Michael, Tony, Chris Brother outside today. You know what I miss about New York and big cities, of being able to walk from one place to the other and feel the weather forecast.
You always do this, what the Brits always do this? Every British person always has to somehow talk about the weather.
Yeah, that's what we do.
I noticed even the F one commentators, many of them are from the UK, and even during a broadcast, during an actual race, they'll divert to talking about the weather. There's a race happening right now. Talk about the race.
Yeah, but you know the way the clouds move and the sun peaks through, and you know impending doom of rain. How can you not be fascinated by it?
From My Heart Podcast one on one Studios and Sports Illustrated Studios, this is choosing sides, Yes one, Wow, Tony, will you tell me the truth for fucking once in this thing? Okay, this episode has nothing to do with F one. It's just a British thing, isn't it. Regardless of the subject matter. You always will sneak in the weather.
Well, that is true. We will always find an excuse to sneak in the weather. You will hopefully find off to this episode that the weather has absolutely everything to do with Formula One.
Actually, how so it has.
It has a pretty massive effect. Actually so, I'm Bernie Collins. I am an ex head of race strategy for the Aston Martin Formula one team. Before that, I was a performance engineer with Jensen Button in twenty fourteen, so I've been trackside in F one for around eight and a half years.
I always been a fan of Whether my whole life, so I'm just ecstatic to be on here.
This is Elizabeth Olmacha. She is a meteorologist specializing in race and motor racing predictions, cool and in her free time. Michael, she actually chases storms storm chaser. It has bed time.
I would say it would be more like a freelance storm chaser. I do it on my free time, but I highly don't recommend people doing it if they don't understand what they're getting themselves into, because it can be a very dangerous situation.
Just like driving a Formula one car. Leave it to the experts. This is doctor Aaron Studwell.
President founder of race Weather.
A meteorologist specializing in motor sports, and a huge petrol head himself.
Love the sport, love the racing, love racing in general, and happy to provide a service to fans, teams media.
Are you also a storm chaser like Elizabeth?
When I lived in Oklahoma?
I did.
I've seen tornadoes in person, but yeah, I live on the East coast of the US now, so it's not real. If I'm here, I'm generally tropical storm chasing or hurricane chasing.
I didn't realize there were like different categories of storm chasers.
If there is one thing that fans love and hopeful and drivers are terrified of is the unpredictable last minute weather change. The effects of the weather on a circuit, on the driver, on their performance, on the performance of the car cannot be understated. It basically changes the whole game.
You're asking a driver to drive as close to the limit, and we talk about the limit being the limit of grip. So if you think of taking a corner really slowly, that's easy. Anyone can do that. And then if you go up in like ten kilometers an hour, you know every time you do the corner, there will be a point where the car no longer makes the corner. The drivers are working out where that point is, Like how fast can you go around that corner before the car
starts to slide? And if you get a gust of wind one lap to the next, the car will be theoretically able to do that corner at a slightly different speed. If the temperature is a bit different, then the tires will have a slightly different level of grip. So what you're asking the driver do is predict that maximum limit lap one lap, one lap. And I heard a really interesting thing recent from Alonzo who said that every lap of the reis the track is improven, and every lap
of the riis the car is getting lighter. So every lap of the rest, the grip in that corner is different than the weather plays a part in that. So if you get a driver, you know, and that's where we see drivers having a little off because there's been
a gust or whatever the case may be. And that's why we hear so much of the READLYO where the teams are telling them the winds picked up, or we hear the driver asking the question because they can feel the effect on the car and we're trying to keep them ahead of the gear.
If we can any examples of.
That, Yeah, there's a very well known historical example of this, which is the story of Nikki Lauda's accident. The late Nikki Lauder's accident during the nineteen seventy six German compree.
All the top drivers are here at Novo Gring for the European Grand Prix.
The Nuva rings what my girlfriend used to wear in college so she wouldn't get pregnant.
I'm sorry, what what to quote?
Tony moving swiftly on the most dangerous of Grand Prix courses, notorious among drivers.
It's a giant, giant circuit and Niki Lauda, one of the greats. Before the race, he basically raised the flag and he said, listen, I'm looking at this circuit and safety measures are not in place. There's a crash on the other side of the ring. It's gonna take you too much time to get to those people like, this is just not safe. And people people basically like laughed him off, and the other drivers, yeah, we're like, uh, we're good to race. Stop stopp being a scaredy cat.
