It's hard to not fancy the Merc as the fastest car/driver combo, however.... Melbourne very unique track and should be considered when evaluating every car. Vettel keeps referring to Quali and the race? Vettel's Super Soft - dropped 4 tenths in the final corner? Vettel's Ultra Soft - 1st run aborted but 6 tenths up in S1 when Lewus went 1.2 quicker overall? I still think there is sandbagging going on. The RedBull was 4 tenths down in S1 which is all power/drag/brakes, which would concern me. The McLaren looks like a widow maker, they are deluded if they think that is a winning chassis Palmer
Also a point on fridays. What happened here is tbe track is green as a regualr road so friday lays down rubber for quali. With respect im old school. Sims etc are all well and good but imo there's learning to be had in the rral world that sims just dint deliver and never will Im sure nobody wants quali on a green circuit where everyone sits back waiting for it to rubber in and we get 2mins action each section right at end.
I think we'll see a lot more of that type of incident through the year as the cars will start to reach the limits of how fast they can go around the tracks. Means drivers really have to show some skill where they are flat out through a fast corner in 2017 cars, where in a 2016 car it would have flat no problem as the corner could have taken more speed than the car could give.
Seems to be lots of flex and play in the tyres. Lots of opportunity to slide the cars Palmers accident seemed very strange, losing it mid corner like that. Was he on an out lap so cold tyres still?
I think it was at the end of a hot lap, he didn't look to make an obvious mistake, just seemed to run out of grip and then it let go big style.
Exactly, drivers will push but the cars and tracks will try and push them over the edge. Do or die basically.
Not a large number.... In FP2 Alonso managed 18 laps.... but that was done in 6 stints Vandoorne did get 33 laps in, so thats promising, again with 6 stints.
I do still think a lot of delayed testing was going on today- fairly convinced that it wasn't ultimate performance from all teams and I think the true picture will emerge after a couple more races. Unique track, conservative running in practice to save engines, lots of new aero to test- it's far from a foregone conclusion but it is of course Mercedes the team to beat. I would love to see their race pace under pressure and not a cruise control- that's the key thing. But we will see!
As expected the tyres are looking much stronger. Both what people wanted yet didn't want: Pirelli believes the ultrasoft will be the most popular tyre compound in the Australian Grand Prix, after saying degradation on Friday was below the target set by the FIA for 2017. However, the Italian firm is confident that as the season goes on, and aero development puts extra loads on the tyres, one-stop races will become less frequent. Friday practice pace-setter Lewis Hamilton managed a 25-lap run on the ultrasoft tyres in the afternoon session. "We have to consider the improvements of the cars," said Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola. "So more stress on the tyres means more degradation. If I look at the number of degradation now, we are below the [FIA] target letter. "Looking at the expected degradation for the ultrasoft here, we should lose two seconds in nine laps, and we are not losing two seconds in nine laps, so we are below this number. "But of course with the performance improvement of the cars, we will have a higher degradation." He added: "Here some teams this afternoon used the soft and the ultra, and some teams the supersoft and the ultrasoft. It is clear that the ultrasoft is a compound for the race."
completely agree . as I posted earlier , Horner himself said they would be doing less laps in FP as they have to balance performance with reliability .