Before the opening race of the European season, everyone was getting their hopes up that we could see another epic fight between Ferrari and Mercedes, as the Catalan track is very similar in its nature to the Sepang circuit. It is hard on the tyres and strains the rear tyres more than the fronts.
Too bad that the primes are even harder than daddy’s morning wood. Pirelli’s orange-marked Tritanium tyres mean that the load profile is taken away from the rears and shifted more towards the left front, which plays right into the cards of AMG Mercedes and nixes Ferrari advantage, an observation confirmed by Adrian Sutil, who after Auto Motor & Sport‘s technology expert Michael Schmidt in FP1 and Mercedes test driver Pascal Wehrlein in FP2 was already the third co-commentator that Sky Germany have gone through this weekend.
Going by the Friday practices, this unexpected shift is compounded by the fact that Ferrari seem slow in understanding their big upgrade. Especially Kimi Räikkönen had been very critical of his cars handling, labeling yesterday’s second free practice ‘completely pointless’. There is no doubt that Mercedes’ updates are spot-on though and interestingly enough, the updated Merc seems to fit Rosberg like a glove. The German looks so far quite collected and not the least rattled by the unfortunate Bahrain GP or Hamilton’s sometimes showy coolness.
The early part of the session was dominated by a long series of locked up fronts and many a hard tyre was ‘Flintstoned’ in the opening twenty minutes. Some, like Rosberg had also problems getting their rear breaks up to working temperatures. At least that particular problem should not recur due to the warmer temperature in quali and race.
Red Bull’s Danny Ricciardo was running an out-of-sequence program due to the missed running from yesterday and was out on the options already halfway into the session, but it became obvious that the Austrian team is in for a very long weekend when he barely managed to beat the times that Rosberg and Hamilton had set on the wooden tyres.
Speaking of Lewis Hamilton. The champion could be seen in the early parts of the session lolling about in a way you wouldn’t allow your kids in the living room, but when it came to on-track performance, he looked a trifle lacking in concentration. Shortly after half-time he filed his front tyres into rectangles at the same spot where Fernando Alonso had his mysterious shunt during winter testing. This time there was no mystery. Lewis had hit the astroturf and his W06 swapped ends. But the save was quite epic, if somewhat deadly for his tyres.
As the last 10 minutes started everyone went out on mediums and it looked as if Ferrari have learned a thing or twelve overnight. Vettel set an early mark that was quickly beaten by Rosberg, but by less than 0.2 seconds. That’s pretty much the closest a Ferrari has come this year in terms of one-lap pace.
Lewis was never looking likely to beat Rosberg’s lap, even though he was eight thousands of a second back after sector two, but he blew it when he missed a breaking spot and lost two tenths in the last sector, slotting in third behind Vettel. Kimi was a shocking 0.8 second slower than Vettel, but the mystery was solved when Kimi was informed by a somewhat contrite sounding engineer that his batteries had not been loading fully due to an erroneous ERS setting. The Iceman’s reply, dripping with sarcasm, was classic Kimi: “Excellent, Excellent.”
Hippo’s conclusion:
Ferrari seem to have made progress in understanding their own upgrade, but it’s not yet time to break out the champagne. The higher temperatures in the afternoon shift the advantage more towards Mercedes and it has been known for some time that they have an extra engine mode for the one-lap sprint. Ferrari have only a theoretical chance and should be more concerned with defending the second row against Williams, well, at least the one driven by Bottas.
In recent years I would have said Lewis will be unsettled by his mistakes in FP3, but he’s been so at ease this year, it will probably just provide an extra motivation. Rosberg will have to bring his A game if he wants to score his first pole of this season.
No more time tables?
Lets see if Lewis’ slow S3 time in FP3 is a concealment of pace or not.. before that he was half a tenth up on Nico on S1/S2. Comes down to how much each has left in reserve.
Lewis spun touching the dark astro/lower grip tarmac past the green astro (‘grass’ as Kvyat said.. he knows what should be there instead).. ‘Astro of champions’? Alonso, Hamilton, Maldonado..
“Harder than daddy’s morning wood”
Still laughing.
@FatHippo – Interesting to see LH demonstrate clearly the classic concept of:
* Understeer to the outside of the turn
* Oversteer to the inside of the turn
http://www1.skysports.com/f1/news/12433/9842631/lewis-hamilton-spins-the-mercedes-in-practice-three-in-spain
Thanks so much for sharing this. To me this looks (more or less) like a copy-cat of Alonso’s incident in pre-season testing (given the bits of info we had available), and quite similar to other astroturf incidents from past year. Basically, take too much speed into this high-speed corner, understeer towards the outside of the turn, put the wheels on the astroturf, hit the loud pedal, and boom the car violently oversteers towards the inside of the turn…
I say this astroturf stuff isn’t safe overall, since it has a non-linear effect on cars: most of the times you can abuse it and all is fine, but sometimes the car will just snap…
It can’t be a copy-cat of Alonso’s shunt. Alonso didn’t touch the astroturf. His car snapped due to catastrophic technical failure or driver incapacitation. We’ll probably never know, but he definitely didn’t touch the green stuff.
“he definitely didn’t touch the green stuff.”
How do we know this?
Because it’s been confirmed by several eye-witnesses and GPS data?
Yeah, the eye-witnesses were particularly unreliable. As for the GPS data, care to share a link?
Unfortunately the FIA did not share them with us, but with accredited journalists from the BBC or AMuS for instance. We reported that at the time. Give it a rest.
So no GPS data… Well, same advice here, then: give it a rest.
We know it wasn’t driver incapacitation. If Fernando were incapacitated, he wouldn’t have have been able to brake *before* the impact with the wall. By the same token, the car would have ended on the outside of T3 as opposed to on the inside. And people tend to overlook that McLaren had no access to Alonso’s body at any time after the accident. If Alonso were electrocuted (or whichever crazy theory is popular this weekend), there would be no Alonso to talk of today: I have little doubt electrocution by F1 KERS systems is lethal at worst, or comes with some form of permanent damage at best. But even if he were, surely the Spanish doctors would have picked up on it, as well as on his torn overalls (which should be electrocution-proof), and this info—on a Spanish driver in a Spanish hospital—would have leaked by now. It didn’t, and McLaren had no control over it anyways. The only symptoms that leaked (also consistent with McLaren’s press releases & doctor quotes) are that consistent with a big bump on Alonso’s head as a result of the lateral impact with the wall (i.e. concussion). The recovery period too was consistent with a concussion: I remember people were getting worked up that if Alonso missed Malaysia, the 2nd GP, then surely something more severe had happened. Well, he didn’t miss that GP, but people have forgotten to update their beliefs… So this bit is BS.
As for catastrophic technical failure, I don’t see the big deal about this. If the car failed, and they picked it up on the telemetry or with the car’s sensors, surely they’d have announced it publicly by now. The FIA surely would crow about it. And there is no shame in having a car failure — these things happen all the time. That’s why they call it testing. If it didn’t fail, or they couldn’t pick it up in the data (and there was no video footage to help things), well that’s precisely what they had announced publicly.
So all in all, this high-profile public lynching of McLaren and Ron Dennis looks like having more to do with some form of very particular animosity towards and dislike of the team and its boss (I for one sense a vibe of echos from the Alonso’s 2007 blackmail and ensuing brouhaha), than with something substantive. And if it were indeed Alonso biting the astroturf, as I suspect, THEN the FIA would no doubt fail to disclose all the info as it would put their beloved safety measures in doubt once more…