2023 Australian GP: Post Race Analysis

The Australian Lottery Grand Prix. The Red Flag procedure remains as one of the worst situations in Formula 1. Why teams are allowed to work on the cars and change tires makes zero sense. It negates all the racing and strategy that happened before hand, and it's a lottery of who benefits and who suffers. It's ridiculously unfair. Not to mention the time it takes the race director to go from Safety Car to Red Flag.

There is an argument if the red flags should have even been thrown. During the first red flag, we saw the amount of track workers as well as a sweeper truck on track. To do this under a SC would have been difficult. The second red flag; A red flag for a tire is pretty uncommon. However, the red flag did ensure we would get racing to the end, and that is what we all should want.

If a red flag was just a way to pause the race, there would be far less issues. Perhaps it needs to be looked at if the restarts are a rolling start or a standing start.

It is atrocious how bad the FIA and Stewards to do not know their own rules and procedures. A mess that could be solved, but the supposed big brains in F1 just can't figure out.... after how many decades?

Red Bull Racing are without question the class of the field. Factually speaking we aren't talking 1 or 2 seconds a lap, but their advantages are in all the right places. Over the past week or two the media is flooded with the power of their DRS. This is a bit over hyped. Red Bull have had a straightline advantage from the start of 2022, a lot of it because they don't get the same energy "clipping" as other teams. Their DRS is very efficient, but it's also in how they use their battery down the straight. Once Verstappen got the lead, he was in cruise mode. His final restart after the red flag was on the absolute limit of being legal inside the grid box. I wonder if he was in contact with his team to help him line up as far forward as possible. Perez had a decent drive from starting in the pit lane. He didn't seem to make passes as easily as expected. Reminiscent of how Hamilton would pass any car like it was standing still, but Bottas couldn't do anything.

Mercedes had the 2nd best car, one that could potentially fight for poles and wins in the near future? Certainly not the piece of garage Lewis and Toto wanted people to believe. Hamilton got very lucky with the Red Flag. One lap after complaining his race was messed up by not pitting under the SC just as Russell did, he was in prime position because of the Red Flag. He didn't have the car to attack Max, but controlled the pace ahead of Alonso perfectly. A well deserved 2nd place. George Russell had nothing but bad luck, but these days happen.

Aston Martin can be very happy with their result. Another podium for Alonso and P4 for Lance after that chaotic "final lap" which nearly destroyed both their races.

McLaren can be even happier. They have been dreadful all season, and to get double points is enormous. Lando was spectacular, genuinely drove his car into the points on his own pace. Oscar got a little bit lucky, but scored his first points in F1. Great day for McLaren.

Haas got a great result from Hulkenberg. He is pulling away as the clear better driver on the team. Especially after a brain fart from KMag, driving himself into the wall. It puts in perspective how bad Mick Schumacher was, and how even worse Mazepin was.

Alfa Romeo still in the battle for points, which is good to see. Zhou continues to show he is better than what people think, and Bottas continues to show he is worse than what people think.

AlphaTauri led by Yuki Tsunoda getting a point. We heard he was managing something with the car, didn't hear what it was, though I suppose he should be satisfied with a point. There were moments in the race De Vries looked good, but he got punted in the "final lap".

Ferrari. The team have another page of screw ups. Their expectation for rain in Quali and their push laps being at the wrong time. The reality is the results are more of a "things happen" sort of deal. Leclerc's collision with Stroll on lap 1 was 100% a racing incident. Carlos SC pitstop was not a bad call, he just got hosed by the Red Flag, which he managed to battle back from with some astounding pace. Unfortunately, he was at fault for the "final lap" collision with Alonso, which caused all the carnage. He missed the apex, understeered wide. In any other lap, that penalty is 100% deserved. Sadly, given the timing of the penalty, it took him out of the points.

Alpine had a fantastic racing going. Gasly was brilliant up until the end. Sure his pace was slowing in the closing laps, but ultimately on the "final lap", he rejoined the circuit in perhaps an unsafe way, but he also didn't check his mirrors which pinched his teammate into the wall. Very costly mistakes. Should he have been given a grid penalty for the next race even?