There's even a vote among the drivers, and the drivers voted him down. They voted to keep going in the race.
I know where this is going.
Then race day comes and it's raining.
Right. Do they ever stop for any type of weather? Yeah, they do.
If it's too heavy in the downpour, then it will affect their visibility, and that's usually when they away.
Even I think now they're like a little bit too safe about it sometimes.
Yeah, some would argue, why do we have rain tires and wet tires if we don't go racing when.
It's wet, right, They hardly, They hardly use the wet tires because usually when it's when it's raining hard enough to them use wet tires, they they don't let the drivers race.
Which I will argue that I think now that we've got the helmet coms and the driver's view, we might understand what the drivers see and absolutely don't see, and we might have more empathy of like, oh, yeah, you actually can't go racing.
We see videos from the seventies and eighties and these rooster tails and they're still out there racing in this torrential rain. But we've lost so many drivers in these kind of incidents. Were bad accidents that really just didn't
need to happen. So I think now there's an abundance of caution where we're going to say and that's not a negative or we're gonna say if you can't see the car ahead of you, even when they're the red the red light's blinking and they're regenerating the energy that you know, it's not good for the driver, it's not good for the sport.
So the terrible irony here, of course, is that on race that Nicko Lauda didn't want.
A tempted to arrange a boycott of the race.
Exactly right, Niki Lauder lost control of his Ferrari on a one hundred and fifty mile an hour curve.
He crashed horribly and was chopped in a burning car.
The race was restarted, but for Louder it was a race for life. Almost died while his fellow drivers jockeyed for position. He was being rushed to an intensive care unit with severe burns, fractures and lung damage. Surgeons pronounced he was near to death and last rites were administered.
Six weeks later, with bandages all over his body.
Crowds of sightseers and hosts of newsmen gathered at the Ferrari factory in Marnllo, Italy to welcome Nicki Lauder back from the dead.
He's back in a racing car.
What the fuck?
Just forty days after doctors had given up hope and a priest had knelted his bedside, the Austrian Ace climbed back into the cockpit of his glaring red Ferrari.
I'm looking at images of the accident right here. And it's tricky because he might have put in his head that this was a dangerous place to ride. But also that could have nothing to do with this is a professional race car driver who's very good. That's too bad.
It does also bring us back a little bit too manifesting destiny.
Yeah, and I don't want to buy into that, because therefore you would never speak up out of a safety concern because you'd be afraid.
And it's yeah, oh, it was just like he knew what he was talking about.
Yeah, yeah, or it's just absolutely I like that. That's very pragmatic. And I like that that he said, this is a big circuit. People go fast here, You're not gonnably to help me out.
There's a sentence that you might hear, which is rain is the great equalizer Formula one. It shows the priss of a lot of these drivers.
They're going to call it a great equalizer, but I think some are more equal than others. There are drivers who are better in the rain than others. I'm not going to specifically name drivers, but I know there are drivers who kind of dread driving in the rain, and they're drivers who grew up driving in the rain.
Drivers who grew up and were born in countries like Belgium, Austria and the UK where it rains a lot definitely have an advantage. Some of the best in the rain are the likes of Maxwistappan UIs, Hamilton, Lando Norris. What do they all have in common? They all lived for a long time, so there's pictures and videos of them in go karts in the absolute right like aqua planning to your heart's content. And I think we see this on road cars as well. You can see when people
are used to driving in the rain. California rains for a minute and it's a standstill in the city.
People know how to drive, Yeah, no idea. Go down to the south and there's a little bit of a frost and everyone's cars crashing all over the place.
Yeah.
And the absolute king of this skill is the legendary Late Art and Center, also known as the rainmaster.
Cool, absolutely marvelous. Vella went round the outside of Louder into the rough.
Ga and that was brave and skillful.
Just just to put that into numbers for you, because that name is actually backed by by statistics. His overall win rate in Formula one at Donsenna is twenty five point three percent. That means he won about a quarter of the races he started. But of those races, the ones that were in the rain, he won more than half of them fifty five percent.
Wow. Okay.
