2018 Mexico Grand Prix - Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, 26-28 October

[cooken]

So they may make a return in Brazil ? Or maybe not as the WCC is still on.

I suppose the other thing could be that there is something involved they do not wish to show to other teams if they make a protest. Something hardly worth reveling for 3 races when they can keep it dark and use it next year?

Not likely, but possible?

I think it's relatively simple, the rear tires were graining due to sliding, the real question is, were the tires heating up enough to grip into the track rather than sliding and causing horrible graining. My guess is Merc actually wanted to up their rear wheel carcass temps to alleviate the horrendous graining they got in free practice runs and that maybe led to them being even worse rather than better.

Really the tires just didn't work for anyone but cars with excellent mechanical grip and even then... not well.

I've said it elsewhere, this wasn't a case of good tire deg causing more stops, this was a case of the tires simply not working. We want deg where someone can push harder, be faster then do more stops or go slower, do less stops, we want the strategy choice. When for all but a few cars the tires are so bad everyone has to pit multiple times and they still have to go insanely slow and the tires still look absolutely awful that's not good tire deg. That's RBR/Ferrari had just enough mechanical grip advantage to make the tires work less badly than the rest. THe tires were utterly unsuitable for the task of racing in Mexico and the track surfaces lack of abrasiveness and bite into the tires allowing even completely fresh and warm tires to slide across the track and grain immediately, combination from hell. Pirelli and the FIA should have been getting flack all weekend for allowing this situation to happen and instead so many fans said woo, tire deg again, completely misunderstanding what happened.

In the US Hulk was running a second off the pace of Kimi and Max at the front consistently throughout the whole race, in Mexico Hulk was running fully 3 seconds off Max's pace.... the race was a complete and utter failure where 80% of the cars couldn't make the tires work.

Like I said, this race should be close to the scandal of Indianapolis in 2005. Okay the tires weren't exploding and it wasn't dangerous, but the 'race' part of the weekend was a race between 4 cars, with the rest trying to finish on tires that weren't suitable for use. Somehow the commentators ignored that the tires weren't working all weekend and the fans too.

It doesn't help that the track design itself is absolutely horrible. We have some stands, lets put the track through it and oh, lets maximise the time in there so put 3 insanely slow awful corners in there with zero passing and ruining the entry to the straight. Honestly I find not a single positive thing about the track itself except the fans are great and enthusiastic, but they'd be that if they'd made a 'real' track without it going through the middle of the stadium and put in some real damn corners and a surface that works with the tires and cars well.

I can't agree with you more. The race was a disaster. Wonder how much the pressure increase had to do with it...fail.

[cooken]

Maybe Lewis and Will Smith have had a joke in the past about Will telling Lewis how to drive ?

Was pretty bad though !

I think it was well timed. The sport needs to lighten up, but it looks like the european fans didn't get the memo. Maybe the sense of humour is different in the west.

Will Smith has a famous line. He was just repeating it to Hamilton. Just boils down to different sense of humour, but it was a nice little touch at the end to me, and i'm sure to a lot of American fans who watch car movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUbdHw8QG4

Maybe next year we get a transporter or fast and furious, or Steve McQueen line.

FWIW I'm Canadian and thought it was stupid. Zero humour and 'cringe' sums it up best. Does that make me European I guess? But whatever, that was far less important than the farce of a race I saw. Maybe to go along with the 'america pandoring' Pirelli was forced to subcontract tires from Walmart.

[bosyber]

I do wonder whether Pirelli will find a reason to last minute up the pressures again in Brazil, suspect they will 'because it worked'. But, if they do that, you'd think the teams should by then be expecting it, right? (and thus try it themselves beforehand, leading to them having data on it again, and thus, won't work any more ...) Given the way Mercedes and Ferrari were struggling on Friday and to some extent still in FP3, I think it wasn't needed in order to get an interesting race, especially with the hypersofts being sooo useless as a race tyre, and really only being a qualifying tyre. Not doing it, might have made it a 6 car race, at least (or rather a 4.5 car rather than a 2.5 car race, with only Verstappen, Vettel, and Ricciardo for a bit in it - Raikkonen was content to cruise and pick up the podium).

Still, enough suspense for me to make it watchable.

[Just_a_fan]

So instead of getting a really emotional moment between Ham and his team, we got a fake message. If you think that is good, wow, that message was a giant embarrassing stain on the weekend.

+1 from me. It was an entirely pointless, irrelevant silliness intended, presumably, to appeal to the US audience. It detracted from the moment, it did not add to it. I would much rather have heard the team radio at that point.

[GrandAxe]

Maybe Lewis and Will Smith have had a joke in the past about Will telling Lewis how to drive ?

Was pretty bad though !

I think it was well timed. The sport needs to lighten up, but it looks like the european fans didn't get the memo. Maybe the sense of humour is different in the west.

Will Smith has a famous line. He was just repeating it to Hamilton. Just boils down to different sense of humour, but it was a nice little touch at the end to me, and i'm sure to a lot of American fans who watch car movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUbdHw8QG4

Maybe next year we get a transporter or fast and furious, or Steve McQueen line.

Its over the top bravura and manner of delivery rather than sense of humour that would have gulled European types (it would have been even worse with Asians, particularly the reserved Japanese).

