LOL @ScarDuck14 @Meza994 !!! 🥳
But are we taking into account the rear limited nature of Bahrain track?
@TotosHeadphonesYeah, I love to speculate and have spent hours already on the various podcasts and specialized media. Heh, I even got a few AMuS articles under my belt already with the help of DeepL and got my hands on Ted's Testing Notebook despite Sky best efforts into geolocking them hard🤣
But while I find the whole exercise amusing, can always check myself and remember that it is also futile.
There's just no way of knowing the proper pecking order or the full breadth of developments the teams managed to bake in over winter. Again, it is fun and you can have a general feel for it, but I don't feel comfortable at all extrapolating the uncontextualized data to work out performance stats and such.
Engine modes, with different ignition tables or combustion parameters. MGU-H and MGU-K parameters. Suspension specs for different tracks. Wing specs for different tracks. Fuel load. Component revisions.
I thoroughly love the gossip and tittle-tattle that erupts from pre-season test, but if anything they all confirms the very purpose of the event: pre-season test i.e. testing concepts to guide the teams' approach for the whole season.
From one team running stiffer springs to test their car handling for certain circuits, to another pushing the boundaries of car configuration to get a proper reading on their concept's sensitivity and setup window, to another admittedly running deprecated rear wings to mask their real gains on drag reduction – it's just too much uncontextualized data 🤷
What I learned from pre-season testing was that the teams use it to validate all sort of design concepts and all sort performance data they had simulated during R&D so to conform their continuing development throughout the whole season. And that they mask their real gains with a myriad of ingenious ways. And that we'll hardly see porpoising hurting their performance and their drivers' back anymore ��
But I still love the speculation 👍
Edit: Case in point. A scoop from a seemingly reputable Italian journalist spilling the beans on how understeery the SF-23 seems to be. The piece is in Italian but there's google and DeepL making it a breeze to translate the whole thing with a single click 🤌
@Meza994 wrote:
Yeah the oversteery tendency was something he talked about in the first 2 days but on the 3rd it was visably better so i think the balance of front to rear is okay as is in F1 22 for use in F1 23 considering how oversteery it was..
Yep, providing that the track was rubbered even more and some softer compounds were used, I can confirm the rear was almost planted. I watched Merc onboard, it's like a different car on C4/C5 tyres compared to C3. Other cars also seemed quite pointy on those unrepresentable tyres.
