Could not going to testing have compromised Jenson Button?

[GrizzleBoy]

Given Jensons inability to dial in his car this weekend, I wonder if his comments undermining Lewis' wishes to be at the test ("We dont need to be ther") and get more experience with the car really came back to bite him in his behind?

While JB was out doing street shows, nearly all the other drivers were there and doing upto 200 laps with their cars and learning more about them with or without upgrades.

You cant help wondering whether Paffett coming out and doing a single run with the new nose before anyone actually noticed till a few days later, was the right thing to do.

Sure you can mess about in practice, but you have a limited amount of tyres for the weekend. How much you can truly practice with a different array of setups is also limited.

Only making up a single place from the tenth position he started in, with his team mate starting dead last and managing to finish a good few seconds ahead of him with tyres much much older than his, maybe doing some more extensive testing with the new car setup would have given JB some revelations last weekend.

[raymondu999]

Generally I think they still use the simulator to dial the setup in, which is generally fairly accurate. But with tyres as fickle as this year's, they could well be. Jenson in this race (and the last, IIRC) has seemed like a bit of his 2010 self - "no grip" and "no balance" and "understeer" or "oversteer" dominating his radio chatter.

Don't forget he was doing test runs with the new nose on Friday, and testing with the added piece on the bulkhead to test visibility, so I'm not sure they really had much FP time to fine-tune setups. The revised aero map could have thrown him off.

Maybe Lewis had a similar issue, but was affected less. We've seen several times that when he can't get a balance he generally just dials in a bit of oversteer and lives with it. I remember seeing onboards of him several times through the weekend making minor corrections through turn 3. There were no visible slides of the rear, but he was consistently reducing and increasing lock through the corner.

[GrizzleBoy]

Lewis does seem to love to steer/turn his car around the front axle by moving the back of the car about, while Button would rather use the front to steer the car around the rear axle.

I guess its worth noting that the two fastest cars in qualifying (Ham/Mal) were both doing a lot of correction work with their wheels in the understeer inducing long corners and both had their back end weaving on their fastest laps while pushing their way through the very slow turn 12.

You can add oversteer with a loose back end and throttle control if you have a light front end and are understeering.

Jensons style is pretty much based around the rear of the car being pretty much planted and balancing it out with just the right amount of front wing (or overall front end balance I should say, springs, sway bars, tyre pressure etc). It could also explain why he seemed so at home in 2011 with the EBD glueing the backs of the cars to the ground.

Edit:
I honestly dont think there is any way that missing the testing could have been a good thing for either of the drivers though.

Laps in the car are laps in the car and literally anything a team can do this year can be the difference between a win and scoring no points at all.

And as you say, electing to bring new parts into testing and barely test them, then use precious time/tyres during race weekend practice sessions to test them seems a little illogical.

Then again, Jensons contract probably states he has to be doing promo work and I'm sure he couldn't have said something like "I'd love to do some testing, but I've got to go and do some showboating for the cameras".

[raymondu999]

Possible. Barcelona is always a circuit where you have a compromised balance anyway - because what fits the bill for the sweepers don't seem to fit the bill for the piff paff stuff in Sector 3. I remember Alonso and Kubica saying that a while back - Kubica said that as a personal preference, he would always balance his car around Sector 3, and just bear with the car through Sectors 1 and 2.

I think it's a place where he traditionally struggles with balance anyway. Even if you watched back Button's 2009 pole lap, you could see he wasn't happy with the balance - in the high speed stuff the front just washed out through the corner.

[Nando]

No i dont think so. Hamilton taking pole actually disproves the theory.
Mugello is a completely different track, Button just got lost in the setup, it's the only logical explanation because we know he's a good driver.

It can happen to anyone, especially with these tires.

[raymondu999]

The point Grizzle was making is - maybe both had bad setups (as much as you can go wrong anyways, as Barca is pretty much a known quantity for setups) but Hamilton just drove around it.

Button's not generally very good at driving around issues - he just tries to live with it (but if it's oversteer, he usually dies in the process)

[Nando]

Not really. Again, he complained all weekend, and he complained about understeer, then oversteer, then understeer.
In different sessions with different settings.


This tells you they are making changes but it's wrong everytime.
Hamilton on the other hand got the setup where he wanted it.

You also have proof that it's such a narrow window to make the car competitive so if you don't get it right you will not win amy races.
Button, Massa, Senna etc all had this issue while their teammates find the right setup.

[Nando]

You don't drive around a bad setup and take pole by half a second, you might take fifth or fourth if you are a top driver with a perfect lap.

[raymondu999]

You don't drive around a bad setup and take pole by half a second, you might take fifth or fourth if you are a top driver with a perfect lap.

Unless you had a 2second advantage with a good balance.

[GrizzleBoy]

Not really. Again, he complained all weekend, and he complained about understeer, then oversteer, then understeer.
In different sessions with different settings.


This tells you they are making changes but it's wrong everytime.
Hamilton on the other hand got the setup where he wanted it.

You also have proof that it's such a narrow window to make the car competitive so if you don't get it right you will not win amy races.
Button, Massa, Senna etc all had this issue while their teammates find the right setup.

Point I was making though, was that if he had spent the time in Mugello doing the upto 200 laps that other drivers were doing, testing their upgrades and just getting general experience with their car in a variety of situations, whether he would have struggled so badly to find a setup he could use and whether the mechanics would have stuggled so much to translate his feeling of the cars behaviour into stability.

Given that he literally only got to test the upgrade during a race weekend where every second is critical and every choice can be a race decider, compared to the flexible free running in testing, whether getting to grips with it during testing would have improved his ability to decide on how to set his car up for the race.

[simieski]

You don't drive around a bad setup and take pole by half a second, you might take fifth or fourth if you are a top driver with a perfect lap.

Unless you had a 2second advantage with a good balance.

If Hamilton had the same poor set up Button suffered with, it doesn't quite correlate to being as fast as he was in conjunction with being the only driver who managed to use a two stop strategy

[Nando]

You don't drive around a bad setup and take pole by half a second, you might take fifth or fourth if you are a top driver with a perfect lap.

Unless you had a 2second advantage with a good balance.

Maybe in some parallel universe yes.

[PlatinumZealot]

Sometimes to get the car faster it has to be made unbalanced. This is the same old fighter jet analogy we have been beating around for some time now. Sometimes the fastest setup is the one that has the most oversteer tendencies, and Jenson cannot live with oversteer.

I can easily see Jenson's best set-up not allowing him to go into that one second faster performance window of his team mate. He simply could not exploit the full potential of the MP4-27 on a track that demands it. This does not bode well for Monaco.

[simieski]

unbalanced equating to fastest, possible... but unbalanced equating to being the only guy who managed a 2 stopper, while others were struggling on a 3 stopper while also moving from 24th to 8th? I would imagine these tyres Pirelli fabricate from what is most likely some form of cheese, possibly brie, would not go well with turning the car on the rear axle and riding on the limit for any great deal of time.

[raymondu999]

To be fair - we have no way of really having a benchmark of the McLaren pace over the race. We had Lewis who was hampered by a penalty, and Button who was struggling all weekend. Maybe Lewis already WAS managing his tyres. Maybe Button, had he not been struggling, would've won the race, rather than being something like 70s down on the leader.