New regulations new season....
Can redbull keep up the pace
The Danniel Ricciardo experiment has been run too. He's out because nobody wants him. Lots of teams had vacancies and none of them have chosen to give him a seat. Time to let him go.
If finances are a factor, not sure Ricciardo would be as quick to take a haircut to Hulkenbergs level even with his form.
Looking forward to Gasly v Ocon. Gasly was getting a lot of plaudits a couple of seasons back off the back of 2020 when the midfield was a lot closely packed with talk of him deserving a better drive. AT took a step back with the new regs and I don’t think he’s been as consistent either with Yuki not being a strong litmus test to comparison. Interesting to see how the dynamic of him and Ocon works out. Would rank Ocon somewhere near the middle of drivers ability wise so interested to see how it goes. Ocon should have an advantage for the first year at least.
Yes Danial would be the safer and better driver to have in that seat. Hulk had his chances and binned them. He is a great reserve driver but that's it.
Hulk is 35 years old. Doesn't make sense to me.
Mick binned it in practice and missed a whole session, still managed to beat his teammate, That's a decent recovery.
What I don't understand is why Hulk is linked to all the seats. Been there done that, time for something new comes to mind
2 seats left to fill so, Haas and Williams. Haas apparently will be either Mick or Nico Hulkenberg, and can't see Mick having helped himself by breaking his car again yesterday.
And Williams apparently have either Logan Sargeant or Jack Doohan lined up. So no more Danny Ric...
And De Vries for Alpha Taurie.
I got to announce the double whammy in here cause all you saps are asleep! Finally, living in Canada comes good!
Gasly to Alpine confirmed. Multiple year deal.
I would say that is what they are hoping for alright.
Honda have this time finally by the skin of their teeth avoided their usual jumping ship after spending all the money just before it pays off.
This could yet turn into a massive run of world championships for them after the hopeless McLaren years.
sums it up
And Honda are back…but never actually left.
Your point makes zero sense. How does it benefit Hamilton if Russell was left out if all the other teams could benefit from it too? That’s like playing cards and your opponents seeing what you have. And he asked to stay out, the time he was losing was not 10 seconds each lap, it was getting better and better, he was just the wrong side of the cut off time.
He would also have the tires up to temp, so he would have been much faster had it worked for him, along with the gamble on an SC to bring him back into it all.
Your conspiracy makes no sense at all.
Suzuka was the last race from 1996, before that Adelaide was last, with Suzuka usually second last.
Russell wasn't left out there by Mercedes to know when to switch Hamilton to slicks - he came on the team radio and said he was sticking with them. Did it help Hamilton? Absolutely, but going by the radio call, he wasn't left out by Mercedes. You also need to factor in where Russell was in 15th when he pitted for slicks and made it up to 11th before his puncture while trying to overtake Schumacher to make it into the points. Given he started from the pits, I would imagine finishing in the points would have been the primary goal which he nearly got.
Of course all other teams could see what hr was doing. That doesn't take from the point that they left him out to know when to switch Hamilton to slicks. Losing nearly 10seconds a lap isn't a gamble. It means you lose the equivalent to a pitstop in less than 4 laps. Thatsnot a gamble, that's a sure bet (that it's the wrong tyre). Do you honestly think that they thought George would make up the 50 seconds to Magnussen and the other teams wouldn't notice and also pit for slicks. Meaning Georgs would be on old slicks and everyone else on mew slicks and he'd still be 20 seconds behind Magnussen.
How has nobody called out this shambolic strategically inept set of decisions by Mercedes? If Ferrari did this, it would be called out as an enormous mistake. But it wasn't a catastrophic mistake because they left him out to do little more than gather data on conditions.
Hill was champion in Suzuka in 1996 AFAIK! Suzuka used to be last race of season and many championships were decided there.
https://gpracingstats.com/circuits/suzuka/
Suzuka has hosted the following championship title deciders:
Drivers’ title
History to repeat itself?
this was shared on Reddit after they visited the Honda factory. So the HRC on the nose and Honda on the cover.
