Chinese Grand Prix 2015, Shanghai - Race 3/19

smr said:
So 10th place fp2 for button... is that going to translate to the rest of the weekend or just usual practice dont take it to mean anything ?
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Its a 2 second gap rather than a 4 to 5 second one, so a pretty significant leap forward again this weekend.

Fingers crossed they get a full race in for both cars too.
 
prob best to judge their pace with the quali times rather than fp's, no idea what fuel loads or if engines are turned up.

they should have some big leaps early on as the engine isn't even at full tilt, i expect the next couple of races with see them make similar gains.

the gap from rosberg to ham is also huge but cant read to much into it at the moment.
 
Skeeter said:
Its a 2 second gap rather than a 4 to 5 second one, so a pretty significant leap forward again this weekend.

Fingers crossed they get a full race in for both cars too.
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Mclaren were only 2.3 seconds down in Malaysia and were as high as 14th I think in free practice. Race pace may have been very tire limited but single lap pace wasn't as much of a problem.

Either way, they haven't jumped up from 4-5 seconds behind in free practice. At Melbourne they were 3.5 seconds down in free practice, 5.1 down in qualifying. Malaysia they were 2.3 seconds behind in free practice then qualifying they were a further behind in Q1 with Q2/3 boned by rain so not comparative times.

If FI continue to be utterly awful and the obvious Manor cars, getting one car into Q2 is a genuine possibility, Q3 I would say was out of the question. Can only really see both cars getting out of Q2 if FI are crap AND another car has a failure of some kind, bins it out on track or reliability strikes before they get a decent lap in.

Race pace will be interesting, I think they'll be further back compared to the majority of the field as compared to Malaysia, tire deg slowed everyone else down towards Mclaren which we can't see happening here.
 
Shimmy said:
There's a dickbutt on the Ferrari this weekend :p

http://imgur.com/gallery/JJawPuh/new
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I'd just seen that. Unfortunately (for us) it's pretty damn invisible on the car as the logo is darkened a load :(

A little part of me is happy inside knowing it's there though :p

Terminal_Boy said:
Have Red Bull found more pace this week or have they just turned down the boost on the Toro Rosso cars?
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TR probably just saving some engine power, see where they are at after quali.

There is also fairly bad news on the new engine front for Mclaren.

http://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/10.04_-_technical_report_doc7_-_new_pu_components.pdf

Mclaren taking a new turbo, mgu-h and mgu-k each. So they have used 2 ICE, 3 mgu-h, 3 tc, 2 mgu-k, then Alonso has used a second ES and CE units while Button seems to be on the originals still.

They are going to take reliability penalties this year, probably a lot of them.

Manor took a completely new everything, STR both using their second ICE and Sainz a new TC as well. No other changes for today.
 
http://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/fp2_lap_times.pdf

Some live timing data, which coupled with the tire history actually makes some sense now... though this is from an entirely different source.

Merc vs Ferrari.... I would say Hamilton has a 0.5-1 second lead on softs over same stint length to Vettel, both lost about a second but maybe Hamilton lost that speed a couple of laps earlier than Vettel did, but 8-9 laps of a second a lap advantage looks strong. Mediums is a harder comparison Rosberg vs Kimi, times don't show the gap Hamilton/Vettel show, is that driver ability at this race(Kimi/Ham seeming faster than their team mates here) or was Kimi fuelled for a second stint(which will be mediums) while Merc continue doing higher fuel runs than most.


Mclarens, not good pace from either, neither showed much if any deg on the medium but neither went long or fast enough on that tire to show any deg really, poor pace on it. Soft tire, Button's times dropped off about a second over 9 laps and the times were a good couple seconds off the Merc to start with, mediums they look even further behind.

Hulk looked okay, they could have the advantage on soft tires over Mclaren, maybe pretty equal on medium. Perez was no where at all with his times.


Ricciardo's fairly short run on softs still looked pretty fast, a shorter run but he was showing Vettel level lap times, low-mid 1:43's on hopefully high fuel. Bottas looked okay but seemingly slower than Riccy(if similar fuel), TR's longer runs look a mile ahead of Mclaren/FI. TR deg/stint length looked pretty strong. Maybe not spectacular pace but they maintained their pace well on both tires. They don't look far behind WIlliams in pace but maybe with better tire deg. Presumably sitting ducks for a DRS/straights overtake though if they did manage to get ahead of a Williams.

Maybe Merc, Ferrari, RBR, Williams, TR, Sauber, FI/Mclaren too rubbish to call between them, Manor in their own class of god awfulness.
 
drunkenmaster said:
In terms of stints, still hard to compare as fuel loads make a big difference, as does how hard they pushed the tires, if they were new or had done a few fast laps.
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drunkenmaster said:
http://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/fp2_lap_times.pdf

Some live timing data, which coupled with the tire history actually makes some sense now... though this is from an entirely different source.

Merc vs Ferrari.... I would say Hamilton has a 0.5-1 second lead on softs over same stint length to Vettel, both lost about a second but maybe Hamilton lost that speed a couple of laps earlier than Vettel did, but 8-9 laps of a second a lap advantage looks strong. Mediums is a harder comparison Rosberg vs Kimi, times don't show the gap Hamilton/Vettel show, is that driver ability at this race(Kimi/Ham seeming faster than their team mates here) or was Kimi fuelled for a second stint(which will be mediums) while Merc continue doing higher fuel runs than most.

etc.
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These two posts are a direct contradiction. On the one hand you said earlier that it's hard to compare because of other unknown variables yet you spend a lot of time comparing stints above. Make your mind up :p
 
Using the two sources of data then I had tire life of each stint, I found the full timing data which let me compare stint length. How hard they were pushing the tires was when Crofty was saying X is fast... without knowing either tire life left, stint length they were running. With all that data the only thing you have left to work out is fuel data.

Because of the way qualifying goes 99% of the time a soft tire stint will be on the tires they qualified on and at full fuel, because knowing anything else is pointless, no one in the top 10 will start on mediums. Medium stint comparison is harder because you can over fuel a car more easily or go for what you predict will be the fuel you would actually have at that point in the race. Hence why Hamilton/Vettel's times are more directly comparable and Rosberg/Kimi numbers are a bit more guesswork.
 
SS-89 said:
These two posts are a direct contradiction. On the one hand you said earlier that it's hard to compare because of other unknown variables yet you spend a lot of time comparing stints above. Make your mind up :p
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You only just worked this out - he does this all the time:D
 
FrankJH said:
You only just worked this out - he does this all the time:D
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They aren't in direct contradiction and I don't 'do it all the time' you can't even get that this wasn't a contradiction.

I said a comparison wasn't possible WITHOUT THE DATA.... I got the data... thus comparison was possible. Pretty simple to comprehend.
 
Alonso engine issues pretty much on the out lap in FP3. They took several 3rd engine parts on both Mclarens yesterday, Turbo, mgu-k and mgu-h. Alonso was on 2nd of the rest of everything else. But they pushed harder yesterday and now that engine doesn't look happy. THey got on the radio and told Button that the engine problem wasn't fixed so be careful. Which to me sounds a bit like they turned the wick up thinking they'd fixed some problem with the engine, but with Alonso failing already means it hasn't been fixed.

Read somewhere also that Honda had applied for a bunch of reliability updates, ie free of tokens, and asked if they could completely change the MGU-H based on reliability and pretty much got laughed at and told changing the entire thing(presumably design of mgu-h, shaft and location from previous mention of mgu-h issues) would need a token change.
 
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