2021 French Grand Prix - Le Castellet, June 18 - 20

[dans79]

I'd say the difference lies more towards the chassis side, because RB was able to use less df and thus had a higher straightline speed. Normally over the last few years a Merc with DRS seemed unstoppable, now Lewis could only creep up.
I think engine/deployment wise Merc still has a slight upperhand.
But what do I know ..

It wasn't chassis, it was a setup choice. When they were on the same compound tires with roughly the same number of laps on them, Merc was faster in sector 1 & 3, while RBR was faster in Sector 2.

Yeah, well .. ofcourse it was setup, but only so much. You have to have a certain level of mechanical grip to get the car through the corners, right ?

It's not exactly that simple, as you can trade tire life for cornering ability.

You could see this as well in the sector times. Early on in the first stint Max was at times .4 to .7 seconds faster in sector 2. The deeper he got into the stint the smaller that delta got, towards the end of the stint he was even slower than Lewis in the second sector.

[Sieper]

In any case. The one stopper wasn’t so outlandish, it almost worked. I thought it did with 4 laps to go.

It was very close, wasn't it? A slightly slow stop (very unusual for the pit stop gods in Red Bull, of course) would have ruined Max's chances. A slightly sticky back marker holding Max up at a tricky point; had Bottas been able to hold him up for half a lap more; had Max out braked himself just once. Any of that and Hamilton would likely have won.

Exactly. In any race there are usually some points that when later looking back were decisive, but in this race almost the whole thing was on the edge of the seat. I need to look it back, also for the midfield.

[PlatinumZealot]

When the gap came down to 4s, suddenly it went up to 5s. Then, for a couple of laps it was going up and down.
Anyone knows what was that about? Traffic?
It seemed that Lewis was really pushing every second lap, like he would push and then cool his tires.

Hamilton went over the sausage curbs on lap 47 and did low 38's after that instead of the mid 37's he did up until then (floor damage?). Max was also doing mid 37's at that time. Think Hamilton could have won without this off.
http://en.mclarenf-1.com/index.php?page ... Verstappen

Front tyres had heavy graining at that point. Correlation doesnt mean causation as they say.

That same pace was "impossible" according to Bottas and Max on the hards so something had to to give.

[PlatinumZealot]

Exactly. In any race there are usually some points that when later looking back were decisive, but in this race almost the whole thing was on the edge of the seat. I need to look it back, also for the midfield.

I am a little amused that this race was edge of the seat for you . You beleived Max could havd dropped it?

[Sevach]

I found this comparison interesting.

[langedweil]

It wasn't chassis, it was a setup choice. When they were on the same compound tires with roughly the same number of laps on them, Merc was faster in sector 1 & 3, while RBR was faster in Sector 2.

Yeah, well .. ofcourse it was setup, but only so much. You have to have a certain level of mechanical grip to get the car through the corners, right ?

It's not exactly that simple, as you can trade tire life for cornering ability.

You could see this as well in the sector times. Early on in the first stint Max was at times .4 to .7 seconds faster in sector 2. The deeper he got into the stint the smaller that delta got, towards the end of the stint he was even slower than Lewis in the second sector.

True as well, but it wasn't like Ver burned his tires in 50% of Ham's time. Tirewear is allways hard to read into as we cannot know whether one's pushing or coasting.
But true ..

But compared to 2 yrs ago, Ham would take .7 in S2 alone without drs, so from -0.7 to +0.7 is a lot of difference, and that differenc is certainly not all coming from the Honda PU (which my opinion was claimed at initially).

[ringo]

Also in English it makes perfect sense to have a margin in speed over your competitor. You can even have a speed advantage by a significant margin....

To be honest, Mercedes had the advantage on high fuel load, but on low fuel it may well have been reversed. Both RB drivers were complaining on balance in the beginning and said it improved a lot later on. We will never know because both RB's had a significant tire advantage towards the end.

There are more explanations post race. The margin has been clarified as their simulations getting it wrong. The simulations told them 3 seconds was enough margin. It wasnt. Mercedes can account for 2.5s but it cannot acount for the remainder. What they thought was "margin" was not the case in reality. It wasnt about the speed of the cars. You cannot have a speed margin if you have no control over an independent moving target which is your competitor's car. It's not like the cars are moving at one pace the whole race for their to be a "margin". A margin is a fixed amount or distance. So again people are looking for all kinds of excuse to claim the mercedes were faster here without even looking on the lap times and the fact Max blew merc out of the water with in and outlaps.

“We thought when we had just over three seconds to Max we were safe from the undercut and that wasn’t the case,” said Shovlin.

Here's your margin:
“Even now, we don’t fully understand why our models were telling us we would have been okay. So clearly there’s something we need to understand there.”
Shovlin said Mercedes had been surprised by the hard tyre’s strong performance on Verstappen’s out-lap, but there was still half a second missing from the analysis of the time lost that they could not account for.

“The hard tyre was good, and good out of the box,” added Shovlin. “That’s the bit we still need to go through because we haven’t yet understood quite why we lost the position.

“We can account for around two-and-a-half of the three seconds. But it’s something we need to dig into the fine detail of to understand how we were undercut from so far back, because we weren’t expecting that.”

