My point does not rely on Norris and Piastri being equally fast. Norris was a solid second faster than Piastri on the restart. Some of that is driver, a small bit of it was tyres, and a decent chunk of it would no doubt be the upgrade. 0,4s is not unreasonable at all IMO, given Piastri also had a few bits on his car.Sphere3758 wrote: ↑09 May 2024, 11:41I dont remember a recent occurance where Piastri matched Lando's race pace, so quantifying the upgrade using their pace differential is not a sound argument imo.Cs98 wrote: ↑09 May 2024, 10:32Sainz was faster than Piastri in the half upgraded McLaren, enough to pass, yet the fully upgraded McL in the hands of Norris was faster than Sainz. Only a big upgrade would explain such a performance difference.Sphere3758 wrote: ↑09 May 2024, 08:34
I am yet to be convinced by the McLaren upgrade. I don’t think they were much faster than the Ferrari with 0 upgrades. It was a race where track position was key and having free air had a big advantage.
The well timed safety car left Lando with the best tyres at the end, while both Max and especially Charles were on old tyres which they had to restart.
Carlos was relatively close in lap times to Lando at the end and I don’t even consider him the reference driver for Ferrari to judge performance .
So, the 4 tenths number sounds audacious. They were not 4 tenths slower than Ferrari before, the gap was around a tenth/ 1.5 tenths.
As for Sainz not being the "reference driver", might need to re-evaluate that considering he was catching Leclerc at the end. Leclerc was on slightly older tyres, but deg was almost zero.
Charles spent a big portion of the last stint around 2s behind Max, trying to protect his tyres by not getting too close. His pace in relatively free air, that Carlos had after he passed Piastri, might have been better. Lets also not forget that he had to "restart" his hard tyres twice : behind the VSC and the SC.
Anyway, historical data makes Leclerc the reference driver for Ferrari. The same way that Lando is the reference driver for McLaren.
As for Sainz and Leclerc. Data would suggest they've been quite evenly matched in the SF24, and that they were so in this race as well. Both stints were very close on pace. Holding out hope that Leclerc has another 2-3 tenths in the bag strikes me as delusional when it's disregarding the times in the race in favour of "historical data". He clearly didn't have that pace here relative to Sainz.