F1 Testing 2018: Week 2 Barcelona (6th - 9th)

Shimmy said:
Bottas' race sim was 1 sec per lap quicker than Vettel and Verstappen this afternoon. Don't know fuel loads of course.

But imo pecking order seems like Merc > RBR > Ferrari.
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Not really comparable vet started on used ss for his race sim and pitted at lap eleven for his medium stint which lasted 26 laps whilst bottas pitted at lap 36 so fuel load and tyre deg variations on their stints
Not much can be taken so far. It looks on the face of it that rb/ferrari and merc should all be in a good fight. Let's hope so at least!
 
reef said:
Toro Rosso have just done a 1:18:363 on the hypersoft aswell, only 1.2s short of Vettels time this morning - half a second quicker than the hypersoft time from Vandoorne this morning.

Have they dumped Honda at the worst time or was the PU not that bad all along and the problem McLaren's?
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I think it's a bit of both to be honest. I think Maclaren had a lot of requirements that put Honda into a corner (size zero) at a time when Honda needed to figure out how to build that type of engine. It's telling that both Honda and Toro Rosso have talked about how they had to give each other space and freedom to get on with their respective jobs.

The PDFs linked upstream from Reddit show how subsequent changes to the Honda engines all seemed to come with some kind of significant weak spot. Maybe Honda have sorted that out now, especially as TR has given them more cooling and more space.

There's an interesting note in there that Maclaren knews that the size zero packaging would bring problems with cooling and put power down, but the size zero concept was supposed to overcome that with the aerodynamic gains from such a small and tightly packaged engine - but those gains never materialised.
 
From what I understand toro rosso are fitting new engines in the same way they did at mclaren in these tests, that suggests they are far from confident about their reliability..
 
Guessing that they need to put the additional miles on to help them understand further when they'll be blowing up/losing performance and how they can tie this up with the various races for best returns before receiving penalties .
 
I mean the benny hill pit stop yesterday was at least funny...this is just sad to watch. I'm a Ferrari fan but seeing McLaren in the doldrums isn't really entertaining anymore, a storied team shouldn't be scrounging at the bottom.

Given the other Renault teams haven't had the level of issues, it surely has to be the McLaren design concepts?
 
Alonso was adamant he didn't need to test today anyway so maybe he just wanted to go home.

It is frustrating. You'd think in F1 they'd have an issue maybe once, twice tops and would figure it out. There's not many who don't want to see them competitive again, we need teams like McLaren and Williams at the sharp end making seasons more interesting.
 
Ferrari are really putting in the glory laps now. I want to see Mercedes but the hypersoft shoes on the car. Lets see what they've got.

edit:

Mercedes just confirmed they haven't brought any. Damn it.
 
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JunglistE said:
Ferrari are really putting in the glory laps now. I want to see Mercedes but the hypersoft shoes on the car. Lets see what they've got.

edit:

Mercedes just confirmed they haven't brought any. Damn it.
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But they aren't really, Kimi's lap was done on a 10 lap stint on the HS tyres, He did the 1.17.2 on his 3rd or 4th lap of the stint. These cars are clearly capable of 1:16s. I doubt anybody has shown ultimate pace yet.
 
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