Blackcat75 wrote:
mds wrote:
Blackcat75 wrote:
Between winter testing and the first race last year, we saw Mercedes make a larger jump in performance than Ferrari (IIRC).
Again, that just holds true for single lap pace. The long run pace between both teams was not far off the real pace difference of the season's start.
Yea, I'm not saying you are wrong (I don't record of all the lap times as I used to), but how many times have we said 'what happened to the Ferrari challenge?'.
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.
Quote:
Example 1.
The Guardian's piece after 2015 testing (couldn't find Autosport's):
Example 2.
Autosport's Headline after 2016 testing:
Example 3.
Autosport's Headline after 2017 testing:
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.
Quote:
Because no-one has tried to go particularly quick yet. It's like watching athletes jogging round a running track, some are testing out their shoes, some are stretching, some practising their starts, some cruising at 90%, some testing their heartbeat. But no-one has gone 100% full pelt yet.
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.
Oh I really hope you are right - it would be nice to see some racing up front.
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.
Unless of course you want to test the pit crew to see how long it takes for them to change an engine, and the accountants who calculate how much an engine costs these days, and you can afford to skip laps that help you understand the car in different conditions and formats.