Seanspeed wrote: ↑23 May 2024, 19:16
bananapeel23 wrote: ↑23 May 2024, 16:27
The Ferrari has been insanely consistent on the tyres all season, for the pace to just fall off a cliff compared to Norris like this is completely out of character.
Again, the pace did not fall off a cliff. In fact, we were keeping pace with Verstappen just fine. The pace didn't drop
at all.
We didn't get slower, the Mclaren simply got a chunk faster and we couldn't keep up.
We can play the 'what if' game all day, but it seems a lot more likely to me that the temperatures were fine after a lap and a half and the pace was simply what the car was gonna be doing anyways. We saw no dramatic improvement from Sainz in the same period, who made no such mistakes. All while Leclerc continued to be comfortably faster than Sainz.
You're missing the point of my comment entirely.
The point is that even if the pace didn't worsen, it doesn't mean that the tyre temp statement is false. A sub-optimal temperature can still yield lap time improvement and consistent lap times over a stint due to fuel burnoff, but that doesn't mean the car wouldn't perform better if the tyres were perfect.
As the tread wears off across a stint, there is less rubber to absorb the energy. Essentially this means that you can't push as hard to warm the tyres during the end of a stint, because you overheat the tyre surface much more easily, since there simply isn't enough rubber to absorb all of the energy.
At some point it might just be worth accepting that your core temp is slightly too low, because pushing to bring it back up would cause the surface to overheat and lead to graining or blistering, which would cost you more race time overall. This would be made even worse if your car struggles to heat the tyres without pushing, especially if the track cools, meaning that you lose more of your precious tyre temperature to the road surface, forcing you to push even harder to bring the temp back up, leading to even more graining.
Your pace might be good, your lap times might keep improving and your deg may still remain fairly low. But fundamentally, you've still been forced to accept a compromise that might cost a tenth or two per lap compared to the reality where your tyre temp never dropped to begin with.
Again, I don't know if this is indeed the case with Leclerc, but as an explanation for the sudden change in relative pace compared to Norris, it does make quite a bit of sense and is certainly possible. His lap times remaining decent doesn't really disprove this theory, since we don't know how his pace would have been if he never went off. Like it is theoretically possible his pace would improve like Norris' did, it's possible it would have been roughly the same or maybe somewhere in between, we can't tell because we don't have access to the data.
If he lost pace because he went off, we could only really tell if we got access to the Ferrari data. For now we only have statements from people involved with Ferrari to use as reference, and they seem to say that him going off caused temperature issues. Since we can't conclusively disprove it, we should take their word for it, since it's the most authoritative source we have.
