2022 French Grand Prix - Le Castellet, July 22 - 24

[ENGINE TUNER]

Let’s make everything back into a VER/HAM “issue”. Whoever it is, it isn’t right to dive bomb anyone and have the car now on the outside only with 2 choices. Bailing out or know the impact is going to come. If the car on the inside cannot make the corner then it’s not a move that’s “on”

The problem is you now have people who defended max last season complaining and asking for penalties this season about comparable moves.

No defending from me. BUT what I will say, if the driver on the inside is able to make the corner then it’s a fair overtake for leaving the door open.
My issue and always has been is with the haphazard stewarding/policing of the rules. There is no even handed approach which frustrates us “purists” more than the average F1 watcher who just enjoys the drama of it all

The driver must not only make the corner, but must also leave space for the other car to make corner as well, which means leaving them space for them to keep at least 1 wheel on the white line, which means that the inside attacking driver must not touch the white line until the other cars tires are fully outside of those white lines.

Also, the driver on the outside must leave room at the apex, but unfortunately the race directors seem to be enamored with placing launch ramps/sausage kerbs at apexes, which played a part in the contact today between RUS and PER.

[Vanja #66]

Shame for Leclerc's mistake, could have spiced up the Championship. The whole team, drivers included, should use the rest of the year to perfect themselves and challenge again in 2023. As Binotto said early in the year - they don't have any recent experience in winning a Championship, making RB and Merc favourites to the title and he was right.

[saviour stivala]

Still including mercedes for the title?

[Silent Storm]

Charles not ready to be champion. You cannot be making unforced errors like these.
He needs to be in full control of his car at all times if he wants to be considered a great contender.
Now he's just bleeding points and Max is having the easiest season of his career. Max is not bothered at all by Ferrari, he is just driving around in circles and collecting trophies.
Hamilton in P-2 in a slow mercedes looks more ominous than Charles right now. Max managed his gap carefully at 10 seconds to Hamilton. You could see redbull feels more threatened by mercedes and hamilton. Sad.

Charle did make an unforced error but his mistake was not as embarrassing as Hamilton’s last year in Baku. Given his age and lack of experience fighting for the championship, he will learn and come back stronger. If a 7 time WDC can make silly mistakes then so can Charles.

[Holm86]

Charles not ready to be champion. You cannot be making unforced errors like these.
He needs to be in full control of his car at all times if he wants to be considered a great contender.
Now he's just bleeding points and Max is having the easiest season of his career. Max is not bothered at all by Ferrari, he is just driving around in circles and collecting trophies.
Hamilton in P-2 in a slow mercedes looks more ominous than Charles right now. Max managed his gap carefully at 10 seconds to Hamilton. You could see redbull feels more threatened by mercedes and hamilton. Sad.

Charle did make an unforced error but his mistake was not as embarrassing as Hamilton’s last year in Baku. Given his age and lack of experience fighting for the championship, he will learn and come back stronger. If a 7 time WDC can make silly mistakes then so can Charles.

Everyone can make mistakes, but don't make it sound like he is a beginner or a rookie

[Spoutnik]

Charles not ready to be champion. You cannot be making unforced errors like these.
He needs to be in full control of his car at all times if he wants to be considered a great contender.
Now he's just bleeding points and Max is having the easiest season of his career. Max is not bothered at all by Ferrari, he is just driving around in circles and collecting trophies.
Hamilton in P-2 in a slow mercedes looks more ominous than Charles right now. Max managed his gap carefully at 10 seconds to Hamilton. You could see redbull feels more threatened by mercedes and hamilton. Sad.

Charle did make an unforced error but his mistake was not as embarrassing as Hamilton’s last year in Baku. Given his age and lack of experience fighting for the championship, he will learn and come back stronger. If a 7 time WDC can make silly mistakes then so can Charles.

