FORMULA 1 GRAND PRIX DE MONACO 2017: RACE *** SPOILERS ***

It's not a conspiracy theory, I said it before the race that something like this would happen, because it makes sense. All I'm saying is against the fools that are claiming that Kimi lost because he was slow, it's simply not true!

As for the Chinese race...didn't I say that they should let Vettel pass? That's because it was obvious that Vettel was much faster!

Zzz

 

Exactly...but as they did not you just prooved your own theory wrong that they just look after the car they want to win...or did they prefer Kimi over Seb that weekend?

 

Sounds better than the humble pie Kimi had to swallow!

 

I think it was the 2nd race of the season so perhaps a tiny bit too early?

 

Arrivabene: We did not give team orders | GRAND PRIX 247

'As for Kimi he lost a bit too much time behind a back marker'

Yes .and which team ordered him to pit,which put him behind the back marker...?

Is Arrivabene suggesting it's Kimi's fault for not immediately breezing past the tail ender?

He is not exactly blaming the team for putting Kimi there!

 

+1

 

No blame when you engineer what you want LOL

 

Vettel might have a large lead in less than a month with these 2 races approaching - Why Mercedes could face more headaches in upcoming F1 races - F1 - Autosport

 

Just thought I would post:

Why Raikkonen is at fault for Monaco defeat

Why Raikkonen is at fault for Monaco defeat - F1 - Autosport Plus

 

Did you read it? Gary contradicts himself plenty..

 

I don't have premium or a subscription Bas.....but after reading what you have been posting

I would not doubt it.

For me, it was a tough pill to swallow but it was for the team....a solid 1-2 finish. Yes it

sucks.

 

Fingers crossed...I'm always a little skeptical about Canada as on paper, Mercedes should have this in the bag before they even arrive...BUT, even last year when Ferrari had a slow car, look how close they came!

Baku should be ''easy'', however.

Fingers crossed for maximum damage.

 

True. We need maximum points for a few more races. Whilst Ferrari are fast, we know there willl be grid penalties coming later in the season, so a big lead is definitely needed.

 

+1

 

The Ferrari is so good at any track this year I think Canada they are favorites!!

 

I think Mercedes still enjoys a small power advantage...however, that should be negated in the low speed corners and their struggles to heat the tire properly. Wunderbar

 

Why Raikkonen is at fault for Monaco defeat by Gary Anderson

People will not look back on the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix fondly because of the excitement of the racing, but because a home team (of sorts) scored a convincing one-two finish. Per square kilometre, there are more Ferraris in Monaco than anywhere else in the world so what better advertisement for your business than a Ferrari one-two in Monte Carlo?

Monaco is always a bit of a procession, and when poleman Kimi Raikkonen led away, with everyone else more or less in grid order filing their way through Lowe's hairpin, I thought we were in for a long afternoon - and that's what it turned out to be up until the last 10 or so laps.

The two Ferraris pulled away with ease from Valtteri Bottas's Mercedes and the two Red Bulls. Very soon there was at least a two-second gap between cars, showing how these new 2017 cars just can't follow each other.

Coming up to lap 30 they were catching backmarkers. Raikkonen started to lose time and Sebastian Vettel immediately shut that gap down to within a second. Bottas was also closing in on them, and when he pitted to cover Max Verstappen on lap 33, Ferrari panicked a little and called Raikkonen in for his stop on the next lap. Ferrari did this because he was losing time and was worried that Bottas could potentially leapfrog both cars.

All sorts of conspiracy theories came out of that strategy call, but when released from being behind Raikkonen it was Vettel who earned the win. He hammered in fastest lap after fastest lap on his used ultra-soft tyres, while Kimi didn't, or couldn't, make use of his fresh super-soft tyres. Vettel did enough over those few laps to remain in the lead after his own pitstop, and that was Monaco 2017 done and dusted.



To put it bluntly, Raikkonen just wasn't quick enough when he had to be to win the race. By regulation you have to do at least one pitstop. The Ferrari call might have been a bit too reactive, or too early, but it was for the right reasons because Kimi had given away his potential undercut cushion by losing time prior to the stops.

The same sort of thing happened to Verstappen and Ricciardo in the Red Bulls. Verstappen, running fourth, pitted on lap 32. He was the first car in and had a relatively slow stop. Mercedes covered that by pitting Bottas on the next lap. Ricciardo hammered in a few quick laps, pitted on lap 38, and jumped both Bottas and Verstappen, leaving Verstappen with a red mist.

Monaco is a race where, if you don't have to stop you shouldn't, or at the very least you shouldn't stop early. Track position is everything, and on many occasions drivers have won in Monaco in slower cars by just not making mistakes. The current regulations of having to use two compounds of tyre make it just a bit more difficult, so strategy calls can make or break a good result.

At a circuit like Monaco, where track position is everything and the Pirelli tyres could go the full race distance without any problems, why would any team call its driver in early?

For me, the best strategy would have been to run as late as possible, hoping that a virtual safety car or a real safety car would appear for you could to make use of to reduce your pitstop time loss.

The lap times were just getting faster as the race went on, so you didn't have to be a brain surgeon to work out that it was highly unlikely the undercut was going to work. I, for one, wouldn't have been the first one into the pits in that race.



Besides Raikkonen, there were three very obvious lessons that we learned from Monaco, and I hope the powers that be noticed them as well. With all the talk about how Formula 1 is going to be transformed with Liberty Media in charge, these are the things they and Ross Brawn in particular need to be thinking about.

First, the accident that Force India driver Esteban Ocon had in Saturday morning practice when he clipped the barrier on the inside of the second part of Swimming Pool and hit the wall at the exit of the corner.

