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Vettel and Ricciardo are both getting a lot comfier in their cars it seems. Both had good pace relative to their teammates and made progress. Norris and Gasly were as good as expected. Ferrari and Alpine seemed to struggle a lot.
I thought Verstappen had donated the win to Hamilton so it was cool to see him manage to catch back up and win. I gotta feel for Bottas because he was fast today but Mercedes obviously misjudged their strategy. Bottas was comfortably keeping pace with Hamilton and Verstappen the entire first part of the race. I thought Red Bull had basically sacrificed Perez but it turned out his strategy was quite good. It was like Ferrari with Kimi in USA 2018 where his strategy looked horrid but then he ended up winning the race.
It is starting to seem like the cracks are appearing for Mercedes. Red Bull seems as threatening or more threatening than Ferrari was in 2018 but without the trademark Ferrari tactic of shooting themselves in the foot constantly. The pressure is definitely on for Mercedes so it'll be interesting to see if they can cope.
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Huh, Mercedes still seem behind Red Bull in qualifying. It looked like they might have been able to pull ahead after FP3 but I guess not. It sounds like Red Bull's race pace is gonna be tough to match too.
I still find it really weird how various F1 media outlets keep talking like Red Bull and Alpha Tauri got a new, upgraded power unit last race when that's literally banned for this season. All the engines are homologated and can't be upgraded for outright performance, just for certain reliability reasons only. Even Verstappen's been calling them out on it and saying it's nonsense. But then again, we had to listen to David Croft push conspiracies about Mercedes chassis swaps all last weekend even though the entire idea behind that conspiracy was incredibly dumb and not based on reality (even Brundle told him to stop talking about it during the race if I remember right). Never let facts get in the way of a talking point I guess.
edit: Apparently this engine conspiracy was started by Hamilton and Mercedes. They really don't seem to be handling having competition well. It's been something new every weekend for the last 5 races or so.
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I'm quickly getting tired of Merc"s endless whining about RB. Maybe they'll start to realize soon that they didn't do their best job this year and it's not the pit stops or rear wing that's giving RB the edge. If anything, Merc has been lucky so far (track limits, red flags) but they made a number of mistakes themselves.
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Russel is seriously the embodiment of "never lucky"
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Mercedes looks vulnerable. They basically lucked into that Bottas podium with Red Bull's big mistake in Perez's pit stop that cost him several seconds. Verstappen was untouchable. Hamilton couldn't keep up and Red Bull seemed able to handle whatever Mercedes threw at them. Given that Mercedes isn't developing their car anymore, I'm quite curious if or how they're gonna turn this around because as of right now, I can't see Hamilton beating Verstappen. The Red Bull car seems strong at all types of tracks while the Mercedes is much more temperamental and inconsistent. It seems like it may come down to Bottas vs. Perez to decide who wins the Constructor's Championship, and as of right now I'm leaning toward Perez coming out on top of that fight unless Bottas miraculously ups his game (and somehow fixes his horrifically bad luck).
It's like Bottas and Russell are having a competition to see who has the worst luck this year.
edit: I saw an interesting thing that pointed out that, despite Verstappen's gap over Hamilton in points being smaller than Vettel's was in 2018 at this same point in the season, it's quite different now because back then Mercedes could chuck way more resources into catching up since they had twice most teams' budgets. Now they can't because they have less than half the budget and have an entire car that has to be redesigned for next year so their hands are essentially tied now that they've committed to working on next year's car over developing this year's car.
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It's also different because Mercedes was clearly faster than Ferrari in 2018, with Ferrari only relying on fast circuits (due to their cheat engine) and a good chunk of luck to grab an early lead. Mercedes wasn't really sweating despite behind behind a little bit. Currently, that RB, at least with Max behind the wheel, has shown itself to be consistently faster than the Mercs. Not only are Mercedes behind in points, they don't have many options to catch back up. You're also right in that the budget cap isn't doing Mercedes any favours here.
