Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
On the first bit, literally every single first lap of every single race is a bit of a concertina, Hamilton went extremely wide, he left plenty of space. Vettel knew going into the corner that both the other two drivers had a better line and would be going wide(as Vettel was wide in t2 because Max was inside him so he had the worst possible line for t3. Basically only an amateur driver imo, wouldn't take that corner slower knowing that if he went hard from a tight angle he'd understeer hard.
Hamilton managed to avoid Verstappen and Verstappen was moving across him as he had ever right to do Hamilton backed out, but I could see that coming a million miles away, how could Vettel. That was a normal start of a race where you have to take slight avoiding action. Hamilton had a much more difficult and closer call, Vettel had really no excuse for being where he was and honestly, it feels like it was on purpose. Fact is while Brundle says he doesn't know the wing got tagged because he can't see the front wing, that doesn't matter, the shards of carbon fibre flying all over Vettel's cockpit tells him 100% certainly that his wing got damaged.
As for the Renault vs Honda, it was one race. Even if it was a disastrous weekend for Renault, in which they simply turned down their engines less(according to Ted's notebook) than Ferrari and Mercedes, they are no where near as bad as Mclaren. Mclaren are actually on what, engine 12 for one car, 11 for the other maybe, or 12 for both maybe, whatever. Most of the Renault cars are on engine 5 or 6. The Renault engine wasn't 'bad' this weekend, there is no fundamental fault, just Merc said, with this air/altitude we'll turn down to 96% max power to keep them from dying, both Merc and Ferrari went to 93%(numbers just to make the point). If Renault went to 93%, no failures. The cars with likely the cheapest/worst cooling, the TR, had the most issues. IT was likely borderline as well because Max won the race without issues while all the other cars had to deal with hotter air from other cars and that was enough to basically kill 4 of them. Honda had trash engines all year that killed themselves, Renault were not great, but far closer to Merc/Ferrari than they were Mclaren, one minor screw up messed up Mexico. Next year they turn down the engines the extra 2% and Vandoorne has used twice as many engines as almost every other Renault car... it's incomparable.
