The Australian Grand Prix turned out to be one to forget for Williams. While Lance Stroll made it to the finish without any chance for points, team mate Sergei Sirotkin was struck by bad luck as a plastic bag jammed up his rear brakes to force an early retirement.
All they have to do is cut corners 1 to 4 and straighten the current main straight to connect just after turn 4 and a little before turn 5. The slight kink to join this should not cause any problems.
I vote for one tire for all races, super hard. Driver skill comes to the fore, lots of power sliding. You can still make them pit to change.
and the option can then either be a soft or a hypersoft. So if you go superhard, soft you can do 1 pitstop, if you go 2 pitstop, hypersoft (or if these don't last enough then ultrasoft on tracks with more degradation) you will have an enormous grip advantage thus a lot of overtaking. (but 25 seconds lost during pitting and more tire deg).
No idea if this is feasible. But less compounds and bigger compound differences would seem to give more real strategy options?
I agree the 3 PU rule is destroying not only the race but the weekend. In the rain it seemed more and more people were inclined to not bring their cars out during free practice so that' s horrible for fans.
And I don't understand the need for Mercedes to always run a tiny gap with the cars behind them. From what I could see Lewis could extend his gap at will. He was in the clear air, he had no traffic. A 3 second gap with 2 Ferrari's right behind you and no Bottas means they were just asking for it. Simple as that. It's utterly mind boggling an outfit like Mercedes would run a race with so tiny a gap. I do not believe that they did not have pace in their car to have extended to at least 5 seconds.
They were saving tires, not the engine, they still needed to go 40 laps on that 1 set and would have to worry about tires for any restarts after that time.
Ok so going with that argument I still don't get why when Kimi pitted Hamilton had to pit. If he had more than a 3 second gap from the beginning then he would not have gotten an undercut and he could have kept going for a longer stint cause he would see Vettel is still not pitting and once Ham had done a satisfactorily long stint he could have then pitted without any thread - or he could have done a Ferrari and pitted under VSC as well!
The problem is we don't know how much life Lewis had left in those ultras, Kimi was setting purples on his outlap so they might have looked silly had they stayed out another lap with Kimi continuing to set purples. You can argue they were a bit conservative but at that stage you have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Remember USA when Lewis stayed out then Seb was right there all of a sudden, although they got away with it they probably learned from that going forward.
Here is my take on what happened with the Mercedes software blunder:
Lewis was 11.7s behind Vettel just before the VSC appeared, however that jumped to 16.2s JUST BEFORE Vettel pit. This time jump is due to the fact that the VSC maintain the distance delta between two drivers and not the time delta (Before the last race, I thought the VSC maintained the time delta so I was surprised when the time delta jumped from 11.7s to 16.2s). Once Vettel rejoined the track, he was about 1s in front of Lewis. Mercedes said they needed Lewis to be less than 15s behind Vettel in order to be safe. As such, they thought he had a 3s margin.
Considering the above numbers, it can be said that Mercedes were correct in their assessment that Vettel would lose 15s while pitting under VSC (16s-15s=1s) and correctly accounted for the fact that the speed was unlimited on pit entry & exit. What they completely missed was that the activation of the VSC would INCREASE the time delta between Lewis and Vettel (from 11.7s to 16.2s).
So the group who coded the program did a massive and costly oversight and forgot to include that parameter. What they were seeing was the safe margin under VSC but NOT the safe margin under normal racing conditions. If properly coded, the software should have displayed that Lewis needed to be less than 10s-11s behind Vettel in order to be safe.
Last edited by JasonF1 on 27 Mar 2018, 19:11, edited 1 time in total.
So the group who coded the program did a massive and costly oversight and forgot to include that parameter.
That's a pretty big assumption, The person(s) actually writing the code probably knows nothing of the rules, and was just writing code that met the spec given to him. The person(s) who came up with the spec are most likely the ones who made the mistake.
So the group who coded the program did a massive and costly oversight and forgot to include that parameter.
That's a pretty big assumption, The person(s) actually writing the code probably knows nothing of the rules, and was just writing code that met the spec given to him. The person(s) who came up with the spec are most likely the ones who made the mistake.
Do you believe that, if we go back to 2012 tires, we could have 7 winners in 7 races?
It wasn't because they where 2012 tires, it's because none of the teams understood the tires early in the season. it was commonly referred to as the tire lottery.
Do you believe that, if we go back to 2012 tires, we could have 7 winners in 7 races?
It wasn't because they where 2012 tires, it's because none of the teams understood the tires early in the season. it was commonly referred to as the tire lottery.
Yes, but that's not the point.
Gap between the cars was much narrower. Overtaking was possible. KERS tactics helped with that.
In the end, 6 teams and 8 drivers won at least one race that year.
Since 2014 only 3 teams and 7(?) drivers won a race and no one is even hoping that could change this year, or till 2020...
Do you believe that, if we go back to 2012 tires, we could have 7 winners in 7 races?
It wasn't because they where 2012 tires, it's because none of the teams understood the tires early in the season. it was commonly referred to as the tire lottery.
Yes, but that's not the point.
Gap between the cars was much narrower. Overtaking was possible. KERS tactics helped with that.
In the end, 6 teams and 8 drivers won at least one race that year.
Since 2014 only 3 teams and 7(?) drivers won a race and no one is even hoping that could change this year, or till 2020...
And your point is?
not to mention overtaking was different because KERS deployment was manual, so a driver could store it up and deploy it at will.
It wasn't because they where 2012 tires, it's because none of the teams understood the tires early in the season. it was commonly referred to as the tire lottery.
Yes, but that's not the point.
Gap between the cars was much narrower. Overtaking was possible. KERS tactics helped with that.
In the end, 6 teams and 8 drivers won at least one race that year.
Since 2014 only 3 teams and 7(?) drivers won a race and no one is even hoping that could change this year, or till 2020...
And your point is?
not to mention overtaking was different because KERS deployment was manual, so a driver could store it up and deploy it at will.
IMO wide cars and power units "ruined" F1.
I disagree about KERS. It gave much flexibility to attacking driver.
The reason there were seven winners in seven races that year was due to the tire degradation gamble that were the Pirelli tires in the 2012 season.
