I listened to Lando's racing radio. In the first stint he was unhappy with the weak pace caused by worn tyres. Moreover, he noted that he loses a lot of time in slow corners.mwillems wrote: ↑25 Mar 2024, 12:48It's a good point.Emag wrote: ↑25 Mar 2024, 05:25Not sure which lap it was specifically. But I purposefully picked one that was in the last 10-15 laps of the race since both would be pushing at that stage with clear air in front.mwillems wrote: ↑24 Mar 2024, 23:29
It depends which stint you look at, on the hards we lose time at both corners unfortunately, which laps/tyres were you looking at on your analysis?
Going back and looking at the softs and your right, the final corner was OK, not great, not bad and we were being punished universally on the penultimate. Either the tyres or the lighter car allowed us to perform better on the final corner on the softs in the final stint. I would guess that the issue at the front affects the car up to and including mid speed corners, but with the effect greater the slower we are. On the laps below we are .35 to nearly half a second down. The final corner isn't so bad in itself, it is the effect it has up till the start line which is where we start to get parity with the Ferrari.
I didn't post the throttle but it isn't flat out with fuel in the tank, it's about 60% throttle for the bulk of the corner, 80% as the exit starts and then it hits 100% shortly after. 165kph at the apex followed by a lengthy stint of suffering from a slower exit.
https://i.ibb.co/H4SbZjw/Aus-FInal-Corners2.png
I'd love to know how much these cars weigh.
Edit: It is weight. The heavier car suffers in the long mid speed corner as it doesn't have the downforce to drag all the fuel round the corner. This is a snippet from 3 laps of stint 1 where we are 10kph down at the apex and actually slower in the final turn than the penultimate. Looking at the laptimes relative to LEC and SAI, we do indeed improve relative to our competitors as the race progresses. This will be a phenomenon specific to long mid speed corners with a heavier tank.
https://i.ibb.co/zr6rS7K/Aus-FInal-Corn ... -Stint.png
Final Edit: And now thinking back to Bahrain, the corner that they both hated, was like going round on three wheels and is not dissimilar to the final corner her at Australia, was the final corner at Bahrain.
I had to just add lap counts and convert distance to front in meters to seconds in the telemetry to figure out if there was an issue with dirty air. Through luck, the laps I selected in the first stint were at least 5 seconds behind the driver in front. I think typically you feel the difference at 3 seconds so they are probably representative.
In the middle sector, lap 29 was also a way off any drivers and is a tenth better than the other laps, but 27 and 28 would have been affected being about 2 seconds away, and the data does indeed look worse for those laps.
Looking at laps 29,30 and 31 is a better picture and we are losing .19 to .25 in the final corner also, but you can see the laptime loss easing off here, still not far off the loss in the penultimate corner but it is getting better, especially when you look at a range of Carlos laps in that final corner, it drops to a slightly lower loss.
So I still feel that there is an issue with lugging fuel around mid speed corners below 180 kph due to aero that will get better as the race progresses, but you are right in that the issues at the long slow speeds are immutable.
One comrade wrote above that the team should have completed the race with one pit stop. I can't imagine how this is possible. All teams saved two sets of hard for the race. They also quickly got rid of soft and medium tires, because the pace was rapidly dropping. And only the hard tire sets were stable and fast over the race distance.
People also wrote that perhaps Lando should have been called into the pits earlier to prevent Leclerc from missing out. But in this case, Lando would have gotten caught in traffic, and our car had trouble overtaking. Lando also noted this on the radio, saying that he did not want to get caught in traffic. What the team did may look conservative, but there was the most favorable and reasonable option.
In fact, the team will have to solve the problem in slow corners and then they can consistently claim the podium. And increasing the efficiency of DRS is not so critical, because it does not directly affect tire wear. By the way, Lando also noted during the race that the front left tire was running out quickly. This happened during the first stint on medium tyres.
Having rewatched the race three times, I have so far drawn the following conclusions: on medium C4 tires, Ferrari drives consistently fast and takes better care of them. On hard C3 tires, McLaren drives consistently fast and goes either at the pace of Ferrari or a little faster, and Ferrari, in turn, loses efficiency faster on C3 tires.
