end of this week the world will have seen two of the cars expected to be competing at the front - and one of them will have had its first run on the track.
The McLaren breaks cover first, with a launch at the team’s base in Woking, Surrey, before Ferrari reveal their new challenger in Maranello on Friday.
Ferrari plan, weather permitting, to run the car briefly at their Fiorano test track on Saturday ahead of the start of pre-season testing in Jerez, Spain, on 7 February.
On Sunday, the new Lotus (formerly Renault) will be unveiled on the internet – and F1 designers and engineers across Europe will be losing sleep about what they will see when the new Red Bull breaks cover in the same fashion on Monday.
Ferrari Formula One team and drivers including Fernando Alonso (right) of Spain and Felipe Massa of Brazil (left) take part in a winter training session in Lanzarote, Spain. Photo: Getty
These new cars will be pored over for hints of the key themes of the new season – and it will not just be to do with the cars.
At McLaren on Wednesday, the issue of Lewis Hamilton’s mindset will inevitably be raised after his wildly up-and-down season last year – indeed team principal Martin Whitmarsh has already delivered a robust, if familiar-sounding, defence of his driver in an interview last week.
Hamilton has kept a low profile over the winter, training in the US, and whether he can find the mental equilibrium to consistently access his very best form is already one of the talking points of 2012.
At Red Bull, Mark Webber says he has “had a good winter, recharging my batteries, and now I can’t wait to get going again”.
But can the Australian rediscover the form he showed in his title bid in 2010 and challenge team-mate and world champion Sebastian Vettel more strongly than he did last year?
Just as importantly, will Webber stay on at the team for 2013, or will he make way for either Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne, the Red Bull juniors going head-to-head at Toro Rosso, to prove they deserve a chance in the senior team?
Over at Mercedes, the pressure is on to start winning after two lacklustre seasons, while another question is whether Michael Schumacher will decide he wants to stay on beyond the end of his contract into 2013 - and will the team want him to?
Schumacher is so clearly a shadow of his former greatness and has only just begun to get on terms with team-mate Nico Rosberg, and even then only in races.
Already ex-F1 driver Gerhard Berger has said he cannot see his former rival continuing.
"I do not think he will extend his contract,” the Austrian told Auto Motor und Sport.
“He will be tired. I have to admit he drove better in 2011 than in 2010, especially in the second half of the season, and I can imagine he can improve even on that but still he has no chance against Rosberg.
“Schumacher will have to admit that, with an age over 40, it’s impossible to beat a young driver on the level of Rosberg.”
Ferrari, too, find themselves with serious questions hanging over the future of one driver – Felipe Massa – and a need to raise their game after a single win in 2011.
A lot hangs on the new car – and the early evidence is they have lived up to their promise to push the boat out in terms of aggressive design.
The veteran Italian technical journalist Giorgio Piola has produced one of his famous drawings based on leaked details of the new Ferrari.
Italian journalist Giorgio Piola has attempted to draw an image of Ferrari's 2012 Formula One car. Photo: Getty
“If the pictures are accurate,” BBC F1’s technical analyst Gary Anderson says, “Ferrari seem to have gone a different route by shortening the sidepods and having the crash structure (beside the driver) separate and in front of the sidepod.
“They’re trying to remove the blockage the sidepods create to the airflow coming off the front of the car.
“It’s a total concept thing – in that it is integral to the whole car design. So if it works, they’ve got one up on everyone else.”
It’s clear already, in fact, that the look of the new cars will attract even more attention than usual – and that’s because, as Anderson puts it, “the first thing that will stand out will be the ugly noses”.
These are the result of new rules that dictate lower noses to improve safety, but keep the height of the front bulkhead – the front of the chassis – the same.
A glimpse of these has already been seen on the new Caterham (formerly Lotus) – which features a kind of platypus look, with a long rectangular nose, ahead of an ugly lump on the chassis around the area of the front suspension.
The other major talking point will be how teams deal with the banning of last year’s must-have technology, exhaust-blown diffusers, where downforce was increased by blowing the exhausts along the rear floor of the car even when the driver was not pressing the accelerator.
Governing body the FIA has attempted to end this by stipulating that the exhausts must exit on top of the rear bodywork, well in front of the rear wheels, as well as heavily restricting ‘exotic’ engine maps.
But already there is talk of teams directing exhausts at the rear wing – either upper or lower – to try to increase downforce there.
“The exhaust acts like a compressor,” says Anderson. “It moves the air quite effectively, increasing the air speed, and that gives more downforce. The return will be small, but that’s always the case because the regs are so tight.”
This being F1, there is plenty to talk about – and that’s without touching on the politics, which will be intense as teams, the FIA and commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone negotiate a new Concorde Agreement, the contract that ties them all to F1 and which expires this year.
As ever there is a lot going on – and, as always, you can bet something else will emerge to surprise everyone, too.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/01/formula_one_gets_ready_for_ano.html
Tony Brooks Alan Brown Walt Brown Warwick Brown Adolf Brudes
In Monaco before Christmas, Formula 1's governing body held a meeting to discuss one of the key and most controversial aspects of 2011 - the Drag Reduction System or DRS.
Introduced amid much controversy and no small amount of trepidation in some quarters, questions about the validity of the overtaking aid, not to mention the wisdom of employing it, decreased during the season. So much so that, at the Monaco meeting, it was decided that only small refinements needed to be made to its use for the 2012 campaign.
But while the FIA and the teams all agree that DRS has played a valuable role in improving F1 as a spectacle, they are determined to ensure it performs in the way intended. In particular, no-one wants to cheapen one of the central aspects of a driver's skill by making overtaking too easy.