[ringo]

Horner is saying the engine is not anymore powerful. Suggesting chassis and tyre temperature optimization.
As for the pitstop debate.. I saw that Lewis spent more time in the pitlane than Max about 0.2 seconds longer. Despite him doing a 2.2second stationary stop, he had more wheelspin in the pitlane that resulted in a 30s total pitlane time compared to Max's 29.8 or whatever the number was. Maybe those 0.2 seconds would have made the difference.
If someone has access to video could you check it.

[Juzh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSCFCE2 ... annel=test

I found this comparison interesting.

Yeah, this one's epic. Really gels well with Verstappen's post quali interview on sky when he compared his lap and hamilton's. He said how mercedes can really go deep into corners and with very good speed with their higher downforce setup, basically the exact opposite of red bull's setup who had understeer everywhere. Max has to V-line all important corners and focus on exit 100% and this video shows it best.

I hope this guy makes more of these videos in the future, but actually it's pretty hard to make them as video transmission has to be near perfect for these kind of overlapping comparisons to work. In this case le castellet had very good broadcast quality because it's such an open track so broadcast errors are almost non existent.

[Fulcrum]

Don't care who won, what an entertaining race.

This year has the capacity to be one of the best in recent memory (post 2000). Such a pity there isn't a 3rd competitive team to spice it up even more.

[nzjrs]

There are more explanations post race. The margin has been clarified as their simulations getting it wrong. The simulations told them 3 seconds was enough margin. It wasnt. Mercedes can account for 2.5s but it cannot acount for the remainder. What they thought was "margin" was not the case in reality. It wasnt about the speed of the cars. You cannot have a speed margin if you have no control over an independent moving target which is your competitor's car. It's not like the cars are moving at one pace the whole race for their to be a "margin". A margin is a fixed amount or distance. So again people are looking for all kinds of excuse to claim the mercedes were faster here without even looking on the lap times and the fact Max blew merc out of the water with in and outlaps.

Multiple things can have a Margin, but it was clear to me from what he said, when he said it, and English<->German Denglish, that he meant speed/pace margin at the time he said it. They did go on to discuss later the over/undercut margin, but that was a separate part of the conversation, or even different interviews.

A margin is a fixed amount or distance.

In English perhaps, even then this is debatable. In German, if he went from Spielraum then I disagree completely. Pace itself is an English-ism or Motorsport only-ish word. Tempo in German is weird to me.

So again people are looking for all kinds of excuse to claim the mercedes were faster here without even looking on the lap times and the fact

And the reverse of course.

Anyway, It's clear we will not agree on this. Das ist mir Wurscht.

[AGOW]

Horner is saying the engine is not anymore powerful. Suggesting chassis and tyre temperature optimization.
As for the pitstop debate.. I saw that Lewis spent more time in the pitlane than Max about 0.2 seconds longer. Despite him doing a 2.2second stationary stop, he had more wheelspin in the pitlane that resulted in a 30s total pitlane time compared to Max's 29.8 or whatever the number was. Maybe those 0.2 seconds would have made the difference.
If someone has access to video could you check it.

Noticed that during the race, Max's time was about 29.8 while lewis was over 30.4

Edit: Lewis his time was actually 30.263.
Couldn't find the extact time of Max.

[ringo]

When the car dropped from the jacks, it was sluggish to get away. The time could have been lost there.

[Alexf1]

When the gap came down to 4s, suddenly it went up to 5s. Then, for a couple of laps it was going up and down.
Anyone knows what was that about? Traffic?
It seemed that Lewis was really pushing every second lap, like he would push and then cool his tires.

Hamilton went over the sausage curbs on lap 47 and did low 38's after that instead of the mid 37's he did up until then (floor damage?). Max was also doing mid 37's at that time. Think Hamilton could have won without this off.
http://en.mclarenf-1.com/index.php?page ... Verstappen

Front tyres had heavy graining at that point. Correlation doesnt mean causation as they say.

That same pace was "impossible" according to Bottas and Max on the hards so something had to to give.

True, but heavy graining doesnt suddenly start from 1 corner to the other. And wouldn't Hamilton have said thát on the radio instead of "definitely hit the curb" and losing 0.5 to 0.8s per lap after his off. Up until that point he wasnt losing laptime to VER. From the head to head laptime table you can see that VER didnt go faster from lap 47 onwards. It was HAM that suddenly went much slower from S3 of lap 47 onwards (where he went off and hit the curb hard on his way back on to the track).

[Sieper]

Exactly. In any race there are usually some points that when later looking back were decisive, but in this race almost the whole thing was on the edge of the seat. I need to look it back, also for the midfield.

I am a little amused that this race was edge of the seat for you . You beleived Max could havd dropped it?

I thought the 2 stopper was the right call. Contrary to my friends. Otherwise he would have been second, possibly even third (but Bottas will likely not have been able to keep his tires alive). But if it was going to work, for a long time I was unsure, especially so when Lewis kept his 5 seconds advantage almost intact for several laps. At that moment I said Max was not going to make it (still hoped it, didn’t believe it anymore) But then Max still would have been second. So the tactic already “worked” in my book.

Edit, I also don’t think it was a kerb travel,that killed it, just the end of the tire life. It came a bit too soon but it was mighty close. Lewis did a great job keeping that pace for such a long time.