Juzh wrote: ↑19 Mar 2023, 22:23
Honestly, for once I'm amazed at Perez' race pace. I wasn't expecting him to be able to contain verstappen in the slightest. That's assuming both cars were indeed healthy, but for now I'm I'll give perez the credit. I'll go over both onboards in coming days to see how races unfolded for both. What we saw today was finally "
the" Perez that was hired from racing point. I think this win ranks higher than all his previous ones, maybe even Sakhir 2020. This was the first time he was able to go head to head on pure race against Ver. Maybe Ver had a tenth on him at most.
As for car itself, I'd say 0.8-1s advantage over AM, 1s+ vs merc and rest. Obviously it's completely impossible to defend against DRSed RB on this track.
In ten laps from the SC, Max gained maybe 2.3 seconds on Perex, going from approx 7.4 to 5.1. Max then knew that in the last 14 laps, he would never catch Checo so he stayed at the pace he was and got his battery ready to go for the fastest lap. He resigned himself to it, saying "I did the maths and I was not going to catch anyway if I kept on pushing"
Max's pace advantage until he gave up was around 0.230 per lap which is what his gap to Riccardo was in 2018.
He is still faster but any unreliability will put him behind Checo just like it did in 2017 with Daniel. That's why he was so rattled after the race, imo.
The new tyres allow drivers to push for longer and not have to manage them so well. Checo talked about them recently.
I think the first race in Bahrain hid Checo's newfound pace. He got stuck behind Leclerc and imo, that was a gap he could never recover afterwards. Just like what the 15 place start did to Max today.