Hello

Hello,

 

I have posted a couple of questions to the builders corner thread and have received wonderful answers to my questions.  I just now realized that this thread is here for introductions so I thought I should probably do that.

I'm 27 years old and used to mess around with model cars when I was an early teen but never had the patience to get the cars to look very good.  A lot of the time I wouldn't bother painting them and would try to glue them together as fast as I could.  About 2 months ago I was walking through Michael's and came across a small model car section and I decided to buy a model.  Since then I can't get enough of reading about and building model cars.  The first car I built was a Ferrari and I built it in 5 days when I took a week off from work.  The second car I built was a 69 Camaro Z28 and I spent 3 weeks on it and the difference between my first car and second was astounding.  I am currently working on two separate cars, one is a '86 Monte Carlo and the other is a '64 Bel Air.  

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading through a lot of the threads on this site and recently purchased a subscription to the magazine.  

I look forward to working on my craft and gaining priceless tips and tricks from everyone on this forum.

 

Anthony

Source: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/thread/1021107.aspx

Jimmy Bryan Clemar Bucci Ronnie Bucknum Ivor Bueb Sebastien Buemi

Vettel collision: A champion under pressure?

Sebastian Vettel's behaviour during and after the Malaysian Grand Prix has been causing a bit of a fuss in Germany over the past few days.

The media have lapped up his response to his collision with backmarker Narain Karthikeyan, in much the same way as their British counterparts would have done with a similar incident involving Lewis Hamilton, and Vettel has come in for a fair bit of criticism.

On the BBC after the race, Vettel called Karthikeyan an "idiot" for his role in the collision that cost the world champion fourth place.

Speaking in German, the word he chose was "cucumber" - a common insult in that country for bad drivers on the road.

Sebastian Vettel at the Malaysian Grand Prix

Vettel faces increased competition from outside and inside his Red Bull Team. Photo: Getty/AFP

It has also been pointed out that shots from Vettel's onboard camera appear to show the 24-year-old Red Bull driver giving Karthikeyan a middle-finger salute as he drives past. This has led some to call for him to be punished by governing body the FIA, which so far is keeping a low profile on the matter.

Comparisons have been drawn with McLaren's Jenson Button - who also failed to score any points in Malaysia, but who reacted with his usual calm.

Vettel, some in Germany have said, doesn't know how to lose.

They point out that last year he won 11 races on his way to one of the most dominant championship victories in Formula 1 history. Failing to win four races in a row in that context, the critics say, should not elicit this kind of reaction.

Vettel has not spoken in public since leaving Malaysia, and Red Bull are shrugging it off.

After the race on Sunday, team principal Christian Horner defended Vettel's driving in the collision with Karthikeyan, saying that it was the Indian's "responsibility to get out of the way of the leaders as he is a lapped car".

Although the stewards penalised Karthikeyan for the incident, others are not sure it's quite so clear-cut.

One leading F1 figure told me: "It was completely Vettel's fault - he needed to give Karthikeyan more space. He only had to clear the last inch and he cut across the front of him. He was showing a bit of frustration and it bit him."

Certainly Vettel has found himself at the start of 2012 in a situation with which he is not familiar.

Vettel has had the fastest car in F1 since at least the middle of 2009, and he has used it to good effect.

But now things are different. Red Bull's new car is not a match for the McLaren, and it has also been behind one Mercedes and one Lotus on the grid in each of the first two races.

For a man who is as driven to win - to dominate even - as Vettel is, that will not be a comfortable situation.

Nor will it have escaped his attention that team-mate Mark Webber has so far out-qualified him in both races this year - again, quite a turnaround from 2011, when the Australian managed it only three times in 19 grands prix.

It is early days, but so far the comparison between the two Red Bull drivers looks much more like it was in the first part of 2010 - before the team started fully exploiting the exhaust-blown diffusers that dominated the last 18 months and which have been banned for this season.

Webber was never that comfortable in last season's Red Bull - and while he came to match Vettel on race pace in the second half of last season, he never really got on terms with him in qualifying.

Much of that was to do with the behaviour of the car on corner entry, where the exhaust-blown diffusers were so powerful in increasing performance.

Red Bull's decline has also coincided with the stiffening of the front-wing load test, an attempt to stop teams allowing the ends of the wing to droop towards the track at speed to increase downforce. Red Bull were noticeably better at doing this than the other teams.

It may be an unrelated coincidence, but this year's Red Bull suffers from understeer, a lack of front-end grip - a handling characteristic Webber is comfortable with, while Vettel prefers oversteer.

This is not the first time Vettel has been criticised for letting his emotion get the better of him when things are not going his way.

There was the infamous 'nutter' sign he directed at Webber following their collision in the 2010 Turkish Grand Prix.

There were also mistakes in Britain, Belgium and Singapore that year as he very nearly gifted the world title to Ferrari and Fernando Alonso, who lost it only after a strategic error in the final race.

Such was Vettel's domination in 2011 that it never arose- leading some to say he had reached a new level of maturity both in and out of the car.

The truth of that claim looks set to be tested this year, as Red Bull and Vettel struggle to regain a position that the driver at least seems to consider is rightfully his.

Meanwhile, his rivals will have been watching with interest.

Webber, Alonso, Button and Hamilton remember Vettel's behaviour in 2010 all too well.

Betraying his emotions in such an obvious way will be seen by them as a weakness - they will look at it and think he is rattled.

So it is true to say on the one hand that Vettel's reaction proves he is a winner.

