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It would have been interesting if Vettel had managed to get past Bottas and put pressure on Hamilton, or even both Mercs.
Unfortunately, we would never know.
Vettel has now thrown away two races with a potential big haul of points, and that could wreck his championship bid.
Mad Max didn't have the speed, but it looks as if he has tempered his impetuosity.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Either way I can't wait for next year when they'll finally start trying to cut the dependence on clean air to go fast.
Performance increase from Q2-Q3 over the 2018 season so far:
Mercedes 0.815%
Red Bull 0.759%
Ferrari 0.619%
Ricciardo has managed a bigger Q2-Q3 increase than Hamilton. Yet you suggest Red Bull don't have a "party mode".
It's still not clear what you mean by "party mode". Is it a secret, rule-breaking mode that no Mercedes customers have? Or just a normal remap like the chav down the street has done to his Skoda and all the teams have?
We can see from the above that Mercedes are achieving a Q2-Q3 differential over Red Bull of 0.055%. At France this equates to 0.05 of a second. In Azerbaijan, the longest and one of the most power-dependent circuits, Ricciardo had a bigger percentage improvement Q2-Q3 than Hamilton, ditto Verstappen over Bottas.
I personally think all the teams have different engine modes, and there's nothing special about Mercedes in that respect. Williams are crap at the moment so no conclusions can be drawn there.
Every engine (and therefore every team) has a bunch of different modes, ranging from "oh shit we don't have enough fuel" to "cane it for 2 laps in Q3 but ONLY 2 LAPS OR WE'LL EXPLODE", and a bunch in the middle.
The backmarkers are all using the "cane it" mode in quali but they're all in shitboxes so it makes no odds. This is definitely the case for Williams and McLaren, who have exactly the same engines as Merc & Renault respectively but they've both employed a bunch of relative simpletones (in other words not spent $200m a year on a team of 300 blokes) so they have built shit cars and are at the back. You can't look at speed traps alone as that's a complex balance between outright power, downforce and drag.
Mercedes (and at this point also Ferrari and RB) have managed to find a way to generate huge amounts of downforce without drag, so they can still go quick on straights while also going quick round corners. Obviously this is less true for RB, since they're probably 20hp down with the Renault engine. But on most tracks, the balance of setup between downforce & drag is what separates the top 3 on laptime and speed traps. It just isn't enough to tell who is trying to cheat the rules with extra modes.
Last year's McHonda had shitloads of downforce because they knew they were down on power so they were trying to make up wherever they could in the twistys. I suspect that is why they thought they had such a great chassis, but they didn't realise just how much more downforce & drag they were carrying compared with the other teams.
Honestly, I'd like to see them return to the days where the driver had a wheel and paddles and a radio button and *everything* else had to either be done automatically by the car, or changed during pitstops, or not changed at all during a race. But we all know that's a pipedream
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
That makes more sense than turning up to eleven doesn't it?
5’19”...
The previous record was a 6’11” set by a Porsche 956
https://youtu.be/PQmSUHhP3ug