2013 Italian GP - Monza

[beelsebob]

You can't start to cut down on the pace from the point you have a 5 second buffer on Rosberg. To make that gap Hamilton had already used up his tires. To make the tires last for 40 laps (from lap 13 to 53) he would have to drive so slow that he never would have even caught up Rosberg in the first place (on lap 27).
I'm sorry but your theory is full of holes.

Hmm looking at your time tables it seems to me that Rosberg kinda harmed Hamilton's race a bit. It seems on lap 27 he came out of the pits right in front of him and caused him to lose time for the entire lap and lap 28 too. Not very good teammate behavior. This came to pass because Hamilton did a really poor lap 25 (any idea who held him up for that?).
I think these two incidences caused him to be again behind Raikonnen after their second pitstop. All in all Hamilton would have been 7th just behind Rosberg.

But my question was if his hard tire first strategy would have worked. I think everybody ahead of him had soft tires and nobody went really long, so his hard tire first would have earned him clean air after lap 20 or so and a faster last stint than competitors too.

When you're in traffic at the start of the race, starting on Hards is basically the only way to go. Being in the field at the start means you know you're going to be running slower than you can anyway, so you might as well use the slower tyres while you're doing that. More so, you know you're going to be tucked up behind gearboxes, so you might as well use the tyres that can withstand the heat, and the tyre scrub better.

You then switch to mediums at a point in the race where you're in clear air, and do the fast stint that everyone else just did as their first stint. If it all works out, it means that you get nearly as much clear air as the leaders, and you come out not much behind, despite having started far back on the grid. The downside is that it requires you to fight through the field at the end.

Basically, yes, it works – it gets you high up the order, despite starting relatively low down. It's been used quite a few teams by all the top teams when they have a driver out of position on the grid.

[Juzh]

Just noticed something. Webber didn't use his drs to re-attack alonso the lap after he very generously let him trough.
These pictures are all before the braking zone.







And this one is in the braking zone.



You can clearly see the wing doesn't move. Webber let alonso trough and then never attempted to re-pass him. Frankly, this is just the stuff you could expect from webbo after the shenanigans he pulled of in brasil last year.

[Phil]

If your version of cooling the pace to preserve tyres involves only running 0.3 seconds a lap slower, then you're not talking about cooling the pace at all. When drivers run a strategy that involves one fewer stops, they need to run significantly slower, not just a tiny bit. You don't get to simply preserve a 5 second buffer to someone who's on a one-stop-fewer strategy (which is effectively what we're talking about here – hamilton effectively doing a "no" stop, because his first stop was forced to be so early).

I tend to agree that all factors and unknown considered, the two stop was the logical step. I think however that SectorOne has a point; these tyres are still very much a lottery and lots of unknowns. They can run them in practice and do all kinds of simulation runs, but if the track conditions on race day are different, you'll either see tyres performing better or worse, which is pretty much the reason why you have various teams saying post-race things like "Yeah, the tyres didn't exactly last out the way we had anticipated" etc.

We've heard these things countless of times this year. The point being; with these tyres, it's still very much unknown how well they will perform on a given day. The teams might have a fair idea, but not in absolute terms because there are simply too many factors that dictate how well they perform.

Considering Hamiltons rank in the WDC and his prospect of finishing 'best' in 6th (which was highly unlikely) in front of his team-mate - I myself wondered how the tyres might have lasted if he had attempted to finish the race on them. Would he have made it to the end? How much time would he have lost? How bad would reaching the cliff had been?

My other thought was if there was a slight possibility of rain 10 minutes before the end of the race - if yes, it would have made sense to try to keep him out and see if he could pit directly on to intermediates (which would have been a great gamble). At the end of the day, you either commit to a two stop (like he ended up doing) with minimal time loss or you attempt a one-stop. If that fails, the time you lose by gambling wrong will be a lot more costly than if you commit to your strategy. However, if the best you're effectively driving for is 7th to 10th (and you're a front-runnin-team), perhaps it's going with the risky strategy is not such a daft idea. If it doesn't work out, the worst you can get is the points for 7th (which ended up being a 9th). 2 points. For 2 points, IMO - a gamble to earn 5 points (or nothing) sounds worthwhile.

[iotar__]

Just noticed something. Webber didn't use his drs to re-attack alonso the lap after he very generously let him trough.

I don't think he "let him through", he could have done that under breaking, he slowed down to avoid collision. If we're using trust they hypocritically like to talk about it was 100% trust on Webber's part and 0% trust on Alonso's, to his credit he kept it on the track and made the pass possible but had to rely on Webber slowing down, not taking better line and outright stopping, any less than that and it's a heavier collision, they still clipped wings after a chop.

[radosav]

Just noticed something. Webber didn't use his drs to re-attack alonso the lap after he very generously let him trough.

I don't think he "let him through", he could have done that under breaking, he slowed down to avoid collision. If we're using trust they hypocritically like to talk about it was 100% trust on Webber's part and 0% trust on Alonso's, to his credit he kept it on the track and made the pass possible but had to rely on Webber slowing down, not taking better line and outright stopping, any less than that and it's a heavier collision, they still clipped wings after a chop.

