The Canadian Grand Prix was yet another exciting stage full of surprises of this 2024 season. In the end he prevailed again, Max Verstappen, even without the best car, but driving better than the competition and supported by a team that was in turn perfect and precise in everything, including tactical and strategic choices and execution of pit stops. The Dutchman found the right antidotes for the poisonous curbs of Montreal, choosing lines that were sometimes different from his rivals, but always effective, and leveraging the good level of load and the excellent traction that his Red Bull however it guarantees. On paper, the Canadian one was one of the least favorable tracks for the RB20And Sergio Perez he didn’t fail to remind everyone of this by qualifying in 16th position and then retiring from the race without having almost progressed in the standings, but Verstappen’s talent and skills once again emerged, finding a victory that anyone who had recently set their eyes on the standings must have consider it a resounding missed opportunity.
McLaren still the best car of the weekend, Barcelona for the confirmation of having the Red Bull pace
The one who certainly regrets the missed opportunity most of all is Lando Norris with the McLaren. Once again the car of Woking it proves to be the most complete, competitive even on a track like the Canadian one on one side and capable of exploiting the low temperatures to its advantage on the other, as we had seen happen in China. Tire management of the first stint, while in front Russell And Verstappen were putting their covers to the test, had given Norris an enormous advantage, both in terms of pace (at times 2 seconds per lap faster than his rivals) and, once in front, in chronometric terms, given that the leading Brit had dug a gap between himself and his rivals by almost 10 seconds. Bad mistake of not stopping immediately with the Safety Car for the team led by Andrea Stella which cost Norris the lead and perhaps the race, given that overtaking was not a trivial undertaking in any case, especially given the great traction of the McLaren which, coming out of the hairpin, showed excellent rear grip. The mistake of the McLaren wall, contrasted with the continuous perfection shown by Red Bull, tells the difference between a team that is maturing and one that has won the last 3 titles. The McLaren technical package, however, has been at least on par with Red Bull if not better in the last 4 races and it is no surprise that Plates, in the post-qualifying interviews, let slip a reference to their fight for the championships, showing that, beyond the superficial cautions, McLaren is watching the rankings. The next race, that of Barcelona, will be the truly great test of truth for McLaren. The vocation of the car is almost totally aerodynamic, with a Mercedes Power Unit well managed and a mechanics that still has some weak points even though it is also well managed by the team, and the track Montmelo it will be that of the truth to understand if Norris and Piastri have in their hands a vehicle with performances comparable to those of Red Bull.
Mercedes: the rebirth needs further confirmation
Also regarding the team Brackley there are some regrets about the Canadian weekend, although the impression is that Russell and the W15 were still a step behind McLaren. The weekend of Montreal showed one Mercedes which seems to have found a solution on the aerodynamic stability front, but there are still two big unknowns to verify. The first concerns the operating window, since we have noted many times how the single-seater designed by James Allison suffers from a particularly narrow window, so it is very fast when it finds the right condition, but quickly loses competitiveness by moving away from it. If it is true that the Canadian weekend was a potpourri of situations, it is also true that the W15 always gave the impression of being at ease in conditions of low grip on the track (which is why it often went fast in free practice, with non-tyred track) and in the end the entire Canadian weekend was run in this situation, with the rain continually washing the tires off the track in every session. The second factor is the ground clearance of the cars. It was easily noticed that in Montreal, apart from the wet conditions, very few sparks were seen coming out of the bottom of the cars due to rubbing with the asphalt of the track. This is because in order to have a good passage on the high curbs the teams had to increase the height from the ground by raising all the cars. This is a decidedly more “forgiving” situation for those who have problems when they try to lower the car a lot like Mercedes, so we don’t feel like defining the team led by Wolff as having “arrived in the fight” in turn until we see some confirmation on different types of tracks and conditions.
Ferrari: Vasseur’s darkest weekend
We conclude the analysis to reflect on an objectively disastrous away match for the team Maranello. Fredric Vasseur he had spoken of zeros as the worst thing ever for the ranking and in Canada Ferrari even placed a double one. Looking at the race, there are very few possible comments: the engine problem Leclerc (which from our analyzes weighed on average 12-18 km/h in all sprints compared to Sainzand between 8 tenths and 1.2 seconds per lap) makes his performance in the race invaluable, and, as regards Sainz, Vasseur himself declared to Sky that the accident in the first phase of the race cost the Spaniard damage to the floor which lowered the load level by as much as 20 points, so it is difficult to give a real value even to the team’s performance. number 55. The dynamics of the race then also somehow limited some types of comebacks, with long phases in which the dry strip on which the drivers had to drive was barely as wide as the car and it was impossible to get out of it, which is why the ratings on Sunday those who started as far back as the reds are left without great technical motivation. The reality is that Ferrari’s problem was mainly on Saturday, again on the flying lap, again in the cold. On a track that gives little energy to the tires in terms of morphology, given that almost all the corners are slow, the low temperatures and the low-grip track seem to have been a fatal mix for the SF-24, unable to extract the peak grip from the soft tyre, as we had already seen happen. In our opinion this has little to do with the updates brought to Imolagiven that, according to the Maranello engineers’ own declaration, that package was not designed to solve the qualification problem, an aspect that should improve from Silverstone, for a second evolutionary package which should also bring a further step in aerodynamic load. After the race Vasseur implied that he had a precise idea of what happened to the car’s performance on Saturday, and it is interesting to note that over the course of the weekend more than one Ferrari man made references at different times to the inflation pressures of the tyres, but it is difficult to think that it is just a single factor that needs to be modified to magically find the right one. From this perspective, the Barcelona race, if it confirms the hot temperatures often encountered, should go against the red, but given the highly aerodynamic nature of the track it is difficult to think that Ferrari can already compete on equal terms with RedBull And McLaren, which at the moment seem a step ahead on that front. The strengths of the SF-24 should have made the difference in Canada but a combination of wrong decisions (we still wonder why Leclerc was so angry on Saturday), conditions and reliability problems transformed a potential opportunity into a brutal Caporetto.
#Canada #analysis #misses #opportunity.. #Max