The incident at Baku wasn't a "real" driving mistake. The off road into the gravel at Imola is a way better example.
I still think Hamilton or Max would have saved it somehow, like Hamilton at Imola or Max in Spain this year.

[basti313]

So Russell absolutely did fulfill the requirements.

Of forcing another driver off the track? Or what do you mean with that sentence? There are no divebomb requirements. The only relevant requirement in overtaking is to neither crash or run off your opponent. There is no requirement on when you are alowed to run someone off.

This is just about whether he was in the right when pedantically sticking to the wording of the guidelines and he was and it's nigh impossible to disagree with that - so it would have been up to Perez to leave enough space and then ultimately to yield - now we can both agree or disagree with whether this is fair/unfair correct or not correct but George fulfilled the requirements and it wouldn't surprise me if the next drivers' meeting will be a bit longer because of him whipping out a powerpoint presentation.

I also do not get this point....yes, it was up to Perez to yield. Perez yielded, used to runoff and everything went on as before. Russel completely fulfilled the requirements of running someone off the track. So what are you discussing?
And what powerpoint? About "why did I not get a penalty"? Everything was fine, no damage...I think it is completely ok to not give penalties in such a case.

The whole team, drivers included, should use the rest of the year to perfect themselves and challenge again in 2023.

I can not see this. They prepared over years for nothing but this season. The whole team is simply not on the level to Merc and RedBull. I can not see how they will be challenging next year, especially with some late rule tweaks.

As Binotto said early in the year - they don't have any recent experience in winning a Championship, making RB and Merc favourites to the title and he was right.

I do not know...this is simple strategy and communication, nothing about a championship. The team gave up the track position, otherwise they would have covered the undercut. The position was well lost, tire advantage was 1.5sec with two laps for Ver. At the same time Leclerc is trying some odd stuff at the inlap which should not be an inlap, the position was lost, the only way to win was to go longer.
This is just not making any sense what they do on strategy.

[wogx]

*tinfoil hat mode on*

Does it really look like Leclerc's mistake, not an actuator problem? Would he really press that pedal so hard in a corner, leaving those rubber marks?

*tinfoil hat mode off*

[basti313]

I think at this point he is still on the brake. The power from the engine, even if the throttle is hanging, would not make skid marks. To me it looks he simply went in too hot.

[organic]

https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/for ... r-leclerc/

AMuS race analysis.

The prospect of a duel between Leclerc and Verstappen in cars of equal value had fired up the atmosphere in the stands at the Circuit Paul Ricard. In the end, however, the duel only got the fans out of their seats for the first 18 laps. Then the Ferrari with start number 16 suddenly got stuck in the barrier of the Le Beausset corner.

[Leclerc's incident]

There was initially some confusion about what had triggered the departure. Leclerc had complained about his gas pedal in a radio message. Was this the same problem as two weeks earlier in Spielberg, when the small damper got stuck under the pedal? Team boss Mattia Binotto provided clarification: "The reference to the accelerator pedal referred to the attempt to free himself from the gang with reverse gear. That requires a certain procedure on our car. But unfortunately the nose was completely stuck."

Leclerc himself didn't even look for excuses for the faux pas. "I'm driving in the form of my life and then mistakes like this happen to me. If we end up losing the championship, then I know what the reason was. Something like that is simply not acceptable. It wasn't the first slip-up this year. We had the fastest car today. I just wanted too much."

At the scene of the accident, the drivers were doing around 180 km/h. According to the competitors' telemetry data, the Ferraris were consistently racing 15 km/h faster through the long right-hander than anyone else all weekend. If the rear end suddenly breaks away at such high speeds, no amount of countersteering will help. Normally, spins at Le Castellet end smoothly because of the wide asphalt run-off zones. Not in this case. Leclerc chose the wrong place for his spin.

Who would have won the duel?
When Max Verstappen crossed the finish line, his race engineer congratulated him on the radio for the win, but also added: "Too bad, that would have been an interesting fight today." The spectators probably felt the same way. The Ferrari and the Red Bull have never been so close this year. For almost the entire first stint, Leclerc and Verstappen raced across the track in tandem.