This angle of photos shows nothing. In later parts of race when Webber was chasing Alonso and was in DRS zone i thought that Webber isn't using DRS at all. But then i saw Webber DRS open when director show it from one of the cameras positioned very low, at ground level. Webber's rear wing is very small so you can't notice if opened DRS or not.
Other thing is that RB9 (Webber) with opened DRS wasn't fast enough to overtake Alonso.

[1158]

About the whole Hamilton should he have pitted argument. There is something not being discussed. I think Merc were playing it safe because they are more concerned about the constructors championship than the driver's championship at this point. 2 points doesn't sound like a lot to lose, but with how close the battle for second is right now those points matter.

[Juzh]

Just noticed something. Webber didn't use his drs to re-attack alonso the lap after he very generously let him trough.

I don't think he "let him through", he could have done that under breaking, he slowed down to avoid collision. If we're using trust they hypocritically like to talk about it was 100% trust on Webber's part and 0% trust on Alonso's, to his credit he kept it on the track and made the pass possible but had to rely on Webber slowing down, not taking better line and outright stopping, any less than that and it's a heavier collision, they still clipped wings after a chop.

This angle of photos shows nothing. In later parts of race when Webber was chasing Alonso and was in DRS zone i thought that Webber isn't using DRS at all. But then i saw Webber DRS open when director show it from one of the cameras positioned very low, at ground level. Webber's rear wing is very small so you can't notice if opened DRS or not.
Other thing is that RB9 (Webber) with opened DRS wasn't fast enough to overtake Alonso.

You must be blind if you can't recognize open/closed drs? The angle is perfect. You can see the wing open easily WHEN it is open. It's clearly not here. Why? Only webber knows for certain.

@iotar. He maybe didn't let him trough on purpose, but surely didn't put up any kind of resistance when the move was in the making, like you said.

[Juzh]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5kvMTLnLmo[/youtube]

Not the best quality but you can still clearly see under braking his wing doesn't move an inch.

[Richard]

You must be blind if you can't recognize open/closed drs? The angle is perfect. You can see the wing open easily WHEN it is open. It's clearly not here.

Look at the other cars, we can't see DRS open on them either.

[SectorOne]

If your version of cooling the pace to preserve tyres involves only running 0.3 seconds a lap slower, then you're not talking about cooling the pace at all. When drivers run a strategy that involves one fewer stops, they need to run significantly slower, not just a tiny bit. You don't get to simply preserve a 5 second buffer to someone who's on a one-stop-fewer strategy (which is effectively what we're talking about here – hamilton effectively doing a "no" stop, because his first stop was forced to be so early).

Not really, it all depends on the situation at hand. The Mediums looked superior in every way.

Nope, you're living in fantasy land. You're assuming that a 40 lap old Medium tyre is going to have held onto its pace just as well as a 30 lap old Hard. It's not going to happen.

Maybe maybe not, it still looks like reality to me but i´ll let you know if i spot a unicorn somehwere.
Sometimes weird stuff like that happens with the black magic called rubber.
Sometimes the softer compound provides not only better laptime but much better wear.

No, Rosberg would simply pull away from you before the first DRS zone, because 35-40 lap old medium tyres will be that much slower per lap than 10 lap younger hards by that point.

Not instantly no.

That would be... because teams have got really good at predicting when it'll happen, and pitting their drivers before hand

No they haven´t. We heard several times on the radio "ok push now, push now, use the tires!"
The only thing they will predict is when to pit, and even that changes from time to time.

The driver knows wear, team knows temps and pressures.
What they did in FP2 may or may not be correlated with actual reality on Sunday.

Again, Fifteen laps, just 15 more. With a 5 second buffer to Rosberg. Stay within one second of Rosberg´s laptimes for 5 laps and now it´s only 10 laps to go, it´s nothing!
It´s not like i´m saying you should do 40 laps on Silverstone with it´s super high energy corners.
This is Monza, very little energy put through tires here.

This was THE time to pull this thing off. I bet if the radio worked they would have discussed if he can do another 15 laps.
It would have been the drive of the season so far.

[Redragon]

You must be blind if you can't recognize open/closed drs? The angle is perfect. You can see the wing open easily WHEN it is open. It's clearly not here.

Look at the other cars, we can't see DRS open on them either.

When Alonso overtaked Webber on the race the DRS was't activated yet. It started to be activated 1 lap later.

[Juzh]

You must be blind if you can't recognize open/closed drs? The angle is perfect. You can see the wing open easily WHEN it is open. It's clearly not here.

Look at the other cars, we can't see DRS open on them either.

When Alonso overtaked Webber on the race the DRS was't activated yet. It started to be activated 1 lap later.

I'm not talking about alonso on webber.

I just looked at the HD version and it is true that nobody opened their drs on the 4th lap. Why is that?

[Richard]

Were there yellow flags for DiResta? I think DRS is disabled when the yellows are out

[Juzh]

There were no yellow flags. Track status was green.

[irang]

It looks to me Hulkenberg, Rosberg and Ricciardo used DRS. You can see their rear wings are getting closed while they are approaching the blurred white cross line.



Take a close look at Hulkenberg's rear wing. It's easier to spot in motion.