Michael Schumacher's lap time of 1m21.249 was seriously quick. Ferrari described the time as "impressive" on their website. A few days ago, these "experts" were saying that only Red Bull would be capable of high 1.21's, but that was obviously proved to be false as others easily achieved those lap times. With an extra 20kgs of weight on the car, and the loss of the double diffuser, you wouldn't think these cars could achieve the lap times that they are. What I found interesting is that Kovalainen in the lotus managed a 1.23 and experts said that Lotus were close to the back of the midfield. So how quick do you think these cars can go?
The 20kg is for Kers, so theoretically it should result in the cars being quicker. Webber's pole lap here last year was a 19.995, so Schumi was within 1.3s. And considering that was the fifth race the cars had had a few developments brought to them. A lot of the engineers had said downforce levels might be slightly down on last year, but only slightly. I think the major drop in times were expected to come from the Pirellis. In the first few tests this was guestimated to be about two seconds. Pirelli have said their tyres were developed to work within a specific temperature range (why they didn't make a range that catered for all venues is a mystery) and that because it was cold for the first few tests they weren't functioning properly. However it's been warmer in Barcelona this week so presumably the tyres have been working better meaning the cars have been able to eat significantly into that predicted 2s gap. Basically the performance relative to last year is going to depend on the weather, which will make it very hard to predict roughly what the time required for pole will be. To answer the question, I think in the middle east the cars could be within a second, but somewhere like Silverstone or Spa they could struggle to get within two seconds. We'll have to wait and see.
yer if the weight of the KERs made the car slower when KERs is used then what would the point of using KERS be. Their would have to be a benifit
