2021 Spanish Grand Prix - Catalunya, May 07 - 09

[Jolle]

Doesn't matter who the driver is, if you disobey team orders you do it at your own risk.

Vettel received no penalty for it at Red Bull Racing.

Allegedly RedBull got a letter from Vettel’s lawyer that he wasn’t contractual obliged to follow team orders

[Mr.S]

I really don't get why people say it was a gamble. Soft-Medium-Medium was the fastest strategy by far with nothing close. 1 Stopper with Medium-Hard was possible but the Hards had no grip & had bad pace. Soft-Medium was not realistic with a 1 Stopper, the tyres would have gone off. It is not that easy to overtake but when you have 30 Lap fresher tyres with DRS down the main straight, the overtake would be happening in a couple of laps or so.

If RBR didn't have 2 Mediums, Soft-Medium-Soft was the way to go (as predicted by Pirelli as well). Verstappen had an unused set of Softs unlike the rest of the Top 10 !

1 Stopper was hard without the Hards & overall a slower option even with the advantage of Track Position !

[JordanMugen]

Bottas: "I am not here to let people by. I am here to race."

Good stuff!

[NL_Fer]

Bottas: Static on the radio, didn’t want to foul the tires on dirty track, could not see Lewis due vibration in the mirror.... etc

[El Scorchio]

Bottas 3.0 is, as always, going maximum attack for the title!

Clean-shaven Max looks very odd.

I’d like to see him with a great big beard. Wouldn’t be comfortable racing with it inside the helmet though!

I suspect Max cannot grow a great big ZZ Top beard, why else would his regular beard be so thin?

Maybe a fu Manchu moustache instead? I think maybe Kimi would suit the full ZZ Top

[PhillipM]

He wasn't racing Lewis, and if they intended on racing Bottas, they wouldn't have bothered pitting. So either way "I'm here to race" is BS

If he was there to race why was he driving around like Miss Daisy on his new set of tyres instead of pushing on and stopping Max taking the fastest lap from him?

[MKlaus]

Bottas: "I am not here to let people by. I am here to race."

Good stuff!

finally, some b**ls. seems like he has got his contract sorted elsewhere.

[foxmulder_ms]

Sublime week by the man... 100th pole, a good win.

[El Scorchio]

Bottas: "I am not here to let people by. I am here to race."

Good stuff!

Yeah. I think he gave an utterly fair answer that made sense actually. LeClerc was probably in play for him. Although I think he’s a bit lucky it didn’t come back to bite him if Hamilton hadn’t won.

[JordanMugen]

He wasn't racing Lewis, and if they intended on racing Bottas, they wouldn't have bothered pitting. So either way "I'm here to race" is BS

If he was there to race why was he driving around like Miss Daisy on his new set of tyres instead of pushing on and stopping Max taking the fastest lap from him?

Bottas should have defended much harder to see if he could secure the valuable maximum WDC points for his WDC attempt.

[214270]

'They just had the quicker car'
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, speaking to Sky Sports: "I don't think we could [have done anything differently]. In fairness, hats off to Mercedes and Lewis.

"They were just quicker than we were today. We were surprised they didn't go for the early undercut. [At the end] We knew he was probably going to catch us.

"They just looked like they had a quicker car today. They were able to follow so closely. They had nothing to lose when taking that pit stop into the clean air."

When you’re the only team running a spoon wing it does beg the question about how they set the car up. They had a torrid Fri, I think they panicked a bit and set up their car for quali & this is the result; poorer pace & deg on Sun.

[foxmulder_ms]

He wasn't racing Lewis, and if they intended on racing Bottas, they wouldn't have bothered pitting. So either way "I'm here to race" is BS

If he was there to race why was he driving around like Miss Daisy on his new set of tyres instead of pushing on and stopping Max taking the fastest lap from him?

agree.. Pointless message by Bottas.

[djones]

Bottas did himself no favours at all today. It was a zero sense thing to do and even more so to then comment about it as he did.

I get that any Hamilton haters will think it was good. But anybody neutral or mature enough to take a step back and look at it objectively will agree it was very silly of him.

[Shrieker]

Even with RedBulls slow pitstop the timings as mentioned earlier in this thread shows it was marginal and Mercedes would have had to perform the fastest ever pitstop to get Lewis out ahead. Going longer was calculated to possibly take advantage of a safety car, but also give Lewis just the right amount of laps to catch Max twice.

But this had a huge downside as well. Had there been a VSC after their second stop, Max would've gotten half a stop for free, and would've remained ahead on fresh tires. And to prevent that from happening, it's best to seize track position when you can. I have looked at the previous forum pages, but haven't seen anything regarding who would've came out ahead on pit exit. All I know was, Lewis was right on Max's tail when the latter dived into the pits, and his pit stop lasted 4.2 seconds.

[InsaneX_Badger]

'They just had the quicker car'
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, speaking to Sky Sports: "I don't think we could [have done anything differently]. In fairness, hats off to Mercedes and Lewis.

"They were just quicker than we were today. We were surprised they didn't go for the early undercut. [At the end] We knew he was probably going to catch us.

"They just looked like they had a quicker car today. They were able to follow so closely. They had nothing to lose when taking that pit stop into the clean air."

When you’re the only team running a spoon wing it does beg the question about how they set the car up. They had a torrid Fri, I think they panicked a bit and set up their car for quali & this is the result; poorer pace & deg on Sun.

Idiot here, what are the benefits and drawbacks of using the spoon wing. Especially in terms of how this would have been good for quali but bad for the race.