Man of Honour
The Iceman is back!
And, yes, confirmation from Mercedes that Bottas is on a race simulation - on the second day of testing with a brand new car! That's some feat.
Members of the Spanish media, who have been hanging around the McLaren garage, are reporting that Stoffel Vandoorne will not be out on the track again today.
He completed 29 laps before the team announced they needed to change the car's engine.
If f1today is right then Hamilton done his fast lap on SS. Where as Kimi done is top lap on Softs
Game on.
Aren't Ferrari always quick during testing?
Aren't Ferrari always quick during testing?
No, it really really was. Over 16 laps or something you'd end up what, 1 second or so faster total... to see 17 seconds of deg that means he was going 15+ seconds slower by the end of a 16 lap stint, meaning he just didn't get he was doing slow laps at the end of the stint and jumped to massive tire deg.
Looking at Bottas's previous run on softs, which included 16 timed laps, it doesn't look like tyre degradation is particularly under control. Taking his first laptime, a 1m23.4s, then factoring in fuel-load reduction on each subsequent lap, you can work out what the tyre degradation is. After 16 flying laps, he's a total 17.45s slower than he would be with the tyre degradation removed. So that's just under 1.1s per lap lost on average. Some of that could be in set-up or the way he's driving, but that doesn't come close to low-degradation to my mind.
Gary Anderson
McLaren must be a laughing stock now. It can't all be down to Honda as they still weren't a front running in 2014, nor 2013 when they had a Mercedes engine (obviously under different rules)