Aerospeed wrote:Or the whole team for signing with Mercedes instead of Renault...
Domenicali must still be crazy, though, for calling Williams a front-running team, I just don't see it happening...
Mercedes, though, isn't really that much of a surprise - They obviously have the best engine, and their chassis design is not much different from Ferrari's, which I thought was one of the smartest of the grid (even if it looked like an elephant trunk). Now it's just a problem of picking between Rosberg and Hamilton for the championship...
It is true that, as many other posters have noted above, we have routinely seen our hopes for Williams recapturing some of their former glory cruelly dashed with alacrity once the season comes round.
That said, I can plausibly see Williams managing to secure a few strong finishes in the opening part of the season thanks to their very strong reliability - Williams managed to end the pre-season tests with the most mileage under their belts, narrowly beating Mercedes following the problems that Mercedes encountered in the final few days of the last test (both Bottas and Massa managed to rack up two race distances within a single day during the final test).
It may not necessarily be that Williams are outright faster than teams like Ferrari - in reality, I would say that the situation is more likely to be that Williams and Force India will be towards the front of the midfield pack, close enough to harass the leading teams but probably not beat them.
However, it is possible that if, say, outfits like Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren are unable to utilise the full performance of their cars whereas Williams can, a slightly slower but steadier team could upstage the larger teams until the greater resources of the larger teams prevails in a development war.
SgtPepper wrote:watka wrote:Freeze-O-Kimi wrote:The Red Bull is looking more like a the Peugeot 307 WRC car from 2004: Shows the odd flourish of speed but is all too often let down by some form of problem. I wonder if Seb will follow Gronholm and announce "I'm fed up with this car"
I wonder what name he will give the car? Probably something non-broadcastable.
I think as with any season, the biggest unknown is still how the tyres will hold up in a race situation. Teams do complete long runs during testing but they are not always doing so at full blast. I think if anything, this is the biggest question mark around Mercedes as its been their weak point in the past. Peter Windsor's videos give us some insight into how different cars and drivers are driving, so you could guess that Williams (running high gears and getting wheelspin) will suffer more than Force India (running longer gear ratios and being tidier on corner exit) but until we have a side by side comparison in real race circumstances its difficult to tell.
I think the 2014 tyres are supposed to be more conservative than recent years past -
http://grandprix247.com/2013/12/18/pirelli-testing-slower-2014-tyres-during-bahrain-test/, though of course how much more resilient is still relatively unknown. Do we know how many stops teams made on their race sims?
It is a little problematic because some of the race simulations were disrupted by red flags, but it would appear that Pirelli do seem to have achieved their target of making the tyres a bit more robust. There were also some situations where a driver would use three different compounds during a test - i.e. a different compound for each stint - and it wasn't always clear how heavily used the tyres were before the drivers put them on for their race simulations.
That said, most of the race simulations seemed to suggest that two to three stops would be the norm and for the opening races Pirelli seem to have opted for slightly conservative tyres (medium and soft tyres for most circuits, apart from a hard/medium combination for Malaysia). As a rough guide, Pirelli seem to be suggesting that the soft, medium and hard tyres would be one grade harder than the equivalent compound from 2013 - i.e. a 2014 soft tyre would equate to a 2013 spec medium tyre and so forth. The supersoft has changed by a smaller amount, but to a certain extent that compound is a bit of an anomaly anyway given that it is only really designed for a handful of circuits (Monaco, Hungary and sometimes Singapore).
Sad, because for an avatar challenge, that'd be perfect for me 
