As nothing else has been posted, I figured I’d open this up to discussion.
A brilliant race, I thought. Lots of fantastic battles. An intelligent strategy from Ferrari. Not too chaotic or arbitrary. Albon fighting on 40-lap old tires for a huge P7.
How’d everyone else enjoy it?
I love that Albon and Williams 100% played to their cars strengths, and nobody seemed to have an answer for it!
We need to add Alex to the ‘tyre whisperer’ club. It’s one thing to stay ahead of that DRS train, it’s another do so when his tyres were so old. I’m so happy to have Albon in the sport. It’s a shame Williams aren’t in a place yet to have a good second driver, who could also pull shit like this.
It isn’t some giant secret; they are super fast on the straights so followers with drs can’t get alongside, and are “fast enough” (but slow comparatively) in the corners that nobody can get past them.
We see this pattern from them in every race; they always lead a long drs train, with the car in front of them tens of seconds ahead.
Being super-fast on the straights is maybe the only benefit of not being able to afford a decent floor.
Reminds me of this classic from r/formuladank after Alex’s last spectacular performance
Yeah, absolutely. I’m remembering a wet race last year where he went all but one lap on the same tires. Makes me root for him.
He pulled that shit in Australia but that wasn’t a wet race. Which were you thinking of?
Admired by Norris’s last attempts, just wished he made it for the heck of it.
I love Lando but tbh I was confused by that one 😂 he was never going to outrun the penalty. Looked like he just wanted to take out Ocon for the lols.
I want Lando in the second Red Bull seat. Imagine Max Verstappen having a teammate with balls.
I took it as racers gonna race. Plus, track position is still important givem that an appeal may just be able to turn over a penalty. I guess track position is also why Stroll wemt for the overtake on Bottas as well.
Such a great effort for Albon… easy DotD, and huge for Williams in the lower WCC battle. Hope it’s a sign that the Williams upgrades are decent & we may see more of it.
Russell cracked under the pressure of trying to stay on the back of Alonso… absolutely insane that the car almost finished the race after that hit… I was surprised it finished the lap! F1 cars are made of strong stuff these days.
Max mega as ever… ominous that Newey appears to be fully invested in F1 again after a few years where he seemed to drift away.
It feels like we see Alex getting great things out of the car, even when we aren’t at low downforce tracks like this one. Hopefully when we go to Monza he’ll have another chance to earn big points.
I think Max has really benefitted from an extended stretch of having the best car under him. Just having the confidence in the car seems to have taken him to a whole new level. This whole season he has just carried himself like a true champion.
Always difficult in a shunt to know whether the car is going to turn out to be made of adamantium or tissue paper. Can be either!
kudos to Albon and Williams 👍 👍
I know Max doesn’t need the help but my god Perez does not deserve that Red Bull put Norris in it or something.
+1 for putting Norris in as a fan. However if I was Red Bull management I’d keep giving him one year contracts until be becomes a liability. They’ve got constructors nailed on and a clear driver hierarchy. It’s ideal for them.
Yeah they need what Bottas was to Hamilton, up there but never making a serious challenge for number 1 like Rosberg did. Then again Max is so dominant that maybe fixing what’s not broken isn’t an issue.
I think if I was at Red Bull my primary concern would be Checo getting so demoralised that he becomes a burden.
Put Albon back in that car, now that he has the experience. He’s proving how good he is at Williams.
Great idea. Do RB still have an option on him?
I call bullshit. Are you forgetting that Perez is still #2 in the WDC? And can we agree that none of Max’s teammates have been able to drive the car, likely because the fact that it rotates around the nose is harder to drive for most people?
Do I like where Checo has finished lately? No. Does he deserve the seat? Absolutely. Hell, he was within one point if Verstappen earlier this year. You MIGHT be blowing this out of proportion. The car is great, but Max is the one that can squeeze the most of out it, whether by design or circumstance. That doesn’t make Perez any worse of a driver.
Look at Ricciardo coming from McLaren and jumping into the Red Bull sim. The team said his form was unrecognizable. Lando would probably be TERRIBLE in the Red Bull until he got used to it. Even then, it would likely still suit Max better, meaning Lando would look foolish driving it. They built that car around Max, and it has paid off, but it has also cost a few drivers their reputations, and in some cases their careers.
Given that everyone believes the Red Bull is so far ahead of everyone else, how does Perez get stuck in the midfield so often? Is Red Bull intentionally holding him back so that a TD doesn’t come in and nuke the car out from under Max?
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Given the last couple of years I wouldn’t be too eager to put rice back in a car.
only do that if you really need to get the humidity out
I’m glad to see that the gap between RB and the competition is slowly closing. Maybe it was a one off, maybe they expected rain all weekend and went with a setup that favors stability over performance, maybe it was a dead bird, maybe Aston’s and Merc’s upgrades really work.
Ferrari took a gamble and DID NOT FUCK UP. That was a refreshing change of pace, especially after being in full Ferrari fuck up mode all weekend (all year so far?).
The battle between Alonso and Hamilton was epic, as were the ones behind Albon who held onto his spot by sheer will and raw pace.
De Vries being De Vries, taking himself and K-Mag out on an open online lobby divebomb…
All in all, a great race :D
I’m glad to see that the gap between RB and the competition is slowly closing.
