AR3-GP wrote: ↑23 Oct 2022, 19:38
Hammerfist wrote: ↑23 Oct 2022, 18:24
AR3-GP wrote: ↑23 Oct 2022, 17:41
The driver sitting in the driver seat says the power is lacking. That is more truth than anything we can guess from observation. They have clear clipping issues which were exposed in Monza among other matter-of-fact observations.
Meanwhile Renault, Honda, and Ferrari are all reportedly as good as last year (Honda), or better (Renault due to entirely new architecture) and Ferrari (for more complex reasons....). Merc is the only PU that has gone backwards from 2021 to 2022.
Politically speaking, Merc aren't going to say much (They have 3 supply customers after all), but they know the issues are two fold (power and aero).
I think hamilton was talking about compared to last year. As already mentioned all the engines have lost power.
The williams is one of the fastest cars on the straights while the alfa tauri with the supposedly unbelievable honda pu is nothing special in a straight line.
When you add everything up it points to drag being the main issue here and not power.
Anyone who knows about drag racing will tell you that once you are at the 1000 hp level incremental differences in horsepower matter less. It just becomes so much harder to make performance gains at these high power levels. It would probably take 50hp or more for the difference in rb and merc to make sense were it solely or mostly down to power. I dont think there is any chance these engines have 50hp in between them.
Many subtleties here which you are missing
1) The new fuel caused a reduction in power,
before the winter development cycle. That is true for all manufacturers and that's what you are parroting. What you have missed is that each manufacturer had an opportunity to redevelop the fuel and engine over the winter. Some manufacturers did a better job than the others.
Ferrari has more power this year than last year:
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/arti ... LatoL.html
Renault has more power than last year:
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/ocon ... y/9509653/
There is a late article where I believe Marko or someone from Honda confirmed (after initially reporting great difficulty) that they did not lose anything from 2021 and 2022.
Now you have the lead Mercedes driver repeating what he most likely has been told by his engineers which is that they have lost engine power (as you know, Hamilton leaks tidbits that his engineers have briefed him on). How many more red flags need be told?
The second matter is that peak power is one thing. Average power is the other. How much power can be sustained? Mercedes (and likely Renault), were no good in Monza and experienced clipping and deployment issues. This is a separate conversation to drag. Clipping has nothing to do with drag. It means the operation of the ICE, MGU-H, and MGU-K just isn't good enough to sustain the peak power down the full straight (strong contrast to Honda/Ferrari).
Top speed is obfuscation to a degree. Even a Honda from 2017 will top the speed traps if you remove all the aero (which is what a 2022 Williams is...a car severely lacking in aero which lends itself to a slippery figure down the straight but terrible in the corners).
All engines lost power compared to 2021 and not an insignficant amount of it, cars are almost down to V8 levels of acceleration (ok with more weight i'll give them that). Lets not compare to 2019 and 2018 as those were on a different level entirely.
Mercedes lost more with E10 than others, this in my opinion puts them around 10hp behind honda and ferrari. Pre-toned down ferrari was possibly even further ahead but this could also be down to supposedly mercedes being severly overweight early on.
But actually, mercedes' biggest problem is drag related. They're constantly having to run parachute RW to have any kind of corner performance and on top of that RB18 has some sort DRS efficiency advantage over everyone else, exacerbating the problem.
All that drag further creates deployment issues as ERS is working overtime to combat that effect. It's a snowballing situation. We've heard Verstappen say it in the past (saudi 2021 and again in saudi 2022) that when you're slimmer on wings ERS management is much easier and allows for easier attacking and/or defending. I will say honda must have an advantage on deployment this year no matter any other factor, as Italy proved this conclusevely, creating an anomally.
Renault PU is probably somewhere on mercedes level, however alpine has less drag (and downforce) so their "problems" are not as apparent.
