Sorry I missed this one guys. My computer got a virus and was out of commission all weekend.

 

Also, apologies for missing the online side of this one. Too many people at my house to be nerding it up!

WEBBER! The best part about Webber is that now more people in Australia are at least aware of F1.

 

you better rep every single person in this thread or else you're fired

 

This race had some strange similarities to the German F1 GP. Vittel once again gave up his pole position advantage by doing something very stupid. We also saw the continued amazing effect that Ferrari is receiving from turning much of its team engineering over to ex-McLaren top engineer, Pat Fry. And we also saw the same brilliant strategy that was used by McLaren & Button in Germany, give Weber his AMAZING victory in the Hungary GP.

At the Germany GP, Button stayed out on his soft tires long after everyone pitted and changed to hard tires very very early in the race. Button was able to gain 8 positions on the other cars by setting fast lap, after fast lap for over 24 laps using his much more grippy soft tires.

At the Hungary GP, Webber did the same thing, but from an even better position. Webber must have laughed as the other cars went in early to pit for their hard tires, when he knew the softs had many, many more extremely fast laps left in them. He came up from 4th place and then gained over 24 seconds on the rest of the F1 field, using these soft tires!! Two races in a row, we see that keeping soft tires on longer, makes a HUGE difference. Why do the other teams want to change so soon away from the softs? Obviously their times were not getting slower... Not even close. Go figure. At least someone ( Webber & RedBull) learned from Button's brilliant decision in Germany.

Unfortunately Vettel's whole season is becoming full of these "if only I had....". I think you will also find that after Webber finally did pit for his hard tires, and came out a little ahead of then leading Alonso, Webber again gained ANOTHER 20+ second lead over the whole F1 field,... on HARD tires! Webber drove a true legendary race at Hungary. And that has, at least temporarily, moved him into the slot of Number 1 driver at RedBull. He has certainly earned that position up to now.

 

So my question is this... are the composition of the tires changed each week, as far as what a soft or a hard tire is? Not only was I surprised to see Webber go 40+ laps on the green stripe but I was very surprised to see him gap that lead back to 20s after getting on the hard tires. Seems like the soft tires would have taken a thrashing on this circuit.

 

There are 4 main compounds, iirc, that get chosen from for each race. There is a rule that they can't choose two compounds that are next to each other in terms of softness, so they can't use the soft and super soft tires in the same race. They'd have to use super soft and medium or soft and hard compounds.

I think it comes down to the location of the race and the track temp to choose which tires to use. On the tracks in warmer climates, it'd really be a challenge to get so many laps out of the super soft tires so they aren't usually one of the chosen tires at tracks like Bahrain.

 

Thanks Alex, that clears it up.

 

I cam late to this thread, where is the TS points standing etc? Id like to get on some of this action.