2015 Spanish Grand Prix - Circuit de Catalunya - 8-10 May

[iotar__]

Does anyone have fastest sector times? I'd like to see how McLaren fared in S3.

Does anyone know if Vettel pitted during his race-sim. I believe he started on hard tires and ended on it. Can somebody confirm?

No. http://www.fia.com/events/fia-formula-o ... nformation

Sector times are extra special classified information, you need to contact Mr Ecclestone for that. It's unbelievable how horrible this new live timing is at F1's site. No pitstops, no laps in FP, no sector times, you need to switch between commentary and times. I watched one GP2 race and they still have an old school live timing there

[Jef Patat]

Quick sketch of long run pace from P2:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zFzcoPMPqwA/ ... _lp_p2.png

Seems MCL is getting closer to the midfield.

[PlatinumZealot]

Quick sketch of long run pace from P2:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zFzcoPMPqwA/ ... _lp_p2.png

This one is more intuitive than the jumbled up one you posted first.

[prince]

Ferraris is just as fast as Mercedes now... They might be faster in the race too.

Watched FP2 live on Sky. Crofty and Anthony Davidson just concluded that on the race trim Mercedes is half a second faster than Ferrari and Ferrari is another half a second ahead of the rest. The pace advantage is same on both compounds for Mercedes. In Bahrain FP2, Ferrari was over three tenth faster than Mercedes over race sim, but still couldn't win. Here they are half a second behind.

After ferrari installs their race engine get back to me with what the gap is....... they arre running the engine they took out of race rotation after china.....Crofty and Davidson are doing the same thing we all do guessing.
for all i know the gap could be bigger but making that statement at this point in friday practice is kind of silly.... remember bahrain when Ferrari had better race pace than mercedes on friday? what happened in the race again after mercedes changed their setup?

So, what you are saying is; A 2 race old Ferrari PU is not good enough to beat a 4 race old Mercedes PU, despite having 70% upgraded car? It is safe to say the 70% is all chassis (could be PU software too) and no PU hardware changes. If that is true then Ferrari PU was never in position to beat the Mercedes PU, right from the beginning. It also means that Ferrari can never use the PU that they are using today, as it simply cannot stand in front of much older Mercedes PU, let alone new PUs that Mercedes is going to introduce later in the season. At some point in season, if Ferrari land up in the difficult situation of using today's PU due some engine failure, then a Mercedes win on that day is simply given.
How can you simply dismiss what the Sky commentators are saying, as they, in front of them, have a lot of data that we never have access to. Like, lap times, sector times, track temperature at that point, traffic and what not. They are in much better position than us to even do the guess working, ain't it?

[Andres125sx]

Quick sketch of long run pace from P2:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zFzcoPMPqwA/ ... _lp_p2.png

Very interesting graph =D>

McLaren and Ferrari are the only ones wich lap times remain constant through the stint, all the rest increase their lap times, but McLaren and Ferrari are perfectly flat

Sandbagging?
Tire managment?

[giantfan10]

So, what you are saying is; A 2 race old Ferrari PU is not good enough to beat a 4 race old Mercedes PU, despite having 70% upgraded car? It is safe to say the 70% is all chassis (could be PU software too) and no PU hardware changes. If that is true then Ferrari PU was never in position to beat the Mercedes PU, right from the beginning. It also means that Ferrari can never use the PU that they are using today, as it simply cannot stand in front of much older Mercedes PU, let alone new PUs that Mercedes is going to introduce later in the season. At some point in season, if Ferrari land up in the difficult situation of using today's PU due some engine failure, then a Mercedes win on that day is simply given.
How can you simply dismiss what the Sky commentators are saying, as they, in front of them, have a lot of data that we never have access to. Like, lap times, sector times, track temperature at that point, traffic and what not. They are in much better position than us to even do the guess working, ain't it?[/quote]

ferrari has brought no engine upgrades to this race.

the ferrari pu has already beaten the merc pu this year and finished ahead of one car on more than one occasion so u may want to rethink your PU logic

its realy easy to dismisss because changes will be made to setups prior to the next practice... who knows what the teams agenda really is?.... we will see in qualifying and the race who is where.....deciding what the gap is between teams based on practice is not very smart in my opinion.....
if you think the gap is half a second you can go ahead and believe that i'm going to wait for qualifying and the race....you're not going to convince me otherwise so that should be the end of that.
it was windy today and to a man every driver in the top 4 has complained about their car and how inconsistent it has been.. add to that the race will be in much cooler conditions than practice....i will wait to pass judgement
here is the Mclaren CEO's take on pace relative to friday practice.... happens to be my point of view exactly: from F1fanatic.com

“I wouldn’t read too much into a Friday,” said McLaren’s acting CEO Jonathan Neale. “We all like to convince ourselves that if you’re quick on a Friday you’ll be quicker during a weekend but Fridays are notoriously fickle, you don’t know what everybody else is doing so we’ll see tomorrow just where we’ve got to.”

