101FlyingDutchman wrote: ↑17 Jul 2021, 11:29
What is encouraging is that Silverstone is a front limited track. Somewhere that traditionally the MCL has been weaker on. We clawed back some of that deficiency this year. However it’s still blatantly obvious that the low speed 90deg corner are where the top cars are well and truly head and shoulders above the rest. Lewis S1 27.2, I think the MCL35M could only do a 27.6. That’s really only one 90deg right and one 90deg left.
Still compared to last year, it’s no doubt an improvement
According to an article posted recently, a number of the changes we had made to the car had been to address the front, such as the enlarged front wing which reputedly stopped the car from bottoming out as much and gave a small increase to front downforce. I was aware of the changes as they came but didn't put it together that they were actively addressing the front grip until I read that article.
If the car was bottoming out a lot under braking into turns then you can see how this a larger wing would help the situation in anything but the lower speed corners, which becomes mechanical. In tracks with medium to high speed corner and with less trailbraking, this will give us a good amount of grip throughout.
You could see that the front limited deficit still exists at tracks like Austria where there are some corners that require a strong pointy nose through both the lower and higher speed corners. In fact, it was made mention yesterday of Norris taking turn one, which is a 90 degree corner at full speed without lifting.
On another note, when watching the sprint qualy yesterday I noticed some more interesting telemetry between stroll and Vettel. Vattel was faster and again, his speed came from carrying less speed into the corners.
Now I'm sure this is partly just coincidence but so far every time I see a difference between racers, be it Vettel and Stroll, Max to Lando and Lando to Danny Ric, the faster driver has always scrubbed more speed into the corner to carry more speed out.
