SchumiSutil wrote:At the moment, all the lap times seems inconclusive to me... the fact Hamilton did a 12 lap stint does not mean he had more fuel...
He did an 8 lap stint, and that means that he had 8 laps worth of fuel on board, 7 more than he needed to have to do a qualifying run, he still did a 1:22.7. Given that one lap worth of fuel weight accounts for 0.1 seconds around Barcelona, that tells us that he
could have done a 1:22.0 at least if he had 7 laps less fuel on board. It's plausible that he could have gone faster, if he had even more fuel on board. We also know that there is 0.5 seconds a lap (roughly) between the different tyres, and that his lap was set on hard tyres, thus we know that if he was on softs, he
could have done a 1:21.0. We do not know if he was using DRS or not, but the bottom line is that even if he was, this car is at least 0.7 seconds a lap quicker than last year's McLaren around Barcelona (compared to the same driver, using DRS, and with an overly low fuel level). We also know that it's 1.2 seconds a lap quicker than last year's william's around Barcelona (which was pretty damn quick).
There isn't really dispute in this, these are knowns. He
may be able to go faster, other people may also be able to go faster. But we know that the Merc is
at least this fast.
Note – I did not assert that Merc could pull that time in qually this year (making your comments about DRS being banned irrelevant). I asserted that they're able to do it now (with or without DRS, which is an unknown), and that it's a fail comparison against last year's pole time.