Sebastian Vettel enters the DRS zone at the Spanish Grand Prix. Photo: Getty
To recap briefly, DRS was introduced in an attempt to solve the perennial problem of there being too little overtaking. After years - decades even - of discussions, F1's technical brains hit on what they thought could be a solution: DRS.
DRS does what it says on the tin. When deployed, the top part of the rear wing moves upwards, reducing drag and giving a boost in straight-line speed. In races, drivers could use it only if they were within a second of the car in front at a "detection point" shortly before the "DRS zone". The DRS zone was where DRS could be deployed, which was usually the track's longest straight.
The idea was to make overtaking possible but not too easy.
There is no doubt that racing improved immeasurably as a spectacle in 2011 compared with previous seasons. But how big a role did DRS play? And did overtaking become too easy at some tracks and remain too hard at others?
It is a more complex issue than it at first appears because it is not always easy to tell from the outside whether an overtaking move was a result of DRS or not.
In Turkey and Belgium, for example, several drivers sailed past rivals in the DRS zone long before the end of it, leading many to think the device had made overtaking too easy.
But, armed with statistics, FIA race director Charlie Whiting says appearances were deceptive. What was making overtaking easy at those two races, he said, was the speed advantage of the car behind as the two cars battling for position came off the corner before the DRS zone.
Whiting showed me a spreadsheet detailing the speeds of the respective cars in all the overtaking manoeuvres that happened in the Belgian GP.
"This shows very clearly that when the speed delta [difference] between the two cars at the beginning of the zone is low, then overtaking is not easy," he said. "But if one car goes through Eau Rouge that bit quicker, sometimes you had a speed delta of 18km/h (11mph). Well, that's going to be an overtake whether you've got DRS or not."
According to Whiting, the statistics show that if the two cars come off the corner into the DRS zone at similar speeds, then the driver behind needs to be far closer than the one-second margin that activates the DRS if he is to overtake.
"One second is the activation but that won't do it for you," Whiting said. "You've got to be 0.4secs behind to get alongside into the braking zone."
Confusing the picture in 2011 - particularly early in the season - was the fast-wearing nature of the new Pirelli tyres, which led to huge grip differences between cars at various points of the races. A driver on fresher tyres would come off a corner much faster and brake that much later for the next one. That would have a far greater impact on the ease of an overtaking move than DRS ever would.
Critics of DRS might argue that while it may be useful at tracks where overtaking has traditionally been difficult, like Melbourne, Valencia and Barcelona, for example, it is debatable whether there is a need for it at circuits where historically there has been good racing, like Turkey, Belgium and Brazil.
According to Whiting, DRS does not diminish the value of an overtaking move at tracks where it is usually easy to pass. It just means that DRS opens up the possibility for more. In other words, it works just as it does at any other track.
McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe is an influential member of the Technical Working Group of leading engineers which came up with DRS. He said people had been arguing for years that engineers should alter the fundamental design of cars to facilitate overtaking.
However, tinkering with aerodynamic design was never going to be a solution, according to Lowe, because F1 cars will always need downforce to produce such high performance, and that means overtaking will always, by the cars' nature, be difficult.
"What's great [about DRS is] at least we can move on from this debate of trying to change the aerodynamic characteristics of cars to try to improve overtaking," added Lowe.
"We've found something much more authoritative, much cheaper, easier and more effective, and adjustable from race to race."
Whiting thinks DRS worked as expected everywhere except Melbourne and Valencia.