The front of his car got caught under the safety barrier at the exit of the corner. Now this was in a relatively low-speed corner, so in itself was not a problem. But one of these days someone will submarine underneath a barrier or, more likely, another car.

This has been a problem for several years. A much more serious example of this was seen during practice for the Russian Grand Prix in 2015, when Carlos Sainz Jr crashed at Turn 4 and his low nose pushed the Tecpro barrier over the front of the car and let him have a 46g impact with the Armco barrier. That was a clear warning that hasn't been taken seriously.

The move towards low noses was triggered by accidents like the one that led to Mark Webber being launched into the air after hitting the back of Heikki Kovalainen's Lotus at Valencia in 2010. But the problem is that the energy in a crash has to go somewhere.

And it's not just hitting barriers. What happens when a car stalls on the grid and gets hit in the rear by another car? That's the kind of accident that we've all seen plenty of times over the years, and if the nose does go under the rear of the car in front then the risk is the driver's head ends up close to the crash structure.



If it were down to me, I would put all the crash structures - front, rear and side - at wheel axle height which would be around 35cm from the ground. At least that way they are all at the same height, so the chance of submarining under another car would be dramatically reduced. Any nose-to-wheel contact would be at the level of the wheel centre, in effect allowing all the suspension members take the impact.

The second lesson is that these car regulations, which were intended to 'make the racing better', are probably the worst I have ever seen as far as cars being able to follow each other closely.

Monaco is a slow circuit with mechanical grip carrying the emphasis, but still to get within a second-and-a-half of another car is a problem. Let's not kid ourselves, the only reason the racing is better is that Mercedes has thankfully screwed up this year. Ferrari has also done a good job and looks pretty good on all circuits, so we have two teams capable of winning races.

So it's nothing to do with the regulations, nothing to do with the wider tyres, the increasingly complicated aerodynamics. It's simply having two teams with a similar level of performance. It never made sense to improve the racing by allowing these hugely complicated multi-element front wings to continue to be used, but they are still there. The worst thing will be if F1 decides the changed rules are the reason for the improved racing.

Like I say with a car, if you have a problem you need to understand the reasons for it and why what you are going to change is going to fix it. What you can't do is change something and decide that is the thing that's made the difference when it's something else entirely.

The third thing is something that you don't hear so much about today, the brake-by-wire system. This was brought in with the V6 turbo hybrid engines in 2014 and was done because of the complexity of the Energy Recovery System.



But in FP3, Ricciardo had a failure at Ste Devote. A brake-by-wire failure is still a brake failure, so this is something serious we are talking about. I know failures will always happen, but for me this system is too critical.

The standard brake system without assistance should be adequate to stop the car. Having the ERS as the main retardation system on the rear axle is fine, but there needs to be more adequate redundancy in the system available in the event of a failure.

When the driver is using the brakes, the ERS is harvesting energy from the MGU-K, depending on the amount of battery charge required a control valve allows a certain amount of brake pedal-induced fluid pressure through to the more or less standard rear braking system.

If the ERS requires a high battery charge then very little pressure is let through, if it requires very little battery charge then a high percentage of the braking pressure is allowed through. In reality it will always require something, so to save weight the F1 designers design the rear braking system using smaller components that are inadequate to use as a braking system if the ERS was to completely fail.

A simple way to carry out a braking system adequacy test would be at the end of P1 to require every driver to do a straight line retardation test from high to low speed with and without the use of MGU-H harvesting, the stopping distance would need to be within a certain percentage.

However it was probably a failure in the control valve or the control valve signal that meant the system just didn't work and Ricciardo had no brakes. Either way I would hate it to happen if I was heading down to Turn 1 at Monza especially on the first lap with half a dozen cars in front of me.

Why Raikkonen is at fault for Monaco defeat - F1 - Autosport Plus

 

I LOVE F1 and Ferrari specifically. However, some points really get beat into the ground around here. It's a Ferrari 1-2! Be happy.

Look, drivers come and go. Ferrari will always be here. OK, maybe even the Rocky Mountains will someday disappear. But Ferrari goes way beyond the drivers. It's an accepted fact the drivers are temporary employees.

Have a nice day!

 

Like I said, he contradicts himself.

 

I think Ferrari may be down on power, but the car is much kinder to the tyres. When Merc was forced to abandon their FRIC-like suspension, I think that was a WDC-winning move by Ferrari. Clearly, the Merc hasn't been able to come to grips (no pun intended) with the Pirellis after being forced to switch suspensions. Same is true for RBR.

When Ferrari wins the WDC/WCC, that will turn out to have been the decisive move in the 2017 championship.

 

So here is a run down of the PU usage(all teams) going into the 2017 Monaco GP (links are

in PDF doc.)

http://www.fia.com/file/57458/download?token=JUCZYO-A


and this is the PU usage during the 2017 Monaco GP ( none of which are Ferrari's)

http://www.fia.com/file/57480/download?token=qIes_5C1

http://www.fia.com/file/57488/download?token=ehirNBaL

http://www.fia.com/file/57607/download?token=SykkHIM6

it seems we are going through TC's = turbochargers

 

https://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2017/05/insight-key-indicators-that-show-whether-ferrari-favoured-vettel-in-monaco-f1-gp/?utm_content=buffera14d4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

read this and be done with it, next race is coming up

1-2 on qualy and 1-2 on sunday plus bonus no merc on podium..such a great day a day we all missed for so long

 

Precisely. We are second only to McLaren in terms of number of components used. That's not good. We have penalties coming. Merc have an advantage here.