But it is also the case that learning how to lose gracefully - as Button and Alonso, particularly, have learnt in recent years - has its benefits as well.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/03/vettel_collision_a_champion_un.html

Bob Christie Johnny Claes David Clapham Jim ClarkÜ Kevin Cogan

How Webber turned tables on Vettel

The madcap conclusion to the Chinese Grand Prix, with 12 cars battling nose to tail for second place behind winner Nico Rosberg, was packed with some of the best racing Formula 1 could ever produce.

But among the wheel-to-wheel battles and overtaking moves, one incident stood out more than most.

With 20 laps to go, Mark Webber's Red Bull ran a little wide on the 170mph exit of Turn 13, caught the edge of the kerb, and its nose reared up into the air.

The car looked briefly as if it might take off - as Webber did in the 2010 European Grand Prix, when his car landed upside down before skidding into the barriers, without injury to its driver. He also suffered two similar accidents at Le Mans in 1999.

But then the nose crashed down on to the track. "It's always a worrying moment when it gets a lot of air under it like that," said team boss Christian Horner. "He's used to that. I should think he was on the brakes."

He wasn't, as it turns out. Webber told me a "little lift" of the accelerator was enough to bring the car back down again.

For those watching, it was a heart-stopping moment. But Webber obviously did not dwell on it long - in the very next sector of the lap, he set his fastest time of the race so far.

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Shanghai was another impressive weekend from Webber, notwithstanding a couple of errors that probably cost him a podium finish.

He spent last year in the shadow of team-mate Sebastian Vettel as the German cantered to a second world title. While Vettel took 11 victories, Webber won once in Brazil - and then only when Vettel's car hit gearbox trouble.

This year is a different story. Not only have Red Bull slipped back into the pack, but Webber has so far had the edge on Vettel.

The qualifying score is three-nil in Webber's favour and the final overtaking move in those frantic concluding laps in China was Webber separating his team-mate from fourth place between the penultimate and final corners of the last lap.

It was the climactic moment of a fascinating weekend at Red Bull, whose drivers were in cars of two different specifications.

Vettel has never been happy with the handling of the RB8 in the upgraded trim that was introduced at the final pre-season test. And for China he reverted to the specification in which the car was launched, while Webber stuck with the newer one.

According to chief technical officer Adrian Newey, incidentally, the car was in exactly its initial configuration - not, as we reported over the weekend, with slightly longer exhaust pipes.

The two designs have a different aerodynamic philosophy.

The older one uses the exhausts to improve the airflow through the "coke-bottle" area at the rear of the car. The newer one aims to direct the gases at the area where the floor meets the rear tyre, to "seal" the diffuser.

Both improve downforce, but to different degrees, in different ways and with different effects.

"There were some characteristics about the upgraded car that weren't particularly suited to (Vettel's) style of driving, which is to carry a lot of speed into the corner," said Horner.

Vettel qualified only 11th, but said afterwards that he "felt happier with the car than (in) previous races". But the decision to put him back into the older-spec car in China was not, Newey said in an exclusive interview after the race, at the driver's request.

The newer car had shown "a few characteristics that haven't worked as intended," Newey explained, "so we simply brought the old bodywork for Seb this weekend to get some more data, as a direct comparison."

It was a test session, basically, and Vettel was chosen to run the older-spec car because he preferred its handling.

"We could have then put both cars to the latest spec, the spec that Mark raced, on Friday evening," Newey said. "But we felt that would be more disruptive than simply continuing. And we'd have probably burnt a (mandatory FIA working hours) curfew in the process. But both cars will be back to the new spec in Bahrain."

Newey clearly believes the newer car is faster, but he says it's "difficult to say" by how much.

I pressed him, asking if he thought the difference in performance between the two cars was in the region of the 0.331 seconds by which Webber was faster than Vettel in second qualifying, which Vettel did not progress beyond.

Newey said: "Mark seems to have taken to this car more easily than Seb at the moment, but that's simply the reverse of what happened last year."

Indeed it is. But why?

Engineers in rivals teams say Red Bull have been hurt more than any other team by the banning of exhaust-blown diffusers this year because they were exploiting the technology, which pumped exhaust gases along the floor of the car even when the driver was off the throttle, far more effectively than anyone else.

Red Bull pioneered it. If you got it right, and combined it effectively with the overall design of the car, it could gain you something in the region of a second a lap. But it was difficult to master the aerodynamic effects and most teams never did.

This year, the teams are still trying to exploit exhausts gases in a similar way, to hold on to some of the downforce-boosting effect. But the regulations now define an area within which the exhaust exits must be, engine mapping is restricted, and the gains are reduced to about 10% of what was available in 2011.

Webber never really got on with the way the Red Bull behaved last year.

But this year the cars are handling in a more conventional fashion, and he is back to where he was in 2010, when he and Vettel were evenly matched and Webber led the championship for much of the year.

The Red Bull drivers' Chinese GP results match their championship positions. Webber is fourth on 36 points, eight ahead of Vettel and nine behind leader Lewis Hamilton.

Whether Red Bull can improve their car enough to fight consistently for victories - and therefore the title - remains to be seen. But they are too good a team, led by too brilliant a designer, to stay down for long.

And the battle between their drivers adds a delicious extra dimension to their fightback.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/04/how_webber_turned_tables_on_ve.html

Johnny Cecotto Andrea de Cesaris Francois Cevert Eugene Chaboud Jay Chamberlain