The rb18's laptime at Suzuka in 2022 was better than every 2023 car except the rb19... so Ferrari are far from alone in this boat and it makes it feel less significant. The conditions are also not the same so I think that it's a bit hard to read into. It rained Friday night in '23 which lowered grip for instance
I think everyone's aware of how hard it will be to catch RB for next season. I think it's a bit unfair/mean to be reminding ppl when the constant reminder is happening in every race weekend. Some people will be optimistic but that optimism shouldn't be crushed just because others might think it misplaced
We've seen McLaren switch to the correct concept and find 1s/lap of laptime relative to the field this season and it's not like their resources to do this have been outlandish. They had a compromised wind tunnel and went through a management/leadership restructure and still made progress. We can't really say how much time Ferrari will find by switching concept or how easily it will come. Development rates are not linear - same applies to RB
chrisc90 wrote: ↑02 Oct 2023, 19:56
organic wrote: ↑02 Oct 2023, 13:56
I think it was more the Austria upgrade and then improvements with understanding incrementally
The good tyre deg has been around for longer than just Suzuka. Monza for instance showed Ferrari having only marginally worse degradation than RB who carried more df that race and have been class of the field in terms of tyres this year
How do you come to that conclusion?
In broad terms by observing trends. And spending too much time looking at data!
For the second half of 2022 and the few races at the beginning of the year Ferrari would always heat up tyres quickly especially rears, be quick at start of stints and fade away relatively quickly. At Barcelona they brought their upgrade designed primarily to make the car more consistent and become kinder on tyres. What we immediately saw at Barcelona and subsequent races was Ferrari struggling with tyre warmup, made all the more apparent by the wet weekends; an entirely novel phenomenon for Ferrari in the 2022- regulations. We can look at other cars that have excellent tyre management like Merc and RB and they have this similar weaker warmup. A new car characteristic perhaps
Looking at the race pace from then onwards.. Ferrari's race pace was consistent with low degradation in line with others already at Canada, Austria, Silverstone.. they were actually competitive on deg already. It was masked by Canada's awful start positions & in Silverstone they completely botched the strategy, seemingly expecting tyre falloff that never came - even for their car. Belgian GP Leclerc could simply manage his gap to Hamilton behind and had him covered at all times despite Spa being tough on the tyres. At Monza sainz was pushing on C5 tyres for 17 laps before max got past and even then it was only due to a mistake. It's hard to say if rb's deg advantage was enough to make the overtake stick on track to be honest - we didn't see that play out. What we did see is that Ferrari's deg was about the same as Russell despite Russell just managing his tyres & bringing the car home whilst both Ferraris were constantly fighting throughout the race and pushing their tyres to the edge whilst running very low df setups
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