Burt Macklin

Yeah, great performance by Alonso. It looks like AM developed a green SF 23. Very fast in quali but falls back in the race. Stroll posting his fastest time of the day in Q1 and being that far off his teammate in Q3 gave me a good laugh.

If Checo was a good qualifier, it would be impressive, but Checo has been a below average qualifier his entire career. Beating Checo by 3 tenths isn’t some super impressive qualifying performance. It was good but nothing special. Certainly not something to lose your mind over, like OP did.

Lol wut. Max is a good qualifier, but it’s the car. Checo is historically a bad qualifier and Max only beat him by 3 tenths. There was nothing special about that quali from Max.

This could be quite the weekend for him. He qualified on pole in F2 yesterday and he qualified P2 at Jeddah last year, so he’s good at this track. Should be interesting to see where he qualifies and how he does in the race. Ferrari looks to be second fastest here, so he’s got a good chance to score some points.

Your ability to be a blind homer in the face of contradicting evidence that you post is truly impressive. The first 3 3rd and 5+ on the game chart you posted were WR screen, QB run, and a short pass to the RB. That’s exactly what Cosell was talking about. They didn’t ask/trust him to drop back and drive the ball down the field very often.

Some interesting data about Leclerc’s Bahrain pace. Ferrari estimated Leclerc lost about 6 tenths per lap on his early soft stint due to the braking issue and then was able to better manage the break temperature imbalance as fuel load went down and he got used to it, but still lost some time. Leclerc has averaged about .25 per lap faster than Sainz at Bahrain from 2021-2023, so if you give Ferrari an additional 2 tenths per lap and take off a pole seconds Sainz lost for having to fight through the field, it’s very likely Leclerc would’ve finished second and Ferrari got a 2-3 or 2-4 finish while being about 15 seconds off Max. Obviously Max is in a league of his own, but Ferrari having the pace to fight with Perez and get P2s while staying in Max’s pit stop window would certainly add some more excitement to the season. Then again, this may all be irrelevant as every team seems to be bringing big updates in the first 5 or 6 races.

Yeah, the amount of dirt coming out on MBS lately seems very coordinated and he’s made a habit of pissing off FOM since he took the role. It seems to be more Jos than Max, so I’d guess it’s an ego thing. Maybe they think they can get Newey to go with them if they jump to Merc. There’s also talk about Ford backing out of its deal with RBR over the Horner stuff, so RBR could be in real trouble for the new engine regs in 2026. Merc or Ferrari could pass them up if they don’t do well with the new engine.

This is all fallout from Mateschitz dying. There’s been behind the scenes wars over the power vacuum left since he passed and it’s coming to the surface now. Horner wants RBR to be separated from the Red Bull company bc he doesn’t want Red Bull management having control over him and the 51% Thai owners of Red Bull are on Horner’s side. It also sounds like there’s been a power struggle between Horner and Marko within RBR with Verstappen being on Marko’s side. If this were a TV show, I’d say it’s all too outlandish to even be worth watching.

He’s from the state of Texas, pedant.

I saw that Ferrari changed out brake ducts on Charles car before the race so I’m guessing they knew their might be an issue before the race. Still annoying that Charles had brake issues today. He’s been about 10-15 seconds ahead of Carlos the last three years at Bahrain, so we could’ve had a real battle for second if not for that. Either way, Ferrari’s clearly fixed their tire deg issues, which is huge and they have a great shot at being consistently the second fastest this year.

I mean, for one, everything is not the same. Ferrari and Mercedes have made big improvements from the start of last year and have definitely made progress on catching RB. RB had a massive lead last year, so overtaking RB by the start of 2024 was never on the table. Also, when you realize the top 4-5 teams all have some of the best people in the world working for them, it’s not that shocking that no one can make a massive gain over the other in a year.

*4.5 teams. Lance Stroll still exists, good sir.

DetroitHorn was a staunch defender of Shaka for pretty much his entire time here. Misrepresenting people and making up strawmen in order to defend shitty basketball coaches is just what he does. He can’t help himself.

