Formula 1 goes on vacation with a nice Hungarian Grand Prixwon deservedly from Max Verstappen and from his RedBullmore and more leader of the world rankings despite the apparent difficulty of the eve. Phenomenal to say the least both the Austrian team and the Dutch driver, who shows more and more his value and his enormous progress at the level mental on the management of pressure and competition situations. Always fast, never hasty, Verstappen leads his team to victory, which in turn follows him with precision in important decisions, sometimes with technical imperfections but always on the right side when it comes to “put your head in it”, That is when the decisions have a decisive weight on the match. Clearly diametrically opposite speech for the Ferrariwith the first reality to look in the face is that the last, already feeble, hopes for the title remain in Budapest with a race that has once again become disastrous just as the decisions began to make a difference.
The first thing to point out is that Leclerc And Sainz they returned, both during the race and after, two completely opposite feedback on their cars. Sainz has complained extensively about a bad balancing and a abnormal degradation tires. Leclerc, on the contrary, said in the race of feel very good with the medium tire and confirmed it in interviews, stating that he did not have no problem of pace. This is, in our opinion, due to two factors. The first is that during the qualifying Leclerc had already had some problems with the low temperatures and had said to having to study to eliminate the problem for the race, a task that apparently has been successful. On the other hand there is a more proper aspect of nature of the two pilots. Leclerc is indeed more instinctive and able to adapt quickly to changing conditions, unlike Sainz who needs to work to get the most out of it. The radical change in temperatures, with the race run with over 15 degrees of difference compared to the free practice simulations, he put Spanish is more in crisis compared to the Monegasque, bringing things back to the beginning of the year, when Leclerc found the performance while Sainz struggled. However, what remains is that F1-75 number 16 had a step much better of the number 55, so much so that Leclerc managed quite easily to overtake his partner via a overcut at the end of the first stint.
In the middle phase of the race we see Leclerc be in control of the situation, once you find the overtaking on Russell. The Monegasque shows an excellent pace on medium tires enough to say on the radio that he feels very good with that tire and that wants to keep it as long as possible. A pilot who tells the short wall that he feels good with the tire is the most obvious symptom of one well balanced and fast car. And here comes the strategic disaster of the red wall. In front of a concrete but not obvious threat of undercut by Verstappen, the Ferrari wall responds in a manner apparently clumsy with a cover attempt by Leclerc with hard rubber which will prove to be disastrous, given the impossibility of bringing the hard compound into the right window of use, irreparably compromising the Monegasque’s race. The alternative for Leclerc was wait another 10 laps and then mount the soft tire for the final stint, exposing oneself more to the risk of undercut but with the possibility of having a last phase of the race on the soft compound and with fresh rubber, against a Verstappen with very worn medium rubber, for which a situation however potentially advantageous. The issue to be addressed is that if from the outside some decisions appear only “meaningless”, they actually arise from a system of instruments and from an organization vast and complex, all devoted to identifying the best decisions, for which it is not only the insane judgment of a person, but a sistem which, with yet another sensational patatrac, shows not to work. This brings out the first problem that we find in the Ferrari strategic sector, that is the type technician about tires. The predictions made by the simulations on the performance and duration of the various compounds often turn out to be incorrectgenerating in turn necessarily wrong decisions. In this case the information given to Leclerc was that the first 10 laps stint would have been difficult, but then the balance of performance he would have traded with opponents. The reality is that none of this has happened confirming a notable gap between simulations and reality. If the correlation it has improved in a masterly way from an aerodynamic point of view, the one concerning tires and strategies seems to have not progressed in the least. Not only this though: the strategy software system includes a huge set of evaluations in real timeand is also based on the data collected on the other cars, updating the forecasts instant by instant, and often making use of to artificial intelligence. Leclerc was the seventh driver to mount hard rubber, Alonso, Ocon, Zhou, Schumacher, Magnussen and Bottas had also used it before him and none of these pilots had worked. And then one wonders how it is possible that the strategic system of the horse has not detected none of these situations and put his driver, leader of the race at that time, on the track in those conditions, widely predictable even simply with the naked eye. And here we enter the second type of problem of the strategic department, which is that Human. The eye And instinct of man remain a fundamental element for a good strategy. Listening to Max Verstappen we discover that his original plan was for starting on hard rubberbut that, putting the car on the grid in the deployment lap, both he and the team realized that the white tire was not working and they revolutionized the entire prepared floor on the spot, opting for a soft rubber start. On the contrary, at Ferrari we notice a series of signals nothing short of sensational: before the race Binotto had in fact stated to Sky’s microphones that “with low temperatures, graining will be a problem, especially with medium tires“. Now, since low temperature graining is a phenomenon of its own softer compoundsBinotto had practically revealed that the softer tire that the Ferrari drivers would use would be the average and that so the other compound would have been the hard one. And in this also the radio team arrived at a certain point in Leclerc who informed him that “the warm-up of the hard tire is more difficult than expected”, preparing it for when it would be his turn. So on the one hand RedBull had instinct And elasticity to quickly make a key decision, while in Maranello it was not enough the deployment laps, 39 race laps and 6 drivers on which the hard tire did not work to change the set plan and avoid destroying Leclerc’s race. A mental stiffness that is difficult to understand in a discipline fluid by naturemade up of plans that change minute by minute and decisions made in real time. Speaking of looking at reality, it is now a constant that in situations where the eye and the feeling with the track are important, Maranello’s strategies remain precisely disconnected from reality, working on conditions that don’t really exist on the track. The greatest human problem, however, is that of not wanting to admit that the above stated exists And is indeed a problem. It is not clear why when the SF90 was lacking in terms of downforce Mattia Binotto spoke about it openly, when the SF1000 lacked horses the Team Principal even said how manywhile on a strategic level, while continuing to make obvious errors, we continue to consider the thing a taboo theme. In the interviews after the race, Binotto gave the first responsibility for the result to a performance of the car below expectations, but if this is true for Sainz it is absolutely not the case for Leclerc. We averaged each stint and the result is unequivocal.
Leclerc was the fastest on the track in the first two stints and, indeed, it was faster than Lewis Hamilton in the last soft tire stint (12 laps for Leclerc, 15 for Hamilton up to VSC). We also did a couple of simulations and if instead of stopping at the garage Leclerc had done from that lap onwards the race with Sainz’s times he would have easily finished in second place, while with a couple of tenths on the extra lap of his partner he would have fought head to head with Verstappen for victory. We have seen that Leclerc’s pace advantage over Sainz was 4 tenths in the central stint and well above half a second on soft tires, so Leclerc would have had what it takes anyway. to play for the first place. Probably the F1-75 with higher temperatures would have had a much more conspicuous advantage over the rivals but the data (and the words of the driver) deny the Ferrari Team Principal. The team has grown enormously in all other departments, while the strategy team is becoming a heavy burden to carry with you, where it would be the case with put hand seriously, as has been done elsewhere. There is a clear need for one figure of experience for the department, that it can directing a refoundation both the schemes on which the information systems are based, and the decision-making hierarchies. The drivers are from the world championship, the technical department has produced a world championship car, the engine has a reliability problem but in perspective it is certainly from the world championship. The gross strategic errors shown this year (but not only) absolutely not. But the first step in solving a problem is to look reality in the face and understand that you have it.
#Ferrari #face #reality #FormulaPassion.it