#Mark hughes f1 full#

On front-limited tracks it always had a bit of a tendency to open up its outer front in graining. Slow Ferrariīut the Ferrari’s lost performance, evident since Hungary hit him both in qualifying and in the race in particular, is rooted in how he uses his tyres.

#Mark hughes f1 full#

Ferrari regularly exchanged practices between the pre-France soil and the first updated one, as if uncertain that it would bring the full promised benefits. “The improvements to the car are definitely helping,” says Max, “but I still think our car is better on a Sunday than it is on a Saturday and luckily under the new regulations it’s not great even when our car not so great on Saturday doesn’t really matter because you can still pass most of the distances on.”īoth cars have been constantly updated, but Red Bull’s regular bottom edge changes appear to have been more targeted and successful than Ferrari’s single major bottom changes (one in France and another here). So Ferrari’s initial weight advantage has steadily disappeared.

As he explained at Monza: “The car was a bit lazy when turning and tended to lock up the brakes.”

Not only that, but where the weight has been removed, weight distribution has improved enough to better tune the car to Verstappen’s preferred tastes. The car was on a steady diet early in the season and the accumulated benefit was very evident in the latter part. What once you shut down on low fuel it’s particularly painful.” As the excess vehicle weight accounts for a larger proportion of the overall weight when running on minimal fuel consumption, the weight penalty weighs more heavily on qualifying lap times than it does in the race. The first side of this equation is pretty easy to assess and Verstappen actually explained it to us in the post-qualifying conference: “In the beginning our car was very overweight. There are a few things to unpack in this image, but essentially the Red Bull has gotten faster and the Ferrari slower since the end of July.