wsr paul ricard

[bella]

welcome to a warm but damp and windy paul ricard...

yelloly is on pole, ahead of frijns, da costa and bianchi. interesting surprises include aleshin in 9th, ghirelli in 11th, bird down in 16th and korjus in 15th. overtaking is troublesome to say the least so expect a tedious race, but an important one for the championship battle. it looks like the rain has gone for now, so it *should* be a dry race.

the fr3.5 race is at midday local time, 11am uk time.

[ptclaus98]

At this rate, Rossi won't even be in demand for IndyCar teams. He has become just another driver. Hopefully Conor Daly can step up.

[p-matt]

Rossi has been dreadfully unlucky to be fair.

What happened to Frijns this weekend? I'm guessing the offical line will be that the car wasn't set up for wet conditions?

[ptclaus98]

That's been the excuse all year. His teammate is blowing him into the weeds.

[Willi]

hello everybody, first post here...

Frijns made a good start but then dropped a few places in the first laps, he was about 6th or 7th when he came into the pits, but after that his race craft was even worse at a point he was losing almost one postion per lap at the end of the race.

At a first moment, i thought he had worked his setup hoping the track would dry, but as the track dried out he didn't seem to had a proper setup either. Overall, i think he never managed to adapt himself to the changing conditions. Usually he's always in top 5, always collecting big points, but this weekend he was a little bit off the pace, which is bad for him but good for the championship as we'll probably have the title decided in the last race again, but this time with 3 contestants.

[ivanalesi]

From the onboards it seemed like he was massively struggling for traction, so may be this was the problem. In any case Bianchi was very fast and calm, but I still think Frijns will take the title at Barcelona.

[chunterer]

Interesting events unfolded in France then?

Down to the wire again, fantastic stuff for the series organisers!!

I might be inclined to plump for Jules to nick it now though, just a gut feeling that he'll be up for it?

[bella]

yeah, i think he will nick it too. experience over youthful enthusiasm seems to win over in fr3.5 in the past few years, and i think bianchi will just keep going.

though i have a sneaking suspicion that it'll come down to a handbags match at turn 1 on lap 1 of race 2 or something like that. this one isn't over yet!

[Hawkwood]

I certainly hope Frijns gets it, it's always nice to see a rookie come in and give the experienced boys a thrashing

What's people's opinions on Yelloly?
I'd not heard of him before last year but then and through this year he's impressed me greatly. Some inconsistancies sure, but I'd like to see him go higher.

[bella]

i think (and this is unscientific) that yelloly is still hampered a little by relative inexperience. he obviously has a lot of natural skill - his nurburgring win was absolutely superb. it was the kind of race where you needed good judgement, composure, and logical thought processes as well as a huge amount of feel for the car and the level of grip available. he might not have been one of the fastest on track and one of the guys finding the grip the quickest, but he ran his own race, and won by a country mile as a result.

i don't know where he could go from here though - he's going to need to jack up his budget a bit to get one of the drives closer to the front or bank on roly vincini's overhauling of the team bearing fruit on a consistent basis next season.

i think one really interesting side story to this year is how the uber-experienced guys have contrasted against the first and second year drivers with far less experience. sometimes it's been really obvious, other times it's meant absolutely nothing. and the times it has meant something haven't necessarily been when you'd expected it to!

[chunterer]

Yeah it's like someone said to me at Silverstone, ;-) Nick's clearly got great natural talent but has probably done amazingly well just to get to where he has with his career and although he clearly deserves to go further it's difficult to see how he can?