dans79 wrote: ↑25 Jun 2018, 14:14
GPR-A wrote: ↑25 Jun 2018, 14:10
atanatizante wrote: ↑25 Jun 2018, 13:59
At the press conference after the race in France, Lewis said they should put emphasis on the qualy position here in Austria, cos it`ll be very, very hard to overtake even they will introduce a 3rd DRS zone (that`s my presumption).
In addition, he predicts that RB should be very fast around this circuit. Nothing about Ferrari, though it`s always in his mind, y`know ... so more compromised setup towards qualy it`s the key for victory, isn`t it?
I think the quali Vs race setup is myth I guess. What I really think is, Mercedes has traditionally preferred harder of the available compounds. They seems to now working towards basing the car for the softest compound available, which they did in France. They have done more or less similar for Austria too. They have to aggressively move the balance of the car to US, which should hold them into good stead for the quali. They have not complained about degradation problem in the races this whole season and even if there should be a compromise by favoring US, then it should be worth it.
So, I guess, if they focus on US, then good chances of pole.
The only complaints I can remember so far this season have been about balance on the softest compounds.
I said this somewhere else too. They came to Winter testing and kept banging in laps on Soft tyres and did least work on US and HS tyres. So, their car is inherently liking the harder compounds as probably a result of vehicle kinematics designed for those tyres, not because they have a degradation issues like in 2012 and 2013 kinds (that is a bygone era). They need to redo a lot of that analysis and baselining work. As this year's tyres are nowhere as fast degrading as they were planned to do, their work on creating a car that work well on Softs, has most probably created problems with working with US and HS. Especially HS as the difference in performance between US and HS is around 1.1 seconds! Which means, there is a sea of difference between the compounds and clearly, Mercedes W09 biased towards Softs, need revolutionary changes to bring to work on HS. I doubt if W09 ever would like HS this season, specially in qualifying.