Also, few phones produce good raw files which are essential for archiving. I can get better results from 15-year-old raw images shot with an EOS 30D than I get out of my flagship smartphone.
A budget cap is one solution to keep design regulations to a minimum and ensure that smaller teams can compete. F1 introduced a $145 million budget cap for the 2021 season, going down to $135 million for 2023-25 seasons. Right now the three biggest teams (MB, Ferrari, Red Bull) spend somewhere around half a billion or so per season.
But that’s not a solution for balancing the concerns of the two competitions. The new regs are going to bring F1 closer to being a spec series than it’s ever been before.
The budget cap is just a little over the current Haas budget. Personally I don’t find the prospect of watching a race with 10 Haas level teams in it to be a particularly compelling idea. I’m also not that excited about the idea of constructor innovation being limited to what you can achieve with a Haas budget.
The budget cap is probably the bluntest tool available for addressing constructor performance balancing. For example, the current chassis rules make aero incredibly complex to design (which is expensive), and makes close racing impossible (because of all the dirty air). They would have been better off simplifying those rules (and maybe bringing back ground effect). Look at how well Racing Point performed last weekend, they nearly got a podium. The only significant change they made was copying the Mercedes 2019 aero kit.
I would be very surprised if Haas is spending anywhere close to the incoming budget cap. They arguably have the smallest expenditure thanks to the Ferrari parts deal and contracting the chassis out to Dallara. Of the current teams, I think only Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mclaren (by a much smaller margin) are spending above the incoming cap.
Sealed ground effect will probably not return to F1, not for performance reasons but safety. Introducing the seal greatly increases downforce but once it is broken, the dropoff is incredible. Maintaining that would be nearly impossible with surface imperfections and debris on the track.
The Haas budget for last year was ~ $170 million, not all of that goes to capped expenses, but after you account for that it puts them just under the new cap (Williams, Toro Rosso and Alfa Romeo all spend less than Haas). Renault, McLaren (about $270 million each) and Racing Point (about $190 million) are all above it. There are also 0 teams currently under the cap who make their own engines (Renault is the lowest budget non-customer team). So in terms of budget the current cap really does push everybody down to about the same level as Haas.
Regarding ground effect, the new 2021 regs have already brought it back. They’ve simplified the wing designs, and moved a lot of the downforce to ground effect. It’s not the same level of ground effect that F1 had in the 70s/80s, it’s more like the current IndyCar ground effect design. But the result from a following car perspective is the same. Moving the downforce from wake generating bodywork to under the chassis. However the overall effect is less downforce and therefore slower cars on circuit.
Those numbers are pretty generous, I would beg to differ on at least some of them. [1][2][3]
My mistake when you mentioned ground effect, I thought you meant sealed (skirts and fans). The ground effect you mean is already a thing in present F1 thanks to diffusers. The new rules have just made the diffuser bigger and simplified the front and rear wings.
The budget cap was revised down after Covid hit (down to $145 million from $175 million), to stop the midfield from going broke, and Ross Brawn says they’re going to lower it further in the coming years [0].
You can’t figure out exactly what teams that’s going to hit, because publicly available finances don’t have enough detail. But it’s either going to bring spending more or less in line with Haas or Racing Point, who are both pretty close in terms of spending anyway. The reason McLaren (a relatively big spending team) are so publicly in favour of it is that they’ve had some pretty serious financial trouble going on recently.
I'd go with something more radical: a 2x5 meters max box, 100 kg of gas for the 300 km race, 600 kg minimum weight, 50 million budget maybe including the drivers (there is a very long line of them) and maybe a max downforce test if it can be made hard to cheat. Then let the teams do whatever they want.
Somebody will optimize for the engine, somebody for the aerodynamics, somebody for the suspensions, somebody for the tires (buy them from whoever they want) etc. I guess very few will spend much on the driver.
At the beginning they'll be slower than the current cars (which are only marginally faster than the v10s of 2004) but year after year they'll improve new areas of the design and get fast again. I expect a lot of technical drama and very different solutions. It's going to be back to the 70x and 80s with today's technology and processes.
