loosecannon said:
Christian Horner keeps making noise about the Mercedes speed and I wonder how much of it is just posturing or trying to deflect from their own exploiting of grey areas. In this Racer.com article, he claims that Lewis was running Monaco wings and was 30 km/h faster than Max in Brazil but if that were true, why would Lewis lose time to Max in sector 2 (the twisty bits)? It seems that Red Bull just can't accept that anyone could be as good as they are and on the rare (in 2021) where Mercedes matches the RB, Horner suggests that the Mercs must be illegal.
I don't think Lewis is going to win the Championship without a miracle because the Red Bull is so superior this year but dang, Lewis drove like a true champion today and that level of performance could make for an exciting last few races. So, I see that Formula 1 has never raced on the Losail Circuit in Qatar before so I am excited to see who figures it out the quickest. Bottas has been very good at figuring out new circuits quickly and I expect him to top FP1 and FP2 but I'm guessing that Lewis will prevail in Qualifying and the race, and Lewis already holds the record for winning on the most different tracks (29).
I think you're right about Horner. All team principals are doing this to one degree or another, but Horner seems to be especially loud relative to his peers. I don't take anything Horner says seriously as it all seems deliberate and calculated with some end goal in mind.
Never get between Horner and a microphone.
There's some analysis on F1.com about where Mercedes got their speed this weekend. Basically, by concentrating on balanced tire wear.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.monday-morning-debrief-how-some-deep-analysis-at-mercedes-hq-set-hamilton-up.6D5q6AUSnKjNvQ0HOcoK3A.html
Will there be a Schumi championship clincher sometime this year?
Could be...
Streetwiseguy said:
Will there be a Schumi championship clincher sometime this year?
Could be...
Right now, there's only one driver that is in the position to do that, and given that he's turned into the other car multiple times this season, it does seem likely he will try.
To be fair, it's the team principles job to seek every advantage possible - I'm not sure why anyone bothers to listen to the various rumors between races. Well, or takes them with anything more than a grain of salt.
In reply to accordionfolder :
Did Toto imply that Honda and/or Red Bull were cheating? I may have forgotten about that.
As I see it, Mercedes admits that Red Bull was a better car over a weekend, Red Bull suggests that Mercedes was cheating in some way. Kind of reflects the idea that Max seems to think he's entitled to a corner no matter where he comes in from it.
alfadriver said:
In reply to accordionfolder :
Did Toto imply that Honda and/or Red Bull were cheating? I may have forgotten about that.
As I see it, Mercedes admits that Red Bull was a better car over a weekend, Red Bull suggests that Mercedes was cheating in some way. Kind of reflects the idea that Max seems to think he's entitled to a corner no matter where he comes in from it.
Oh, not that I've noticed - I just saw a bunch of posts about Horner saying this or that. I was just pondering generally. It's like trusting what Lewis says about his tires in a race. The meta-game is way too deep to just take what they're saying at face value. When literal 10ths of a second matter, every advantage on and off track is pursued - they'd be doing an injustice to their multi-million dollar investments any other way. "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
In reply to accordionfolder :
Christian is clearly implying that Mercedes must be cheating. That's not just normal talk and pandering- that's an accusation. As opposed to just accepting that Mercedes learned something.
alfadriver said:
In reply to accordionfolder :
Christian is clearly implying that Mercedes must be cheating. That's not just normal talk and pandering- that's an accusation. As opposed to just accepting that Mercedes learned something.
And that's his job me thinks - remember Ferrari? If he weren't doing an amazing job as team-boss, he wouldn't be there.
Horner has learned that you just keep throwing crap against the wall and hope something sticks. I did notice the RB mechanics forming a human wall to keep the TV cameras from focusing on Verstappen's rear wing during the pit walk, though.
Lewis using the switches on his steering wheel to tell the team what his preferred tire choice was without broadcasting it over the radio made me laugh, that was brilliant. Even if the team ignored it :)
Also, has anyone else seen the Seb post-race radio transcript?
"I'm gonna touch Hamilton's rear wing"
"Don't do that! Very expensive"
"I'm joking. (pause) I'll try the front wing, maybe it's 25 grand".
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Seb is truly a treasure. It will be a sad day when he chooses to retire.
And to be clear I love Toto and Christian - very charismatic dudes in their own ways.
When he does retire, I'm hoping he comes back for some commentary gigs. I think he's got a lot to add and his low key humor would be great. More than some certain recent champs have to offer.
Speaking of recent(ish) champs, Janel got to meet Jenson Button at the SEMA show. He was signing autographs in the Armor All booth, which is sad. He was apparently a little surprised when the blonde girl with the cat mask on turned out to be a long-time fan who mentioned seeing him race at COTA 7 years ago and regretted not bringing her old McLaren hat for him to sign. She did not tell him that she had a cat named after him, that seemed a little too stalkery.
