2018 Pre-Season Thread
Discussion
You might've seen Kubica asking that talk of his 'limitations' are left behind and admitting that he was 'too honest' about it coming in? If you watch Ted's notebook from day 2 you can see where those quotes come from. Ted was pretty clumsy around it and Kubica has obviously had enough of talking about it.
Vaud said:
ELUSIVEJIM said:
Heard from a number of different sources that many teams asked if they could run on Sunday or an extra test day during the next test because of the weather.
Unfortunately two teams voted against this from going ahead.
Wonder what two teams would block such a move.
Pretty petty stuff.
At a guess, the two poorest or two who had other commitments for their drivers on Sunday/Monday?Unfortunately two teams voted against this from going ahead.
Wonder what two teams would block such a move.
Pretty petty stuff.
At the moment there are 1.6 seconds between the fastest lap of fastest man Vettel on the mediums and Perez in 9th on the softs, Vandoorne excluded for obvious reasons, usual 'testing' type caveats aside this would appear to be an encouragingly small spread across the cars. As testing progresses and as the season starts I want to see that the time gaps separating the teams has concertinaed up since last season.
Sauber were looking like the new HRT / Marussia last season but with a bit of luck the up to date PU will bring them into contention with whoever happen to be occupying the last few rows of the grid.
Increasing customer engine parity can only be a good thing, I'm sad that we've lost a few of the minnows in the past several years but those who were running the Cosworth towards the end of the V8 era used to be so far off the pace and we don't seem to have anybody in that bracket anymore.
Sauber were looking like the new HRT / Marussia last season but with a bit of luck the up to date PU will bring them into contention with whoever happen to be occupying the last few rows of the grid.
Increasing customer engine parity can only be a good thing, I'm sad that we've lost a few of the minnows in the past several years but those who were running the Cosworth towards the end of the V8 era used to be so far off the pace and we don't seem to have anybody in that bracket anymore.
I am a long suffering fan of McLaren and this is the worst kick in the balls yet- the realisation that Honda have on a number of occasions been a scapegoat for McLaren failures and McLaren’s problems seem to run deeper (operational / managerial). Worse still, they may turn out to have abandoned the chance of being the de facto Honda Works team at the worst possible time. I hope I am wrong but I can genuinely conceive of a situation where Red Bull Honda win a race before McLaren Renault do 
Derek Smith said:
HustleRussell said:
I am a long suffering fan of McLaren and this is the worst kick in the balls yet- the realisation that Honda have on a number of occasions been a scapegoat for McLaren failures and McLaren’s problems seem to run deeper (operational / managerial). Worse still, they may turn out to have abandoned the chance of being the de facto Honda Works team at the worst possible time. I hope I am wrong but I can genuinely conceive of a situation where Red Bull Honda win a race before McLaren Renault do
I'm a fan of McL too. I'm not sure the continual failures of the Honda engine can be the fault of McL management.What the team needs is to sack Dennis and to get rid of all the high level staff that he brought in. Do that and they'll be winning in no time.
In some ways the past year has been a lesson in the plus points of a dictatorship over boards and committees... we’ve got dissent in the teams and some questionable leadership decisions since Bernie went and Dennis’ leadership is perhaps being missed at McLaren.
When Honda weren’t delivering they got the blame for everything, rightly or wrongly. A driveshaft broke and it was definitely the vibrations from the Honda engine that done it. The engine was down on power and thirsty but instead of optimising the car around it Mclaren heaped on the downforce so that they could smash sector 2 and say that their slowness in sector 1 & 3 and the speed traps was due to Honda. It won’t have helped Honda.
isaldiri said:
mantis84 said:
Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but wasn't a lot of Brawn's early success down to their innovative diffuser design, and that once the other teams started to catch up towards the end of that season their performance advantage was a lot narrower? So the 'package' point of view might still have some merit?
Isn't that more everyone else threw large amounts of $$ to develop the cars further over the season (on top of getting the double diffuser to work) which Brawn didn't have so the performance gap narrowed/probably disappeared by end of the year?Then, as now, the Mercedes engine was the one to have, and at the beginning of 2009 the Honda was the chassis / aero package to have... and the rest is history.
Of course the other teams soon caught up so the whole thing ended in something of a nail-biter.
andburg said:
I think my 1 take away from testing so far is how poor the Williams seems to be.
its always propping up the timesheets, occasionally ahead of the Sauber / TR Honda cars but certainly seem to be last of the midfield runners
Who has a worse driver lineup than Williams? Serious question. Is it better than that of Sauber? Debatable. Toro Rosso? Probably not. its always propping up the timesheets, occasionally ahead of the Sauber / TR Honda cars but certainly seem to be last of the midfield runners
I think there are going to be great battles throughout the grid this year. It’s going to be a good season.
Ricciardo saying his makes should put a ‘cheeky 75k’ on him for the championship at 10/1
LaurasOtherHalf said:
shame we had to get rid of Georgie the slutty drink driver and Pinks the MILF.
More or less on board with your rant, however it's a bit s
tty that the only comment you saw fit to make on the female members of the team concerned their relative sexual attractiveness. 
REALIST123 said:
Even a ‘diva’ could be consistent at a track after several days of testing and running 2-3s off the pace.
Not that there was ever much real evidence of last year’s car being a problem.
ajprice said:
From the Sky feed:
Talking of the Honda power unit, James Key confirmed to Ted Kravitz yesterday that Toro Rosso had used three of the Japanese manufacturer's engines across the first seven days of testing - a schedule he says was always the plan.
As of yesterday, we know the Renault works team, for example, had just used one.
Interesting stat.
Another Ted’s Notebook car crash yesterday, Helmut Marco wandered through shot mid-piece and said, glibly “I don’t like what I’m reading in the press…” Talking of the Honda power unit, James Key confirmed to Ted Kravitz yesterday that Toro Rosso had used three of the Japanese manufacturer's engines across the first seven days of testing - a schedule he says was always the plan.
As of yesterday, we know the Renault works team, for example, had just used one.
Interesting stat.
I assumed it was obviously about Ted’s apparently baseless suggestion that Honda might be achieving it’s impressive reliability by changing the PU every night. Ted seemed to deflect it neatly by volunteering that the comment must’ve been directed at James Key about something he said in a press conference.
James Key did say that they had used three but only because they were cycling them and hadn’t experienced any failures which makes some sense to me but could also be taken as a sign that one PU couldn’t go the distance depending on how optimistic you want to be about Honda…
The fact that Marco happened to interject during Ted’s live piece suggests to me that this wasn’t about Marco and Key.
REALIST123 said:
HustleRussell said:
REALIST123 said:
Even a ‘diva’ could be consistent at a track after several days of testing and running 2-3s off the pace.
Not that there was ever much real evidence of last year’s car being a problem.
And yes, of course, he’s going to be giving time up in the corners compared with a ‘qually sim’.
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