dialtone wrote: ↑22 Mar 2024, 20:41
How can some folks here criticize attempting to find the right setup for the car? There is no prize to win in FP1 and 2. If the team has correlation issues, how are they supposed to find what’s wrong if they don’t run these tests?
And why would any driver care about whether they are testing setup windows or going for performance in FP1-2?
I don’t understand how the evaluation of a team and driver is happening in FP2… Ham is leaving but he’s a professional and somehow here people think that he’s going to soil his reputation with the brand he’s been with for 20 years because he’s going to Ferrari next year? That would be so unprofessional as to be impossible.
I don't think anyone cares about FP for the sake of FP. But so far there has been a pattern of poor practice sessions leading to poor quali and race results.
And why would any driver care about whether they are testing setup windows or going for performance in FP1-2?
Because if you are testing strange set-ups instead of marginally improving every session (from a baseline set-up) you end up behind the curve. I can't think of one race these past 3 years where Merc found special performance from all these "experiments". It's always them trying something weird and then having to revert to baseline when instead they could have spent that time adapting the baseline set-up to each driver's preferences.