Well… there was a dead bird in the break duct of Verstappen, so I don’t think they are closing the gap.
I mean, that bird certainly closed a gap :')
I can’t understand how Perez just couldn’t compete with Ferrari’s pace at all. Not his best circuit.
Not his best season.
not the best driver.
Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s lost some inspiration. Max and the car are so far ahead that there’s nothing for him to do but be unflatteringly compared to Verstappen.
But what did Lando do though?
My understanding is that he slowed down on the race track leading up to pit entry so that McLaren could double-stack him after Piastri. It’s against the rules to deliberately go slow and impede like that.
They did discuss it on the international (Sky) broadcast.
They discussed it on the F1TV broadcast as well.
Ted whinged about the nondescript nature of the penalty so much that someone from the FIA got in touch to tell them what it was for.
They talked about it on the F1 Live commentary.
Loved the way the penalty was phrased: “Unsportsmanlike behavior”. Aka being like a total dick you know.
Interesting that Nando didn’t get a penalty for doing it worse at Monaco last year
I don’t remember Alonso driving overtly slowly under a safety car which led to an enormous gap between him and car ahead
No, he did it under racing conditions. I didn’t realize that Lando had done it under SC, so perhaps that’s the difference.
I enjoyed the race. Being honest Max was on his own race as usual, but not that far.
The fight ALO-HAM was very intense, many many laps doing qualy laps each other and putting pressure on the rival. ALO managed the gap brilliantly IMO given the circumstances (lift&coast)
Ferrari’s dice was right in this race 😄 Very good and consistent race pace, just marginally slower than podium cars on a diferent strategy. Kudos to them.
Albon: Driver of the Day on merit.
Plenty of action in the race despite the DRS trains
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Favorite moment was Alonso’s pit telling him Hamilton was just 1.9s behind. “Okay, leave it to me.” And then suddenly it was a 6 second gap.
I’ve pinned this to the top, thanks for starting the post.
Enjoyed the race which for me was interrupted by a biblical downpour causing my roof to leak. 😬
DotD for Albon. Kept it clean under huge pressure.
My observations are more on the community than the race…
- This community was amazing this weekend. I was quite active in /r/formula1 and was apprehensive about a race weekend without them. But I don’t feel like I missed anything being here instead. News about major developments got posted here, and the discussion was great. If other race weekends are this active, this is my new f1 home without doubt.
- Moderation was great, warning people about stuff that’s gonna be against the rules next week, while being chill about the fact that they’re not finalized and everything was clear but just real non-confrontational. Thanks mods.
- I thought a single discussion post for the weekend would be ok, but for me it wasn’t. I was lost in the main thread by the time qualy started and struggling to find new comments or figure out what session a comment-chain was about. It significantly hampered my ability to follow things and I contributed less to the discussion thread as a result. In a change from my take when we were planning last week, I’m now strongly in favor of per-session discussion threads plus a post-race thread like this one. If the modbot situation isn’t clear to the moderation team within a couple weeks of Lemmy v18 coming out, I’m willing to pitch in here to get a bot that can schedule posts for us in advance. With the big API changes coming in v18 of Lemmy, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to get it sorted prior to then. It’s likely that any bot that works in v17 will be broken on v18, so I think we just get it going once all the modteam’s instances are upgraded to v18.
It’s interesting you should say this, as my impression of the sub was the it was dead! I imagine this is a teething issue for the fediverse but when I looked there was no race thread, so I started one! Now I look at Top - Week and see a whole bunch of stuff I never spotted before.
Very weird.
It was dead 2w ago, but really came alive this weekend. If you were missing posts after they were made, check your language settings and make sure BOTH eng and undefined are selected (or nothing selected seems to work ok as well). Overly restrictive language limits can hide lots of posts that don’t specify language.
I took over this sub 16 days ago, when we had 36 users /month. Now we have 10x that and close to 3000 members.
The growth in the last two weeks has been insane.
Thanks for the shout out in your original comment. With any luck I’ll be getting the rules set up later today. I’ll make a post when I do. So far so good though, the general behaviour in this community has been great.
Decent race. Ferrari finally pulled off 5Head strategy, great recovery run by them.
Enjoyed that one, good battle between Alonso & Hamilton early on, Albon deserved driver of the day… Stroll recovered to a points finish, but really should be doing better, given what Alonso is doing with the same car… Ferrari just being Ferrari 😅…
Sainz playing strategist from the cockpit yet again.
I wonder what his pace would have been like had he been given the swop around he asked for.
it’s not like he got close enough anyways.
Yo why is this thread still here?!
Albono master class! Dude is driving that shitbox to perfection!
He’s really come a long way since his time at Red Bull. There’s no way that Williams would normally be in the points.
I felt he was hard done by at Red Bull. I remember in particular when he got torpedoed by Lewis in Aus but I always felt like he was a pretty awesome driver who was pretty unlucky on several occasions. Honestly felt he could swing it back his way given time.
Then again, I believe his attitude wasn’t the greatest at the time and he seems much happier at Williams outperforming the car. It seems like a totally different operation with James Vowles as well.
Perfectly stated. I was surprised Williams was even up there. Maybe this is the start of a Williams turnaround? I certainly hope so. I’d love to see them doing better.
