FittingMechanics wrote: ↑08 Jul 2024, 21:21
Second clear mistake was not putting Norris on mediums. They obviously chose to bring two mediums and a hard (for a usually 1 stop race), they talked about the medium over the radio yet they laid it onto Norris to try and pick the right tire in the middle of the race with misleading "cover Hamilton or cover Verstappen" comment. This was a mistake.
Agree that the way his race engineer composed the message to Lando, was in itself a loaded question. It was 'do you want to go for a win or happy with 2nd ?' Obviously the driver will choose the win.
But I dont think we should 'blame' McLaren for this call. Inherently their car is kinder to tyres than any other car on the grid, so expecting the used S to last for 12 laps AND be quick wasn't a bad estimation, esp since Hamilton was on same tyre. As I mentioned before, despite all the prediction algorithms and tools at their disposal that crunches the numbers and presents them with live info 'what tyre now' final choice
(after they plug in the laptimes of themselves from the weekend on same compound fuel corrected, the laptimes of other representative teams on the same compound from the same race that's ongoing, the data about the tyre from pirelli, the track temp data etc etc) .
The data from pirelli that shows X tyre is faster than Y tyre by 0.zz seconds, is based on peak grip at some fixed temp. The 'average laptime' (that will again depend on the car, how much aero load it has, how much slip angle the tyres suffer in average over a lap) etc are all in the territory of 'algorithms' as they must be calculating the 'average grip' over a stint. So if their tools are telling them used S for 12 laps has better average laptime than fresh M, we can't fault the pitcrew for relaying this info via race engineer to the driver.
It's not an exact science, so the 'feel' from the driver matters and that's why they even ask the driver, who can make a subjective 'gut feel' call on this. And hence the loaded question by his race engineer. For Mercedes, their algorithms told the used S is the one to go for rather than a fresh H - but look what happened with Redbull, their tools told them fresh H is the one to go instead of used S. So there is a lot of
'does it suit that particular car' involved.
That's why a generic
'how come they didn't know used S was slower than harder compounds, other teams knew' is off the mark I think. The team knew anyway that it was a marginal call, and tyre grip prediction is not something exact, like downforce number at a particular speed.
Plus, on top of all this, there is a huge dependency on how the driver uses the newly fitted tyre on his outlap. I think Lando took a lot of life out of the used S on his outlap, he was blisteringly fast.
According to me, this was not the 'big blunder' that the internet should be blaming them for.
The big blunder was of course, leaving Piastri out to the wolves, because there was no ambiguity in the data, it was crystal clear that every progressive lap was losing more and more laptime.
