GPR-A wrote: ↑18 Sep 2017, 08:27
If one was to believe that Honer was lying, it becomes difficult to believe then that, a driver who qualified ahead of another, gets a new Inters and could fall away to the guy ahead, who was on 12 laps old Inters. It is difficult to overtake on this circuit, especially between the front runners, regardless of the pace advantage, but in that situation, Ric should have been atleast on Lewis' tail constantly and that did not happen at all. He was falling away. That is hard to accept, if it wasn't for some kind of problem. I know, none of us heard any radio about the gearbox issue and that makes us believe that, Horner is lying as radio about every front running drivers' issues gets relayed.
Either Mercedes had enarmous pace advantage in those conditions OR it was that, Ric was genuinely nursing some problem.
Personally I'd say new inters if it's still raining and the track isn't drying is a plus, but ultimately worn inters are closer to slicks and in the conditions that were no new rain but drying slowly used inters were probably the faster tire, the question was would they burn out and would they suddenly just blow. Ricciardo was behind Ham and fairly safe anyway so chose the potentially slower but vastly safer option that I think Hamilton and Bottas should also have made(as they'd have lost nothing). Though very likely the reality is RBR would/should have said if Ham pits stay out, if he stays out you pit, RBR had the strategy advantage there.
Old inters are bad when the groves are wearing down but the standing water isn't decreasing but in those conditions I doubt it's a disadvantage at all.
The issue is the hype from fp2 but I never saw RBR as remotely competitive from FP2 timings. RBR are 3rd in the WCC, they could have won here or DNF both cars for 3 races, they are getting 3rd. So they have little to no reason to avoid engine penalties or really care about anything. This was a track they felt was best chance of a genuine pace win so they maximised this weekend. I think ultimately absolute best data for sunday comes from running full race mode performance in Fp2 but to avoid engine failures 95% of the time you'll run lower engine modes and extrapolate the data you see to the expected pace in the race. So I think FP2 was a case of Merc/Ferrari knowing the championship could well be decided by a engine penalty and running the usual or even more reduced engine power than normal while RBR in not caring about engines and trying to maximise their best shot at a win for the rest of the season ran full power to get the absolute best information they could.
On top of that Merc usually run highest fuel while most teams seem to run mid stint fuel because that gives you overall balance for the race, Merc seem to like to set up for the worst case stint of the race on heaviest fuel so they are always showing worse pace comparably in FP2 anyway.
Quali came down to mechanical grip, the cars with the most managed to extract more performance in Q3 and this is where Mercedes lacked a half second, but in the race at 5+ seconds slower the car was no longer mechanical grip limited. I said that a couple places on Saturday, the race performance advantage for Merc was expected for me, hell even when you look at FP2 times Ham's ultrasoft stint wasn't great but his stint on softs was fantastic.
I think too many looked at Bottas's times and maybe thought Ham was pushing tires too hard so the pace might be closer to Bottas but in reality Bottas just had truly terrible pace all weekend. He was 2 seconds off in FP2, he was miles down in Q3, he was easily 2 seconds a lap off in the race whenever Hamilton wanted to push.
I do think RB are probably making up an excuse, they hoped they really would be competitive and if Max had made it to T1 maybe they would have been able to prevent people passing them and been in a good shout of a win. I think people hyped up the supposed race pace advantage which I didn't see them even having and as such they want to make it look better for them to fans who thought they'd be a second faster a lap than Merc in the race.
This race was a rare case, as rare as it has been first wet night race ever, and on an urban track with walls all around. There has never been an environement as stressful for F1 drivers as this one, literally. Take Sainz as an example, he´s usually polite, as shown in the first radio comunication (leave me alone please), but on the second one (shut up, please, please) was a lot more harsh
