mclaren_mircea wrote:Helios wrote:I'm still not convinced regarding all that Mercedes yay, Red Bull nay - talking. Could it be that Mercedes were mostly focused on reliability instead of performance and RB went the other way round? If that was the case, Mercedes need to hope for RB to retire like every 2nd race of the season, which I doubt is going to happen. Sure, you can work on your setup early on with a reliable car and squeeze out some tenths of a second, but that wouldn't really help much if their concept is clearly behind RB's concept performance-wise. And then there's McLaren aswell ... even though the laptimes in Jerez don't mean a lot, it still seems like they've got some serious pace aswell.
+1
Mp4-29 shown flashes of speed that I dind't saw on the W05. Hamilton's best time on Thursday was on mediums, like Kevin, and he did a 7 lap stint, while Magnussen ws on his first hours as a F1 official driver, made gis time on a 3 lap stint, and between them was more than half a second (it was almost a second). In now situation extra fuel for 4 laps will bring you more than half a second. And remember that Kevin said that it wasn't a back at the wall lap that 1:23:2 because in the subsequent lap he did a 1:23:5 a lap time which wasn't touched by Rosberg or Hamilton in 4 days. They did in this four days long stints, but not only, and believe if Mclaren's team of engineers got it wrong last year, doesn't mean that they can't do a better car than Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis. There were aero measurment laps for Mercedes W05 not only race simulations, and in none of that they were close to mp4-29. In fact in all the days mp4-29 was on track was faster than W05.
The discussion with the sponsors it's non sense, because they have big big budget for this year, and from 2015 HONDA will be sponsor to (pumping money not only free engines). After a bad year like 2013, Mclaren can't afford to to running for the sponsors, all what they did was optimising the car.
For the umpteenth time reading anything into the laptimes over these test days in Jerez is a pointless exercise
not until the final test in Baharain before we begin to get a clearer picture of what the pecking order is like, besides having the fastet car over one lap is nowhere near as significant as it used to be. With these new rules the car with the best combination of engine reliability, speed, fuel efficiency and tyre management would be the car to beat.