The flip side of this is that RB is focusing all their attention on this year's car, while Mercedes has switched all their focus on next year. That could indicate that RB will be further behind next season, unless they luck out on some clever design decisions.
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Looking good for Max. Looking at previous years he probably has 1-2 more DNFs coming his way but as long as he keeps getting 6 points over Lewis in the other races that doesn't even matter.
Finally an exciting season though, the race itself was a bit of a snoozefest but oh well.
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This Christian Horner quote from this article is cracking me up:
“It’s undoubted that Honda have done a great job over the winter but just look at the configurations of the car,” said Horner.
“They’ve got a barn door on the back of their car for this race and we had a pretty skinny rear wing. So, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out why we’re potentially a bit quicker on the straights.”
Even Mercedes' people are starting to admit that they probably went in the wrong direction in terms of setup since for the last several races they've sacrificed straight line speed for faster cornering.
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On June 29 2021 04:19 Ben... wrote:This Christian Horner quote from this article is cracking me up: Show nested quote +“It’s undoubted that Honda have done a great job over the winter but just look at the configurations of the car,” said Horner.
“They’ve got a barn door on the back of their car for this race and we had a pretty skinny rear wing. So, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out why we’re potentially a bit quicker on the straights.” Even Mercedes' people are starting to admit that they probably went in the wrong direction in terms of setup since for the last several races they've sacrificed straight line speed for faster cornering.
Hmm, just spitballing, but it could be a result of the car becoming increasingly uncontrollable after the new rules forced teams to remove the side skirt aero. For whatever reason, far beyond my understanding of physics, it hurt low rake cars (such as Mercedes) a lot more than high rake cars (Such as RB), and Mercedes has been fighting to get back in form ever since. Upping the rear aero not only increases downforce and traction, but it also makes the car a lot more stable. This could (But I should re-iterate: Pure guesswork!) be the reason for Mercedes' barn door, and would explain why they're so much slower on the straights than RB, despite having a more powerful engine.
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Haha Mercedes. Christian Horner called bullshit on Mercedes not updating anymore their car this year and then Wolff doubled down on saying they weren't updating it.
Now the chief technical officer at Mercedes, James Allison, has confirmed that Mercedes is bringing updates to their car this year and has more updates planned. I guess at this point there's no point even interviewing Wolff anymore since all he seems to be doing right now is starting rumours about other teams and lying about his own team.
Ferrari's team principal, Binotto, was interviewed by Motorsport and he said that it seems like between a bunch of role changes for senior staff and uncertainty for the future, Mercedes has been destabilized and are now struggling to get back to where they were. Binotto also backed Red Bull on the engine debate, saying that Ferrari's GPS data doesn't suggest Red Bull has taken a step forward with their engine, but instead perhaps have fixed some energy deployment issues.
It's starting to look like everyone's getting tired of Mercedes' bullshit. Between all this and the recent interview where Paddy Lowe straight up admitted that Mercedes deliberately ran their engines on lower power in 2014 and 2015 (so the FIA wouldn't try to equalize the engine power and thus provide actual competition for Mercedes), they've started to become something of a pariah. All those rumours that existed for years about them are being confirmed. They knew that they had an unfair advantage so they kneecapped themselves just enough to stop the FIA from doing the types of changes they did for Ferrari in the early 2000s when that team was too good. There's probably a pretty good argument to be made that Mercedes did a fair amount of damage to the sport just to keep their advantage over everyone else. I know quite a few people who tuned out of F1 in 2014-2016.
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Look, I'm getting as much schadenfreude as the next guy watching Toto squirm, but teams are not under any obligation to put everything on the table at once. Merc thought they could win without maxing their PU in 2014, so they held it. Keeping capability in your pocket for when it's needed is just basic strategy in any sport.
