Diesel wrote: ↑29 Sep 2017, 19:16
Vettel looked nowhere in Singapore practice and he put it on pole.
Huh? He was 2nd fastest in FP1 in Singapore and in FP2 his quickest time wasn't representative, but on the hot lap that he wasn't able to complete, he looked to be on par with the RedBulls and definitely faster than Mercedes. On top of that, long run suggested that Ferrari was indeed the strongest (source: AMuS). I suggest you go read up on the Singapore topic again. The only thing that had a big question mark about Vettel, Ferrari and Singapore was if RedBull might indeed pip them to pole. That pace Vettel then demonstrated in QF was quite something indeed, but the performance relative to Mercedes was never in dispute.
UPDATE:
AMuS reports that Mercedes may have gone wrong with their new updates and that that may be the cause of their huge performance loss. They go on to explain that the engineers noted extremely high tire temperatures and that they were losing big time in T5, T6 and T12. They seem to think that they got something seriously wrong, either set-up related or with the updates or both. At this point, who knows - they may well revert the car to the last spec for tomorrow, depending if they find something in the data that might explain their lack of performance.
On the other hand, the updates Ferrari have brought seem to work quite well.
Their short analysis (based on very limited runs by the team) suggest that Ferrari are very strong, Kimi bit in the longrun, Vettel in the one-lap pace and that Dan Ricciardo had very impressive consistent times. This is the gist of it.
Link here for those that understand German:
http://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/form ... 69851.html