f1316 wrote: ↑27 Oct 2017, 22:57
GrandAxe wrote: ↑27 Oct 2017, 22:36
Lewis long FP2 runs look ominous, Ricciardo's as well.
The commentary is truly low quality, click bait stuff though - quite annoying.
I don’t know what commentary you’re listening to but if it’s Sky I couldn’t agree more; Crofty getting all defensive at the merest sign of any criticism from tweets doesn’t help either.
In terms of long runs, I’m not drawing any conclusions; Vettel actually was lapping the quickest at the end of the session but means very little, I think.
The Red Bull looked the quickest car today but that’ll all probably change as the others use quali modes and the track rubbers in. I still think it’ll be another Lewis/Seb shootout.
On longer runs, the general trend across 3-4 years now is if lets say if all three teams pull 1:21.5's in FP2, that Merc will have the highest race pace, Red Bull would be second and Ferrari would be third. In many many weekends Ferrari shows better fp2 pace than Merc but in the race Merc are faster and Ferrari are pretty much where they were in FP2. The general gist is, Ferrari seem to run close to normal race power and mid/lower fuel levels for their long runs, Merc seem to run completely loaded on fuel to get worst case scenario numbers and as such they are maybe a 1 second slower than Ferrari just on fuel. Red Bull seem to run lower fuel but lower engine power as well, likely due to the much poorer reliability of Renault in this era, so RBR lose less to Merc compared to Ferrari.
This I would say holds true for 80% of race weekends, sometimes it doesn't work out, sometimes one team can turn a tire on and runs better than expected or other weekends teams just can't make a tire work.
Also realistically Vettel's final 'faster' lap came after a 1:39 cooldown lap. Because there is so little deg here they are all likely temp limited more than anything else so running a stupidly slow lap lets the tires cool and you can do a faster lap. In that long run from Vettel he did I think 4 fast laps in a row before a cooldown lap, each cool down lap followed by a faster lap. THe longer run of fast laps is near enough a second off Hamilton. That is why Hamilton's looked so impressive, he managed 11 laps at that pace without traffic, and far fewer slow laps in between little spurts of pushing. RBR just didn't do anywhere near enough laps to know where they are really at except to say that in what few laps they did, they didn't look faster than Hamilton.
On Sky, as much as I really dislike Crofty and really can't stand Ted anymore now he's more gossip than spending real time showing detail on new parts compared to old parts, complaining about free practice is pretty silly overall.
Ultimately free practice is absolutely all over the place, there are long spells where teams don't come out at the start, long spells with only a couple of people on track and if it's wet it's often worse. Free practice isn't qualifying or the race, you can't just get commentary because for the most part very little interesting is going on. So they really have to be filler/casual in terms of commentary for free practice because otherwise 70% of the session would be dead air.