Really, all of these controversies are a product of the slightly unhealthy way that the regs are used to pick winners and losers. It creates really perverse incentives for teams up and down the grid. The constant changes and arbitrary rule tweaks mean every team has to devote half their attention to the competition and half to guessing what the FIA might do, and that level of focus on the rules rather than the racing is, I think, a real negative for the sport.
F1, to me, should be about the fastest driver in the fastest car. That combination of individual talent coupled to technical excellence is what makes it so compelling. There's nothing else like F1 in the world.
Obviously some regs are necessary. You have to define the problem. There has to be an asterisk pointing out that this is the fastest car on a given set of tracks, with a given type/amount of fuel & tyres, with particular handling and safety characteristics, etc etc. The cars would look very different if the tracks were ovals or Hamilton was a tesla AI and that's fine.
However, that asterisk really dominates the conversation now. The FIA seems to prefer to prescribe how the teams solve problems rather than defining the problem itself. It's actually about the team with the fastest car that has <80mm brake duct winglets and strakes with less than 6mm of curvature and a diffuser less than 1050 mm wide and on and on for a hundred and thirty pages, and that's both far less sexy and far more prone to silly gamesmanship.
I can't deny that this approach has produced the most interesting season in years, but I'm hopeful that once next year's budget caps and the new regs are fully in place, at least some of the micromanagement might be backed off.
Imo once the budgets are equalised, if a team wants to spend 5% of their cap developing something like DAS or finding a wing with just the right amount of bendiness, they should be able to. If it's a bad investment, they lose time compared to someone who used that 5% for something else. If it's a good investment it propagates. That's innovation, and I would love to see it rewarded rather than punished.
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On June 30 2021 12:57 Belisarius wrote:
Look, I'm getting as much schadenfreude as the next guy watching Toto squirm, but teams are not under any obligation to put everything on the table at once. Merc thought they could win without maxing their PU in 2014, so they held it. Keeping capability in your pocket for when it's needed is just basic strategy in any sport.
This is totally fair. I think the thing to keep in mind here though is that there were rules in place that basically made it impossible for anyone to catch up to Mercedes, so as long as they hid this advantage, they were untouchable and there was no actual competition. During that time there had an engine development token system that limited development, basically cementing in Mercedes' advantage. Had they been honest about their engines earlier, the FIA probably would have abolished the token system way faster. What doesn't sit right with me is that they also hid this all from their own customers. Remember the famous incident in Spa 2015 where Grosjean was chasing down Vettel, got a cryptic message over the radio of some mystery combo of settings to use from the Mercedes engine tech, then suddenly his car gained a bunch of power and became a lot more driveable? It's quite similar to what happened happened in Bahrain 2014 when Hamilton and Rosberg stopped listening to the team orders and started running their engines on higher settings, causing them to be over a second a lap faster than anyone else.
To think back then, had Ferrari not (allegedly) started cheating with their engines in 2017 through 2019, we would have had 5+ straight years of Mercedes dominance, and this probably would have done irreparable damage to F1 as a sport. Mercedes has always talked themselves up as being the most sporting of teams, but anytime they have ended up having actual competition they've acted anything but sporting. It's one thing to have an advantage over the competition in a sport and use it to win. It's an entire different thing to manipulate things so you can continue this advantage for years even when it becomes clear that in doing so you are actively hurting the sport itself. Nobody's who's in a sport for the right reasons actually wants every event to be a foregone conclusion the way things were from 2014 to 2016.
The FIA is definitely partly at fault here though. Their rules, especially back a few years ago, were such that it was basically impossible for anyone to keep up. They had to have the rules in place to stop the big budget teams from running away with things (which happened anyway) but how they implemented them ended up making it so those behind could never catch up. They have done some good things in the meantime at least, like their more advanced engine monitoring and bans on the types of engine maps that allowed Mercedes to keep their advantage over all other teams for years. Now if Mercedes has some fancy engine mode they want to use, they have to use it all weekend and provide it to their customers. They can no longer keep all of the advantage for themselves.
