2012 Testing - Jerez 7-10 February

[Alexgtt]

senna made an impressive 60 lap stint and he is still on track with 1.2 second's behind the fastest alonso. does this seem's that williams are making progress!?

He use a new set of soft tyre for the last stint, 1.21. remarquable consistency.

That's what I'm reading. Very good consistant running. I think that is a good sign from Williams, especially the last phase.

First race sim of 2012. Be very interesting if other teams do the same this afternoon.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Im not sure about judging consistency.

Even last year we had all the runners lapping at fairly consistent rates during their race sims.
Hell Mercedes W02 looked good over a race distance during tests.

The problem with consistency is that it's double edged, 1:21s could be consistently shite or consistently good.
Until you have direct competition, with equal fuel loads, on the same tyre, with the same track conditions(temp, rubbered in, track debris etc) as well as 2 motivated drivers and teams(testing can lend some apathy, and will definatley not have the same edge as say, a quali session), then there really is very little I can get from the Williams times.

I hope for Senna's sake it is consistently good.

[FrukostScones]

Im not sure about judging consistency.

Even last year we had all the runners lapping at fairly consistent rates during their race sims.
Hell Mercedes W02 looked good over a race distance during tests.

The problem with consistency is that it's double edged, 1:21s could be consistently shite or consistently good.
Until you have direct competition, with equal fuel loads, on the same tyre, with the same track conditions(temp, rubbered in, track debris etc) as well as 2 motivated drivers and teams(testing can lend some apathy, and will definatley not have the same edge as say, a quali session), then there really is very little I can get from the Williams times.

I hope for Senna's sake it is consistently good.

Sorry, That is not true JET.


I think the 2012 tyres don't have that steep drop off the 2011 tyres had.

[kilcoo316]

Hmmm.... with the track that cold I'd be wary of reading too much into pace over a distance.

Better than reading into a 5 lap run, yes. But, not necessarily a true reflection of performance in Australia with a track temp of 30deg+.

[zoro_f1]

here is all lap times from senna in his williams renault. you can see that senna made an consistent lap times with 1:21, 1:23 and 1:25 early in the day. the team also made an race simulation and maybe in the next shcheduled test's we can see fast lap times.

[Lorenzo_Bandini]

Electrical problem for Alonso too..

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

@ Frukostscones

The tyres were worse last year than this. So "consistency" to my mind would be harder to achieve last year than this no?
As for the Mercedes, it showed much greater consistency once Mercedes had chucked all the bits and bobs onto it.

Mercedes GP again aimed to build more mileage on its W02, with Nico Rosberg racking up an enormous tally of 131 laps. While showing better consistency on longer runs, the car doesn’t quite seem to have the pace of the front-runners. Rosberg’s best effort came with a qualifying-style sprint late in the day.

Richards F1 site
*host of others I just cant be asked to search right now

[Lorenzo_Bandini]

BBC Sport's chief F1 writer Andrew Benson

"We're told by paddock sources that the Ferrari has been in the garage much of the day because a bunch of new parts - including a new exhaust system - arrived from Italy and are being fitted to the car.

[tinvek]

not sure how much you can believe that, makes no sense to waste the last day fitting new parts if you're not able to run them before you leave.

more likely they fitted the parts overnight and now they have a problem

[Maynard G. Krebs]

Hi, first post here!

I want to say about whether the practice times have any meaning- I say yes. While it's true that drivers aren't going flat out all the time, the point of trying new things is to make the cars go faster. At some point in the testing, the team will want to see how fast these things can make the car go. Putting on a new part and going slow with it doesn't seem like it would tell you very much.
Also, even if these aren't full lap top speeds, all the teams are doing essentially the same thing (with the obvious exception of Mercedes at this point), even if it might be at different times. Even if we can't tell the exact pecking order, I think we can tell who is near the top and who is not. Based on that, I would say that Lotus looks good and Ferrari does not. Even though Alonso is at the top today, I think it was an outlier lap, wasn't it?

[KnottyBwoy]

not sure how much you can believe that, makes no sense to waste the last day fitting new parts if you're not able to run them before you leave.

more likely they fitted the parts overnight and now they have a problem

I give my +1 on that. that's good common sense. quite a sad day for ferrari knowing it's the last day of the four days test. i can smell a crew reshuffle again from luca...somebody's gonna get fired again. hmmm.

[KnottyBwoy]

Hi, first post here!

I want to say about whether the practice times have any meaning- I say yes. While it's true that drivers aren't going flat out all the time, the point of trying new things is to make the cars go faster. At some point in the testing, the team will want to see how fast these things can make the car go. Putting on a new part and going slow with it doesn't seem like it would tell you very much.
Also, even if these aren't full lap top speeds, all the teams are doing essentially the same thing (with the obvious exception of Mercedes at this point), even if it might be at different times. Even if we can't tell the exact pecking order, I think we can tell who is near the top and who is not. Based on that, I would say that Lotus looks good and Ferrari does not. Even though Alonso is at the top today, I think it was an outlier lap, wasn't it?

good day mate...you must also consider what fuel loads are the teams into...one might be concentrating on high fuel loads the whole day to see how fast they can be even with high fuel load compared to being light. just a bite of cookie before drinking coffee...

[raymondu999]

Welcome to the funhouse Maynard! Problem is we really don't know what teams are doing. A lot of teams such as McLaren use tests as data collection sessions to improve their cfd and windtunnel correlation, and build good aero/tyre mechanical simulation models. You might see a car go for 1 flier on soft tyres, but they might have done it on 50 laps of fuel.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

A lot of teams such as McLaren use tests as data collection sessions to improve their cfd and windtunnel correlation, and build good aero/tyre mechanical simulation models. You might see a car go for 1 flier on soft tyres, but they might have done it on 50 laps of fuel.

I do wonder about using 4 days in a test to correlate windtunell CFD only.
I reckon all the teams can guess who is where within about 0.3 to 0.5 seconds.
They have the tech to work out the discrepancies that we do not.

[raymondu999]

Yes, but we as viewers can't read much out of the times. I wasn't saying 4 days for cfd correlation, but ee don't know which day(s) they would be using. We could be comparing a glory run to a cfd run on a given day.

I still think we could probaby kmow conclusively about car consistency by seeing trends on long runs we won't know if it's consistently ---/good, but we'll know it's consistency.