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People keep taking away the wrong conclusions from last season's testing as well; Ferrari started last season quite close to Mercedes and should have won in Melbourne. They failed to develop and were overhauled by Red Bull ovwr the course of 2016, but they started off close to Mercedes.

I'm very well aware that this is testing, I'm not even trying to argument that Ferrari WILL be ahead. That would be foolish
I am just saying that what we've seen in testing this year is very different to what we saw in 2014, 2015, 2016 - that we can't say it's the same old as we've always seen from Ferrari.



The thing is, the examples of year 1 and 2 are different as they only focus on single lap pace. Mercedes duly used that to hide a bit, but looking at long run pace it was always evident also in 2015 and 2016 that Merc were ahead.
This same pattern does not hold true for 2017 testing.



Maybe not, but then I'm wondering what sense there is in going testing and at least during race sims not turning the wick up like you would do in actual races. How are you going to test reliability? How are you going to know if there are issues if you aren't anywhere close to potential? Isn't testing when you want to find and solve those issues instead of encountering them during actual races and then having to solve them during the season, with virtually no testing available and thus with fixes possibly taking much longer?

Unless they are so confident that their new power unit will be reliable - but that's a huge leap of faith.

Ferrari have made a huge step with their PU over the winter, they're able to get 50s of the 160bhp ERS boost now(Last year around 30s) and reliability has taken a step forward thanks in part to a new fuel from Shell. Did the entire test on one unit as did Haas. Can harvest more efficiently from MGU-H thanks to new turbo and reducing bar from 5.5 to 3.5.

Unsure if some of the woes of Mercedes are down to a too long a wheelbase or the new package not working as intended thanks to the HPC suspension being limited now which was noticeably different from 1st test but performance in slow corners is poor and tricky on the drivers.

https://it.motorsport.com/f1/news/anali ... ce-882107/

Wow if true!

But I thought the rules only allowed for 30 secs of deployment per lap? Did they scrap that rule?

Wonder if there's any truth to this?

http://en.f1i.com/news/261925-mercedes- ... ngine.html

But there's no point in testing engines to destruction. Stress them, yes, a bit towards the end of the testing program to see what shakes, rattles and rolls, or what components wear faster than designed to. I've never designed a test program for racing cars, but I've designed tests for prototype military equipment and you only plan potentially destructive testing once you have all the data you need.

I would take an educated guess that failure rate rises exponentially rather than linearly, meaning an engine could be perfectly reliable at say 95% of race settings but can exhibit a few faults at 100% of race settings. So how can you take comfort in just testing at 95% when you know you will have to run one unit at 100% for several races, and outside of preseason testing the time for testing solutions to problems is severly limited?

I still don't see why teams would take such a risk.

2 How much of that Ferrari as Allison, and do the remaining team understand it?

Allison worked on it until the end of July, then left. It's hard to imagine that he left it and since no meaningful work has been done on it. So I would say the remaining team seems to have a good handle on the car.
Now, that does not automatically mean that the path forward is evident or clear, but up until now it seems like they have been able to do good work on and with it.

I'll cough up with what I was thinking

If he knew it was a good car, which it seems to be, why would he move on right now?
Either the development plan is in place and he is going to get the credit anyway, or he sees limited development, so gets the glory of it being good out of the box, his part, then tailing off.
Seems strange to walk when a winner is there?

Wasn't it a family bereavement that forced him out?

Wonder if there's any truth to this?

http://en.f1i.com/news/261925-mercedes- ... ngine.html

People keep taking away the wrong conclusions from last season's testing as well; Ferrari started last season quite close to Mercedes and should have won in Melbourne. They failed to develop and were overhauled by Red Bull ovwr the course of 2016, but they started off close to Mercedes.

Assuming of course, that Ferrari went all out and did not hold back a bit....

Yes, and I believe they do still have something in reserve. I hope for the sake of Mercedes they really were hiding a technical issue, otherwise they might get annihilated by Ferrari in the first stanza of the season.

I dont base any pre-season analysis on testing. There are simply too many variables.

I guess that's not entirely true, as we know Honda is in serious trouble. I doubt that they would sandbag so hard as to actually blow up their own engines. But aside from that, the only time things get real is on qualification day at race #1. Anything before that is just pure guessing.

I think that would be good. Even though I am not a Ferrari fan. It would be nice if RBR are in there too, because if there is a company who will do all to catch up, its Merc.

This would give us a very good season.

Well. That changes things.

Mercedes might not immediately unlock that pace though, as well as perhaps needing more time to find a general balance in their setups. Ferrari look well oiled and ready to party in Melbourne, straight up and out the box.

Any more rumblings about the potential Merc engine issue?

2004 and 2012 are the only seasons I can remember where the pecking order was incorrect come the first race.

Can't find any solid updates on this. But it's touched upon in this article

http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/me ... tory.shtml

https://f1metrics.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/2017-preseason-analysis/

Might as well post this here too...

I read it, but it mostly confirms what I already believed!

Seriously though, what everyone cares about is whether Ferrari is ahead of Mercedes, and the F1Metrics article stops short of making a call on that.

Well. That changes things.

Mercedes might not immediately unlock that pace though, as well as perhaps needing more time to find a general balance in their setups. Ferrari look well oiled and ready to party in Melbourne, straight up and out the box.

Any more rumblings about the potential Merc engine issue?

I read it, but it mostly confirms what I already believed!

Seriously though, what everyone cares about is whether Ferrari is ahead of Mercedes, and the F1Metrics article stops short of making a call on that.

Last year when RBR also got better of them and Ferrari became 3rd best team. I think they were demoralized. So it will be good if they can have win a race quickly this year and sustain it. Having said that we have to wait some races to know as Australia is not the proper track to indicate the performance of the car. I also think RBR will be good. So it will be a 3way fight. Ferrari, Mercedes are probably ahead in first 4-5 races

I'm not sure I'd agree with the first sentence. I think they made a decision to switch to 2017 development very early on, when they knew they didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning anything. Sure, they probably got peed when they saw Red Bull overhaul them, but I doubt they got demoralised as they weren't putting as much effort into 2016 development as they could.

This year's their big chance. If they screw it up, then I'm sure they will get demoralised. But so far it looks like the decision to focus on 2017 may have paid off and they may have closed the gap (I say may, because personally I'm not convinced they've overhauled Mercedes and we've yet to see the Germans anywhere near their full strength).

Not really talking about testing to destruction, just testing to realistic parameters i.e. seeing what it does in actual race pace, testing whether the normal use case is sustainable by your solution.

Surely that's something you absolutely want to do?

I would take an educated guess that failure rate rises exponentially rather than linearly, meaning an engine could be perfectly reliable at say 95% of race settings but can exhibit a few faults at 100% of race settings. So how can you take comfort in just testing at 95% when you know you will have to run one unit at 100% for several races, and outside of preseason testing the time for testing solutions to problems is severly limited?

I still don't see why teams would take such a risk.