Its not just that one joke that didn't go down well either; there was also the repeated comparison of F1 brake temperatures to being "as hot as molten lava" - clearly American style hyperbole (another common example of the kind being "the size of four Olympic swimming pools").
That manner of speaking might be to showy and loud outside the US, so people have complained that it jarred their taste.

Liberty needs to be keenly aware of worldwide cultural differences, especially as its basically a new sport in the US, but an old, well established one (with huge audiences) in Europe and Asia.

[digitalrurouni]

So the tires did not change right? I mean it's the same tires that have been used before in the season. So is it really the fault of the tires or is it the fault of Pirellis messing about with tire pressures?

[dans79]

So the tires did not change right? I mean it's the same tires that have been used before in the season. So is it really the fault of the tires or is it the fault of Pirellis messing about with tire pressures?

It's all Pirelli's fault. Honestly, I might seriously consider not watching f1 anymore if Pirelli wins the next tire contract. Every year, they seem to produce tires that are horrendous in one way or another.

[Shrieker]

So the tires did not change right? I mean it's the same tires that have been used before in the season. So is it really the fault of the tires or is it the fault of Pirellis messing about with tire pressures?

It's all Pirelli's fault. Honestly, I might seriously consider not watching f1 anymore if Pirelli wins the next tire contract. Every year, they seem to produce tires that are horrendous in one way or another.

They still haven't fixed the excessive marbling. They're now bordering on dangerous rather than just hampering good clean racing.

[dans79]

They still haven't fixed the excessive marbling. They're now bordering on dangerous rather than just hampering good clean racing.

They've already been dangerous, don't forget 2013!

[Oehrly]

Someone recently asked about reading telemetry from the graphics in the onboard videos and plotting some curves from that. I thought that might be a good idea, so I decided to give it a try. Below is what I managed to do with my code so far. It is still a work in progress and I currently can only read speed but I'm working on it.

The data is from the two comparison videos Juzh posted a few pages back.




The difference between Ver and Ham isn't that big as their lap times were quite close. The data for Alonso is a bit messed up because that onboard video proofed to be rather difficult.
Except for Alonso's lap the data is only slightly to not at all processed. I am making sure that all breaking/acceleration points stay exactly as they are.
The data is synced to the start of the lap at zero seconds.

If anyone has got suggestions for improvement, please tell.

[Jolle]

Someone recently asked about reading telemetry from the graphics in the onboard videos and plotting some curves from that. I thought that might be a good idea, so I decided to give it a try. Below is what I managed to do with my code so far. It is still a work in progress and I currently can only read speed but I'm working on it.

The data is from the two comparison videos Juzh posted a few pages back.


https://i.imgur.com/e73B1rt.jpg

The difference between Ver and Ham isn't that big as their lap times were quite close. The data for Alonso is a bit messed up because that onboard video proofed to be rather difficult.
Except for Alonso's lap the data is only slightly to not at all processed. I am making sure that all breaking/acceleration points stay exactly as they are.
The data is synced to the start of the lap at zero seconds.

If anyone has got suggestions for improvement, please tell.

Wow, if this data is correct, it looks like slow speed corners where Mclaren really struggled. That’s a big gap!

[GrandAxe]

Someone recently asked about reading telemetry from the graphics in the onboard videos and plotting some curves from that. I thought that might be a good idea, so I decided to give it a try. Below is what I managed to do with my code so far. It is still a work in progress and I currently can only read speed but I'm working on it.

The data is from the two comparison videos Juzh posted a few pages back.


https://i.imgur.com/e73B1rt.jpg

The difference between Ver and Ham isn't that big as their lap times were quite close. The data for Alonso is a bit messed up because that onboard video proofed to be rather difficult.
Except for Alonso's lap the data is only slightly to not at all processed. I am making sure that all breaking/acceleration points stay exactly as they are.
The data is synced to the start of the lap at zero seconds.

If anyone has got suggestions for improvement, please tell.

Thanks, that's nice. It's really explanatory.

One improvement would be a vertical line to mark the point the pole sitter crossed the finish line - should be straightforward from the pole time.

[Just_a_fan]

From the inboards, the comparison between Max and Lewis looks about right. I remember being impressed that Hamilton was braking later than Max. But then Max was getting on the power earlier. Apex speeds were fairly close but the Mercedes was definitely faster on the long straight.

Good work. Well done.

[sosic2121]

Someone recently asked about reading telemetry from the graphics in the onboard videos and plotting some curves from that. I thought that might be a good idea, so I decided to give it a try. Below is what I managed to do with my code so far. It is still a work in progress and I currently can only read speed but I'm working on it.

The data is from the two comparison videos Juzh posted a few pages back.


https://i.imgur.com/e73B1rt.jpg

The difference between Ver and Ham isn't that big as their lap times were quite close. The data for Alonso is a bit messed up because that onboard video proofed to be rather difficult.
Except for Alonso's lap the data is only slightly to not at all processed. I am making sure that all breaking/acceleration points stay exactly as they are.
The data is synced to the start of the lap at zero seconds.

If anyone has got suggestions for improvement, please tell.

+1

[Yurasyk]

If anyone has got suggestions for improvement, please tell.

Thank you for those nice plots.
As a suggestion I would try to integrate those points into a cumulative curve of the covered path and then synchronize speed points to track position points.