DiogoBrand wrote:Xero wrote:
Yes, but he's saying that the ERS deployment has given them 4 or 5 tenths by itself. There will also be gains in the ICE, chassis and aero. The snowball effect of having everything working in better harmony will also yield more gains.
Everything is going as expected, nothing to get excited or disappointed about yet. We won't get idea of their true pace until the 2nd test I'd guess.
Makes sense. But since they had a gap of around 2,5 seconds last season, and so much of it has been blamed on ERS, I'd expect them to have more than 5 tenths of gain by fixing it.
Completely agree on the 'nothing to get excited or disappointed about yet' part, though.
They were down by 3 seconds at the end of last year and Mercedes has been improving their car at close to 2 seconds every year since 2012, which means the benchmark is going to be near 5 seconds. Will McLaren-Honda be able to gain 5 seconds? May be not, but to remain in the mid field (somewhere along Red Bull/Toro Rosso/FI), they need to gain at a minimum 3 seconds. Only then, can they see some hope for 2017. Otherwise, they should forget this project.
My guess, based on what we have been reading around, it is quite possible that they ran their PU at de-tuned mode to first check the reliability of all the parts and might then start turning up the PU. What we have also heard from Ted on his notebook, is that, McLaren have two alternative configurations and they want to test both in these two tests and then arrive in Melbourne with a a package that is best of both the worlds. If they can stay under 2 seconds by the end of each tests (long runs), there is definite hope.
