The TV director just completely ignoring Hamilton limping to the finish, which was probably the only interesting thing to happen since the start
yeah, always the way when you're racing, it's the fault of the guy who hit you, until you see a replay and find out they were as much a victim of circumstance as you were.
It’s a shame Verstappen started on the softs, they seemed pretty poor on full tanks & combined with Oscar’s slow stop once they got to hards where they all seemed to be doing the same pace they were all spread out. Having said that passing looked pretty impossible, so maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. Unexpectedly strong performance from Merc, which Russell took full advantage of - especially yesterday, but good reward for a driver who imo, has been almost as strong as Max this season.
Because of his brake problems he was getting warning about track limits and even got a black and white flag apparently
Pleased that Norris scored above Piastri, with 6 races to go, the gloves are finally off. May the best man win. It is going to come down to strength of character now and maybe pit stops and not ignoring the interference that Verstappen can bring. As for Ferrari, that car just isn't up to the challenge. I hope next year we will see a car that is built to win and isn't favouring local suppliers if they don't have the best product.
Norris & Piastra need to make sure that Max can no longer win the championship before they both declare that "the gloves are finally off."
The thought crossed my mind. I am not in the Ferrari garage so really don't know the full reasons for the failure at Singapore. There may have been other factors but there has been criticism of the brake pads earlier in the year. I fully recognise there may have been other factors at play. My thinking is more that I sense Ferrari have underperformed for years and need to up their game. Lewis making the Tea break comment earlier in the year, for me makes me consider the team are not as one and that decisions are sometimes political. Having lived in Italy I am thinking of my own experiences.
Thanks. I’d guess the failure on at the weekend was a consequence of installation (insufficient cooling) - about half the teams use Brembo discs and it didn’t seem like anyone else had issues. I saw somewhere they were managing the brakes from early on, if so putting Hamilton onto the racy “free stop and sprint” strategy on softs that was inevitably going to load them up more seems like a risky choice, which probably tipped him over the edge (to be fair to them though he nearly made it without issue). I’m hearing good things out of Aston Martin about Enrico Cardile, who left Ferrari in April 2024 and was previously their head of Chassis. Chassis has been a Ferrari strength recently (even when they were porpoising in 2022 it was controlled and the car settled nicely into the corners), but this year is a weakness, meaning they can’t run where they want for aero. Will be interesting to see if this is a blip as a transitioned (I recall Fred took over that department for a bit, which suggests there wasn’t someone immediately able to step up), or they’ve lost something significant.
I’d not commented on the Lando/Oscar clash, because it seemed like - whilst risky - it resulted in a non-event, but if Ted is right here about the content of Papaya rules - it does throw a different light on things and explains where Oscar was coming from.
The question is of course,do papaya rules still apply when it`s an accidental bump into your team mate?
So far I’d suggest they’ve tried to correct for outcomes rather than intent. The slow pit stop in Monza wasn’t intentional, but they wanted to reverse the outcome.
It is an interesting one. Oscar did push Lando to the left out of t2 forcing him to have a closing gap on t3 approach - but they were racing against each other so that's fine. The problem was that Lando hit Max and then slid sideways into Oscar - so Lando did break papya rules in the literal sense. Without seeing the throttle, brake, steering traces it's impossible to know what was the cause of the collision. Did Lando brake too late, did he turn in too far causing understeer, or did Oscar squeeze his team mate too much so he ran out of grip? I would love to see the data but that's not going to happen is it?