Wet conditions are often used as an example of when actually the car is less important than the driver. So actually the driver coming can make quite a big difference because of his ability, let's say, to work in this very changeable condition. But there are still some teams that are better at management of those situations. So people always think there's more risk and reward in those situations as well. So some people really delight in the chaos of it all.
I always thought it was a bit panicked. So I wasn't that sure that Reian was good for.
Us, because you were you were the one in the chaos having to make the decisions. Yeah, exactly, give you some order.
It's like, oh, Yeah, exactly, it's it's you know, but for a for a lower team, a team lower down the order, it is more likely to bring this avharc result that doesn't otherwise happen. So that's why I think it's a bit more of an equalizer.
So tell me about driving in the rain, what is okay? How is that different?
Hey, it's going to affect the grip of the car and how it goes round the track. To complicate things, these f one circuits and tracks, as we've spoken about, are massive, which means that there are massive areas where puddles of water can start compiling together, which means you can start ending up with aqua planning as well. It also means that certain aspects of the track are going
to drive faster or slower. So when they start switching out to the tires, you will hear them saying I can see the sun on the second part of the track, but it's still raining on the first part of the track where you use the wet tires the dry tires. That adds a layer of strategy, but also just complicated to drive on the right tires, wrong tires, right track.
Even just where you have more peaks and valleys, not a flat track, but say more in Europe where you're going up a hill and you may have worked us your winds at the top of the hill. It can be across wind, it could be provide more downforce, it could be a tailwind. Going down the street. You're gonna the driver's gonna need to know that, both from a handling condition, in from a speed condition.
And it also just affects visibility. Again when you think about it, they're lying down in these cars. They're very close to the ground. If you are in front, you are in a great position. If you are in the back, you're getting everyone's rain and water and backspash in your face. Yeah, yeah, whitch go.
This is the start of the nineteen ninety eight Belgian GP.
Oh, this is kind of pulling.
This is the worst start for aprol rate.
But I have ever seen in the whole of my life.
I'm looking at this video and if you mean every place crashed, I mean, first of all, there's one car in the front who has good visibility, and then every other car is just toe you can't see anything.
And we're laughing.
I know, it's not funny.
The danger on like, yeah, none of these cars have wheels left. It's just it's a wheel race.
That's not funny. It's you know, in between my laughing, I want to say, it's not funny, it's very entertaining. I'm gonna look at the second one spree coming off the front axle. The any visibility you have is just canceled. This just doesn't look feasible. It doesn't look feasible, it doesn't look possible.
This is where the gut instinct and driving right.
I would encourage anybody who's listening right now to just go watch a helmet cam of any one of these F one drivers on a dry situation. It seems chaotic and unreasonable. And now in the rain, it's uh it certainly. I mean, are they going slower in the rain? Absolutely not me. When it rains in New York, I'm going faster.
Today, on the exit ramp from the Queensboro Bridge, comedian Michael Costa, recklessly driving his Volvo station Wagon causes a multi car pile up. Thankfully no one was injured, but drivers stuck in the ensuing traffic We're not happy.
Do I like it?
No?
It's a lack of respective rules.
What are you gonna do?
Is. I'm Danielle Waxman for Fake NYC News quick Break for ads and we'll be back before you can say aquaplaning.
So when you're talking about whether you're really just talking about if it's raining or not wet or dry.
A lot of people think it's just rain and that will affect the tracks, but it's not just rain.
For most of us. Minimal changes in temperature and small shifts will mostly go unnoticed, like we don't know if it's dropping temperatures, But in Formula one, even these smaller increases or decreases, even if we're talking one or two degree changes, actually has a pretty big impact on how the different teams are going to approach a race or a different session. When we're talking weather forecasting, we're not talking what we see on the TV or even my
little British chit chat about the weather. It's actually we're talking about all the different layers. So air temperature, track temperature, even sometimes like the driver's temperature, how are you doing inside of the cockpit? Are you okay?
It can be twenty to thirty degrees hotter inside the cockpit than it is outside on a track. So if it's stay it's ninety degrees. It can be like one hundred and twenty inside and there is no air ventilation or like ac you know that you can just crank up. These drivers, they have to adapt to these different conditions.
The temperature inside of Formula one car during an actual race will average to about one hundred and twenty two degrees fanheight.
Wow, that's an average, and that's just inside the car. That's yeah, inside the car. Wow. Okay.
