Juzh wrote: ↑10 Apr 2022, 18:42
dialtone wrote: ↑10 Apr 2022, 17:34
silver wrote: ↑10 Apr 2022, 15:49
This sort of math is senseless. The leader as in most of the times, would be cruising without showing full potential of the car. When Verstappen retired, it became so easy for Leclerc to simply manage the race. So the difference between Leclerc and others cars in terms of where they finished, is not a clear indication of the gap.
I don't know if I agree. Verstappen was clear that he knew from the start he couldn't race Leclerc, right before retiring he was managing the gap to those behind rather than attempting to race Leclerc.
Leclerc was never in any danger aside from the second SC restart where he had understeer through T15, but RBR had no top speed advantage here and once side by side VER couldn't capitalize.
For long chunks of the race, everyone of the top 4 was in free air driving with at least 2-3 seconds in front and behind. If there's a race where race pace is indicative it's this one.
The reason of the big gaps is just that RBR couldn't manage the tyres, the rest of the field managed them well enough, see Albon.
You mention albon, but it was easy to manage hard compound tyre and red bull did so too. Perez' PB lap was on the last lap and it was a pretty fast lap. Yes, 8 tenths slower than leclec but leclerc had 3 DRS uses on his fastest lap, so he gained loads just with that. And this is Perez we're talking about, lets not pretend for a second he's faster than verstappen.
Many people struggled on mediums, I'd say nearly entire field apart from leclerc who had zero problems and mercedes who had less but still present. Singling out red bull as being the only ones unable to do good pace on mediums just doesn't hold water. Alonso dropped like a stone at the end when he switched from hard to med and even had to make another pitstop. Magnussen was similar.
Went to pick up telemetry and wrote the simple code to draw how laptimes evolved:
LEC v VER and HAM and you can clearly see after lap 10 that VER has significant degradation of his tyres, nothing of the sort is visible on the Merc. LEC spent the 2nd half of this stints managing gaps.
This is LEC v PER v RUS and even here you can easily see that PER degradation on mediums was very bad, even on Hards there were parts, after lap 50/51, where Russell was actually faster than PER. At the end Perez certainly got a fast lap, but his tyres probably went through the graining phase and regained some lap time.
So yeah, overall Red Bull struggled with tyres more than the others.
EDIT:
another interesting aspect is that VER had big degradation on the Mediums after lap 10, but Perez was quite stable until lap 16, my guess is that to try and keep up with Leclerc, Max took out a ton of life out of his tyres.