So very early I know, but come on Alonso 
, that Aston looks quick so far….
RBR looking very dominant.
Amazing debut at Aston Martin for Alonso.
Drive of the day from Gasly
I bet finger boy is wishing he had hung on for another season but I am not sure he could have wrung out the performance that Alonso did, He seems as keen as he was in his first season
I’m concerned that hitting the front with a 1-2 after all the controversy RBR have been in the middle of is only going to see more criticism of RBR and the penalties they received. That they are extremely good is without question, but there is a tarnished image in the minds of many.
Absolutely fantastic to see Alonso do so well in the Aston Martin! 
The severity, or not, of the punishments handed out to RB don’t explain how Ferrari and esp. Merc have collectively shat the bed, and allowed Aston to make monkeys out of them
Only one race though, so let’s hope that the Ferrari issue is a one-off. Merc seem fucked by their own admission.
If not, RB will be working solely on their 24 csr by Monaco :-/
(Absolutely delighted to have Fred back in a competitive car. There’s few things more fun to watch than him with the bit between his teeth.)
Aston recruited Dan Fallows who was the head of aero at RBR over a year ago. So it is no surprise that the Aston and the RBR share very similar attributes from an aero handling point of view.
Merc and Ferrari have again got it wrong as they continue to misunderstand that a fast car is not just about increasing downforce and reducing drag. It is about putting downforce on each corner when it needs it to provide the handling that the driver needs to go fast.
The aero ideas generators (Frank, thanks for that term!) at Merc and Ferrari seem to have lost their way with the new rules.
Dan was recruited at Lola straight from Uni whilst I was a consultant there. He was taken on to do CFD on the Champ cars and by far the closest “old formula” to the current F1 rules with the big turning vanes up front is those old Champ cars.
My guess is that Dan’s work on those 20 odd years ago probably means he had more experience of the sort of flow structures likely to be exploitable with the new F1 rules than anybody else in F1.
That combined with the other aero team at Red Bull, probably mainly Adrian, meant they got a big leg up in understanding what would be effective with the new rules.
For me it is how long it will take the others to catch on. None of the teams seemed to realise how narrow their aero experience was when the rules changed and didn’t realise where they were “blind”, a bit like how long it took some of the established teams to realise their front wing end plates heavily optimised to years of being aligned with the inside of the front tyre were not much good for the 2009 rule update and didn’t even look at changing for months.
The aero teams back on the Champ cars were tiny and CFD in its infancy so I am not sure how many engineers there are out there who may be able to give the insight Dan has/had.
Ian and Frank - thanks for your insights once again 
Seconded, thank you Ian & Frank .
IMO getting rid of Mattia Binotto displayed a profound lack of understanding of Formula 1 and they deserve everything they get.
I agree completely.
Fred is a team manager and really had to accept the Ferrari job offer, but a lot of people expect him to fail as he will be out of his depth there.
He had the face of a condemned man during the race… No doubt the clock is already ticking…
Aside from the racing malarkey… the car most likely to end up in your bed? Obviously the Alfa.
The most annoying colourways, Aston and Merc. Buck the fuck up, in tv long shots both cars look the bloody same from the front, greenish with yellow borders Put a silver flash down the front of the Merc or something eh, there’s good chaps.
Fallows started in April, and Marko was intimating last weekend that other RB staff had followed in his wake
How much tike would he/they have had to put their fingerprints on the 23 car?
(I’m not doubting they have, just what the lead-time would have been)
All those aero guys and engine guys at Merc obviously haven’t got a clue, they should have listened to Lewis 
Don’t see anything wrong in his comments. Telemetry can provide data but if the driver is saying it doesn’t feel stable in the corners etc they have to listen to that as well. It’s not the engineers driving the car in a race, the team has employed who they think is the best driver and they have to use driver feedback as well as data to develop the car.
Or he’s getting old and is just blaming the car for his creeping dotage 
There is still the implication Fallows took Red Bull technology to Aston whereas, based on my knowledge of the similarity between the new F1 rules and the old Champ car rules, which are profound, my view is that Fallows was a, probably the, major reason the Red Bull was as good as it is, and he has simply used his knowledge of the flowfield created by this sort of rule set to do the same sort of thing at Aston.
You can measure, or ask the driver, what is wrong but that often doesn’t give you any clue as to what to do to fix it. That is where the engineers who understand the overall concept come in.
I used driver comment only for years and added on board data logging at tests later and eventually telemetry every time the car ran.
All this does is tell you where you are slow, not what to do about it.
It is an engineering problem but when the way of working has been micro refinement of an already successful car for many years it doesn’t give any insight into how good their understanding is of the overall flowfield following a big rule change. And I would say the evidence is “not very good” at Merc.
I am sure they listen to Lewis and read the data but that does very definitely not tell them how to fix it.