What does confidence and being relaxed really mean. First of all, I appreciate the insight and my next comment is definitely not to be seen as anything negative.Andi76 wrote: ↑01 Mar 2023, 14:38Well, I would like to say several things about this. Of course, we can only speculate here, but the teams themselves know exactly how they have to assess the competition. There's a lot of effort being put into this with, as I think most people will know, GPS data, sound measurements etc. What stands out here is that Red Bull and Ferrari are very relaxed. At Mercedes it looks a little bit different. Yesterday I had a conversation with someone from Ferrari and I can only say that they are very satisfied and relaxed. This already shows that they are very sure to have a good car. He told me that most of the time they had lot of fuel on board all the time and they never actually made a real qualifying run. So even when they did their "faster" times, they still had more fuel on board than they would usually have. He also told me that they never looked for laptimes, not even with the faster times they did, it was all part of a well planed and organised programm and approach and you could feel the confidence when he said that. So correlation is definetely perfect and the car works just the way you want it to. And as I said - the teams know relatively well how good or how bad the competition is. So I expect Red Bull to be in front, but I also expect the SF-23 to be not far behind and to be the car with the greater development potential. However, this is where what really worries me comes into play, namely the development over the course of the season. Many people make fun of the fact that Ferrari never manages to develop the car as well as the competition during the season. But of course there's a reason for that. Ferrari used to be by far the best team here, back in the Schumacher era. The reason back then was that Ross Brawn, Rory Byrne, Jean Todt and Michael Schumacher really ran the race team. Ross Brawn had full technical responsibility and had this written into his contract. Of course, that didn't stop di Montezemolo from trying to exert influence here, as he had done all the years before and after that era. However, he ran into a wall, because Ross Brawn made it clear that he would not tolerate influencing his employees and ordering anything technical. Unlike the pre-Schumacher era and the post-Schumacher era, however, there was now a united front of race director, technical director, chief designer and number one driver who were completely loyal to each other and in complete agreement. The racing department is run by them, they are the professionals and not the president. And should the president not want or accept that, especially since the TD had even been contractually assured of that, as well as the chief designer, then they would leave, because that was not what had been agreed. So di Montezemolo was deprived of any influence concerning the racing team and the engineers could go about their work quietly and undisturbed, without the Ferrari or FIAT bosses messing up any technical things or development plans. And above all according to plan and in one direction. After the 2007 car that Brawn/Byrne and Schumacher were still developing was mostly finished, this ended and Brawn/Byrne and Schumacher left Ferrari. There came, as today, technical extremely capable people in their place, but people who no longer had the power to block out the disruptive influences and changes of direction of the bosses. An engineer could either do what the bosses wanted, or do what he thought was technically best, but that left him vulnerable. This is also the reason why some excellent engineers left Ferrari or others were fired after they argued with the bosses after failures regarding their interference that negatively affected the team technically.
Sorry, that was a bit much, but I think something like that has to be mentioned. Finally, I would like to say again that I have never experienced such confidence at Ferrari. And since the F1 teams usually know exactly where the competition stands, I think Ferrari is well prepared. At the latest when the first updates will come in the second or third race. But the car should already not be too far away from the Red Bull. Of course, this is a purely subjective assessment and I can be wrong, but it the impression of the Ferrari people conveys this quite clearly.
My only question is that I'm not sure what "appearing relaxed" really means. Aston Martin and Alpine also appear relaxed. Neither of those teams have the fastest car.
Yes I know each team (at least the bigger ones), have very thorough "competitive analysis debriefs". I'm just not sure anyone really knows. Being relaxed could just be satisfaction with their data and correlation as opposed to knowing they are the quickest (that goes for both RB and Ferrari as well as some of the darkhorse midfielders).
