Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubbles
At times during the race it appeared Bottas had the better pace and the dirty air behind hammy wasn’t great for his tires. Up until the last few laps, bottas was fastest in sector 1 and 2 consistently.
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My point with Bottas is, is that he's a really good qualifyer and that he's really consistent in a race (still not as good as HAM though)
if there's no threat or pressure, but he's very weak in dogfights.
Maybe he cracks under pressure or something.
He's not a good overtaker and not good at holding his challengers off.
And VER is the opposite.
That Bottas was pissed over the radio about this race being a 2 stop race shows that he really is the #2 in the team and only the #1 counts (in the end I think that's the way in most top teams).
They probably didn't gave BOT a 2nd stop (and maybe get that FL) so he could serve as a barrier to VER gaining rapidly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubbles
they underestimated Max’s outlap potential especially sector 3 where he posted fastest overall for the race.
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Even Max was flabbergasted by that he said in an interview.
He gained 3 sec by that undercut pitstop.
There was also an interesting analytic discussion about that and that had to do with the #1 pitbox (the merc box) on Paul Ricard.
When coming in, the cars for the #1 pitbox have to make a sharp turn to the right and then to the left to get to the pad, and the #2 and further boxes can do that more gradually.
So the #1 pitbox takes more distance to drive into. They believed (in that discussion) that that alone could take up 0,5sec, so that helped Max get that unexpected lead during the first pitstop.
It's of course debatable how much that influenced the final results as Max gave away his lead (less than 2sec) again after ~20 laps to make his 2nd stop