For as much as weight as they lose any normal race, they'd probably lose even more if it's you know you talk about widely erase Jetta at night, Well, it's going to be ninety five degrees during the day. Jet is actually a humid environment because it's right next to the water. So that's going to be both of the crew and
the driver. It's going to be just depleting and you're going to have We've seen races where drivers have just got got out of the car and just kind of flopped against the car, their helmet at their side, just drinking water or having water poured down their neck. They're so busy it's dark here, fading with.
Flow blood pressure and just passing out in the car.
So for example, during this year is Qatar Grand Prix. We had a combination of heat and humidity, which meant that it was absolutely unbearable for the drivers.
Honestly, yeah, I fell ill by fifteen sixteen.
One driver is the band Okon who said that he felt like he was vomiting in his helmet.
You know, I was throwing up in the car. And I've managed to come down afterwards, tried to really focus on what I had to do, and I've managed to get down the control.
But got so bad that many fans but also people within the industry and the ecosystem were saying, this is probably a bad time to be racing in such a rouson.
Once again, Michael Karsta brings it back to tennis. I mean, humidity affects a tennis ball tremendously. I can only imagine a fire burning machine with four wheels on it.
And fire burning machine in really incredible temperatures like we had this year. I think it was like the Katar GP. When we're talking about safety. The drivers were cracking open their helmet visors so they could get air coming in.
That air that we get into the cockpit is just horrible, you know, it's like I don't know a fire, you know, going through the through the helmet.
One of the drivers describe cracking open their helmets so they could get air. By the way, really dangerous. The last thing you want to do with a helmet is crack it open, because that's where something can go fly
right into your eye. But that was my only solution to try and call down, which, by the way, it did bring up a whole conversation which if we go back to the logistics of Formula one, it did bring back a conversation about the racing calendar and why are we racing in Qatar at the time of the year where it's actually really hot, which goes back to actually the logistics of pulling off that F one race calendar is really really really tricky.
Yeah, let's let's come back here in this humber, please not October. Yeah, that was definitely a tough one.
Air temperature. How does that affect a car? My Volvo runs like a tank no matter what temperature is.
Well, the cold is kind of the enemy of Formula one cars because frankly, they don't often run in the cold.
This is Scott Mansel, and he's not only an X racing driver, but he's also the founder of an immensely popular Formula one YouTube channel called driver sixty one.
Most of the temperatures across the year and the season are within a kind of fairly warm range, right, and so the engineers and the teams are just designing the cars to run in these temperatures. Of course, if they wanted to, they wouldn't be as quick, but they could get them to run at colder temperatures, but they're just not typically designed to do that. So they have issues with the engine temperatures, with blanking the radiator ducts off so you don't have as much cold air rushing through
over the engine and through the radiators. But as you say that, the main problem is the tires, and it's as simple as the rubber just doesn't get warm enough to then have that chemical reaction that bite into the racing circuit, and so you just have less grip overall. And typically when you have less grip, it's just more difficult to drive, Like you know, if it was if it rained and there were wet conditions on track, it's more difficult for the drivers, and so that means you
have to be more careful on the brakes. The breaking distances will be longer, the risk of locking a tire rup will be will be higher, the cornering spears will be lower, and you'll have to be more gentle and more sensitive on the accelerator. But where it's really difficult, and I think we saw this with Lando in Vegas, is in the quicker corners, because when you're in like a slower corner, the tire is gonna scrub across the Circuit's gonna slide across the circuit in a fairly predictable way.
This is what you're looking for as a driver. You want predictability. You want to be able to not be reacting to the car, but predicting what about to happen.
So one of the paradoxes of Formula one cars is they're both some parts of the car built to resist just about anything and the other part if you're just like bang it a little bit it or falls apart, don't sneeze in it. And so the air temperature is going to affect the performance of a Formula one engine, for example, on tracks like the hotter Middle Eastern circuits.
This is actually a pretty big issue. In addition to managing your tires, for example, the driver also needs to manage the engine temperature because the last thing you want is an engine that's overheated.
Engine failure.
Okay, engine radia.
So that was air temperature. Then let's talk a bit about track temperature, because this is also where it gets really interesting. So track temp can have a huge effect, and mostly on the tires because obviously it's the tires that are hitting the track. And so, as we discussed in that tire episode, these Formula one tires are extremely picky, meaning that they have a very very narrow window of what is called the optimum performance of these tires.
