Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
In my slot racing days I painted all my 1/24th scale cars pink with brown flashes.
The 2020 F1 Season
- Thread starter Tony Lockhart
- Start date
Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
According to one source the other teams appealing means it goes to court for much greater clarification now.
Tony Lockhart
Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
Thats not the point. The point is that he’s consistently trailing his team mate by quite a margin.
It is very odd. The car is not competitive (so far) this season but you get the sense as well that Vettel has checked out a tad.
The pattern from Vettel's driving achievements are pretty clear.
Give him a car with particular handling characteristics that he likes and he will be very quick. But if the characteristics are not like that and he will be slower to a lot slower. Since the days of his winning at Red Bull it has been very to extremely difficult to make the car work that the way that he wants it to work. Which suggests that this year's Ferrari has some bad handling traits that Charles is better able to deal with.
The gap is probably made larger as Charles continues to learn about F1 cars and improves his driving, whilst Vettel is nearer to the end of his F1 driving learning curve than the beginning.
Tony Lockhart
Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
I'd say it's nice to see that the cars really are so obviously different.
cutting42
Arrived at B4 Hacker Ergo
It is clear that the Merc is designed around the relatively hard tyres in modern F1. The key as I understand it is the ability to switch the tyres on quickly which they seem to do very well. We often see Mercs restarting after safety cars and getting on the tyre really well and gapping the cars behind.
This has come to bite them on the arse today with a very hot day, very soft tyres and a circuit that is very aggressive on tyres with lots of fast sweepers and the Merc has the highest base downforce. Kind os a perfect storm for them. Still finished 2nd and 3rd tho.
Was cool to watch. I had to stop watching halfway through and felt that Merc might even not be on the podium at that point. Yet again HAM comes out of a bad day still beating his closest challenger.
Very good to see.
Pirelli bringing softer tyres helped considerably.
In this race we had a 1 stops, 2 stoppers and 3 stoppers to try and get the best race result. That all helped to keep it interesting.
Rack Kit
pfm Member
Congrats to Max - another great drive. To be currently 2nd in the WC in a car that’s well behind the Merc on pace is some going. Shame that Albon just can’t get the same performance out of the car at the moment & I fear for his long term future at the team if he can’t get up near Max to give the Mercs another car to worry about when they’re having an ‘off’ day.
A very good recovery drive by Lewis and finishing ahead of his main rival is going to have Bottas scratching his head wondering how he’s now only 3rd the WC table.
A very good recovery drive by Lewis and finishing ahead of his main rival is going to have Bottas scratching his head wondering how he’s now only 3rd the WC table.
Instead of blaming the strategy (there was nothing that Merc could have done as RBR were considerably faster in the hot conditions and on an opposite strategy), Bottas should look to improve his race pace compared to Lewis a bit more and to work really hard on improving his overtaking. If he does not do this he will need an enormous amount of luck to be world champion with Lewis in the same team.
The writing was on the wall as soon as Pirelli's softer rubber was confirmed as the British GP Friday when it was hot showed the Mercs not to be as fast on the then mediums (this weekend's hard). In modern F1 it seems impossible to build a car that can dominate at every track in every set of circumstances and this is a good thing.Yesterday the temperatures, tyres and circuit played against Merc, but crucially they also played to the strengths of the Red Bull at least in Verstappen's hands and that leads me on to another thought... just how good is Max? He seems able to better his teammates with increasing ease and you have to say is more dominant over Albon than Hamilton is over Bottas, but I think this partly illustrates that the Merc is a much easier car to drive fast than the RB, Max (like Lewis) is able to extract more from a tricky car. That said I'm not prepared to call who would win if both Lewis and Max were in the same team right now as I think Max is getting better all the time. I wish we could see it, but we never will sadly! Anyway it was a brilliant strategy from RB and expertly executed by Max.... great to see a win from a non-Merc.
One more thought... I am thinking back to Prost/Ferrari in 1991 when Ferrari sacked a then 3 time WC and one of the greatest drivers the sport had ever seen as he publicly criticised Ferrari. Will Vettel see out the season at the Scuderia? I'm beginning to think not! It's sad because I like Vettel very much, but clearly he's not happy there and even I (someone not particularly into conspiracy theories) think Ferrari are not giving him quite the same machinery as Leclerc somehow. In my mind he'd be better going now, recharging his batteries and coming back in 2022 for a last hurrah, but maybe I'm wrong and his time has passed.
Rack Kit
pfm Member
I was going to write the exact same thing regarding Max & Lewis but you beat me to it!
It’s only guessing obviously but despite being a Lewis fan but I’ve got a feeling Max might just edge out Lewis in the same car. Could be wrong, maybe Max would push Lewis onto another level? The only thing we know is we’ll never find out.