The Prime Minister of Bahrain, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, is dead.
Not sure of the financial arrangements but this could have an impact on the team.
Mercedes run extremely tight packaging so I dont think that would be possible if cooling was a big issue. Let's not forget that their PU is actually the most Thermally efficient, in other words, it converts more petrol into motive power and less into waste heat than the other engines.SmallSoldier wrote: ↑11 Nov 2020, 19:44You bring an interesting point in regards to cooling... The new PU will have different cooling requirements than the Renault PU, therefore it is to be expected that Mclaren will have to change radiators and other cooling requirements to match the new PU (which according to reports runs hotter than the rest of the field).
I want to be as cautious as you and think that there isn’t a big disparity between PU’s... But the Mercedes one is still the most powerful PU in the grid and it is expected to make another jump for next year... Whether the rest manage to catch them or not is a different story and we won’t know until 2021, but the expectation is that it will continue to be the best in class or at least very close to it... I wouldn’t downplay the benefits of the change in regards to power... Now, the increase in power won’t allow Mclaren to improve by half a second, a couple of tenths at most is what could be expected from the switch... But, if gains would be so easy to find elsewhere in the car, Mclaren would have close the gap to the front farther than it has so far.
Norris had a 1.29.988 deleted, yeah (Sainz not though). His best sector times would add up to 7th, but still over a second behind Leclerc. Hard to say what it's worth, but they seem to struggle less than Renault for example
IMHO that´s far from lottery race, but providing more weight to driver talent as they must drive a car with a setup wich is far from perfect. Or in other words, what F1 needs to be less predictable and more interesting