Carlos crashing on lap one was a disappointment. Initial excuse of some sort of torque blip catching him out seems not to have been expanded on, so probably a painted line loss of grip blip instead.
They do seem to be banging on a lot about how his insight helped the pit strategy too much for me though. It is true though that few teams have experienced enough people for rain running.
It is hard and un-obvious (at the time, not later) what to do and it took me 20+ years to be sure because you only get worthwhile data rarely, and a lot of less experienced people donât believe it.
Lando learned the hard way.
If Toyota had stopped to put rain tyres on in Brazil rather than telling me âit is too near the end of the raceâ, which it wasnât, Lewis wouldnât have easily caught and overtaken Glock on the last lap and Massaâs celebrations would have lasted forever rather than a few seconds.
This.
Not this.
Teams care more about the manufacturers title than they do the driver one.
Unsafe release is a safety issue and the punishment does have to fit as it could result in a crash or even worse pit crew being injured or even killed.
I might be very out of date on this, but isnât the lions share of the prize money linked to the manufacturerâs championship and not the drivers? Driverâs gets the publicity, manufacturerâs gets the money.
yep, manufacturers positions also drives the sponsorship deals
With the current definition of a âbudget capâ winning the constructors influences how much the owner can take out of the business himself or pay the drivers. The rest of the team members gain nothing and are probably at least as interested by the driverâs championship as any other fan.
LH wins the sprint race in China.
Great result.
I suspect the circuit flatters the car, but that takes nothing away from how it was done.
Both Ferraris DQâd after the end of the race!
I never understand how teams get basic measurements wrong, Is the extremely marginal performance gain worth the risk?
Leclerc is likely due to the missing front endplate to the end of the race plus staying out longer on the tyres rather than pitting, so more tyre wear - Hamilton was caught out by that last year. Will have been very marginal.
With Hamilton just excess wear to the sacrificial protective parts underneath the car.
Not sure with Gasly, who was also DQâd.
LeClerc and Gasly were both underweight. LeClerc was 1kg (or so) down.
One of Hamiltons skid plates was under size. By less than 0.5mm, but undersize.
I can sort of understand that as they under fuel for the race and expect a safety car to sort it out.
There were no safety cars in the race and at one point there was discussion about making sure they a1litre of fuel left for testing, A litre of fuel weighs about 0.75kg
It may surprise people who havenât spent time in a wind tunnel but the 0,5 mm extra wear on the rear of the skid likely gave a worthwhile performance gain.
It is quite likely, or at least not impossible, it was worn after the sprint race and they raised the car for the race, but not enough, which was the reason for the loss of performance.
0.5mm of extra wear when the skid touches at the end of the straight will mean an average rear ride height considerably more than 0.5mm lowe in the corners and may well be worth 0.1 to 0.3 secs per lap.
There arenât enough people, nor enough time to check all the cars for everything so the tech delegate decides a feasible number of checks and reports them to the stewards, it is entirely possible that one of the cars that gained from the disqualification of those 3 to have been underweight or have too much skid wear but just werenât on the list to be checkedâŚ
Donât think they are being daft, both height and weight are performance gains worth pushing the margins for
1kg of weight is around 2 secs over a race distance, which may count, but worth having, a lower ride height can be worth several tenths per lap. even with flat bottomed cars 1mm was about 0.1 secs per lap, likely to be more with ground effect.
And this is why we need you here!
Very few people can clearly explain the benefits (or otherwise) of what seem to most people, insignificant changes or details.
Thank you, Frank.
So Lawson is toast, Yuki comes in from Japan
Total f madness
Seems more than a bit Previous.
Well Yuki gets to see if he can live-up to his righteous butthurt.
So they didnât chose him cos heâs a bit of an unstable nutter who can lose the plot not irregularly, and they put him in from the (checks notes) Japanese GP
Canât see what can go wrong, really
CAN see Lawson doing fine in the Torro Rossi though. Hope he accidently runs down the one eyed Adolf in the pits on his way to a points finish
LL out of RB seat, Tsunoda in.
The internet trolls are on fire - LL isnât up to the job, etc, blah, blahâŚ
Iâm unqualified to comment but if pushed would say the trolls are wrong.
HoweverâŚ
Next GP is in Japan. YT is Japanese. Big boost to RB merchandise sales.
Honda already heavily invest in RB, and have previously offered $10m to have YT in a RB seat. This was turned down, but a more recent approach indicates this figure was massively increased to get YT into a RB for Japan.
Money talks. Ability walks. (Although LLs ability is something that others will argue endlessly about.)
Now we just need LL to finish above YTâŚ