Williams had a lot of potential for a good result today. Logan Sargeant was never near the same level as his teammate, and had a Forza Online moment, driving up the backend of De Vries off the last restart. Albon the purple S2 driver, had a very strange spin. Very unfortunately as points looked very likely for him.

Driver of the Day: Lando Norris. One of, if not the worst cars on the grid getting P6 at a track that is tough to pass, in a car that has terrible straight line speed. Very impressive. Gasly might have been the guy until he made a huge mistake that took out both Alpines.

 

Red Bull DRS advantage faked by Hamilton/Mercedes?

We are hearing a lot about Red Bull's DRS lately. Lewis Hamilton has been very vocal about how fast the Red Bull is. Making claims he has never seen a car that much better, which is nowhere near as dominant as some of the Mercedes cars he drove. He again talked about how unbelievably fast the Red Bull is in a straight line, how it passed him so easily. It looked crazy on TV, but to me it looked strange, so I looked into it. Sure enough, the telemetry shows Hamilton's own driving gave a false impressive to just how fast the Red Bull was.

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On lap 12 the pass for the lead was made. Hamilton for some reason had his slowest lap of the race, by a huge amount. A 1:24.616. Verstappen using DRS, set a very fast lap for that time of the race at 1:21.994.

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We can see Max was 24 kph faster than Hamilton with his DRS open. That's big, but since 2019, speed deltas of 20 kph are not uncommon.

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Here we see Lewis let off the throttle prematurely. Max has DRS open, full throttle, hard on the brakes into turn 9. Vmax 324-325 kph. Hamilton Vmax of 298 kph drops to 269 kph at the point Max hits the brakes. Hamilton dropped over 2 tenths of a second in that very short period of time.

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In other laps by Hamilton, that were not aided by DRS, he stayed at 100% throttle much longer, braked much later, and carried a lot more speed into Turn 9. At the same point where Max hit the brakes, Lewis was typically 25-30 kph faster than the lap he was passed.

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It's not a case of being concerned of aero understeer into turn 9 since Verstappen was many many car lengths ahead before the corner anyways. We can see Carlos Sainz in the laps he went from 8th to 6th, using DRS and in the tow of cars going into turn 9, he was able to carry more speed while being closer to the car ahead.

What's going on here? Is this Mercedes playing games, is it Lewis specifically in order to draw doubt into the legality of the Red Bull? The Red Bull is crazy fast on the straights, they have been since the start of 2022, so maybe there is something fishy going on. Is it a tactic to continue to pretend the Mercedes is not as fast as it really is? The telemetry suggests this was done on purpose. The comments to the media is of a narrative that Red Bull is so much faster, and mysteriously fast on the straights. The media is eating it up and spitting it out as part of the narrative. Sky Sports at least are regularly making comments about how "its the car", which didn't seem to be the case when Mercedes were dominant. So many questions, and we will never get honest answers, so there it allows for a lot of speculation.

 

So true. The reset the grid to make Alonso's spin effectively something that didn't happen. So therefore why the Penalty?

Devils advocate might say because the Alpine's didn't get a redo, which only got collected because of Sainz.

Such a weird situation that F1 and the FIA don't have a clear set of rules or procedures for. It seemed like they spent 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do on a whim, trying to formulate a result that doesn't make them look like the muppets they are.

 

I expected the same type of passes from Perez, and I found it strange when I didn't see that. I watched several cases when Perez failed to make a pass before turn 9, around much slower cars than the Mercedes. This is part of what didn't make sense to me. How one Red Bull can drive around a Merc and have 5-10 car lengths before the corner, and the other fails to make the pass. As it turns out, Hamilton stuffed the lap on purpose. I agree with no need to push to keep up, no need to defend, RBR is for sure faster. By why go 1.5 seconds slower than what he can do and let off the throttle when Max was already gone? It doesn't make sense.

 

This is exactly why I made the post with the telemetry. It is absolute BS. It was a demonstration of speed that was manufactured by Hamilton. The media, especially the British media, don't do the research and make these accusations and the fans that never do any research believe it.