Ambient temperatures will be very high… brake/engine cooling components will be interesting because teams will only have 1 session to optimize the right cooling requirements for these elements.BMMR61 wrote: ↑05 Oct 2023, 08:38Thanks for the insights into the future off SSB technologies and the next 3-6 years....
Meanwhile in 3 days we'll be getting a picture of McLaren's competitiveness at the Qatar circuit, I have some questions;
With the reported total resealing of the circuit which last saw F1 action in 2021 how will the McLaren work it's C1, 2, 3 (softest range) tyres in temperatures of up to 34 degrees?
Will this be another two stop race?
Therefore will this again be regarded as a "high deg" track requiring further evolution of Oscar's tyre management?
Have the Singapore updates brought about much improved aero efficiency in terms of non-DRs top speeds or am I missing something from the Suzuka data?
Wings - are that thorny topic on this forum - what wing do you think they will be bringing?
Anyone for believing McLaren can reduce the qualifying deficit to Max to significantly less than 0.5?
Consensus around most insiders appears to be that McLaren will be second fastest (again) ahead of Ferrari, then Mercedes trying to compensate poor outright pace with less tyre degradation. McLaren seem to be continuing a trend of quite decent deg relative to all except the Red Bulls.
I think track temperatures will be somewhere between 30-40 degrees at night, which is obviously still very warm, and suggest a 2 stop, but to be honest the hardest compounds have been quite resilient this year imo.
There is only one DRS zone ...I think the overall aero. efficiency matters more and that has improved rather than whatever differential comes between non-DRS and DRS.
I know a lot of people were talking about Oscar's race management after Japan... I also think the gap was a bit augmented through setup choices and something I mentioned after qualifying. While Lando and Oscar ran the same wings, I'm sure Lando ran the ride height lower, hence more downforce.. it makes the car bottom more in qualifying and slower on the straights, but the performance is amplified on higher fuel.
^^ Will likely see this configuration seen at Singapore with this beam-wing configuration… If they feel they need more downforce they will run the rear-wing with the connected main plane.
It’s very hard to make a numerical prediction on a sprint weekend because any team could easily get the setup wrong after 1 practice session… with a lot of unknowns in terms of new asphalt, kerbs, heat etc. any team could go to conservative on ride height and cooling or the other way around.
But my overly optimistic prediction is the gap in qualifying will be very close (<0.1) … and this maybe the closest in terms of race pace we may be all season with marginal losses coming in sector 2 (turns 6 and 10).