10am here, ready for this sprint. Here's hoping for a crash, fight or dog on track.
10am here, ready for this sprint. Here's hoping for a crash, fight or dog on track.
I suspect the Ferrari will eat its tyres here, but this is promising for the season.
Fresh air is king then. Max and Piastri absolutely cooked their tyres and went fully off the cliff.
Its good to see the newbs early on, spinning around in dirt
Poor old Doohan is on a one-way trip to Mount Panorama at the moment.
Brundle making a good point here that Verstappen could Prost his way to the championship even in a shit car.
Norris looks like he’s towing a boat around here
Lawson
Hadjar to be in the Red Bull and then fired before season's end. Keep going Helmut.
Getting mugged off on out laps.Originally Posted by Sir Andy Mahowry
Lawson
He found the NOS button, new lap record.
Same again in Q3, chief. No excuses
He was making a weird number of mistakes throughout that session.
Leclerc in Sir Lewis's bodybag already, French chump.
Should be a fairly routine win for Piastri tomorrow from the front
We need an indiction on the time screen, when drivers have completed their flying laps but they they havent taken the chequered flag. We know when drivers go into the box as it tells you. Its tension trying to figure our for 20 seconds, who is still on a flying lap and who has just completed one.
Should be a good race I think, certainly any of the front four could win it, maybe front six if Ferrari have any race pace, quite rare in this era.
I think there's quite a lot they could do with modern tech to allow us to follow people's laps better on the broadcast. Have similar delta things up on screen maybe to what the drivers have in-car.
Clean air is king, as shown by Hamilton earlier today. Unless Verstappen makes places at the start I can only seen him going backwards in the race with that horrific degradation.
I was thinking that as well. He doesn't really have terrible days.
I'm wondering how he's going to cope with this. With Sainz there was that sense that maybe he had the edge on track, but Sainz wasn't quite viewed as the same level of star as him. Now the gaffer has essentially brought in his favourite ever student, who also happens to be the last remaining mega star of F1. Oh and just so happens to be the best driver the sport has ever seen.
I've got a lot of time for Charlie boy and he along with Max are probably quite clear in being the guy you want for that one lap. However his ability to chuck a mistake is going to cost him a lot if we are seeing a return of full motivation SLH.
It's been half a weekend. Let's not get carried away just yet.
Exactly. Hamilton's motivation for a weekend could disappear very quickly if last year is anything to go by.
Quite.
I hope we continue down the path of Car X being better at Circuit Y, but not the same as it was last week, that we got at the end of last year. Could also be interesting if Max does Prost his way to many a 2nd/3rd place while the other teams yo-yo about.
Nice to have some ambiguity in a sport now that the football season is over.
What's the deal with Verstappen's team mate? Obviously there is a skill gap, but how can you be consistently last in a car that's also near the front? Aren't Red Bull meant to be the "talent ID" guys?
Car is designed for Max to drive only. Albon said that when he was his team mate, Max likes the car to feel, the same way your mouse does when your turn it to max sensitivity. It makes the car really difficult to drive for everyone else. Allegedly.
Perez did well with the car, until he didn't. As for Lawson, this is his second weekend on the car. Last weekend was a rainy one and all the rookies struggled. As much as I would enjoy to see him flop as some sort of revindication for Perez, we have to wait at least a few more races before entirely giving up on him.
It's a true one-car team. Kind of ironic as one of the best parallels from history was 1994 when Benetton made a car purely for Schumacher and the fall guy trailing around like a leper 15 places behind him was... Jos Verstappen.
And Red Bull are the talent ID guys but they also have Helmut Marko who likes to sack said talent after about 5 races. Gasly and Albon from the current grid have both been through this, Sainz got out before it happened to him, and countless careers are in the mud because of it.
Yuki has been driving round at half mast thus far this season.
Perez did ok when the car was most of a second quicker than anything else, they seem allergic to putting anyone half decent in that seat and when they did they gave them half an hour to get close to Verstappen then kicked them out the door.
Yuki's probably better off where he is, believe it or not.
A bit like when Casey Stoner was the only one that could win on the Ducati.
At this point if I was a young driver I would be trying to avoid the Red Bull seat, at least until the new regs kick in.
I also don't want to defend Perez too much because it will sound that I am just biased for my countrymate and I couldn't really care less, but he was a 'half-decent' driver, at least until the last year and a half.
I agree but he really wanted that RB seat so he must be loving shitting all over Lawson.
Yuki is not a great driver. He is perfectly average at best. He is Sergio Perez with ADHD. You put anyone in that second car and they will be abysmal because the entire thing is built from the ground up for Max to T-1000 his way to championships or if it's a shit car, drag it kicking and screaming onto the podium. You cannot ask people who are not Max Verstappen to drive this thing competently. It cannot be done.
We have had 6 drivers and a decades worth of evidence that has proved this time after time.
McLaren’s dominating when it really matters. Not a real surprise
Leclerc's missing front wing endplate taking all the load out of the front left, absolute cheat code around here. He could challenge Norris here.
Love that Leclerc's improvised aero modification leads to him being the fastest car on track (or so it seems).
Edit: Was a bit late with that.
Something needs to happen.
McLaren telling Norris for maximum pace a bit ago just for him to sit in dirty air was a ridiculous call. Norris needs to get rid of that engineer badly. His tyres look cooked now
Easy peasy. McLaren on their Red Bull/Mercedes arc and I’m here for it.
Imagine my shock that the C2 held together flawlessly for 40 odd laps. Haven't actually seen 'the cliff' since about 2010.
My Piastri 10/1 ticket remains in my pocket.
When was the last time a tyre genuinely went off? When Hamilton binned it here on the way into the pits to scupper that title in his debut season, in one of the worst bits of team management ever?
That was really boring.
Most extreme example I remember was Kimi in a Lotus.
You know when Russell is sitting in 3rd place that it’s been a boring race. The king of saving tyres and sneaking onto a podium. Nearly got up to 2nd in the end with Norris’ brake issues.
There was that one epic race in Canada where everyone had to make about 6 stops.
Was that a turning point for durability?
One of the reasons 2012 was a good season was that they had clown tyres that actually fell off. If you're going to have massive aero wake (which you are) then you can't have super-durable tyres as well or there's no jeopardy for the driver in front, especially around this smogfest when there's a triple-apex nightmare leading out into the long DRS zone.
Russell doing a 1 stop at Spa and winning the race (well until it was overturned) should have been the nail in the head for these tyres. The more pit stops needed the better. 1 stop is fine if there’s an element of risk but the V Carbs were on for an easy P7 and P9 before going for a second stop today which ends up royally fucking them. Same with Hamilton - was never catching anyone after pitting
If the tyres aren't going to get less durable they need to make the races 10 laps longer.
Yeah, take the distances back to 1960s levels.
LeClerc and Gasly underweight with Hamilton having excessive plank wear. All three could be gone.
Leclerc and Hamilton both disqualified. Forza Ferrari chaps.
Albon up to P7
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