The flex-wing issue right now is the perfect example of where the FIA is going wrong though. All of the teams who built their wings with flex built them to within specification. Their wings pass all of the required tests and thus are legal by every rule in the book.
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I definitely agree with the point about the wing being everything wrong with that approach.
I do still see the engine tokens as a game issue rather than a player issue. It was clear as day from the beginning that when they gave everyone the same number of tokens, the team in front would stay there, especially when that team also had the biggest budget. If the teams behind had got more tokens it could have been different, and that's such an obvious thing to do.
Hiding power from the customer teams is a player issue, I agree. I'm certainly not defending everything Toto has done. It does need to be a rule and not a handshake, though.
The thing about being "sporting" is that this view often creates situations like the flex issue in the first place. The whole of f1 is about optimising within the rules. To me, having actual rules with gentleman's agreements layered on top is just asking teams to break both whenever they think they can get away with it. F1 is more than complex enough without teams having to read all hundred pages of the spec and guess that bendy wings are against some definition of "sporting" that exists in the FIA's head.
Imo the good of the sport comes into play at the meta level, when the teams are giving feedback on the budget caps or a set of new regs. On the track, I expect Mercedes to care about the good of Mercedes. It's the FIA's job to set the parameters that create fair and interesting competition, and eight years of merc dominance is largely merc's success and the FIA's failure.
They set out to stifle innovation on the basis that merc could innovate more, but of course without innovation, things are going to stay the same.
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i don't think Ricci will get the car; we should've seen improvements by now.
he does a little better on some tracks depending on layout and that's about it.
gg LNoris.
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This Lando guy is pretty good for a Youtuber. He should consider a career in motorsports
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whats baffling with the Daniel situation is that in a circuit like this , where you basically have 4 corners to master, he got 2 full weekends back2back and still couldn't compete with Lando , the gap between them is the most embarrassing thing on the grid right now taking into account the overall sentiment before the season started , I saw Ric > Norris on almost every prediction thread.
Riccardo needs to send it this race, he either makes a Charles lecrec drive of last week or he crashes while trying , doing a Bottas , which is not passing slower cars lap after lap is not an option for him.
he starts 13 on the grid with 8 cars that are slower than his , time to take some risks , I expect him to go hard on the first lap as well.
Love to see him turn this around !!!
Also hoping for some Ferrari race pace magic , they should start on hards and go long , hopefully when they switch to medium they can overtake the rest of the field that will run the hards for a while (as they all start on either soft or mediums).
Ferrai might also start Carlos on Mediums to get ppl early while Charles goes long on the hards , last week CL had the better pace so they will try and avoid Carlos slowing him down.
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Lets Go McLaren for the win!! HYPE
![[image loading]](https://www.thecheckeredflag.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Lando-Norris-28.jpg)
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Lando getting robbed with that penalty. He was ahead, and on the inside. He had the right to the racing line, and Perez just didn't yield.
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There's so many time penalties in this race. This needs some getting used to but Im liking that the stewards are trying to enforce the rules now
Kimi and Vettel touched at the last lap after Max crossed the line lol
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There's so many time penalties in this race. This needs some getting used to but Im liking that the stewards are trying to enforce the rules now
They're not tho, they're just handing out 5 second penalties where they felt like it, with no basis in reality. Previous rulings have been that the attacker, when on the outside, has to be equally alongside the defender to have a right of the racing line. The stewards just threw that out the window and made up their own rules on the spot and gave Norris a penalty anyways.
Its especially stupid since lately there have been a culture of less penalties, and more "racing incidents", handed out due to drivers, the team and the fans all wanting harder racing. And suddenly on one weekend they completely reverse that and hand out penalties left and right for exactly that.
The only penalties that should have been handed out this weekend was imo for Tsunado being a dumbass with the pitlane entry. At worst, Perez deserved one penalty for pushing Leclerc off when Leclerc was ahead
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EPT
