Just_a_fan wrote: ↑30 Aug 2023, 01:07
organic wrote: ↑29 Aug 2023, 23:56
You must know that - It's clear you're really reaching to make a point
And for the record, I don't think RB was within 1-2 tenths of other teams. I disagree with the quote
Of course, the point is that there is such a large amount of nuance and detail that the bland "all bar 0.2s is down to the driver" is as ridiculous as claiming one person designs the car or any of the other silly things that get stated/inferred by journalists and others.
Yes fair enough. Journalists have to make a living and that usually means statements without any facts to back it up - these are the best for generating good quotes. I have ended up posting it here after all.
I would say that if you dig into the data it's not outlandish. The average race pace advantage of max relative to Fernando was about 0.25s
Assuming Schmidt's 1 - 2 tenth advantage max wouldn't even need to make up more than a tenth to fernando. Something entirely within the realm of possibility for a difference between drivers.
If you look back at Alonso's time next to Ocon, I would say Ocon was not more than 1 tenth slower than Fernando on race pace that often. Even sometimes he was quicker than Alonso. This year, Gasly is now fairly equal against Ocon - Gasly is coming into Ocon's backyard and has outqualified his teammate. Can we say that Gasly and Ocon are generally considered average F1 drivers? If so I would say a 'great' like Hamilton or Max (in current form) could put more than 3 tenths race pace into Gasly/Ocon - max's advantage to Gasly was over 6 tenths when teammates for instance. This would loosely infer 2 tenths into current Alonso is possible...
As for 5 tenths different to Perez. That seems about average for max-perez especially considering much of it was wet when he usually puts >1s per lap into him
So to me it feels like a statement that could be true, but like you said it's something journalists will say out of nowhere. We'd need teams' data to really conclude it