Gillian wrote: ↑28 Mar 2026, 17:03
AR3-GP wrote: ↑28 Mar 2026, 17:00
I would agree. We are not using our time well in here so please stop making replies to that member. It has no value.
It's just a race. The car is currently overweight and has some problems. Not everything needs a reaction. If they improve the car, then what? Like I said before, let's see what happens after the weight comes down in Miami. They also seem to have suspension problems which make the aero platform unstable. Verstappen said the rear is jumping. This will make the downforce unpredictable. It doesn't look great now, but the rate at which things can turn around could surprise you.
For tomorrow, they are in a position like 2015. A Verstappen race is interesting no matter where he is in the field and no matter what car he is in.
He's correcting oversteer then waiting most part of the corner to accelerate due to understeer. Car does not look stable, but I honestly could not discern the 'jumping' he described. But yeah, not sure how visible it would/could be anyway. The car is just bad.
You won't be able to tell from the onboard. Or from the off board for that matter. Even when they set these cars up soft, they're still stiff as f*ck compared to pretty much everything else the average person has seen on the road.
So unless it's overly dramatic and he heads into the barrier, these sort of things are usually only discernible by the driver feeling.
If he said the rear is "jumping", that sound like the rear is just generally unsettled and it losses grip unpredictably. Perhaps overly sensitive to bumps. When the rear goes "floaty" you're just focused on keeping the car on the road, going fast becomes second priority. I think a textbook example of that is what happened to Max at the spoon curve in his last Q2 attempt, but you can see the car is a mess balance-wise all through the esses anyway. It's just that corners are shorter in that first sector so you can afford to throw it around a bit from one corner to the other, even though you're going to be slow as hell anyway.
The thing is, the car isn't looking good at all at the moment, so it's pointless to have driver talks. They're both trying to overcompensate for its weaknesses. Max is also a driver who prefers a pointy setup, which can really hurt you if the car is randomly getting loose on the rear.
It didn't look as bad in Australia, but I am wondering if that's somehow related to some teams not extracting the maximum out of their power units. It's a bit weird for Max to go from completely dominating the midfield in Australia, to barely matching a Haas for pace in China though.
Let's see tomorrow. If they can keep the midfield behind in race pace while having obvious problems, then that should be a silver lining at least with regards to the potential of the car. It would then be up to the team to do the best they can to settle this car down and bring performance to it throughout the long break until Miami.
