2013 Australian GP - Albert Park

[Crabbia]

If you look only at Jenson's performances last year, you wouldn't think that the McLaren was that good a car. Top 3 - 4 only rather than the out and out quickest for much of the season....

Best summary of McLaren's position I have read

Completely agree with your whole post myurr, I think anyone expecting mclaren to have the development pace they had in previous years is being too optimistic. They are in a similar position to Ferrari last year, only they have two drivers like Massa and no Alonso.

[Nando]

Obviously Webber mysteriously loses the start again and Massa mysteriously gets the wrong the strategy.
Always funny to see.

I don't think those are mysteries at all. Webber is known for his poor starts. Alonso is clear team lider so he gets the best strategies.

I know how he can solve all those issues.

Whatever his radio guy says, add two clicks.

[WhiteBlue]

It was an interesting race. Congratulations to Kimi and Lotus for a great tyre strategy and flawless race execution. Lotus and Ferrari seem to profit most from the unusually cold conditions. They have less tyre wear than Red Bull. Under such conditions it is obviously a bigger advantage than having top downforce. But I'm not sure this is going to continue when they come to hotter races. The pendulum could swing back to Red Bull. Whatever the reason it provided for an entertaining race although I agree with Mark Webber that the super soft isn't F1 worthy. Sutil made a nice start to his race and collected many leading laps for Force India only to practically waste away on the options in the end. Nevertheless a good result for FI to beat McLaren with both cars. For Macca it was the race from hell. They look to have a bit of egg on their face at the moment. It is a bit like Ferrari last year. They need to urgently get their act together with part development and find the right set ups. Lewis will be glad he made the jump to Merc at the moment. I'm curious how that will shape up over the season.

[myurr]

It was an interesting race. Congratulations to Kimi and Lotus for a great tyre strategy and flawless race execution. Lotus and Ferrari seem to profit most from the unusually cold conditions. They have less tyre wear than Red Bull. Under such conditions it is obviously a bigger advantage than having top downforce. But I'm not sure this is going to continue when they come to hotter races. The pendulum could swing back to Red Bull. Whatever the reason it provided for an entertaining race although I agree with Mark Webber that the super soft isn't F1 worthy. Sutil made a nice start to his race and collected many leading laps for Force India only to practically waste away on the options in the end. Nevertheless a good result for FI to beat McLaren with both cars. For Macca it was the race from hell. They look to have a bit of egg on their face at the moment. It is a bit like Ferrari last year. They need to urgently get their act together with part development and find the right set ups. Lewis will be glad he made the jump to Merc at the moment. I'm curious how that will shape up over the season.

Don't forget that Sutil only ran as highly as he did due to starting on the mediums. Sure he had solid pace thereafter, but he had track position because the front runners had already pitted to get off the super softs after their performance had dropped. That he then slipped back on the SS tyres was really only payback for his early gains.

[Blackout]

This race has confirmed what we saw during FP2 race simulations and it was hot in Friday; Lotus RBR and Ferrari very close to each other and Mercdes relatively slower, less consistant and with bigger dropoff... This was clear to me but I was still suspicious. But then some people said Lotus (KR AND RG) was a bit faster than everybody, followed by Ferrari and it was even harder to believe (especially when you know that the E21 did not run the complete new aero package in Friday)
But race confirmed it.
Lotus will be fast everywhere and will be faster in the hotter condidtions, like last year and like Raikkonen said.
RedBull will strike back and hard.

[Nando]

By the way, did anyone notice Alonso using DRS before the "DRS enabled" message popped up on screen?

He used it up to T3. (not the time he went out of the pits)
I´m guessing the on-screen messages can be slightly out of sync of the actual time something gets enabled or disabled?

[ringo]

Does anyone know why Sutils tyre degradation on the super softs was so freaking high? I expected him to be very quick in his last stint; low fuel, super softs, + clean air.

Well i was surprised he finished on those tyres. The supersofts don't qualify as a race tyre to me. They are quite useless.
They can't even do one hot lap. The degradation is unnecessarily high.

