This forum contains threads to discuss teams themselves. Anything not technical about the cars, including restructuring, performances etc belongs here.
Looks to be a tad faster than the McLaren and the Ferrari around here in terms of long pace. The Ferrari is faster over a lap, and McLaren may be sand bagging a little, but Alonso never shows his hand right away either.
Promising start to the week for Alonso, but as we know, the general pace is not the problem. He was faster than Ocon in every practice session two weeks ago. What he needs is a decent Qualifying now to put himself in a good position for the race.
Alonso said to spanish press that they can be faster in Qualy and hopefully the tyres warm up quick. But they spend the whole day testing different runs for the types of tyres.
I wonder what he meant about fine tuning? Maybe he thinks about taking out rear wing or adding more front wing? Even though this is a street circuit, the corners benefit from a stiff rear to help keep the diffuser from stalling. So if you are thinking of having low roll stiffness you'd have to do it at the front which means running stiffer springs, it will be tricky to balance the high speed compression damping to ride the kerbs while not adding too much front momentum to the initial turn in. The stiffer the damper the slower the weight transfer, and you kind of have to do that on high speed compression damping if you have soft front roll resistance and are limited by spring rate.
Softer rear rebound on heave can help transfer weight to the nose quicker, helpful if you want to dance on the nose through the corner turn in. Then you'd have to play with the rear compression damping to make the weight transfer backward, in a way that's comfortable for the driver, not too fast, not too slow.
