Silent Storm wrote: ↑13 Sep 2026, 19:31
I feel like people need to provide hard evidence (laptime) to counter Emag to prove their point instead of arguing, as Emag always comes with receipts.
Also I think it's important to take radio into account... Max was told to manage his tyres by GP after pitstop, GP told him let others use up their tyres. Kimi at that time was on Charles gearbox pushing and so was charles. Then Kimi was told to manage tyres and Max started to push. Context is important.
Most of the time, there isn't any real laptime evidence for these claims because they're based on hypotheticals that can be spun in either direction. That's exactly why I don't concern myself too much with hypotheticals. I prefer looking at what actually happened and working from the hard facts. If we're going to play the "driver X was just holding back" card every time, then I don't think that's much of an argument, because you can just as easily use the same logic for the other side. How can any of us know with certainty how much pace a driver was holding back, or how much of that extra pace could actually have been sustained over an entire stint?
At the end of the day, everyone in F1 is trying to win the race. To do that, they need to go as fast as they can over the full race distance. Obviously, not every car or driver achieves that in the same way, so "as fast as they can" can look very different from team to team and driver to driver. If a driver suddenly becomes very quick over the final 10 laps after spending most of the race being average, you can't just extrapolate those 10 laps backwards and assume they could have maintained that pace for the entire race. Tyres, fuel, traffic, temperatures, strategy and a bunch of other variables don't work like that. And I don't pretend to know those things either, which is why averages can be quite a useful thing (if applied to a properly filtered dataset as I said)
Ultimately, I'm not the one here with some agenda to push. I'm also not some authority whose opinion needs to be taken into account before anyone is allowed to make a judgement. If you think I'm wrong, ignore what I say or argue against it. That's completely fine. I'm doing exactly the same thing when I see statements here that I think are exaggerated.
I try to be as reasonable as I can with this stuff. I think I give praise where it's deserved and criticism where it's deserved, regardless of the driver or team. I enjoy these discussions because analysing this kind of thing is a huge part of why I love F1 in the first place.
But I also understand how easy it is to become overly biased toward a driver. I've done exactly that with Fernando Alonso countless times myself. His 2012 season is probably the best example. Once I took the fanboy goggles off, I realised that while it was obviously an excellent season, it wasn't quite the untouchable, godlike season I used to portray it as.
Just shows how much all these ‘data’ analyses are worth. Not once have I come across a proper, serious one. That would simply take too much brainpower and time for a lazy F1 journo or a typical data nerd from Twitter who comes up with their numbers within 15 minutes after the race.
, has to be a decent sized update to make a difference.