What i do notice though is that Pirelli may have made a mistake by making it so that there are at least 2 pit stops per race.
The race tended to allow too many gains in the pits this way. I didn't really see close racing at the front. The gaps were too big to be closed down, and this was all due to degradation on inlaps and sometimes over 1 or two laps before an in lap.
The tyres are too weak to promote all out racing.
Maybe the teams will learn them in bring things back to where it was in the last half of the 2012 season. It's not very entertaining to see Massa driving his heart out, then by staying out just 2 or 3 laps he pits then comes out fith.

[raymondu999]

On a more car-related point, the great thing for Ferrari is the Melbourne shouldn't have played to their strengths; the Lotus and RB were supposed to have much better traction, which is pretty important at that track, and the Ferrari's strength (from last year's car and Barca testing appearances) seemed to be high speed corners, not to mention top speed was high too.

To be frank, we don't have enough to conclude this yet. Who knows? Maybe the Ferrari has the best traction in long run form. Maybe they have rubbish fast corner pace in long run form. Maybe it didn't have better traction than the RB - it just kept its tyres intact for longer in today's cold conditions, which in turn gave them better traction. We just don't know.

[raymondu999]

I agree. I don't see the point in having a qualifying tyre for the race. The supersofts to me definitely smacked of a qualifier. It's fine having qualifiers for qualifying, but not for the race.

[ferlonso]

By the way, did anyone notice Alonso using DRS before the "DRS enabled" message popped up on screen?

He used it up to T3. (not the time he went out of the pits)
I´m guessing the on-screen messages can be slightly out of sync of the actual time something gets enabled or disabled?

Yes I did notice it and was confused as to whether Fernando will get a penalty for that. But as you said the on-screen messages and the driver-engineer radio messages appear quite late. Like yesterday, the drivers were starting to come out of their cars when race control showed:- another 10 min delay, 20 min delay

[infy]

Its a bit hard to say who has pace here, or who can look after their tyres longer due to RBR and Ferrari's strategy being ruined by Sutil (and then Vettel) holding them up.

If you watch Kimi, you will see he spent the whole of the second stint about 5 seconds behind the Sutil train, going at a slower pace than he could obviously go. He most likely did this knowing the guys in front were using more mechanical (tyres) grip in the dirty air, due to the loss of aerodynamic grip. So Kimi could really buy his time and extend the life of his tyres by just playing it cool in clean air, knowing that even if the Ferrari's and Vettel decided to try do a 2 stop, they would have worse tyres than him. As they were more likely on a three stop, he was in an even easier position (he even said it was an easy win).

Had the Ferrari's been ahead of Sutil and Vettel (like what would happened on an overtaking track), I'm fairly certain they would have gained the needed gap to have covered Kimi's 2 stopper. I think this because when Alonso came out from his third stop, he was only a few seconds behind Kimi (4.2 if I remember correctly). In clean air he would have had the valuable track position, I'm sure.

So in conclusion, I believe this race was won by Kimi more due to the circumstances with Sutil and race strategy, than the life of Kimi's tyres. Unfortunately we wont know for sure until a few races have past.

[hollus]

No body forces you to qualify on the supersofts, but they all did so. Sutil tried starting in the mediums thanks to being 11th in Q, and proved that the result balanced out by the end of the race. Anyone from the bottom of the top 10 could have gotten clever and tried the same. They were free to do only 3-4 laps or even just the last lap in the supersofts, nobody chose to do so... their choice!
The harder compound also tends to lose you a couple of places at the start of the race.

[Ferraripilot]

Anyone have the link showing all lap times and comparisons? I want to say it's on Mclaren's website only I cannot find it.....

[stefan_]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yxe92yiL04[/youtube]

[siskue2005]

The leaders werent stuck behind Sutil, infact Sutil was pulling 2 to 3 sec gap from Vettel at one point
Alonso pitted early and that is what allowed him to overtake Sutil otherwise Sutil had similar pace to front runners

And you said Kimi saved the tyres in the second stint by having sutil ....but thats not what happened he did 25 laps in the second stint and also on his third stint without any saving as such ( and also post race Kimi said they were on 2 stopper from the begining)

Ferrari and RBR could only do a 15- 17 lap stint on their medium tyres

Imagine what pace he could have had , if he was on a 3 stopper