Jonnycraig wrote:
They could be on pole here quite easily (and probably China too) but to get there would take so much life out of the tyre as to make it pointless. Who cares about starting on pole if you have no race pace.
The fact that Hembery says they can easily change the tyres and watch one team run away with races tallies with reports from journalists expecting RB to be cleaning up once (if?) they get the tyres working.
As a Ferrari fan, unfortunately I expect RB to runaway with things (in terms of pure pace at least) if the harder compounds are generally used throughout the remainder of the season.
I feel that there is an optimal window in terms of DF to drag depending on the tire compound, and the RB9 has been a bit out of this window (with its higher cornerning speeds) on the more fragile soft compounds...where the tires just can't withstand the constant abuse of slip angles at such high corner speeds (particularly throughout longer stints). And when you have such a situation where you can't fully exploit your DF advantage lap after lap, compounded by the car being relatively slow/draggy on the straights...I feel this might be why they haven't been anywhere near dominant thus far. And maybe why Newey has been trying to adjust his design (particularly aero efficiency and drag reduction) a bit because of this.
When they are in the ideal tempature window on the harder compounds, I believe this allows them to really exploit their DF advantage particularly in the race without as much relative stress on the tire....while a lot of the other top teams simply don't have enough pure DF to take advantage of the harder compounds higher threshold so to speak.
This is nothing more than an armchair theory of mine...far from proven fact of course lol. And it doesnt help that we were unable to witness Alonso's true pace in the race at Bahrain because of the DRS issue with his car (although Massa looked miles off). Should be interesting to see how things play out nonetheless.
