Darth-Piekus wrote: ↑04 Nov 2024, 20:32
I would like to give my honest opinion. Hear me out before passing judgement. I might play devil's advocate and some may be hurt if I say it but I have to say it. Do you know that the line between success and failure is very thin? People these last two days tend to ignore many factors that lead to that result and tend to overexaggerate the result. Sure I agree that Lando screwed yet another start and I agree that Max drove a masterful race but let's see.
1)He started 17th. 4 places were vacant as they started from the pitlane so 13th. Two cars were the B-Team who got orders to let him pass against the rules of the competition so 11th. After that he passed 4 cars and none of them even made an attempt to defend and I was dissapointed in Piastri not even trying to defend.
2)The first car that defended was Charles Leclerc and Max never managed to pass him. He was stuck for 26 laps.
3)The VSC ended the moment both George and Lando entered the entrance of the pit lane. Nobody could predict that and that damaged their safe pit stop window.
4)Then there was a normal SC that bunched up all the cars. Norris passed Rusell and he was at that point faster than Max and the two Alpines by 4 seconds per lap. Still the SC bunched up the field and it's safe to say that the first three had to enter or risk getting passed. In any case you would expect that Max and both Alpines would have been at the end of the pack until Colapinto somehow lost the car on Safety Car speeds. The Red Flag was a total lucky event noone could predict giving them a free pit stop.
5)Under normal circumstances Max would have been dead last without the Red Flag and then nothing suggests he would be able to pass everyone considering he couldn't pass Leclerc not to mention he would be stuck in the dirty air. I will agree that he would have been on the top 10 but not in the podium places.
Good job for his masterful race but let's not overexxagerate.
Didn't want to talk about a non Mclaren driver here, but there are some factual errors above -
To go from P17 to P6 and get to the tail of LeClerc, Max overtook 9 cars (there were just 2 vacant spots on the grid, not 4). Then he got lucky that he didn't have to overtake LeClerc, Tsunoda, Norris, Russel, because they all pitted. The only other overtake he did was Ocon after the second safety car. So overall 10 overtakes in total (2 did not start, 3 started behind ; to account for a total of 19 cars other than himself).
However, the matter of high praise for him is not really about the 'number of overtakes' anyway.
All the mainstream/social media hype about this 'verstappen masterclass' is 90% by people who don't understand racing , but from those 10% who actually understand, it is not about the P17 or the number of overtakes etc.. It's about the cleverness and skill involved in how different the lines he chose to drive were (for example the outside T3 passing of 3-4 cars in first lap was reminiscent of the same thing from brazil 2016 ; another example was how much kerb he was taking on T12 to straighten before applying full throttle for sector3) , about how he was braking into T1 and yet not locking up his fronts, and how smooth the inputs were for all the sector2 turns. The car wasn't eccentrically loaded at any point where he had to saw at the steering wheel to wrestle back the car (of course, don't know what he was doing with his feet because we can't see it on the onboard footage). As a result his tyres were in much better shape than anyone.
Yes he got lucky with red flag ; yes, many of the laptimes (until the 2nd safety car) were very similar to Russel/Norris. But it was the way in which those laptimes were achieved without punishing the car/tyres.
All the praise across the paddock from 'people in the know' is really about how differently he was driving to everyone else. It's not about the 'how much gap' or 'how many places' or any such measurable numbers.
