Badger wrote: ↑15 Dec 2025, 15:47
diffuser wrote: ↑14 Dec 2025, 21:42
Badger wrote: ↑14 Dec 2025, 13:43
You can pick almost any lap in the first stint and it will look like that. Max certainly never slowed to tow anyone, rubbish.
He is definitely reminded about the gap by the engineer. That is recorded
Then his lap pace drops by .5 of second, then goes back up.
Like I said Max has no slip stream, leading the race, vs Norris that has two early on then just one later, after Russell pits. That makes a huge difference.
Of course he is being reminded about the gap
He's leading. Why would you assume being told about a gap means, "slow down and give the tow"? What a weird assumption. Why did he pull away from George in the first stint if he wanted to tow him?
Just look at the derating, ignore the top speed. You can clearly see that Max's acceleration stops earlier than Lando on several of the straights, that's because he stops deploying, not slipstream.
If you give a tow to Russell, who is in a slower car than the RBR and you're not concerned of him passing you, you negate the DRS speed difference between Russell and Norris and in that way help Russell keep Norris behind. That is why you do that. It's the whole strategy behind a DRS train. It also helps keep Norris in dirty air and increase wear on his tires the whole time he is there. I would also guess it's why Russell pitted so early (the earliest he could in his pit window), just to get out from between them and into clean air.
This is lap 45, You can clearly see that Max is performing lift and coast into turn 14 while Norris is not. Norris is just coming off the throttle and braking while max is lifting off the throttle, waiting 1 or 2 seconds and then braking. It is not running out of deployment, it's more about saving tires. We know the McLaren has a tire advantage.
Anyway, this stuff is all highly speculative, which is why I didn’t want to start snipping graphs of it. There are so many different things going on during a race—drivers are rarely driving flat out lap after lap.
I watch a lot of races just from the driver onboard cameras. Alonso will switch deployment strategies easily five times a race (stuff like STRAT 11, STRAT 5, etc.). That doesn’t count the times he uses the deployment override, which is a button he can press and hold to keep the MGU-K deploying until, well, there’s no more electricity if he wants.
So trying to judge how much deployment a PU has from a series of laps in a race, based on the data we have, is impossible. Plus, when you’re leading a race, you never deplete your battery—you always keep plenty in reserve to defend if you need to.
This brings me back full circle to the YouTube video. The only reason I thought the deployment comment was interesting was because I thought the guy said, “The consensus in the F1 paddock is that Honda has…”. That carries far more weight than you or I looking at F1 tempo data, because they have much more complex ways of measuring each other’s deployment. This is now the opinion of people who have data of all cars that they have compared.