She didn't realize it was an autograph session until too late, she'd thought it was a 2 hour talk and she was 100% ready for that. Shame. The autographed Armor All hat just isn't the same.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Oh man, that's cool! Button has always seemed like one of the good ones.
Also from this race that just keeps giving:
alfadriver said:
In reply to accordionfolder :
Christian is clearly implying that Mercedes must be cheating. That's not just normal talk and pandering- that's an accusation. As opposed to just accepting that Mercedes learned something.
Yeah that is a serious accusation... but it's Horner.
accordionfolder said:
alfadriver said:
In reply to accordionfolder :
Christian is clearly implying that Mercedes must be cheating. That's not just normal talk and pandering- that's an accusation. As opposed to just accepting that Mercedes learned something.
And that's his job me thinks - remember Ferrari? If he weren't doing an amazing job as team-boss, he wouldn't be there.
The accusation is exactly why Max touched the wing. This is one of those- "how dare they be faster than us" BS things that Horner constantly does. I'm sure he would have asked for a race ban had Lewis turned in when Max had no intention of making that corner. And remember Max was pretty nasty in his reply to the warning for weaving.
The disgust with Red Bull just gets worse.
I'll just leave this here.... I'm not quite as invested in the professional wrestling side of f1 ;)
Great race weekend for Lewis. Sunday was just the capper. The car had just the right balance out of the key corners to give Lewis passing opportunities. I just wish VB would have been able to get Max to make the points closer going to Qatar.
I know the engine was just set on MEAN this weekend but watching the MB through sector 2 on the hards made it clear that the car had more balance, grip, AND power over the RBR.
I have noticed a trend in my mind, and I should actually confirm it with some research of this season, but in many races it seems that the MB just excels on the Hard Compound relative to the RBR. It isn't talked about much at all since the start of the 2020 season, but my question is:
How much of the excitement of back and forth battles up and down the field has been a result of the teams having to deal with that defined tire allocation?
Since the 2020 season started Pirelli brought the same allocation of tires for every team. Prior to 2020 the teams could chose how many hards, mediums, or softs they wanted per race. So for Brazil MB could have asked for 4 sets of Hards, used some in FP1 and then went for a one stopper for sure. Or RBR could have went for a Medium/Medium/Soft strategy. It doesn't get talked about much but maybe a good bit of that back and forth this season is due to the teams knowing they will get 2 hards/3 mediums/8 softs. And since they can't redesign the suspension for each track they end up just knowing they don't have the right tire collection to optimize their car for that weekend's track.
In reply to Advan046 :
The tire allocation side effect is pretty crazy for some races- Brazil, in particular- none of the teams had any time on the hard tires since they had to use both for the race. Nuts. They have some really good tire models now, and that's one more major change for next year that will be interesting.
In reply to alfadriver :
So should they keep that format of tire allocations?
I started to think that the teams always claiming the other is faster or looking confused is partially true as they aren't able to run the tires they want in FP1 or FP2 they have to extrapolate data and make educated guesses on what their laptimes will be. Regardless how many engineers and how many millions they throw at it, it is still just a good educated guess. Lewis was fascinated and excited by the fact that his car could just keep going at that pace after he passed Max, he didn't have big tire degredation, he just kept running away.
I have also noticed the Mercedes seems to like one step harder on the tires than the RB - it was even more true last year, I think. I think they've set the car up to work the tires harder overall, so the hards respond better. The fact that Lewis seems to be better at tire management than just about everyone on the grid (especially poor Bottas) only makes this more obvious.
I wasn't aware that the teams no longer got to request their tire allocation. That's one of those changes that probably has a much bigger effect than you'd think - although I'll bet the folks at the Pirelli factory are happy that they know how many tires to make at the beginning of the season :)
One of the things that Toto Wolff was talking about is that this is three races now where Red Bull has replaced parts on the wing after qualifying. You're allowed to replace damaged parts with new ones of identical spec with official scrutiny, but the expectation seems to be that it should be an occasional thing not something that happens every race. I wonder if we'll see stricter rules about this in the future?
Keith Tanner said:
I wasn't aware that the teams no longer got to request their tire allocation. That's one of those changes that probably has a much bigger effect than you'd think - although I'll bet the folks at the Pirelli factory are happy that they know how many tires to make at the beginning of the season :)
This was a covid mitigation factor, there just wasn't time for Pirelli to do all the custom stuff when they didn't even know what races were actually going to happen in 2020. They kept it for 2021, but I don't know what the plan is going forwards.
In reply to Advan046 :
With the brand new tires for next season, I think they should take some time to let it settle first. The are going to be a whole lot closer to Indycars than they ever have been, but I'm not sure that helps at all.