Valencia's DRS zone could be extended for 2012. Photo: Getty
So for next season's opening race in Australia, he is considering adding a second DRS zone after the first chicane, so drivers who have used DRS to draw close to rivals along the pit straight can have another crack at overtaking straight afterwards. As for Valencia, traditionally the least entertaining race of the year, the FIA will simply make the zone, which is located on the run to Turn 12, longer.
There is potentially one big negative about DRS, though.
There is a risk that its introduction could mean the end of races in which a driver uses his skills to hold off a rival in a faster car. Some of the greatest defensive victories of the modern age have been achieved in this way. One thinks of Gilles Villeneuve holding off a train of four cars in his powerful but poor-handling Ferrari to win in Jarama in 1981, or Fernando Alonso fending off Michael Schumacher's faster Ferrari at Imola in 2005.
The idea behind the introduction of DRS was for a much faster car to be able to overtake relatively easily but for passing still to be difficult between two cars of comparative performance. In theory, if that philosophy is adhered to rigidly, the sorts of races mentioned above will still be possible.
However, once an aid has been introduced that gives the driver behind a straight-line speed advantage that is an incredibly difficult line to walk, as Whiting himself admits. "You've got to take the rough with the smooth to a certain extent," he said.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/12/drs.html
George Abecassis Kenny Acheson Andrea de Adamich Philippe Adams Walt Ader
I allready got cracking on it and built the nice, but rather flimsy cardbord diorama. I'll be starting a WIP topic on the '37 soon and i'll put the diner on at the end when she's all finished. I also got old '90s mopar magazines and won a American Grafitti '58 Impala 'Vert diecast kit from our raffle (not shown in pics). The 'Impy I gave to my friend who i'm trying to get in to building; him and I are going build and paint it as i'm showing him the basics of modeling when he's ready.Source: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/thread/908812.aspx
Paolo Barilla Rubens Barrichello Michael Bartels Edgar Barth Giorgio Bassi
I'm about half way through this model but thought I'd post some progress pics anyway. This is my first progress thread! This is also my first model I will finish on my new workbench: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/p/106682/995822.aspx#995822
I'm building my Chevelle as the fastest street car around town in the early 70s. Someone bought a new ultra rare 66 L78 and tranformed it over the years into this monster:

1/1 parts come in handy too, thats my lug nut covers from my Corvette holding the back end up for the mockup!


rare L88 corvette 427 with tunnel ram, I tried to build the most radical 427 chevy motor I could think of that would still idle and go on the street. I could of built a ZL1 but those were not very reliable and very unreliable when built up plus the iron block on a l88 is probably stronger...


Chssis mockup, I'm going to strip the chrome...

i traded the original kit headers a long time ago but found the same ones at a model show. Whoever painted these didn't do a very good job, the paint they used is very thick and nothing will take it off so I plan on building a set exactly like these out of solder.

The interior is finished, I didn't put a tach in because good street racers know their car and know when to shift! I don't know why the seatbelts showed up blue in the picture, they are diffenatly black. I used the steering wheel from revells amazing 69 Corvette model kit and cut out the area inbetween the spokes like the 1/1 steering wheel. I painted the rim with stripes of flat black than painted the rim with mixed thinned red and brown paint to achieve the look of a rosewood rim on a 1/1 corvette wheel. I used an old high E string from my electric guitar for the chrome trim in the dash. I sanded out the radio and shaped a piece of styrene for the block off plate. Extra weight thats not needed, Radio Deleted!

For the shifter I used a piece of solder. I bent it at the right angle than flatened it out with needle nose pliers leaving the top round so I could slid the shift knob on the rod. for the shift knob I used a bead from a necklace. I simply glued the bead on the rod and than painted it gloss white. I used a drob of white paint to fill the hole at the top and let gravity shap the bead into a perfect ball. I found this alot easier than using the needles with a ball at the end and it also looks much more realistic. I couldnt find a shift boot in the right shape so I made one out of styrene. I just cut 4 rectangles that got smaller each time I cut one and glued them together with even smaller rectangles inbetween to space it out.

I sanded the molded in door panal detail and built a arm rest out of styrene. I replicated the plain door panels off of the base model chevelle. I wanted it to look like someone replaced the deluxe panels that were part of the SS package with the plain ones. I used model car garages amazing 1966 chevelle photoetch set for the window cranks and door levers.

Source: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/thread/995816.aspx
Kurt Adolff Fred Agabashian Kurt Ahrens Jr Christijan Albers Michele Alboreto