[psychemedia]

Quick sketch of long run pace from P2:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zFzcoPMPqwA/ ... _lp_p2.png

This one is more intuitive than the jumbled up one you posted first.

Here's a reordered version:



The count is a count of laps as per the FIA laptime timing sheet; this number is not always the same as the lapcount on the FIA session classification sheet - and I'm not sure why that should be the case?

[evered7]

Does anyone have fastest sector times? I'd like to see how McLaren fared in S3.

Does anyone know if Vettel pitted during his race-sim. I believe he started on hard tires and ended on it. Can somebody confirm?

No. http://www.fia.com/events/fia-formula-o ... nformation

Sector times are extra special classified information, you need to contact Mr Ecclestone for that. It's unbelievable how horrible this new live timing is at F1's site. No pitstops, no laps in FP, no sector times, you need to switch between commentary and times. I watched one GP2 race and they still have an old school live timing there

Thanks iotar__! I got hold of the FP2 timesheets from the FIA site. But I was reading Autosport Live and following BBC as well. A lot of confusion as to who was on which tires during their long runs. Vettel was reported using Hard tires by Autosport and BBC. But Sky says he used medium after the first few laps of the race-sim.

Trying to see if I can get a coverage of FP2 somewhere to clear my doubts.

In any case, Ferrari seem on a back foot compared to the previous weeks. Unless something changes overnight, can't see past a Merc 1-2 barring any reliability issues.

[BanMeToo]

So it seems that the weather is not going to be much different on Saturday and Sunday... will be interesting to see what the teams (and individual drivers) can do with the tires from here.

[godlameroso]

Yep, pretty much gonna be around 26-28c and much higher track temperatures, combined with the nature of the circuit. Ferrari doesn't need to be faster outright to win this, they just need to be fast enough to push Mercedes, because I don't see them being any faster than Ferrari over a stint. I noticed neither Lewis nor Nico ran very long runs, the only way Mercedes can win the race is if it's cloudy on Sunday. Barcelona is far more aggressive to the rubber than any track the teams have raced on so far, so degradation can certainly affect strategy. Perhaps Mercedes is going to try to push like crazy for the first few laps to build as big a gap as possible, and try to sneak in an extra stop. It could work but only if they manage to deal with traffic.

The ones that had degradation on their stints are the cars that were pushing, the McLarens are almost metronomic with their lap times, they either have more in the tank or their car still has a significant power deficit.

[Juzh]

For FP3 air 23, track 22 degrees.

[Juzh]

FP3

[Felipe 92]

FP3

[atanatizante]

D.Ricciardo said - I quote - :"This weekend should be the first race where we can race the chassis set-up as we like it - and then let's see where we are. Should put us closer!"
Could anyone tell me what he was trying to tell us ?

[Jordan44]

Yep, pretty much gonna be around 26-28c and much higher track temperatures, combined with the nature of the circuit. Ferrari doesn't need to be faster outright to win this, they just need to be fast enough to push Mercedes, because I don't see them being any faster than Ferrari over a stint. I noticed neither Lewis nor Nico ran very long runs, the only way Mercedes can win the race is if it's cloudy on Sunday. Barcelona is far more aggressive to the rubber than any track the teams have raced on so far, so degradation can certainly affect strategy. Perhaps Mercedes is going to try to push like crazy for the first few laps to build as big a gap as possible, and try to sneak in an extra stop. It could work but only if they manage to deal with traffic.

The ones that had degradation on their stints are the cars that were pushing, the McLarens are almost metronomic with their lap times, they either have more in the tank or their car still has a significant power deficit.

Mercedes long runs are always shorter in practise. It usually doesn't translate exactly to the race and they can go for a few laps more.

It's still there race to loose, cloudy or not. In clean air they're still quicker.