It could definitely be managed better, to optimize for what they seem to be trying to (sport + performance).
Budget caps seems like a cop-out though, as eventually the budgetary rules inherit all the complexity in the current technical rules.
I think some kind of FRAND forced tech licensing / transfer + shared manufacturing would be an interesting solution. Whereby a hyper-optimized solution by a leading team can be licenses (or is outright open sourced) for the next season. And similarly, where all builders have access to a neutral manufacturing facility (a la TSMC).
This reminded me of Finnish folk racing Jokamiesluokka[1], where the owner of the car has to entertain offers for the car after a race and must sell the car if there's a willing buyer. This is to keep the cost of cars down.
This is similarly done in American short-track racing as well with the “engine claim” system - I’ve normally heard of it on dirt but I wouldn’t be surprised if asphalt series do it to.
Below is just one example of how these rules can be structured.
Customer teams get exactly the same engine that the works team uses. The reason they don’t perform as well is that they still have to design the rest of their car (which includes a lot of performance impacting design), and they also may have to modify the engine to fit it in their chassis.
This and the difference in resources. Only Red Bull managed to systematically outperform the factory team of their engine (Renault.) McLaren is more on an even ground with them but still a little bit better. Renault is not pouring much money in their car.
And people who like to think about possible unfairness could argue that manufacturers build about 100 engines per season, test them, then pick the ones to keep, the ones to give to customers and the ones that turned out not to be good enough for racing. It's hard to get the very best engine if you are only a customer and you're really competing against the manufacturer and not only an appearance.
Also, a good driver might not be a good team member which might put them in a disadvantage. Räikkönen was considered one of if not the fastest on the grid during his best years but iirc wasn't very good as a team member in the car's development phase which hampered his and his car's performance
You can put whatever driver you name in a Mercedes from 2014 until today, and he will end at least in second place in the championship. I cannot imagine a single driver, not even Maldonado, that would end worst than 2nd except due to incredible bad luck with the car reliability.
Verstappen is an incredible good driver that probably deserves to win multi-championships. But as it is now, Bottas is closer to that achievement than him.
One of the advantages of a legged machine is its smaller footprint on the often very vulnerable (at least in boreal forests) forest floor. Wheels and tracks tear and dig into the soil and cause a lot of damage that can take years to heal.
I would say Finland has a moderately strong horse culture. Harness racing [1] events remain popular, and using horses in low-impact landscaping and forestry has seen some resurgence [2]. Finland also has its own breed of horses, the Finnhorse [3].
As far as I know California is already short on water. Would a sprinkler in every house system be sustainable or even possible in such conditions that everything burns?
You would have to have a pressurized water storage tank at each house. It would be quite expensive and have a lot of maintenance for how rare the usage would actually be.
Taxis aren’t that expensive in Finland compared to other Nordic countries or countries with similar living costs as Finland.
Swedish taxis are unregulated and there fares have risen faster than in Finland.
And Uber as a ride hailing service was perfectly legal in Finland. The issue was they were hiring drivers that didn’t have taxi permits (and didn’t pay taxes).
C'mon. Getting a taxi permit in Finland requires taking a bunch of mandatory courses on highly Uber-relevant topics like "how to use your taxi meter" (185 EUR) and "local navigation without a GPS" (260 EUR), then passing an exam with questions like "from memory, name all roads between random location X and random location Y", meaning you're looking at a bare minimum of 700 EUR and several weeks of full-time study to get licensed: https://taksikoulu.net/kurssit/#hinnasto
And Uber was way (as in, 30-50%) cheaper than taxis while it operated in Helsinki.
Uber is cheaper because Uber's investors subsidize each ride. Don't let this fool you. Uber will get a lot more expensive when those investors want to see returns.
Uber's prices will remain competitive so long as there is healthy competition. If Uber is able to establish a quasi-monopoly in a particular market, then prices will rise.
