silver wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 06:12
Sevach wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 00:32
JPower wrote: ↑11 Jul 2022, 22:32
Agreed. RB, like last year, looks like they won't have to resort to taking extra PUs unless they experience a dramatic crash/failure. That's a big advantage.
Ferrari is in a very similar position to 2021 Mercedes except that they just experienced rapid degradation instead of catastrophic failure.
To challenge for the WC Ferrari needs to:
Stop blowing up.
Be the faster car very often.
And maybe Mercedes getting good enough to challenge Red Bull but not Ferrari.
It's a long shot.
Not sure if Mercedes can come into play as they are still a second off in races. Ferrari has to help themselves. They have two key weaknesses currently. One is reliability and the other is bad strategy team. Despite having high deg, Redbull pushed Ferrari away from their easy looking 1 stop to 2 stop and then VSC forced 3. Redbull does this well to take instant decision and play well, which neither Mercedes can do nor Ferrari. So I suspect on days when both are on par, Redbull would win the race purely by well timed and thought out gambling calls. Now that Sainz is quite far behind, they should prioritise Leclerc over Sainz and focus on bettering their strategy brains. Clearly, whoever is in that group, are pretty inefficient.
RedBull was on a 3 stopper whatever happened, not a 2 stopper, the VSC saved them to lose another 20 seconds, Ferrari raced as if RedBull wasn't there once they stopped at lap 13. Whatever RedBull did had no influence whatsoever on Ferrari strategy who instead ran their optimal strategy in the race. You can see that Ferrari never needed to play any games because they always stopped Charles and then a lap later Carlos, no need to try undercuts, overcuts and so on.
Ferrari strategy has lost points to Ferrari but reliability has lost an order of magnitude more points, the 2 aren't equal, they aren't even distant cousins. Reliability is 1 through 10 of Ferrari issues and strategy is 11th.