It's almost like a Goldilocks saying, if it's too hot, it's not great. If it's too cold, it's not great. You get right in there eighteen to twenty three celsius. Say you know sixty five to seventy five seventy seven fahrenheit range, you're gonna have great tire performance because if it's too cold, I always grip. If it's too hot, I was grip to.
Go back with cold tires on a race circuit, not too bad aside from the low grip in slow corners, but in the quick corners where the cars loaded up with quite a lot of air row it feels like there's a lot of grip, and when the car slides, when the tire just gives up and starts to slide across the surface of the track, it happens very quickly, and it's difficult for the drivers to predict that, and
so you remove some of that predictability. So if you look at Lando from Vegas, the car looked all right and then all of a sudden it let go, And it doesn't matter how quick his reactions are, he's not going to you know, catch that in his head into the wall. A similar thing happened to me. I mean, I've driven thirty something f one cars over my career, and a lot of them actually have been in the UK.
As you know, it's pretty cold over here, and we did some testing at a circuit called Donnington over here, probably in autumn or early winter one year, and it was, you know, it's five or six degrees, not too far from the temperatures that we saw in Vegas. And I experienced that and I went off as well. You know, I didn't crash, but I went off as well. And when it happens, it happens. Incredibly quickly.
It just goes too cold there get slippery and they go all over the place. I know, grip on the tires too hot and the degradation of the tires greatly accelerated. It also means that the time might be sticking too much and they can't go as fast as they want to.
And then there's something I've been around the sport for twenty twenty five years. They from people I've talked to both on the AI and the modeling and the track people side, they don't have a good model.
The track temperature is actually pretty difficult to predect.
So the track temperature also evolves over a race as the cars are heating that track up because the track is bare and then you're throwing twenty cars on it going really really fast, it's obviously going to effect the track. And not only that, As we said previously, the tracks are really wide, so the temperature of the track isn't the same at all. Elements are all parts of the track,
so that's what's so a component. And if the track temperature changes considerably during a race, the drivers have several ways to actually deal with this. So one way is thinking about how hard they want to push their tires. They can alter their driving lines to suit the balance of the car. They can adjust the differentials that that's the amount of talk that transfers between the rear wheels or the brake balance to the front aurea of the car. So there's a bunch of things that they can play
around with as Formula One drivers. In addition to the drivers, the mechanics can also play around with the different calling configurations across a race. They can adjust the car set up for different weather conditions. So all of that is thought about in advance, and all of that is kind of planned with all the different options available.
Atmospheric pressure barometric pressure can definitely impact engine performance, same with humidity. Race performance can change your degrade based on in handling crosswinds, tailwinds.
The wind has a massive effect. So when we think of, you know, our description of the car in the wind tunnel, the wind is common in the most ideal situation, like straight out of the car, and that is how the car is predominantly designed to work in terms of the loading on the car. Now, obviously a lot of that wind is generated by the car driving out two hundred kilometers an hour, that is you know, the headwind, but if the ambient condition goes against you, you've got the
wind of the car and the wind of ambience. You've got like this additive effect. If you've got a tailwind, you've got a subtraction. You've got the head wind of the car minus the effect from the ambient wind. So that's obviously less wind to work the car. And that's why the wind is really important in terms of how
the car is operating. And you know, a side wind, every you know, you can do the physics on it, but like every you know, angle is then taken or add into the perfect wind condition of the car.
Yeah, rain or dry, do you make a difference. But even cloudy versus sunny with the same temperature and track temperatures. So it's more than just one component. It's really the full fledged what is the forecast from sun cover and we'll call that incoming solar radiation and get real kind of technical on that, to humidity, to bear measure pressure, to you know, temperature, track temperature.
But there's a butt.
There's always a butt.
There's always about.
There is always but to.
Make things even more complicated, they are actually not allowed to adjust the car settings between the qualifying that happens on Saturday and the actual race.
That happens so interesting.
So if the forecasts shifts completely and drastically from the Saturday to the Sunday, you are kind of stuck with what you set up on the car on the Saturday for the Sunday race. Maybe one of the things to say about Formula one is it's always a game of compromise. Yeah, all of this to say, and we can ponder about the strategy behind this or that if we wanted to. Being able to predict the weather during a Grand Prix race is absolutely crucial to inform the strategy and inform
the drive on how to drive. But the reality is it's really hard to predict because anything can happen.
