'sup Toto.

 

would he even fit?

 

just the tip. jajaja

 

 

respect

 

 

and you thought it was a slow excel day

 

 

Lewis. I'm coming for you.

 

Lewis said it wasn't a surprise he retired. Maybe that's why Ocon got the FI drive because Mercedes knew Nico would retire and therefore Pascal could warm the seat for a year until 2018 when some drivers are free agents.

 

well, damn.

as long as Louise is around, Nico knows the chances of doing this again are slim to none. i believe he thought he may have truly hit his career apex.

as a team fan i loved the soap opera and competition. i'll miss it.

re: Nico not getting due credit...i think that is because everyone knows Lewis is the better driver, as his track record indicates, and despite the earlier post about Malaysia not being the difference - it was. a DNF kept the better driver from winning yet again. but i'd say nobody can deny that Nico is a great driver on an all time great team.

whatever, it's over with. this is very strange news.

 

 

The French GP returns for 2018. Yeaaa!

But it's at Paul Ricard. Booooo

 

With Massa and now Rosberg - the last of Schumacher's teammates have retired.

 

that seems to be his personality, he's super salty when he isn't winning. like dude you are 3 time champ chill the **** out, only reason he won his second and third title was because he drove the BEST ******* car in F1 as of right now. as much as I didn't like seeing Fernando leave Ferrari I'd love to see him in a MB right now to see how well Hami measures up against him.

 

Well, you can p much say that about any F1 champion

 

From the F1 chat at work:

"Schumacher faked injury for 2 years, returns from coma to take 2017 championship."

 

My man.

 

Everyone likes to say Malaysia was "the" title deciding event. That was only possible because of some below average weekends from Lewis (by his impeccable standards). He fought back from his early deficit, then slumped after the summer, only to regain that momentum again to have his engine expire at Malaysia. And he seemed to have attended the Mark Webber school of Grand Prix starts for a while there, and that cost him valuable points. If Lewis was perfect all season, and lost the title because of Malaysia, fine. But he didn't *just* lose it at Malaysia, he gave up way too many points on too many occasions this year.

Fact: Lewis was vulnerable this year, and lost because his teammate was just quick enough, just often enough, to take advantage of it.

Head to head, Lewis wins 9/10 over Nico right? Well, 1/10 was all Nico needed in three tries (2014, 2015, 2016). I hope he gets to enjoy his life and family now. Without the ski's.

 

Also Britney pulling a Prost and retiring as WDC.

Britney = Prost confirmed. Sort of. Not really. But maybe we'll think favorably of Britney after a few years too?

 

Besides his racing with Verstappen, his wins, and title what are some of his other exciting career highlights? I know he had a podium in 2008 and I think fastest lap in his first race?

 

first win for Merc at China in 2010.


Also, tonight at the FIA awards ceremony, when he was given the WDC trophy the presenter told the audience that Nico retired and Nico responded - "let's put an asterisk next to that since I'm not sure yet"

He also said that he would have returned next year if he didn't win the title.

 

One year sabbatical to recharge and party like a champion?

 

Or sports car racing? I'm sure he'll miss the driving and eventually will want to get back to racing.

 

TIL that Nico Rosberg scored the highest in the Williams Engineering Aptitude Test that all Williams drivers have to take. While reading about it I came across this article:

Williams F1 struggling to find recruits with maths skills - Telegraph

Williams F1 struggling to find recruits with maths skills

Williams F1 is “frustrated” over the state of education in Britain today after the majority of school leavers applying for its apprenticeship scheme this year failed a basic maths test.

By Louisa Peacock

Alex Burns, the chief executive of the Formula 1 company, which is racing in the Indian Grand Prix, said he was alarmed and surprised that most 16 to 18 year-olds keen to work for the company could not do basic maths sums and had failed to reach a 50pc score on a range of practical tests.

Mr Burns said the shortage of capable candidates – even at elementary level – was holding back the company’s expansion plans in the UK, with the business only being able to recruita handful of would-be engineers out of hundreds of applicants each year.

Of the 250 applications for its apprenticeship scheme this year, 45 were invited to an open day and 16 made it through to the tests round. Just six young people passed, with 10 failing to get more than half the answers right – a failure rate of two-thirds.

In previous years, the company allowed hundreds of applicants to sit maths tests early on in the recruitment rounds, but this led to such a high failure rate the company abandoned the tests until later in the hiring process.

Mr Burns said that a few years ago, only six out of 200 applicants passed the tests, making it pointless to test so many candidates at once

The Formula 1 company uses a series of straightforward maths tests derived in the 1960s by Birkbeck College.

The questions are a mixture of adding up, multiplying and division, as well as basic fractions, logarithms and theory.

One question asks candidates to write three quarters as a decimal, another asks for the square root of 81. More complex questions include what is 11pc of 250, and what is 7,713 divided by nine.

Mr Burns said: “It’s pretty frustrating that the young people cannot complete these tests. A few years’ back, we had such a small pass rate that we now only give the tests after we’ve invited them to an open day.”

One of the adding up and subtracting tests is “pretty straightforward”, according to the chief executive, although candidates only have two minutes to complete it.

When asked whether the testing process should be made easier, or candidates should be given more time, he said: “Well, no. We are looking for the best people we can find, and these tests are pretty generic.”

Mr Burns said he was considering whether to update the tests – as they are more than 50 years old – but at the end of the day, “maths is maths”.

He added: “Finding the staff we need to fill the technical roles we have is probably the biggest constraint on the growth of our business at the moment. We’re a cash-positive business, so we reinvest the cash we generate in the business and I see lots of opportunity to take Formula 1 technologies and adapt those for use outside the business. Our biggest constraint is getting the people we need with the skills that we need.”

Mr Burns said Williams was doing a lot to train young people, including running robust apprenticeship and undergraduate schemes. But he urged the Government to improve basic education so school leavers could take advantage of the Williams opportunities on offer. “We are taking people on and giving them the skills they need. What we look for from government is a very strong education system that gives us young people that are very strong in STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths subjects], and we will then give them the specific skills we need for them to grow at our company,” he said.

Take the test

The Williams F1 maths test is a series of basic sums derived by Birkbeck college in the 1960s. The current failure rate among young people taking the test, hoping to work as apprentices at the company, is two-thirds. Can you do any better? Take the Williams F1 maths test now andcheck your answers here afterwards.



1. 44 + 12 + 35 =
2. 735 - 576 =
3. 7523 x 8 =
4. 7713 / 9 =
5. 2 + 3 =
6. Write 0.3 as a fraction.
7. The square of 7 is =
8. The cube of 2 is =
9. What is 11pc of 250 =
10. Increase 64 by 12.5pc =
11. Find the value of x2 + 2xy + y2 where x = 6 and y = -3
12. 5/16 / 1/8 =
13. If log 3 = 0.4771 and log 4 = 0.6020, log 40 =
14. If log 3 = 0.4771 and log 4 = 0.6020, log 0.12 =
15. The cube root of 27 is =