Second Barcelona Test - Day Three
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@Laurence: I think we are agreeing. The trouble is that the teams have become very good at describing innovations in a way that persuades Charlie Whiting that they are legal. When other teams see them they protest, and poor Charlie has to backtrack. I think there are many people in the sport's administration who are well-intentioned but past their use-by date.
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@SD: Although Mercedes has done a remarkable job under the new regulations there should come a point when we question whether it is possible for Ferrari, Renault and Honda to catch up. If it becomes clear they can't because of the way the engine regulations are structured, F1 should consider changing the rules for the health of the sport. The only problem is that that opens up another hornet's nest of problems as each team tries to get an advantage over the others.
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@laurence. I don't know if you recall but last Sunday I had performed some calculations to attempt to work out the W06's ultimate pace. I revised those on Thursday night and predicted a 1:22.885 for the Mercedes which isn't too far away from Rosberg's 1:22.7 from yesterday. I'm guessing on super soft they would get alot closer to a 1:22 flat (I'm guessing a 1:22.2xx ) which would put them 1s ahead of Massa which puts practically back where we were before Melbourne 14.
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@thequadge: That looks like some good number crunching. But I'll throw in Massa's soft time from from Thursday of 1:23.500. If you give Williams the same soft to super-soft delta as Mercedes that brings his time down to a 1:23 flat. So the gap would be closer to 0.8s. However, bear in mind that 10 kilos of fuel is worth about 0.35s in lap time here. It's entirely possible those times were set with that much (or more) left in the tank.
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@SD. That's the nature of F1 every few years the rules get revised significantly and a new team often dominates for the next few years (98 McLAren, 09 Red Bull (After the Brawn blip). We need new regulations every 4-5 years to keep the engineers on their toes and allow a shakeup in the order.
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@VS: The main concern is making sure the car can complete a race distance. It looks positive so far, but there are also a load of checks the teams have to do, especially with the complex PUs. Smaller tests, such as finding reverse, also have to be completed before the trip to Australia. Pit stop practice is a bit of a luxury but also important (Force India got some practice on the 2014 car last year) and teams can spend endless hours working through different set-ups to understand the behaviour of the car.
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@Laurence, Okay so if the gap to the rest of the field is 8 tenths on like 1 lap and you add around 5-6 tenths to that in race trim that equals around 1.5 secs a lap faster on race trim. So really what we are saying is Mercedes still have a massive 1.5 secs a lap faster on race trim?
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Blistering is an issue:
pbs.twimg.comby Norbert Haug via Pbs.twimg 2/28/2015 11:50:50 AM -
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@Josh: Nope. Somebody else is speculating they are 1.5s faster than everyone else in race trim but I have no idea how they came to that figure. I said that the gap between Williams and Mercedes from the laps we have seen is roughly 0.8s but that 20kg of fuel either way would be enough to skew that entirely.
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@Laurence, Do you not know why someone came up that figure? I can tell you why. Last race of the season in Abu Dhabi before Rosberg's car went Mercedes were exactly around 1.8-1.9 seconds per lap faster than the rest. That's why Laurence. The gap was massive in Abu Dhabi, At one point that was how big the gap was in Abu Dhabi.
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@Josh: But that was last year's Mercedes versus the last year's Ferrari, Red Bull, Williams etc. We are trying to understand the gains the other teams have made this year. You may be bang on, but I would rather try to understand it from the data we have this week than knock off a number at random from last year.
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Chinese Grand Prix April 10-12
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