I mean, is it that hard to predict? Like I have an app on my phone that just tells me what's going to be tomorrow at four pm. I can't the team, principal whatever, just download it and then punch in boom. Problem solved.
Well, I will believe me. I get enough screenshots of apps during the week that I know people download the raps. But when we start getting into finer tuned forecasts, if you're in a commercial business, like where an app's gonna come from. You're either taking direct model output and just plugging it in. Maybe you're averaging it together, which you average them together, you get a little better performance, but
you don't know the rain timing. If if I could have average four of them together, models together, and then once said the rain is gonna start at five, one it's going to say it's gonna start at nine. One says it's gonna start at one, and then once the other one's gonna start at five pm, you average them all together, it's going to rain all day. And that's probably not the case. So when you have a meteorologist on site, like f one does, they're looking at all
the models. They're probably running their own high resolution models on their own in house. I want to watch the radar come in. I know the geography in the area, say something like the Red Bull Red Bull Ring and where there are a lot of mountains in the area that you can have rain coming to the area, but the mountains break them up. Versus someplace like Austin, where it's just flat. You could stand and see thirty miles away that there's a storm over there. There's nothing to
break it up. But you're still going to want to know the timing, how fast that storm's moving, Is it getting weaker, is it getting stronger.
They want to know exactly what minute it's going to stop raining, what part of the track the rain is going to start, when it's going to stop, Is it going to get worse or better? So to that end, which is why I like this question or this pushback to that end. Formula one has its own traveling weather service.
Of course they do.
Rather than looking at the big picture, it focuses on the very very narrow patch of sky tracking storms, even individual clouds when they're approaching the circuit.
You see what this is going to be boring cloud.
See where it's going. It's separated from its group.
The least reliable. It is protecting cloud cover, and the cover has a massive effect on track temperature.
We do have more for you on this, but first we've got to take a short break and we'll come back. Mike check one.
Two.
Hey, we're back.
I could have scattered clouds or shadows coming across the region across the track. Mons is probably the best example where you start see shadows come across in areas and now that track area is cooler by a couple of degrees than anywhere else on the track. So you not only have to mentally I think the drivers kind of mentally know that. But yeah, you're going from a cool to a hot to a cool. It could be up in the you're going up in the mountains a little bit.
It's even at small elevation changes it can be marginally cooler. And I'm talking you know, we talk about you know, tens of a pounds of a psi here for tire pressure, but we're talking tensive degree of temperature on the elevation changes on high elevation change areas.
To that effect, they go around their own weather radar, which they then assemble on site every single week. Back to that logistics episode that we have. Nothing is just brought. That's too easy.
Yeah, on the race weekend, they'll probably send two meteorologists out want to kind of run and set up the radar. They have what's called a field mill as well, which will measure electrical charge in the air for a lighting potential.
So we've got the tools and the equipment and the strategy around it. And here's the key thing. Each team has their own people assigned to this. They're assigned to track this specific data and make the strategic calls in real time. But would you be surprised that, despite all of this technology, how often the weatherman gets it wrong.
It's one of the best jobs weather man. You can just be wrong all the time.
Yeah, and no one will bat and I live. Oh it's difficult.
Yeah, it's like being a podcast host. Nobody really is listening to you in the first place. You're fuld and laundry. You're driving a truck where no one cares. No one cares.
I'm sure you've heard this where they will say to the drive I think it's going to start raining, and the drivers to talking about it's already raining, raining, or you just say, hey, just stick your head out to the pitwall for a second and see if it's actually dry away outside. Especially when we go and race in tropical destinations think Singapore, Malaysia, where the weather changes like absolutely constantly.
I would say that the tracks I like to look at are forecast for more the ones close to the coast, because the weather can just change so rapidly, so it's interesting to see what could happen, especially during hurricane season.
They've just got to be ready for any circumstance possible and imaginement.
And look at the rain pouring down and when it rains in Malaysia, believe me, it comes down not by the bucket fall, but by the ocean full.
I know we've had a whole episode dedicated to the high tech of Formula one and how it's always forward thinking and pushing the boundaries. But once in a while they will deploy some very low tech methods to track the weather. One of them could be having scouts along the racetrack with talkies to just let them know when it's starting.
