The motorsport thread

Given the situation and what Red Bull need and Max needs, it’s Danny Ricci.

Alternate championship standings going into the summer break. Leclerc got a couple of points back last night but his failure to score at Silverstone could prove costly come the end of the season. McLaren now lead the Constructors championship after their one-two in Hungary.

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Piastri really suffers with this system!

Rules are rules and they all have to play by them but the only reason why George Russell came in underweight is because the stewards removed fuel for testing after the race had been completed.
At no stage during the race was the car underweight.

If the stewards take the 2kg of fuel, test it and put it back in the car then the car passes scrutiny. Again, rules are rules and everyone else complied, it just seems a bit stupid to me.

It was good of Toto Wolff to at least accept the decision. He knew that his team must have messed up, and took responsibility. No BS excuses.

I think the logic is that fuel is not strictly part of the car design. I could imagine that teams would take the piss if they could include fuel as part of minimum weight.

if that was the case, then they should test the car without any fuel at all

F1 TV works with a VPN for me. That may be worth a shot

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Rules are the min weight is without fuel.

If it wasn’t, you’d just build a tank 50kg bigger and the car 50kg lighter.

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So they drain all of the fuel, keep 2kg for testing and then weigh the car?

I was under the impression that the car was weighed with the fuel in (minus the 2kg). It makes sense if it is done with zero fuel in the car.

As for adding fuel and dropping car weight, pretty sure the cars are about as light as they can make them right now. It’s why they’ve gone to such extremes as saving weight by not painting them.

And if they’re below min, they have to ballast up.

The min weight is a dry weight. Mercedes fucked up and under ballasted the car by 1.5kg.

Just like Oscar fucked up and overshot his pit box by two metres.

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It also sounds like Mercedes deliberately left the extra fuel in the car to make the weight.
Noted in the report the didn’t do the fuel draining procedure correctly so they potentially knew they were in trouble to make the weight.

Confirmed last night that Sainz has signed for Williams for '25 and '26 (the new Audi team is looking like a mess already with a raft of management changes) and Perez has been confirmed as staying in his seat after a meeting held by Red Bull.

With Sainz finally announcing his destination, the dominos should now quickly fall in the drivers’ market.

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Possibility that they miscalculated the tyre degradation according to some scuttlebutt I’ve seen.

That may be so, but its a surprising mistake to make for a top team. They should have realised that a green track condition inevitably results in higher tyre wear. All the rain on Saturday would’ve washed any rubber off the surface and they would’ve been starting anew with the first support race on Sunday, which I think was the F3 race.

They might have forgot that the cars don’t do a full cool down lap at Spa because it’s so long, so they did get a lot of marbles to run on and pick up to add weight …

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They did weight the tyres separately in scrutineering so somebody had a similar theory at the time.
Surely no cool-down lap would be the first note in the book for Spa

Gotta admit, these are not the things I typically think about!

He also wasn’t meant to do a 1 stop strategy. Had been on those tyres for 40 or so laps with not much rubber left on them I suspect. 4 x tyres 20 laps younger could easily make 2kg difference

Looking more and more likely Jack Doohan will get the seat at Alpine next season. Will be awesome to have 3 Aussies on the grid.

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