Red Bull had planned for two stops before the race. But then the engineers noticed that the tires didn't break down quite as quickly as they had feared. Because Verstappen couldn't get past on the track, the command post pulled the ripcord on lap 15. A small gap had opened up in the midfield behind Lando Norris, into which the Dutchman fell after his stop. "It was the earliest possible time to get through without another stop afterwards," team boss Christian Horner revealed later.

Because the gap was so small beforehand, Ferrari was unable to counter the undercut. "Max was already virtually past Charles after half the outlap. So in the second half of the race, the duel would have been the other way around, with Ferrari having the advantage of fresher tires. It's a real shame that we don't know how it would have turned out," Horner regretted.

Ferrari colleague Mattia Binotto saw his protégé at an advantage in this scenario: "In terms of tire wear, we were superior to Red Bull today. Before Max pitted, Charles was able to pull away two to three tenths per lap at the front."

The only question is whether the Ferrari would have been able to overtake the Red Bull rockets with the top speed disadvantage. Carlos Sainz in the sister car managed this feat against Perez. The Spaniard squeezed past with a strong maneuver in the finishing turn. "But Carlos was also on the alternative strategy with different tires. That's difficult to compare," Horner said.

Was Sainz's strategy the right one?
Like most drivers, Carlos Sainz used the safety car phase after the Leclerc crash to save time by changing tires. Because the Spaniard had started against the trend on the hard compound, he had to have a set of medium tires fitted for the remaining 35 laps.

A sticking wheel delayed the service somewhat. As soon as Sainz was let off the jack, the impatient Madrilenian shot out of his parking bay despite the red light. In doing so, the Ferrari crossed the line of fire of Alex Albon, who had to apply full braking in the pit lane to prevent the collision. That earned Sainz a five-second penalty.

After the restart, Sainz started like the fire department. Within 22 laps, he fought his way up from eighth to third place with some impressive maneuvers. But no sooner had the overtaking king taken the final podium position than he was called into the pits by the command center for a second stop. Sainz then questioned the strategy several times, which ultimately led to fifth place. The Mercedes camp also wondered, "Either he should have come in earlier or not at all."

But team boss Binotto insisted that the tactic was correct: "Carlos doesn't have all the information in the cockpit. We extended his stint to get as much information as possible about tire wear. At some point it was clear that the tire wouldn't last to the end. That would have been a safety risk."

The Italian believes that even without the extra stop he would not have finished in more than fifth place: "Carlos' pace was simply not good enough to gain an advantage of more than five seconds over Perez and Russell and thus make up for the penalty. Thanks to the stop, we still turned the fastest race lap and took the bonus point."

How did Russell get past Perez?
When Sainz turned off for his second pit stop, it was clear that the third podium place would be fought out in a duel between George Russell and Sergio Perez. The second Red Bull was struggling more with tire wear than Verstappen at the front. As a result, he fell into the clutches of the Mercedes. Perez still fended off the first attack on lap 42. Russell subsequently complained that his opponent left the track in the chicane. Because it would probably have crashed without the evasive maneuver, the race organizers did not issue a penalty.

Then, three laps before the end, Russell suddenly slipped through - and nobody knew how it had happened. The Mexican himself provided clarification after the race. The virtual safety car phase, which was triggered by Guanyu Zhou's damaged Alfa, caught Perez on the wrong foot: "I was told that the VSC would end in turn 9. But that was not the case. Then the message came that it would go to turn 12. But there I was too close to the delta time and couldn't give full throttle directly. George obviously had other information and could time it better. There was something wrong with the system."

Perez got backing from his team boss: "Race control couldn't switch off the VSC signal. Then they did a reset. I don't think George would have passed without the problem." The FIA later apologized for the mistake in a statement. However, the referees also stressed that no one was disadvantaged: "There were two messages at the end of the VSC phase. As a result, the system automatically switched to a backup. All teams got the information at the same time."

