venkyhere wrote: ↑06 May 2024, 00:58
Feel very happy for NOR. Deserves it. Has been on the bad side of luck for a very long time.
To all those Ferrari/RedBull/VER fans who are sulking and trying to find reasons why 'pure luck' is the sole reason for NOR win :
- yes, NOR would not have had it easy when trying to overtake Ferrari and Redbull in the straights, because McLaren configured their car with highest DF and lowest topspeed
- yes, the safety car pitstop was luck
- but there is no way to say that without safety car, NOR or PIA wouldn't have overtaken ferraris and Redbulls in green flag racing, despite their straight speed disadvantage. Their pace on H was consistently 0.4-0.5s faster than both those teams, even if it was roughly matched pace on M.
- just accept that McLaren can be now declared to have finally nailed the ground effect and their newest update is a testament to it. Their perennial problem of slow corner traction is solved, without sacrificing their medium and high-speed prowess.
- just accept that NOR drove brilliantly and in hindsight, what Mclaren learnt with their H stint in FP1 was valuable.
- just accept that Ferrari/RedBull went wrong with their calculation/extrapolation/sim/algorithms, on how the H would render the balance on their cars, just from M and S data. They might have gotten that right many times before; but on this track where it was tyre-lottery w.r.t grip, their guesstimates were wrong.
Teams converging into same pace after 3 yrs of development, in a regulation era where there isn't any powerunit differences - that's par for the course, isn't it ? McLaren and Ferrari have done brilliantly, to catch up with RedBull. It deserves applause, rather than sulking. If anything, it promises that 2024 wont be like 2023.
Well, I'm happy for Lando too, but I'm not happy that we were robbed of the possible fight for the win by the race control.
With Lando's pace he was likely to win on merit either way, but I'm angry that he was gifted additional 20s for the pit stop by SC picking up the wrong car. Without it, it would be close and Macca would have to nail the pit stop, for Lando not to fall behind Max.
I can say for sure that without SC Oscar wouldn't have overtaken Ferrari and RB, given how hard it was for Lando to overtake PER and PIA was just slower than the two Ferraris. But also PIA didn't receive the full update.
And your Lando's pace estimate with regards to FER and RBR is off. I'm going to exclude LEC from this, as he was on much older tyres. So, average SAI's lap time after he overtook PIA was 1:31,32 (laps 42-56), while NOR's was 1:31,19. So on average Lando was 0,13s quicker than Carlos. With Max the average for the same period was 1:31,47, so 0,28s slower.
So Imola with both Ferrari and RB bringing their own updates might be interesting (here is to hoping that RB didn't build another rocket).