They are not at the saturation point where an increase in vertical load no longer produces an increase in grip.marcush. wrote:I don´t believe more downforce is really king under all circumstances.I think first of all you only want downforce when you need it...e.g under braking and when cornering maybe to an extend under acelleration from corners....but say you have dificulty making your tyres last it may be contraproductive to put more vertical load on it.so you may be forced to reduce vertical load mechanically (e.g .stiffen up the car to reduce load transfer) or change weight distribution to make it all work ..
I´d say ajn efficiency gain is always appreciated as you reduce drag for the same downforce level-clearly that will improve your laptime and trap speed.
As long as there is a spec tyre there must be a limit of vertical load a tyre can handle and that is the same for everyone.So maybe you can get an advantage on some tyre variant ,be it sof t supersoft or hard but overall the story is the same for everyone -once you know what the tyre can handle you need to get as close to that and not over it to extract the max.
What is going on here is that people are taking a statement and instead of interpreting it in a practical way, they are taking it to the extremes of what it could have possibly meant.
No one believes there is a complete and total disregard for drag. At EVERY TRACK the teams would take an increase in downforce without the commensurate drag increase, but that's not possible so we come up with a compromise of the most DF without too much drag.