diffuser wrote: ↑07 Jul 2023, 02:29
AR3-GP wrote: ↑06 Jul 2023, 16:28
EJ22B wrote: ↑06 Jul 2023, 16:27
It's a Merc engine limitation. Last year, if anyone listened to radios of Albon, Vettel, Lewis and George you will have seen deployment being a common complain by those drivers during the middle of the race.
Albon's engineer told him several times because of PU being hot they have to turn down the deployment. It's the same scenario this year too.
So, it's simply a case of Merc PU getting hot and teams having to manage that by cutting back on deployment.
This is exactly what I suspected.
That wouldn't match what I saw in the data. They were faster, in comparison to Norris in the first and last sectors after the change. There was a big gap before.
McLaren has some of the best cooling technology on their car. They have a exclusive contract with Marelli to supply them with the latest heat exchangers tech among other stuff. This exclusive deal also the reason why they can't run Merc's reaction engine water intercooler and have to rely on air to air intercoolers supplied by Marelli.
It shouldn't be a surprise that they don't suffer from these cooling issues as much Williams, Mercedes and Aston.
Aston and Williams on the other hand use offshelf PWR cores and then modify and build them to suit their cooling architecture. Don't know anything about the supplier of Merc but it's very much possible they might be building their own coolers from the ground up.