F1technical.net

What is your opinion on Mercedes and maybe Force India at Monza in relation to the other teams?
Do you expect some kind of advantage there? Their 7th gear is more or less where everyone else is in 8th.

Is 8th just a dummy gear even in Monza?

SectorOne wrote:What is your opinion on Mercedes and maybe Force India at Monza in relation to the other teams?
Do you expect some kind of advantage there? Their 7th gear is more or less where everyone else is in 8th.

Is 8th just a dummy gear even in Monza?

Ηmmm, maybe they'll try a slipstream trick in Monza qualifying?

SectorOne wrote:What is your opinion on Mercedes and maybe Force India at Monza in relation to the other teams?
Do you expect some kind of advantage there? Their 7th gear is more or less where everyone else is in 8th.

Is 8th just a dummy gear even in Monza?

I'm genuinely curious why FI and merc would have an advantage when we have a williams with short gears always topping or at least equalling top speeds. 348kph in canada for massa.
Merc's 8th gear is not irrelevant and will be used in monza for sure. It's been used a few times by rosberg in china, but only after 330 kph, and even then not always.
Bottom line once again: gears ratios don't matter.

One more thing I've noticed. Max rev limiter allowed by FIA is 15k revs, but teams have artificially set it to much lower than that to protect the engines probably. From the onboards I've heard at least 1 car hitting it very hard while being nowhere near 15k revs.

Juzh wrote:I'm genuinely curious why FI and merc would have an advantage when we have a williams with short gears always topping or at least equalling top speeds. 348kph in canada for massa.
Merc's 8th gear is not irrelevant and will be used in monza for sure. It's been used a few times by rosberg in china, but only after 330 kph, and even then not always.

The big difference is all those tracks are run with medium to high downforce. Mercedes with their advantage might even run max downforce everywhere because they can get away with it.

Now remove all of that downforce and it seems to me that while Williams hit´s the limiter, the Mercedes will just keep going.
I could and probably am wrong though.

Force India has been happy to routinely go up to 13000rpm. With that Williams would reach about 370Km/h, so this might very well be a non-issue. We don‘t know which top speeds they are expecting.

Ok should be interesting to see what happens there, and what speeds they actually will reach.

Looking through the FIA documents i noticed maximum speeds and speed trap.
Now i thought maximum speeds actually ment maximum speeds but for Monza, the speed trap shows a higher figure.

(Qual)

Speed Trap - Gutierrez - 341km/h
Maximum Speed - Vettel - 334km/h

What am i missing here? I think it was dry in Qualifying so it´s not that.

Max speed is usually end of sector 3 aka start/finish line, speed trap is a few m before the braking zone after the longest straight on the track.

Ah well that´s a bit of a misleading name then, max speed should mean the highest speed reached by the car.
They also seem to have three max speeds, one in each sector.

Yup speed trap is a bit behind the braking zone in Monza but there are some cases where it´s placed very strangely.
Like SPA right after Eau Rouge instead of near Les Combes.

SectorOne wrote:Ah well that´s a bit of a misleading name then, max speed should mean the highest speed reached by the car.
They also seem to have three max speeds, one in each sector.

Yup speed trap is a bit behind the braking zone in Monza but there are some cases where it´s placed very strangely.
Like SPA right after Eau Rouge instead of near Les Combes.

That's because max speed in this case is in fact max speed. S1 max speed that is. End of S1 is just before braking for les combes. RB were often quickest trough top of eau rouge speed trap, but slowest in end of sector 1 max speed trap.
#FIA logic

There's some other strange ones. In suzuka speed trap is just after 130r, so you can't really tell what top speeds cars are achieving.

hollus wrote:Sacrbs twitted this weekend that "Toro Rosso confirmed they renominated their gears before Monaco for a longer 1st gear."
Which actually was already said in the comments (I missed that part first time around) in the tweet from Tobias Guener that I challenged before:
https://twitter.com/tgruener/status/472336722739875841

Well, that explains the discrepancy, they only changed first, and I was lacking that first gear until Monaco. I didn't think that they would change one gear ratio only, but that is indeed the case. I take my challenge back, and apologies if they are due.

It does say in the Wednesday tech report (doc 4) for Monaco that the ratios were renominated, I was just too lazy to find the proof at the time.

It's been mentioned on sky that mclaren have changed their ratios. You might want to look into that.

So, the usual video from C+ allowed me to see the new 8th in the Toro Rosso. As expected it is the same as the old 8th, meaning that they indeed only change their 1st.
What the video did not have is any RPM from the McLarens after the change, so for the second race in a row, no data. Does anyone have a video of the McLarens showing RPM data from Hockenheim or Hungary?

You may have noticed that on more than one occasion they have had to be in a less than optimum gearing for a given corner because of being stuck with the gearing mandate.

It's being reported RB shortened their ratios.

They certainly changed them according to FIA's technical reports. Will look at it next week, after holidays.
If anyone wants to have a stab at it, go ahead!