2023 Japanese Grand Prix - Suzuka, Sep 22 - 24

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German Sky had a look at Perez' and Sainz' tyres after FP2, and the fronts of Perez showed significant deformations (like little "sausages"), while Sainz' looked much better. Glock said it's caused by the understeer and the forces on this track.

Verstappen longrun only cosisted of a couple of laps on new tyres unfortunately, so hard to say if it's caused by driving style or "too much grip" of the Red Bull. Perez' tyre drop in the end was massive. I guess Verstappen will be better off, but we've seen it happen before, that a good car stresses the tires too much.

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True. But I feel that was back when we were at the point of overloading the tyres with downforce.. that's probably not the case now?

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Here we go again

Race Director: In order to ensure that cars are not driven unnecessarily slowly on in-laps during and after the end of Qualirving or during reconnaissance laos when the oit exit is opened for the Race, drivers must stay
below 1:54.0 between the Safety Car lines shown on the pit lane map

[Sieper]

With the soft the snake of #Verstappen is galactic. We notice an error of #Leclerc at turn 1 and one of Max at the hairpin. A little "lean" power curve for #RedBull . #Ferrari anyway good in T2 #JapaneseGP

To me the lower engine mode is obvious

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6nDVQIWAAA ... &name=orig

That's not power, that's more wing.

I think so too. Max is probably also running more wing than Checo. He wins everything in sector 1, the esses, and then looses not very much on the rest of the track (higher speed). This way you also keep the tires in better shape which will be critical for the race.

[SiLo]

Here we go again

Race Director: In order to ensure that cars are not driven unnecessarily slowly on in-laps during and after the end of Qualirving or during reconnaissance laos when the oit exit is opened for the Race, drivers must stay
below 1:54.0 between the Safety Car lines shown on the pit lane map

Useless really. It should be a delta for sectors so you can just zoom around the lap and then crawl the last 400m of track at 2mph.

[randolf]

Here we go again

Race Director: In order to ensure that cars are not driven unnecessarily slowly on in-laps during and after the end of Qualirving or during reconnaissance laos when the oit exit is opened for the Race, drivers must stay
below 1:54.0 between the Safety Car lines shown on the pit lane map

Useless really. It should be a delta for sectors so you can just zoom around the lap and then crawl the last 400m of track at 2mph.

They should simply put a minimum time for S3, rather than full lap.

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[Cassius]

Some of my conclusions from today:

- High deg, soft seems useless for the race
- Max was testing improvement of deg after his first soft run in fp2, as based on times in fp1 I don't think RB was happy with it.
- In FP1 looked like Ferrari was on lower fuel testing the hards for the 2nd stint vs RB testing the softs for the first stint.
- Max engine/ERS mode seemed conservative
- Norris really strong on mediums

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Russell suggests it could be a 3-stop if it does not rubber in more

"There seems to be a huge amount of tyre degradation [...] this year it feels like the tarmac has really broken up and the cars are sliding on top of the surface.

Here, the tyre degradation looks probably closer to a three-stop at the moment than it is a one-stop, to put some perspective on it. But I think it will be a two-stop for everybody on Sunday. We will see what happens."

https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/russe ... /10523658/

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no one but Verstappen even has more than three sets of medium/hard (in whatever combination) left, so I guess two stops are more likely indeed.

[LM10]

Are you folks serious?

You think 2-3kph top speed difference is because of engine mode? There’s 2 wings on the car, look at monza between the 2 Ferraris that just had front wing difference of a few clicks.

Do you even math?

Anyway… don’t really care, going to sleep, see you all tomorrow, same time.

Agree. Ferrari and RB match each other in acceleration phase up until 250 km/h minimum. It’s about drag towards top speed.

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no one but Verstappen even has more than three sets of medium/hard (in whatever combination) left, so I guess two stops are more likely indeed.

Do you have a graphic/spreadsheet of tyres left? I guess Verstappen has extra set of med/hard left bc he used an additional soft tyre instead?

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no one but Verstappen even has more than three sets of medium/hard (in whatever combination) left, so I guess two stops are more likely indeed.

Do you have a graphic/spreadsheet of tyres left? I guess Verstappen has extra set of med/hard left bc he used an additional soft tyre instead?

yeah, Verstappen used H-S and S-S today, everyone else only one (Alfa) or two sets of Softs. Going into Qualifying with only three sets of softs is a bit risky, though, even with a dominant car, so not sure if that's really the plan.

Pirelli hasn't released the list yet, so this is only based on my notes, assuming no one returned any unused sets instead:



edit: Official tyre list from Pirelli is available now as well (and similar): https://i.imgur.com/kY68uoV.png

[Cs98]

Are you folks serious?

You think 2-3kph top speed difference is because of engine mode? There’s 2 wings on the car, look at monza between the 2 Ferraris that just had front wing difference of a few clicks.

Do you even math?

Anyway… don’t really care, going to sleep, see you all tomorrow, same time.

Agree. Ferrari and RB match each other in acceleration phase up until 250 km/h minimum. It’s about drag towards top speed.

That's where deployment modes come in. All of a sudden in FP2 the RB stopped clipping after 130R. Did it magically shed drag? No, same wings, just a bit more aggressive deployment. For the record, the RB is running less wing than it did last season and is still well short of the speeds they were hitting then. More to come.