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He didn't get it easy, but Kimi Raikkonen has finally won again, taking victory at COTA for the United States Grand Prix. The Finn had to stay cool against intense pressure from Verstappen and Hamilton in the final 10 laps, but he made no mistakes to win a tense race and his first victory of the season.
Ferrari took all the updates off they had brought from Singapore onwards. They brought several updates to Austin to solve the problems, but due to lack of practice time they didn’t want to risk anything, thus put the car together without updates in FP3. Meaning that in qualifying Ferrari had the car of prior Singapore. Versus a perfectly updated Mercedes.Phil wrote: ↑21 Oct 2018, 18:06Traction could explain it, of course too. But seriously, we know for a fact that Mercedes is running more wing. More wing equals more drag equal more resistance when accelerating. It's maybe that simple. I know LM10 would really love to think everything is back to normal to put the '2nd sensor having any impact' stories out the window, but from what I'm seeing, that huge advantage Ferrari enjoyed until prior to Singapore hasn't resurfaced... or at least, IMO the verdict is still out on that one. For now, I'm just going to conclude that Mercedes was running more wing because they know the temperatures will be substantially warmer today and want to have good race pace and win the race and championship. Ferrari meanwhile are looking to be aggressive, they need one lap pace to get ahead and dictate the race to have any chance.
Anyway, from the little dry running teams had on Saturday morning, it seems Ferrari have a very quick car. They could well be the fastest car outthere on race-pace, especially on the SS tire [according to AmuS], but as said, they had so limited running, it's very hard to draw definite conclusions from the little data available.
Even if the race shows more, there's a point to be made that the teams made their set-up choices on very little FP3 data on a much colder track. Inevitably, some teams will get it wrong, some right, and some more right than others.
those are my own calculations from the FP3 runs, based on the average time over those amount of laps in the brackets:
not reallyFrukostScones wrote: ↑21 Oct 2018, 19:37Troubles for Merc.
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/13954 ... -both-cars