Was Vettel unfairly thwarted by Stroll?
The two Aston Martin drivers almost had an accident in the final corner of the last lap. From the outside, it looked as if Lance Stroll had deliberately tried to slow down his pursuer Sebastian Vettel. The driver from Heppenheim just managed to avoid the collision. Stroll subsequently denied that he had subjected his teammate to a dangerous "brake test": "I was on worn tires. I briefly lost the rear end," the Canadian waved it off.

But nothing of this can be seen in the footage. When accelerating out of turn 15 toward the finish line, Stroll simply can't get going. Even at the apex, he's almost 20 km/h slower than on the previous lap. Vettel made it clear what he thought of his teammate's driving with a clear hand signal. "He got on the brakes again before accelerating," the four-time world champion wondered. "In the end, though, it doesn't matter whether it's me or him who gets the point for the team."

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Juzh]

Obviously the safety car destroyed Sainz’s race…

They gambled starting on hard tyres. Sometimes it works (russell miami), sometimes it doesn't (sainz here). Quite a lot of things have to go just right in order for contra-strats to work, it just doesn't happen very often. In this case where ferrari was very fast I believe it'd be better to just go with regular med-hard strategy and use pace of the car to maximum effect.

[Bill]

these championship is all but over. ferrari doesn't have the pu or the drivers to sustain a season long world champion, if not pu reliability it is driver or team doing some cork up. Mercedes are too slow on straight to play any significant role in the champ.Fia made a mistake by adopting bio fuels , Honda and Renault understood challenge and started project ealier.Merc would have to break rule to found more power, Ferrari would wait long to fix reliability issues so no one to take the challenge to Rbr.Honda and Rbr didn't want the move to more bio fuel because they felt it undermined cost reduction, others failed to back them up maybe they saw potential for more domination in the future for themself.ferrari should have kept vettel at least he has proven that he can win championship given fast car something f1 fans never appreciated ,they think its easy to win champ if you have quick car.

[Zynerji]

Shame for Leclerc's mistake, could have spiced up the Championship. The whole team, drivers included, should use the rest of the year to perfect themselves and challenge again in 2023. As Binotto said early in the year - they don't have any recent experience in winning a Championship, making RB and Merc favourites to the title and he was right.

Step 1: stop crashing
Step 2: ask Carlos for strategy
Step 3: win championship

[langedweil]

The tension between Lewis and Max is not good for the sport. Max is either likable or not.

It's funny, but it's always with Ham around. With Fernando, Rosberg, now Max .. I see a pattern in this strange cold hearted behaviour.
But I agree, this weird polarisation isn't helping the sport in any way .. media gets wild in creating narratives, crowds go out of line.

There is less nonsense of team principals and drivers being d***s and more on track action this year which is good for the sport.

True .. that makes up a bit, but still.

[Big Tea]

What I have noticed this year is that TV shows hardly races not in the top 6 or so.
There seems to be lots of good racing down the field, or even cars making their way back up, but we see very little of it, and so much of what we see is in too tight a shot.

Directing is tough. Very. We see a demo of that every year at Monaco, with that own crew. And that is even a super easy race to televise. Nothing ever happens. But yes, we need to see all the action, or most of it, even after the fact, organize it and then show it when ready, at an opportune moment. Even in FP, constantly showing guys coming of a hotlap, or on a outlap, while someone else has their one first hotlap on reds. It feel it was better last year. Have changes been made to the crew?

Maybe Sky ( or a youtube channel) could cover 'off spotlight' moments from the race covering highlights and maybe some unseen pit or marshal action. They could take this opportunity to add stewarding decisions (reasons) either by direct interview or just a quick mail from them ( if they could be tied down )

Sort of a 'Ted's bits' but from the race (preferably with a driver rather than Ted though)


Not going to happen though, is it.