A Mercedes that impresses for the speed and simplicity with which he found the performance, this is how the weekend of the United States Grand Prix begins. Hamilton and Bottas easily trimmed almost 1 second to the whole group and showed the fruits of evidently excellent factory preparation work. The W12 is very comfortable in the changes of direction at high speed as expected, but it also expresses great performance in extension, in traction, still holding well even in the last sector where the radii of the corners begin to decrease a lot. We see it well in the comparison between Hamilton’s best lap data compared to Max Verstappen’s.
Hamilton arrives at high speed at the top of the climb of turn 1 and then tackles the so-called “snake”That goes from turn 3 to turn 9 with precision, cleanliness and speed. Car number 44 also has a good top speed and, in the third sector, where Verstappen’s Red Bull starts to have its say on the minimum speeds in tight corners, it still gains thanks to the usual power. It should be noted that Mercedes continue not to particularly spare the Power Units on Fridays, although on the other hand they continue to demonstrate serious reliability problems, with Bottas mounting the sixth propulsion unit of the season tomorrow. For its part Honda continues to prove extremely conservative on the regimes adopted in free practice, and if we combine this with the fact that Hamilton and Bottas were the only ones to make their lap on a perfectly new tire, we draw the conclusion that the gap shouldn’t be too big. However, Mercedes appears to have an advantage for the weekend for now.
There Ferrari shows a good performance and is a candidate to be the third force, but with a few more headaches than the opponents. The SF21 particularly suffers from the extremely bumpy asphalt of the Texan track. Preliminarily, this can be explained by reasoning about what we have already said many times this year, namely that the Maranello car has an aerodynamic package, especially at the rear, which is very sensitive to external factors, and the continuous and marked jumps of the car on the holes in Austin seem to amplify the problem, forcing the drivers to turn up conspicuously when the curves follow each other in sequence and therefore it is necessary to have a particularly stable car.
Looking at the data comparison between Leclerc and Verstappen we see how the red already has good speed ideas, confirming the goodness of the news on the Power Unit, but it suffers significantly both in the area of snake, where Leclerc enters with about 1 tenth of advantage over Verstappen from the microsectors but comes out with more than 2 of detachment, both in the last sector, where in the slow corners Leclerc is often much slower than Verstappen, as at turn 15, where the gap it is even 11 km / h. A lot of work to do in Maranello from a mechanical point of view, to find an optimal compromise on the suspension package to be able to better absorb the irregularities of the road surface without compromising aerodynamic stability. An equation that is certainly not easy to solve, but on which the possibility of fighting for the podium depends.
To conclude, we also attach a new graph, an output that we are optimizing in these hours to always bring new information. It is the confrontation between Verstappen, Hamilton and Leclerc in the area of snake with the colors representing the accelerator (green) and braking (red) intensity of the 3 drivers. It is well known how Leclerc has to go on the brake at turn 5, and has more irregular phases before turn 6, forced to fight with the unstable car in that area of the circuit. Vertappen has a more average behavior, even if he brakes more markedly at the entrance of turn 7, while he impresses Hamilton for how he manages to cover the entire stretch from turn 3 to turn 6 simply by modulating the accelerator.
We will see in the next sessions the evolution of the set-up where it will lead the teams.
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