PhillipM wrote: ↑14 Jul 2019, 17:03
I don't think you can say that, he was against a car that had already had to use his tyres to make up a lot of places - don't forget Sainz started 6 cars back. And Norris was closing on Hulkenburg hand over fist at the end - another half lap and he would have overtaken Hulks' Renault too.
They were certainly much closer to each other here, but niether car was 'clearly' faster than the other.
Remember that Hulk got speared by Perez after the restart. I strongly suspect that, given how aero sensitive these cars are, that cost him a chunk of pace.
On the topic of Hulk, at the end of the race he had quite an interesting discussion with his engineer, Mark Slade.
Slade: Great job, Nico. Great job. That was hard. Sorry mate, but you did a fantastic job there.
Hulk: I just don't understand why we couldn't stop early. We just cost ourselves this race. I was genuinely struggling. Not playing any games or bullshit like that. You've just got to believe me. Effing believe.
Slade: Understand Nico, fully understand.
Hulk: It was obivious. MY tyres were a hundred and forty and still 'no, no. It's fine. Let him stay out, it's all good'.
Afterwards he went on to say:-
“Tenth, so not really great," he said. "I don’t know, the race just went way from us. A few things: I think we just pitted too late. I asked to pit, the team didn’t want to pit me. We just hurt ourselves over, making life difficult, then got overtaken with dead tyres and got hit at the rear on the Safety Car restart.
“Then later on, we thought we had an engine issue and we went to a ‘limp home’ mode for a couple of seconds, lost another one position. It was difficult to go racing with so many problems.”
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/art ... UEmdl.html
