I have a feeling things are going to get pretty lively during Turn 1 tomorrow. Lewis is going to come charging at Nico Rosberg right out of the gate ( 😢 ), and Sebastian Vettel has been showing some serious aggression in the opening turns this season. Meanwhile, Fernando Alonso will likely just sit back, watch the chaos unfold, and pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself. I honestly can't figure out where Fernando Alonso lost his pace. He was hitting a 19.5 in Sector 1 on Thursday, but today he's down to a 19.7. His performance in the second sector is looking just as sluggish.
With Mercedes-Benz sitting on pole at a track where tire degradation is almost non-existent, they have everything going for them. If they don't pull off a win tomorrow, they might never get another chance like this. And let's be honest, Ross Brawn is an opportunist; he wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice one driver to secure the result.
😁 Given how things were playing out back then... I actually wrote another post about this here:
I was just scrolling through some Wikipedia entries, and apparently, only about ten or eleven of these races actually made it to the finish line. I honestly had no idea the success rate was that low.
Sebastian Vettel is going to take the championship under these conditions. It’s more obvious than it was back in 2011, when he seemed to clinch the title almost every single weekend.
They were told they could cross the yellow line during qualifying laps this weekend. Ferrari really needs to go all-in on the race strategy. The lower temperatures just aren't working for them at all. They’ll need to burn through at least three laps just to get those tires up to the right temperature. With the way the rubber is behaving, there's no way they're fighting for first place—honestly, even grabbing second feels like a stretch. I'm looking at Leclerc and Vettel in the top three; any other scenario seems pretty unlikely to me.
This is an interesting shot comparing tire wear from yesterday's Free Practice 2. https://twitter.com/Loose_Wheel_Nut/...539456/photo/1 The big question is which simulation lap this photo actually captured...
It was worth noting when Sebastian Vettel mentioned they struggled through the Free Practice sessions last year before finally nailing the setup during qualifying.
It looks like Lotus is currently leading the pack with their simulations, with Mercedes and Red Bull right on their heels, followed by Ferrari. Alonso is driving with a lot of aggression, pushing as hard as he can, though the car seems quite twitchy on track. Räikkönen's long run looks incredibly solid—I'll go as far as to say he’s on a completely different level than the rest of the field.
It feels like Ferrari has been struggling in those slow, technical sectors for ages. We're talking about a trend that goes back at least a few seasons now. On another note, Nico Rosberg looks incredibly strong today;$17 you really have to give credit where it's due.
Hmm, I’m not entirely sure if Perez's DRS was actually active very often... he had it for a few moments, but I don't think he had it during those last three or four laps. 🤷 At one point, he managed to get right on their tails, but then they pulled away and created a gap larger than a second. I could be wrong, though... I'm definitely not an expert on all this.
Nathan Jones98 said:Vettel keeps getting brought up because he always seems to end up in the fastest car or just gets incredibly lucky. I honestly haven't seen an F1 driver with this much luck—and just as much lack of skill—when it comes to actually passing people on the track... What Alonso pulled off in Bahrain was the real deal—it showed what a true F1 driver can do when they're fighting against a massive handicap.
Alonso managed to pass some slower cars without using DRS, but that isn't exactly rocket science. Most of them were just struggling because this year's Ferrari is simply faster than most of the field... it has incredible top speed and really solid traction. Once he hit that elite group containing Mark Webber, Lewis Hamilton, Sergio Perez, and Nico Rosberg, he hit a wall. He managed to get past Rosberg, but that was about it. He couldn't close the gap to Sergio Perez at all; he was stuck a full second behind him the whole time. Passing Pastor Maldonado without DRS isn't that impressive either, especially when you consider how many people were making overtakes in spots where DRS wasn't even allowed.
I’m sitting here listening to Jenson and Marshall right now... what a load of nonsense. I honestly don't get why they're making such a public spectacle out of Sergio. If they'd just take a look in the mirror and actually analyze his driving during the race, they'd see he was the one who forced Sergio off at turn 4. Sergio had the pace to stay right on his bumper, but this guy just floored it straight into the apex and left Sergio to deal with the fallout.
The only thing that felt even remotely debatable was that incident between Webber and Rosberg, where Mark jerked the wheel and caught Nico off guard—to me, that felt a bit too aggressive.