Yeah, I should have said that this engine mode thing was true only for the race sims.Cs98 wrote: ↑11 Apr 2025, 19:07I'm not seeing any engine mode here. Only straight line losses are before and after T14, which can be explained by McLaren running less wing and Verstappen having a poor exit on the final corner. RB usually run lower engine on Friday, but since this is the only representative session they may have turned it up today, at least on the short run. On the long run it's still conservative. Deg is high, brakes were sh*t, balance was off in some corners, so still a lot of time to find on both short and long.
Oh, and Tsunoda is in for a ride I think.
Fighting for P3, given Ferrari brought a whole new floor would be a decent achievement for this weekend.
That only remains true if Oscar doesn't end up being the faster driver overall this season. So far I have been surprised by him. He is not miles behind Lando like he was last year.
Sure, Oscar I think has been quicker in the races so far but I'll leave it there. More generally speaking, there are lots of hopiums and assumptions here as far as WDC for Max goes: Assuming McL get hit a little with the TD and RB make a step, then it's better for Max to have a smaller margin to the top than a larger one. Smaller in this case would be the guy with the largest gap to Max basically loses to his teammate. I am viewing this very myopically indeed but that's all I can hope for.
max after fp2: “just difficult. of course, it took one lap, two laps to get into it but still the gap was quite massive, so not entirely happy. just struggling a lot with grip, the feeling in general. the balance wasn’t too bad but just off and quite a bit of work to do, also in the long run.”
“we’re just too slow basically, every lap and honestly it was not a lot of fun out there in the long run. a bit of drift practice at the end there as well!”
It's not strange. This is Bahrain every year. 18 year old abrasive tarmac in hot weather vs 3 circuits with new tarmac and cold weather.