Formula 1 2024 Season

Absolute disaster class by McLaren.   Both drivers had a real shot.  They gotta stop giving Lando choices.  

Glad for Lewis for the win.  But an exciting race with nothing really going to the stewards.   The way it should be.   

I think Lewis put to bed the talk of him being washed. The first rainy pass on Russell and  then his tire management masterclass. It seems like every stint he falls back from Norris and Russel and then he comes back on them as they burn up their tires

wvumtnbkr said:

I'm hoping for an LH win or norris.  Basically, anybody but verstappen.  I hope verstappen makes it exciting with an actual race.

 

Nailed it.

Mclaren was still 3 and 4 and got more constructors points.

This couldn't have been better for me as a fan of Russell, Hamilton, Lando, and piastri.  

Awesome race.

Max made it exciting!  

Best race of the season (so far) and I'm thrilled to have been wrong about this season being boring. Lewis breaks another record by winning 9 times at one circuit. I love that there's no guaranteed win for any one driver but I wonder if the new rules coming for 2026 are going to reset things and allow one team to become dominant until the rest catch up?

Merc surely has figured out the bouncing. Some cars, some tracks, it still seems to be an issue,  but smooth as glass here. And, they are back on the bumpstop at the rear.  Some of the camera shots here made that super clear.

Damn good race, and genuine emotion from Lewis. You could tell this one meant a lot to him.

When it got wet the McLaren's appeared the better car. It was mentioned they may have been set up softer. At the end on the soft tires, having the soft setup may have allowed them to get chewed up more so than Lewis's?

In reply to vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) :

I believed the McLarens were running higher downforce, which gave them an advantage on the wet

In reply to gixxeropa :

That's a plausible explanation, because they worked really well in the wet.  Apparently Lando's last set of softs were used as well, which would have definitely shortened their life. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Don't know why they even gave Lando a choice instead of just putting him on mediums 

The tire compounds are not living up to their promises. I understand there's a lot of nuance in how or if they get into their operating window, but how are we going to have a driver on softs unable to outperform a driver on hards, even over one lap? They should be 2 seconds a lap quicker but fall of quickly, leading to exciting strategies and races. Instead there's just a right tire, a wrong tire, and a tire in the middle that teams try to minimize the use of. This doesn't lead to differing strategies, just one strategy and teams trying to guess what it is. 

In reply to steronz :

With all due respect there has always been a right tire and a wrong tire. Sometimes the choice is more clear than others.

As a Hamilton fan I was very happy to see him win.

In reply to Tom1200 :

Define "always". The current "designed to degrade" era is only 12 years old, and has gone through several iterations. The compounds they have now aren't exactly the best we've seen over that period. 

There has always been a particular tire that was the one to be on going all the way back to when Goodyear was the tire supplier.

In reply to Tom1200 :

Sure, but during that era everyone was just trying to make the fastest, best tire they could.  Since 2012 Pirelli has been tasked with, promised to deliver, and sometimes succeeded at bringing "artificially" poor performing tires that both necessitate and encourage different strategies.

To wit, what we should have seen after the last pit stop today was two cars pull away on the soft tire, then slowly get reeled in by a longer lasting but slower hard tire.  We've seen that in countless races over the last 12 years; since nobody knows exactly when the softer tire will degrade, or when the harder tire will finally come up to temp, it leads to exciting race finishes.  And it puts a lot of weight on the drivers to maximize a tire that has drawbacks engineered in.

Instead, we know within a lap that the soft tire was E36 M3.  It didn't lead to a different strategy, or an exciting race finish.  It just flat out didn't work.  If Pirelli is going to bring 3 compounds, they should all work for their stated goal.  The soft should be fast but short lived.  It shouldn't slow and short lived.  Pirelli is screwing the pooch here.

In reply to steronz :

If Hamilton or Norris only had to go 5 laps, they would have run off into the distance, but it was clear they started off in tire saving mode, which made the hard tires a lot faster because they would last. 
 

From what I heard, Mercedes had no choice but to run those and at a speed they were fast enough to win. What McLaren were thinking, I have no idea. Mediums were a better choice no matter what since they would easily last the end of the race. Someone needs to step up and lead that team. 
 

Add that to the non stack up for Piastri- what were they thinking?  The way the race ended, he would have immediately been on Max's rear and probably would have been able to pass way before they reached Lando or Lewis. 

As much as McLaren has improved, they still seem to need to attend the racecraft101 class. 

I think the idea at McLaren was that they needed the softs to chase, catch and pass Lewis. They'd had moments during the race where they'd had pace on the Mercedes and Lando is hungry for wins and not just podiums. If they really were used softs, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But the pace of the RB on hards and the ease at which Max got past was unexpected. Track position isn't as valuable at Silverstone as it is at some other tracks.

They didn't realize just how much that extra lap was going to hurt Piastri. They probably figured he wouldn't lose 5 seconds in a lap, and that's a plausible loss of time for a double stack with the cars running so close together. Even executed perfectly - Mercedes seems to be the best double stop pit crew on the grid - it takes a few extra seconds to do two cars because the crew has to reset. It was a gamble, and the only way to find out how a gamble works is to try it.

In reply to steronz :

Pirelli is making calculated guesses as to which of the three compounds to bring. They don't have any more data than the teams do. Sometimes one of the tires just doesn't work.

Oooo, why not make the teams choose which three compounds they get for a specific race? They'd have to give enough notice for Pirelli to produce and ship the tires. Let's say three months. You'd have to tell Pirelli what tires you wanted for Silverstone just after the season opener. Let's see how you like THAT, teams!

I presume Piastri and crew didn't realize it was going to step up the rain.  They were wrong.

I'm guess they figured to need the softs for Lamdo, but they had a new set of mediums.  They also anticipated leaving the pit in front of Lewis, then Lando botched the entry. Would Lewis have the speed to pass Lando?  Maybe, but used softs were sure going to need some lovin' to get to the end.

In hindsight, McLaren screwed the pooch.  I'm not sure they were initially bad choices, they just ended up being so.

Also, who knew Max was going to find all that speed at the end of the weekend, after kinda sucking (from a RB standpoint) for 3 days.  Having said that, I am not remotely surprised....

In reply to Keith Tanner :

So for Lando, they didn't take the practice data seriously?  Even before the race started, the commentary was that nobody was going to use them hard as they go off so fast at that track. They knew the time they had to drive to for each tire, so "covering Lewis" means they don't pass him. 
 

As for piastri, didn't they check the data early in the race to see how fast the inters dropped off?  
 

Neither made sense in real time, let alone in hindsight. McLaren has been dropping the ball all season as a team. 

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

As far as I could tell, max didn't find speed, he was just not having to save his tires.  It's all relative. 

One thing we have not talked about is Haas!  Another great finish by Hulkenburg. Way better than the field. 

For those of us with F1 TV they've had an ex-strategist lady chiming in from time to time with some really interesting insight. She mentioned Lando's softs degraded 0.2 sec/lap while Lewis's went at 0.03/laps (from memory, it was significantly different) over the final stint. Medium's were definitely the right tire on the McLaren but that was just one of the mistakes they made this race that cost them the win/two cars on the podium.

Max looked like he pulled 0.75 seconds on Lewis on the last lap, that might have been Lewis backing off a hair to finish the race or maybe another lap and Max would have got him. I guess that is why Lewis has won 104 races.

alfadriver said:

One thing we have not talked about is Haas!  Another great finish by Hulkenburg. Way better than the field. 

Hulk has scored more points in the last 2 races than Perez has scored in the past 6. Ouch.