I was hoping to see them use a different livery this weekend, I did like the white livery last year
If he pitted again for new inters, he would lose time pitting and again with overheating tires. So staying on on the dry was his only option really in the hope that a SC would help him.
Even Merc themselves said it was a gamble
“George's race was frustrating,” said Mercedes trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin. “There were points where it looked like he was going to be able to make good progress, but he was also finding it tough to get through traffic. The switch to medium was a gamble, he did a great job to keep it on the track but ultimately, we got it wrong and called it way too early.
“However, he did have good pace in the tricky conditions, and it looked like we would have at least got back into the points as [late in the race] he was pulling the cars ahead by many seconds a lap. Unfortunately, that hope was short-lived when he had contact with Mick [Schumacher] that caused a puncture.”
Him going onto slicks was of benefit to ALL the other teams, so you saying it was for Hamilton makes zero sense when all the other teams would see what his times were. Which were evolving lap by lap, so again, leaving him out was the only real option.
Mercedes started him from the pit lane after fitting a new power unit, given that he’d qualified only 11th. He made relatively modest progress and the only chance to perhaps vault many places might have been to gamble early on the change to slicks, hoping that the track was ready when a Virtual Safety Car (for Fernando Alonso’s broken-down Alpine) allowed him a saving of 10s to the field over a normal pit stop. This was Lap 21.
That 10s saving from stopping when the rest of the field was restricted to a 40% reduction in speed was quickly gobbled up by how gripless the cold slick medium compound tyres proved to be on a track which was taking so long to dry thanks to the humidity and absence of sunlight.
But the significant thing was that Russell’s sector times allowed everyone else to monitor exactly when the time for slicks would be. “I think if George wasn't out there, there will be a lot more people pitting earlier,” Perez later observed.
Ten laps after his stop Russell was still 5s off the pace of the leaders. The way that deficit was split between the three sectors gave a stark picture of where the problem lay.
In sector 1 on the 32nd lap he was 0.7s slower than Perez. In the middle sector he was actually 0.1s quicker. But in the tight twists of the final sector where most of the water remained, he was 1.4s slower. One lap later, however, he set the fastest lap of the race so far. That was the signal: the track was finally ready for slicks.
Without Russell out there as the guinea pig, there would surely have been a far greater strategic variation between the teams.
It was a gamble that just didn't pay off as they hoped.
So thy watched him lose 8 seconds a lap to magnussen and said "hard to know how this gamble is going, but if we stick with it long enough, he might start making some of the time back".
I think you know too much about F1 to think that's credible.
I think both will feature more Honda badging, that is all I have heard.
Are RB or Alpha Tauri doing a special livery for the Japan GP ?
As expected, we will see more Honda branding on the cars from this weekend.
The thought process has already been covered. Reality often isn’t half as exciting as a good conspiracy.
A post on Reddit said that Am went over by $4,000,000 and RB went over by $100,000.
Delayed till monday.
You got to wonder what sort if sad idiot spends their time making fake fia documents like that.... weird world.
It was a gamble, he was far back and stuck in traffic at a track where is incredibly hard to overtake without a big delta. The whole weekend was shot for him after qualy, so again, it was a gamble. In this case for him, even though he was losing time, the time was slowly coming to him, so he was getting pace on the tires with each lap.
Had he pitted, his inters would have grained and overheated, and eventually he would have had to pit again anyway for slicks.
So you see, the gamble just didn’t pay off. He wasn’t a test dummy for Hamilton, who at this stage was having his own issues with his race.
You think he was toddling around nearly 10 seconds a lap off the pace, and everyone just thought it was fine strategy. He thought it was fine anf the team thought it was fine.
What do you think was the strategy? I've said what I think it was (seeing when was the right time for Hamilton switch to slicks). What do you think the strategy was?
