Yeah, those are pretty accurate with what I`ve seen live on F1 official live timing ...
I have some personal considerations after the first day of testing with a disclaimer that we couldn`t know all kinds of variables like fuel loads, engine mappings and so forth.
In the first part of the day, all the teams were doing correlation tests in order to see had their real data are matching with their CFD and WT ones. Then in the second part, they were carrying initially some race setup stuff and ending with a race simulation.
Having said that yesterday Jolyon Palmer was on track at turn 11 and said that RB19 and F-23 were the only cars having a strong front end with a sharp turn-in. All other teams were struggling at different degrees, with W14 having some mid-turn understeer that needed some micro corrections from HAM.
F1 reporters were quoting VER saying that he was running smoothly with RB19 and LEC telling that they were testing all kinds of extreme setups from both sides of the range and that`s why F-23 was looking twitching and bouncing sometimes. Then reports are saying that only RB19 and F-23 are riding smoothly over the kerbs with W14 having some struggling due to a stiffer suspension than the 2 above teams, supposedly... Regarding the car`s ride heights, we could see that RB19 were sporting the same high ride height philosophy although a little bit lower this time, maybe due to the new regs. Both F-23 and W14 cars were running lower even touching at some parts of the track with the latter car sparkling more than the former one at the entire track.
Now from the top 3 teams' race sims, I could spot the following:
- all 3 cars were running much higher ride heights with no bouncing just visually unbalanced behaviour due to the bump/track level before turn 1 and turn 12.
- VER and LEC didn`t do a real race sim, they were more focused more on simulating the last stint of the race with various tyre compositions, doing some 14,15 lap stint
- HAM, in contrast, was doing a real race sim having a C3-C2-C1 tyre strategy, running between 17 and 21 laps between the stints.
- All cars were having a drop out in lap times after some 6-8 laps on all tyres, then a plateau with a consistent lap time across the remaining lap of the stint, ending with a big drop out at the end of the stint.
- From the sector top speeds side, VER was faster in S1 and S3 (LEC was 1-2kph and HAM 2-3kph slower) with HAM being the fastest in the S2 speed trap (at turn 12) with the other 2 drivers being 2-3kph slower at this point. So we could figure out that maybe RB19 has again the edge on the straights and W14 on the high-speed turns stuff, something that we could spot last year also
...
Of course, these are just early days and the real pecking order we could only see next Saturday in Q3 regarding qualy speeds and after the Sunday race regarding the race pace ...