Max’s long runs in FP2 were way ahead of everyone else. They were sandbagging in the single lap pace. Merc was fastest in S1 and S3, which are mainly just straights, so it looks like they ran a higher engine mode than their competitors. In other words, we still don’t know anything other than Max will have a comfortable lead.

BOW’s crusade against Majors this offseason looks even dumber now than it did last year, which is really saying something because he came off as a total regard last offseason.

That would solve their problems at backup QB at least.

So an Italian reporter who knows the Ferrari engine modes watched the onboard of Charles day 3 runs and says Ferrari ran close to a race-spec engine mode (race engine, lower ERS) on Day 3 to induce tire deg because they weren’t getting much in conservative modes on Day 2 with Carlos. Someone compared Charles 3rd lap in the 2023 race to his 3rd lap in the race sim on Day 3 with the same tire. He actually lost some time on the straight due to clipping, so if he had been running full race mode, he would’ve been about 1.5 seconds faster than last year. Ferrari completely fucked up their 2023 car, but it’s still crazy to think they’ve gained about 1.5 seconds in race pace over last year with a much better idea how to develop this year.

Yeah, testing in Bahrain is similar to all the street tracks. Sacrificing quality for big fat paychecks. it’s even more complicated because the first Europe race isn’t until Race 7, so you have to bring updates at somewhere like Australia, Japan, or China unless you want a third of the season to slip away. Ferrari has already said they’ll have some minor updates for Thursday and then a big update package for Japan. Im sure lots of other teams will be doing something similar. RB is rumored to be going with a zero pod update by Japan, which is race 4 this year. Supposedly they had a bunch of space between their reconfigured radiators and the sidepod ay testing, so technical folks are surmising they’re planning a zero pod-type design.

This might be the most accurate way to sum up testing I’ve seen. https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/s/rythU2D4QW

The telemetry and speed traps made it look like Verstappen had his engine way tuned down. certainly more so that Leclerc and others. He was one of the slowest in the speed traps on those stints. So probably need to add another .2/.3 to everyone else’s times to adjust for engine mode. I’ll be beyond shocked if the gap between Verstappen and Ferrari is only .3.

Interesting graph of Sainz race sim from Day 2 and Leclerc’s from Race 3. Neither of them refueled for these so they are actual race sims. Looks like Ferrari is finding the limits for tire deg. Leclerc clearly pushed more on his stints, which caused more deg later in the stints. According to an Italian reporter, Lecerc’s race sim was 18 seconds faster than Sainz. It goes to show that between engine mode, fuel load and how much a driver is actually pushing can drastically change times and tire deg. In other words, we still know absolutely nothing other than Max will win WDC with about 8 races left.

Burnt Ends will keep doing their photo shoots though, right?! We need more quality shots like this one. But I have to say this photo makes me question Burnt Ends leadership. I’m not sure paying Herman an appearance fee of three lines of coke was a great use of our donations.

I have about one more week to be hopeful/optimistic as a Ferrari fan and then I’ll have to shift my attention towards 2025. Ever since Vasseur got to Ferrari, he’s talked about understanding the car, mainly in terms of tyre degradation and a predictable base to build from. Ferrari ran some long race sims today, and their times were insanely consistent lap over lap. Sainz stayed in the low 37s for about 17 laps. Last year, Ferrari’s tires would fall off after 7-8 laps. They’ve never showed this type of easiness on the tires since about 2017. Red Bull look to be ahead of the pack with all their innovations this year, but I’m cautiously optimistic Ferrari will be the clear second team with this kind of tire deg. https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/s/OTnDagfyHh The other thing Vasseur changed last year was hiring a new head of strategy, and Ferrari’s strategy was notably better last year. Finally, a lot of technical experts have noted that the current Ferrari aero is fairly basic, and Ferrari have talked about wanting to confirm correlation on track before they bring more changes. Their head of technical said they already have updates in the wind tunnel that could be ready 4-5 races into the season. If this car continues to be predictable and easy on its tires, they could start to bring some pace improvements rather quickly.

We got our first racing of the season boyz. https://imgur.com/a/HGPNYdL