You’re confusing taxi driver’s permit (which requires exams, not courses) with a taxi licence/permit. Uber drivers didn’t have either and the latter is where the law is very strict. Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often, meaning the costs of a legitimate taxi business are much higher than unlicensed Uber drivers.
> Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often
I have yet to visit a city where these inspections and insurance premiums seem a reasonable cost-benefit trade-off for the median rider. The long-term competition from ridesharing, and lack of prevalent organized rider (versus driver) opposition to it, corroborates that observation.
Such permitting is a crony capitalist scheme to protect the existing taxi drivers at the cost of those wishing to enter into or compete with the industry.
See also cosmetology licenses in many states in the US, which are just dumbest thing.
If the pricing of taxis is correlated with local purchasing power, taxis are almost (#2 or #3) most expensive in the world in Finland.
It doesn't matter if the prices increase or decrease. The price will get adjusted according to the market needs IF there are no other regulations or interferences. If the prices increase, it means that there are other regulations or restrictions in place which are not publicly known or people don't have a need for taxis in Sweden. The former assumption is probably correct one in this case.
Outside of North Europe in countries with similar living costs as Finland taxis are still much cheaper like Israel or Japan even though their taxi markets are also regulated.
Also in Finland car purchases for taxi drivers used to be subsidised with tax money resulting in most of the taxi cars being expensive luxury cars like Mercedes', Teslas etc. Nothing wrong with luxury cars, but most people just wanna get from A to B and not pay fortune for it.
Interesting, I live in Espoo, and usually, I'm hesitant in taking a taxi from Helsinki city center. 20 min ride (17km) costs me on average 45-50 euro. I don't think this is cheap.
It might not be cheap, but it isn't more expensive than in other comparable countries. I've lived in Brussels where it's cheaper to ride a short distance, but as the distance increases the fare is comparable or bigger because the fare/km is higher than in Finland where the pick up fee is higher.
(Finland: pick up 5,90€ + 1,6€/km/1-2 people vs. Brussels 2,40€ + 1,8€/km/1person or 2,70€/km/2 people).
There is no mystery why taxis are expensive in Sweden. Deregulation legalizes price gouging, meaning few people will ride independent taxis or look a new companies. That doesn't just limit competition, but also puts more taxis on the road in relation to riders. Meaning higher costs.
In a regulated market you just, in theory, take the closest taxi because you have no choice. But if there are five companies covering the same area, each company is going to have less coverage or need more cars. Each company is going to have to drive longer to pick up passengers. One company might have no cars available and passengers waiting, while another company has empty cars doing nothing. All in all there is less utilization of cars. I am not sure how big the effect would be though.
That is ridiculous. That's like saying that the food market is more expensive because you can have multiple vendors of food in one area, so it somehow promotes price gouging. I personally like having differentiated choices of food rather than going to the state sanctioned store close to your house because they all have the same things anyways.
> All in all there is less utilization of cars.
Sure. Because there is competition for supermarkets, more food gets wasted. You did not respond in defense of your other point that somehow this would magically raise prices because ???
The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.
The price gouging doesn't come from multiple companies, but from the free pricing. Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.
Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.
> The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.
Wait, what? The customer is prevented from shopping around for rides? Before Uber, you couldn't call multiple driving services and get a ride. What is your point?
> Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.
This makes no sense on the face of it. You could just ask before you get in how much the fare is going to be.
> Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.
No, that means they have to drive more and hope they get rides which increases supply and decreases cost. By your logic, the more empty apartments there are in a certain area, the higher the prices for apartments are going to be because of "less utilization" and "covering the overhead".
>Much has been written about IKEA's remarkably effective retail formula. The Economist has investigated the group's no less astonishing finances.
>What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover. And if that seems too good to be true, it is: these arrangements are extremely hard to undo. The benefits from all this ingenuity come at the price of a huge constraint on the successors to Ingvar Kamprad, the store's founder (pictured above), to do with IKEA as they see fit.
