Well these are really similar laps, quite impressive. I haven't been able to watch FP3 live so I'm going off of just telemetry.
* Start speed could be higher for Ferrari given how well it matches RBR at the finish line speed.
* Normally we've seen earlier braking for RBR, but now Checo is braking very late in a few critical points, very good braking performance. The question here is wether he's pushing the car a bit more or if RBR found something to improve braking performance compared to past races.
* T2 (600m) LEC brakes quite a bit early, in fact due to early speed difference and early T2 braking, Ferrari is almost +0.1s already in just 2 corners, traction however allows Ferrari to minimize the time loss.
* T8 (2800m) is the castle section, LEC remembers what it means to be stupid and decides to take it extremely easy, after having gained 0.2s between T2 and T8, he proceed to lose all of them in T8 alone.
* From right after T8 onwards the performance between the cars is very similar, slight gains in straight line for RBR and slight losses for RBR in corners.
* Yesterday I had commented on the porpoising of Ferrari that was punishing the straight line speed, and after Pirelli raised tyre pressure by 1psi, this issue seems gone. Straight speed traces are extremely close now, slight gain for RBR above 300kph suggesting a slightly less draggy car.
* Ferrari performance in the corners suggests that the PSI increase hasn't punished their traction too much.
* RBR, contrary to yesterday, is closer in S2 now even accounting for Charles T8, yesterday the gap was bigger so it seems RBR made some beneficial setup changes.
* RBR is now upshifting with the speed that one would expect, yesterday in FP2 they were upshifting much slower.
IMHO the real question mark here is the braking performance of the Ferrari, if they can brake as late as they did in Monaco, this is going to be their quali to lose.
This telemetry compares the top 2 in the championship. As I mentioned in previous practice sessions don't read too much in the delta_time dotted line as it can be off by quite a bit, like here.
If I read this one I go back to seeing Ferrari better under braking, so it's either a confidence problem with Verstappen, unlikely IMHO since he's actually just great, or Max and Checo have basically taken a different approach here where Max didn't want to risk much in FP3 and took most braking easy, including T8 which he took just like LEC.
Nothing too interesting here really, Sainz like Leclerc is taking S1 fairly easy on deployment, and is going a bit stronger in T8. Sainz however isn't gaining as much in the straights and in S2 in general, despite T8. So I think Checo has an edge here.
This is going to be a really close quali, a perfect lap is the only thing that will get you on pole as the cars are virtually identical in performance.
