organic wrote: ↑19 Sep 2024, 20:15
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/red- ... stened-to/
Sergio Perez has revealed some of Red Bull’s Formula 1 engineers apologised to him after the recent Italian Grand Prix because the team now better understood the nature of the car problems that had been limiting his performance earlier in the season but were only fully recognised once team-mate Max Verstappen started to struggle too.
Perez:
"In a way, yes. To be fair, some of the engineers after Monza came to me and apologise, in a way, because now it’s a lot clearer [what] the issues I was talking about [were].
"It was always the speculation around it and people saying the problem was I was not focused enough or other things.
“But at the end of the day, I’m just happy that we found out the problem and that we can focus on that and improve it.”
So this is the same issue as the rb16 essentially. Gone down a development path that added instability and you only find out you've done it after 12 months because Verstappen can drive around it until it gets ridiculously bad. Something within their process of drivers feeding back to the engineers needs to change I suspect. .
Here's Waché talking about the rb16. It seems very applicable to current situation
It’s ironic that, in 2020, Max’s talent was a contributory cause to the problem we had,” he remarked.
“He has an ability to control this sort of instability that would be impossible for some others. We know that sometimes, making a car on the edge in this way can create a quicker car – and you don’t realise you went in the wrong direction because you are still extracting more lap time from the car.
“But you don’t realise at first it’s only because he has so much talent. So you keep going in this direction but you go too far and it takes you a few months to come back from that and realise you’d gone in the wrong direction.
“The system is so big that to rethink the aero surfaces of the car and remake them, it was a long and painful process.
It's not a given that a "more stable" car would have made the RB19 faster last year (and if the RB19 would have been faster last year than it already was with another design, then lmao
) . At the end of the day, what matters is the laptimes and results, not how it got there. If Max could take advantage of it, then it wasn't the wrong thing to do. It's only wrong after they have exhausted its potential and no longer improve. That's true of any concept. Now is the time to come up with something new. They have reacted in a reasonable time frame.
So this doesn't absolve Perez entirely and he doesn't get to rewrite history. They had a very fast car with some instability in it, while Perez was struggling. That's on him, not Max or Red Bull. What is on Red Bull is not detecting the crossover point sooner. That crossover point is not just "when Perez started struggling". Clearly Max could get a lot of speed out of it with some instability and there's no reason why the car shouldn't have a manageable amount of instability as long as Max can drive it quicker than one which is "stable, but slower".
A lion must kill its prey.
