British Grand Prix 2012, Silverstone - Race 9/20

Lol. Some epic panning shots if F1 cars doing almost 200mph, but you cut the front off the driver parade truck doing 30mph :D

Nice pictures.

In terms of the rules, did either the Sky or BBC properly explain this new rule from the FIA about having your wing alongside the rear of the driver infront apparently meaning you have to give up the spot? Sounds utterly retarded.
 
JonnyGLC said:
It's just horrible watching how much McLaren are falling back, every race it's getting worse and worse :(
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I have a theory. McLaren were the first to get the ducted exhaust things working and it gives a fairly significant advantage. Now everyone has got them the advantage is gone so they have fallen back.
 
That's all that i can think of as well. The annoying thing is that there's not really been any visible changes to the car for the past few races either, so whilst there's possibly been mechanical upgrades there's nothing really major in the aero department. There's a quote going around where either Whitmarsh or Michael have said there's a significant upgrade visually coming at Germany though.

One thing is for certain though, if the upgrades at the next race don't put McLaren back to the front, the rest of the season is a write off :(
 
Thing is, people keep forgetting how close it is this season. Teams gain a tenth on your development, in years gone past and it wouldn't change much. Now you're talking several places.

It could well be exhaust. Perhaps mclarens car wasn't fundamentally as good as the others, now the others have the exhaust they've been leap frogged.

But to me it seems far more down to tyres, other teams seemed to off worked out how to use them and McLaren haven't. How many of the past few races have we seen McLaren scratch there head on tyres. Button pitting for tyres then doing the same lap times. The soft tyre graining today.
Ferrari although they messed upto day, thats not for the same reasons. It looks likely they thought it was going to rain, hence starting hard made sense.

As we've seen every year, some cars are better on tyres than others. Now the teams have data, McLaren seems to have a bad car on switching the tyres on and keeping them in the needed window.
 
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your forgetting the race hamilton won because mclaren had the correct tyre strategy and none else did?
the teams swap around depending on temperature a lot as well

some teams fair better when its warm/hot
others like the cold
 
arknor said:
your forgetting the race hamilton won because mclaren had the correct tyre strategy and none else did?
the teams swap around depending on temperature a lot as well

some teams fair better when its warm/hot
others like the cold
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Hamilton was genuinely faster than both Alonso and Vettel, he caught both, passed them, it was only late in the race that both made a stupid error, but had they pitted the extra time, they would have been as fast as Hamilton, but starting off from behind, Alonso and Vettel could have finished higher, they wouldn't have beaten Hamilton.

Why, I can't say precisely why they were faster or why the other two were slow. However going into Valencia Vettel went from unable to keep Hamilton behind to basically over a second a lap faster whenever he wanted to be, and pretty much the same today.

It's not as black and white as people think, Mclaren started fast and dropped behind for sure, though **** pits through away a good 20-30 points for Hamilton while they were almost there. Mclaren have had improvements and that showed at Canada, but they didn't come out and blow Vettel away at a second a lap they went from behind to a slight advantage, to RBR and Ferrari with new updates being significantly ahead.

Mclaren have their updates, but they seem to be smaller and not often enough.

Today they sucked, was it because they were certain it was going to be wet and set up the car far to focused on downforce and it raining, possible. Hamilton's pace on the full wets was pretty awesome. They were really only as slow as they were at Valencia in the dry. The amount of time they need to make up to be winning a race seems, pretty massive, and improving over the current car at Germany discounts the probable situation that RBR/Ferrari/Merc/Lotus can all improve as well.

Thing is, they were categorically slower than 4 other teams at this race, if they didn't screw up Hamilton's pitstop and likely brought him in a lap or two later, he'd have been pretty high, but had Vettel/Grosjean not gone out, still realistically slower than 3 other cars. Basically half way through the season Mclaren have gone from one of the most competitive cars at the start to 5th faster car on the grid..... there really isn't any way to spin that positively. If they were only 1/10th off the pace of those cars, that would be one thing. But we're talking a second or so off probably 3 of those 4 cars with maybe Merc being a bit closer.
 
I reckon it's the higher nose that's the issue. The whole car was designed with a low front nose and now they've raised it pushing more air under the car and upsetting the balance.

I could be wrong... But it's funny how they became carp when they put the new nose on.
 
How much of McLaren's new parts were they actually able to run in the race?

Didnt I hear something about they were not able to run (m)any of their new parts on Sat because it was so wet (and therefore wouldnt make any significant difference)?

At least by the sounds of it JB's problems with the fronts has been sorted, and it was a general issue with the car as a whole yesterday that made them slow
 
FrankJH said:
How much of McLaren's new parts were they actually able to run in the race?

Didnt I hear something about they were not able to run (m)any of their new parts
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From what i heard on the telebox they both used different new parts. Would be very interesting to know what those were!
 
Duke said:
We need a dry race weekend at Germany to see where everyone is.
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Yeah a lot of the teams had a lot of upgrades they couldn't properly test as the only dry session was P3 and that was used for race and quali setup.

I need to know if the Lotus wing in the pics with the Tumbler is an upgrade part or just for show, as they looked cool as hell.
 
Yeah I think Massa's performance shows that Ferrari are up there with RBR now, which to me means Alonso is the man to beat. With a rear gunner he will be unstoppable.
 
Confirmation of what we were thinking about the Mclaren updates -

Whitmarsh said:
"I think it's been one of those weekends," said Whitmarsh. "We had lots of stuff on the car, and we couldn't run it properly on Friday.

"We've got a decent, bigger, more visible upgrade package for Germany and we've got to deliver that and make that stick. It's the same old game, we have got to develop the car, and we have got to make sure we use the tyres better."
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http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/101101
 
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