Ben1980 wrote: ↑02 Jul 2025, 10:51
bluechris wrote: ↑02 Jul 2025, 08:26
tinuva wrote: ↑02 Jul 2025, 07:42
The smoke is getting stronger and stronger by the day.
I just dont see it... i dont know why, basically i dont think Max will like to be there plus whats the point really? a promise of a maybe good engine? i dont buy it.
Racing drivers want the best car or loads of money. Ideally both. Max is mo different. If he thinks the Merc will be the best, he will want in.
I think nobody can be sure what car will be the best next year, not least because Mercedes won't be the only top team with Mercedes PU, even if it will be the best indeed.
But what is quite easy to know is that red bull for sure won't be competitive enough car, a car good enough to fight for a championship in the mid term - the next two to three years at least. Also, I think it's very easy to see even from onboards Mercedes cars are much more suited for Max driving style, they have naturally strong and responsive front end, even if that often mean lose rear. Not just this year, but past year as well, a year before that, basically all new gen Mercedes car have been like that. Whilst with red bull it is exactly the opposite. All new gen red bull racing cars were coming out of factories very understeery, this is their base trait which comes from aero balance. They of course come up with certain updates trying to rectify it, but even more so Max always had to address it mechanically using suboptimal settings. Not only it takes a lot of time to find somewhat tolerable settings even for Max to extract something meaningful, that is not even always possible to find such mechanical settings to rectify that innate understeer , depending on track layout and base aero config they had to run, but that indeed makes a car very tricky to drive, always on the edge, which is why teammates struggle so much. That was no different this year, we saw how understeery car was from the get go. Nico Rosberg was talking exactly about that watching Max driving trackside in Barcelona. Oversteer was and still is never a problem with this car, it is understeer that Max had to deal with and fight against going for very tricky mechanical compromises with this car.
Lawson never blamed oversteer, it's very easy to see his biggest mistakes came from and directly after big understeer moments. The car simply wouldn't turn. The same with Tsunoda, we don't hear him blaming the lack of rear grip, he simply cannot extract pace and in AUstria he was blaming complete lack of front end grip - the definition of massive understeer in the car.
The whole idea that Max demanded them to design such car is totally wrong and I think he is tired of listening to this narrative also. A lot of people believe still this car was designed that way because he likes so. People mix up the cause and the effect.