To rae I wet it's happening.
The other one is even funnier than this, which is just looking at the crowds and the fans and figuring out when they start putting up their umbrellas.
That's a great one.
Easy.
Yeah.
Another you know, not a source of data.
Someone's hat just flew off their head. It must be wind. It's getting wind.
Yeah, I'm wondering. You're you're in your personal life. Where where do you get your weather report? Do you just go to like the weather channel or a weather app, or do you like do you predict your own way?
I personally like to use my radar. I find that one very more accurate than other weather app.
Do a lot of your like friends and family, Like, do they.
All hit you up for all the time? Yes, all the time? Sometimes though even like ask me, like about what's the weather going to be like in these months? And we can only we can barely see a week ahead of us. I'm like, I don't think it's going to be that accurate, but I would give it my best shot.
Where where do you see the field of meteorology and race weather prediction going? I mean, will you eventually just just know what the weather is?
Hopefully Knox and I'll be out of a job.
What has been really interesting is the evolution of AI in forecast models, where they're going back and taking all the previous information and all the ground observations and upper ere observations, and we'll say, okay, when have we seen this pattern before, and we'll go through how that pattern evolve.
So you don't like a world in which like the AIS and computers get so sophisticated that basically weather prediction is solved, Like, that's not a world you envision, not.
In our lifetime. Now, Yeah, somebody I could write in say, hey, write me up some good interview questions from a meteorologists on racing. Well, but here you're using your insight and your ialition and you're able to adapt your ushians to my answers. So there's always going to be a need to have humans in the chain.
Yeah, fair fair point there, and fair point you know for the.
General person going to day to day if I want to know whether to grab an umbrella, that's fine for high resolution, high performance risks where that I've worked in with both racing and commodity trading, both high dollar spends. You want that accuracy, you want the human insight. As a human, I'm a little biased.
But no, you know, I find that comforting less in the sense of like being you know about your job, that your your job security. Sorry, I mean I'm glad for that as well, but more in the sense of there's something a little like, I don't know if I want to live in a world where the weather is predictable, is you know, it's sort of like like that's it's weird to imagine.
That is a very holistic. It's a very holistic view of it. There's this broader view that takes in not only the human element, engineering, pure science and melts them all together into something we love.
To that end, Michael, any thoughts on meteorology, any strong feelings about the weather.
I was surprisingly delighted to hear you talk about the weather for so long. And I know that you kind of genetically have to because you're British, but to my astonishment, it was really interesting.
I'm glad to hear that. You know what, You've just made my day? How to make it brit happy? Tell them you enjoy the web.
I love all the high tech, high tech, high tech. And then it's like, hey, stick here, Ralph, go over there and are you wet? Debruh? Did your hat fell off? Okay, we got a confirmation. And man, visually, when it rains on an F one race, it is so fun to look at. You can't believe they do it.
Less fun when you're an F one fun you're standing in the crowd.
That's not me.
This has been Choosing Signs F one, a production of Sports Illustrated Studios, iHeart Podcast and one oh one Studio Podcasts. The show is hosted by Michael Costa and Tony Cowan Brown. This episode was edited, scored, and sound designed by senior producer Jojai may Thaddle. Scott Stone is the executive producer and head of Audio, and Daniel Wexman is Director of Podcast Development and production Manager at one o one Studios.
At iHeart Podcasts, Sean Titne is our executive producer, and a special thank you to Michelle Newman, David Glasser, and David Hootkin from one oh one Studios. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, go visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whatever you do, don't forget to rate us and tell your friends it really does mean a lot.
Next week on Choosing Sides F one, we reach our climax. So I can't believe I'm saying this. This is the moment that you have all been waiting for, Right Michael, you are going to reveal to us what kind of Formula one fan you fashion yourself to be.
I can't believe this. I can't believe it's here. I'm still reading the regulations manual. Okay, so maybe that's a little bit of a hint. I have a lot to contemplate. There's so many good episodes here for me to review and listen again, and I'll make my decision, and it's gonna be. It's not gonna let you down.
Do you think you're gonna pick one or do you think you're fashioned yourself a multi fastening, multi faceted, or multi hyphenate.
I'm gonna pick one because that's the only one I give a shit about.
Okay,