[ad_1]
There is clearly a good element to the result of having three British drivers in the top three at their home race, rewarding those spectators who braved a wet day to be at Silverstone.
But behind the headlines at Saturday’s British Grand Prix was a fascinating example of game theory. It was a battle between McLaren and Red Bull, but it allowed Mercedes to advance from the middle to secure the front row, George Russell from Lewis Hamilton.
For Formula 1, Silverstone is now a low-drag circuit, and has been for many years. Other categories gain lap time by loading their cars with wings, but Formula 1 cars have such high-speed grip that they are all pretty much flat (in qualifying) through the Abbey, Coppes and Maggots.
Your speed in a Formula 1 car is determined solely by the speed at which you arrive at these corners. The car sees these corners as bends, not corners. So, counterintuitively, if you run a low wing, you will go through the corner faster. Since you will also be faster on the straights, it makes no sense to run a low downforce setting at Silverstone.
But how low? There are still the low-speed sections (Village Loop, Brooklands-Lowfield, Vale) where you’ll find that a wing will give you a better lap time. Then there are the complications of tyre height. Higher wing height usually means better tyre performance during the race.
Finally, there is the weather, which is inevitably a major consideration at Silverstone and especially this weekend. More wings are crucial in the wet and windy conditions – conditions that have prevailed for much of the weekend so far and are expected to continue intermittently through to Sunday.
Red Bull and McLaren have shown a slight but clear advantage over Mercedes and Ferrari over the past few races. This has led to both teams watching each other during practice and reacting accordingly. The wing level is the battleground in this cat-and-mouse game.
Because they feel they have an advantage over the third and fourth fastest cars, they may feel they can give up some qualifying performance in exchange for what they feel they need on race day to hold off the competition. Without losing their grid position to Mercedes or Ferrari who are working to improve qualifying.
So McLaren arrived here with a low-downforce rear wing but with a choice of three radial wings – low, medium and high – to adjust as needed. The Red Bull main wing was larger. McLaren ended up choosing the highest downforce radial wings to counteract as much of the Red Bull main wing’s downforce as possible. As we recalled in our analysis of qualifying in Austria, the Red Bull’s incredible downforce and super-effective drag reduction system often allow it the luxury of running a larger wing without all the usual penalty.
But the Red Bull car wasn’t very well balanced – Verstappen went off the track in the first qualifying session, damaging a tunnel line and causing further damage to the underbody. The car continued like this for the rest of qualifying and was clearly below its best. It was no longer able to compete for pole position.
It seemed like everything was going in Lando Norris’s favour. With his main rivals in danger and the Ferraris not around, even with their greater drag than the Mercedes, he could certainly beat them. He was quickest in the second qualifying session, 0.164 seconds ahead of Russell.
But how did he end up being outpaced by Russell and Hamilton? Well, Norris obviously started his final lap badly after making a mistake on the approach to Turn 3 – and then another mistake at Turn 3. He retired. But even his first lap in Qualifying 3 was slightly slower than Russell (by a mere 0.006 seconds).
Let Russell explain how it all went his way. “In Q1 and Q2, there were times when I thought I was going to go out. It was really tough. But in Q3, the conditions put the car in a perfect window. Also, a really big headwind developed and carried a lot through Turns 6 and 7. [Brooklands and Luffield] “That allowed me to brake very late. The car was on track and I was very confident. I think we were still a tenth or two behind Lando and Max, but…” But under the circumstances it was enough.
The increased wind between the third round of qualifying seemed to allow the lower-downforce Mercedes to make up for what it had previously lacked compared to the McLaren – and Russell was able to do so. Looking at the GPS traces, Hamilton appears to have used a slightly longer wing than Russell – taking time away from him in all the slow corners and being slower at the end of all the straights. But it still seems to be a lower-downforce setup than the McLaren or, especially, the Red Bull.
“We were in a position to potentially get pole position, but we couldn’t do it,” said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella.
“The conditions in the first sector were a bit difficult. Lando spun into Turn 3 and Turn 4. But we gained time and were ahead compared to our previous run – and then there was a moment at Becketts. According to the data, we look on a par with Mercedes for the lap.”
However, in theory, this greater downforce should benefit dry tires, and especially wet tires.
Mercedes, however, continues to improve. The update that received little attention in Austria was a larger, more powerful horizontal damper at the front. This provides a more stable aerodynamic platform, and allows greater exploitation of the much improved flow from the front wing introduced in Monaco. Both drivers were pleased with its balance around Silverstone.
So McLaren was supposed to be fighting for pole position with a more race-oriented setup than Mercedes. How would McLaren – or Mercedes – have fared against a healthy version of Verstappen’s Red Bull? Who can say, but even before Verstappen had passed it through the gravel, it looked less irritable and more nervous than either McLaren or Mercedes.
The higher downforce setting gave it an advantage in the corners even with the damage (Verstappen claimed this was worth up to 100 points of downforce at the start, up to a second) and the DRS advantage was only just starting to kick in at the end of the straights ahead of Cobbs and Stowe.
However, there was a very significant loss on most of the straights before those corners. For example, Verstappen was 0.055s ahead of Russell on the mid-corner lap at Lowveld, but by the time he reached Copps he was 0.171s behind. Red Bull lost 0.226s to Mercedes on that straight and 0.109s to McLaren. On the Hanger, it was 0.155s to Mercedes and 0.033s to McLaren.
But it’s noticeably quicker through the Maggots than either of them and takes time from both of them in the braking zones at Village, Brooklands and Vale. The RB20 around the tough Silverstone looks like a car with the potential to be pushed by Verstappen for pole – but that’s made it very difficult even for him to extract that potential.
Much will depend on what the weather gods have in store for us at Silverstone. But Russell is expecting “a race that is very similar to Montreal,” with one difference. “The risk-reward for me is not going to be quite as high this time.”
Russell, Hamilton, Norris and Verstappen are all candidates for this competition.
[ad_2]
Source
)
