Juzh wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:58 pm
People saying mercedes is twitchy but I just don't see it. On the onboards their car was planted on all the usual oversteer corner exits in S1 and had no understeer in S3 even on medium (yellow) tire. Compared to ferrari which didn't necessarily oversteer but instead understeered like a van. From telemetry it's apparent they had good high speed corner performance, but fell behind in medium and low speed stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWWqyggLOI
Straight line performance almost equal between all three. So far...
On Sky, Martin Brundle was consistently commenting on the twitchy nature of the Mercedes at various points around the track, as he was onlooking from just a short distance away.
He did clarify that the Mercedes seemed "just as fast" as the Ferrari, but not nearly as planted and stable. He seemed convinced that the Ferrari was the best looking car of all all around the track.
So then what to make of FP2 times? Has Ferrari just not yet optimized its setup? Are they sandbagging? Running a tire degradation assessment program and not really concerned with outright pace?
We don't know! And none of us will know until about the last 3 minutes of Q3! Then we will find out how fast the Ferrari can go and how fast the Mercedes can go.
So in that sense, at least this is still a riveting and suspenseful start to the season.
I cannot wait for Quali to get here!