I'm not taking anything you said out of context. You posted the average lap times which take all the laps into account (minus extreme outliers) and suggested it was representative of actual race pace. I reject that, I think it's illogical knowing the nature of the race and track.Emag wrote: ↑14 Sep 2026, 18:14You keep taking what I say out of context for your own benefits. You're not meant to consider 100% of the race. That's definitely not what I said. You are however, supposed to look at the whole thing and discard the obvious junk, or at least weigh it appropriately.Badger wrote: ↑14 Sep 2026, 15:39The joke is on you for thinking 100% of the lap times are relevant for judging pace when most of the race was spent in traffic. Absolutely nothing can be learned by watching Lando drive 20 laps within one second of Max except to say that he was quicker but stuck. Yet those are the kind of laps you want to bring into the sample instead of simply looking at the parts of the race when they were in free air and pushing. That is you being unreasonable and a bad data analyst, not us being biased.Emag wrote: ↑14 Sep 2026, 14:35Its funny how you can demand context to be applied on a selective manner and still claim the others are the ones who are being blinded by data. Somehow we are supposed to take for granted that a 10 lap sample is the one that needs to be considered entirely representative while the rest of the race is useless.
If you think RedBull really had a 4-5 tenth deficit to Kimi and more than that to Lando here then that’s up to your interpretation. Those numbers dont pop anywhere unless you deliberately dismiss 90% of the available data, but that’s an individual’s choice on what they think matters or not.
If there's any data analyst that looks at a cluster of data points with an obvious outlier cloud and decides to take that as the representative set, then I pay zero attention to whatever they have to say immediately, because statistically that doesn't make sense.
In any case, since I never actually defended my view, I will tell you where it comes from.
The only thing that bothers me, is the extrapolation based on the last 10 laps. There's far more representative sets within the race without looking at the middle which you don't want to consider. Even the first stint is way more representative than the last 10 laps. You can look at that and you wont see a gap of more than 0.5s to Lando and 0.3s to Kimi on the extremes with a - 0.150s on the averages.
In qualifying itself, it would have been 4 tenths to Lando (assuming he doesn't f*ck up the last corner) and 2 tenths to Kimi.
RedBull's biggest problem in the last two races (at least), has been the fact that they they dropped off the longer the stint went on. They had the same issue in Monza. Look at Max vs Kimi in the second stint in Monza. They are very close to each other while clearing cars. Then there's another 3-4 laps where Max keeps up with Kimi on pace and then he immediately drops off really hard. I personally read that as a car which has good pace potential, but possible balance problems which don't allow the driver to sustain it. Could be many reasons for that (thermal deg, over-reliance in one axis, difficult balance which makes it hard to stay consistent as the mechanical grip drops off etc ...)
Which is why I can't take those last 10 laps at face value, because they're taken at a point where Mercedes is arguably at their best against the others. If you see where Kimi was gaining the most in his fastest laps for example, it's pretty much all in the last sector. The slow, rear-tire/traction dependent one.
The car is not as bad as people here make it to be. No one is saying it's the best, but it's not a complete disaster either. It's unfortunate we didn't get a more representative pool with regards to Ferrari, but even then, at worst I would put them equal at this race. The car is inconsistent, nobody can argue that much. But if it is not in a disfavourable track, the biggest issue that I see is sustained pace in the race. In ultimate pace, with another upgrade, I don't think it's unreasonable to think Max might have been on pole here (only if we assume Lando f*cks up). But that's an hypothetical nobody can say with confidence. All I know is that he was close enough as it is.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see them as second force behind McLaren briefly if they bring an upgrade before Mercedes brings theirs.
The last 10 laps were the most relevant part of the race for gauging RBs pace relative to Mercedes specifically. Tyre degradation was not a major issue, everyone had "negative deg" on the hard. For McLaren I looked at other sections, specifically those when Lando was driving in free air on hards. So all the comparisons are done with same age hard tyres, no slower car in front, with both cars having incentive to push. That's why I picked those samples. You may think that is an arbitrary selection, I think it's a logical selection if you actually want the true relative pace.
How do you define a bad car? In absolute terms, is a car that gets on the podium several times bad? No. In terms of a team with the ambitions of RB, is a car that is half a second off the pace bad? Absolutely. They have to rely on luck and perfect Verstappen execution to scrape podiums. They are 4th best. That is bad for RB and I don't think you are going to convince many of their fans otherwise.
