Phoenix wrote:mario wrote: As WIDD says, there are those who suspect that the RB7 may have a lot of untapped potential in reserve, and the F150 isn't looking too shabby over a short stint either. And in Bahrain, if you apply were to apply the 107% rule during Q1.
Do you want to get demanded by Ford Motor Co.?
Considering how fast the RB7 is probably going to be I suspect a DNQ could be on the cards for HRT, maybe not at Melbourne, but maybe at Sepang or Shanghai. And I'd watch out for d'Ambrosio too, that MVR-02 doesn't look very good either.
Fair enough, although the car has been through so many name changes that it is less confusing to refer to the original, albeit disputed, name. And at least it is considerably more courteous than the way that the Top Gear production team referred to the Ford Motor Company...
Although I agree that there is a chance of HRT failing to qualify in Sepang or Shanghai, I would have thought that it would be most likely to occur at the very start of the season. The further into the season, the greater the mileage that HRT will have, so they will be able to optimise their set up work, if nothing else (which was why they were closing the gap to Team Lotus and Virgin Racing at one point).
To put it onto perspective, a full race distance of 58 laps at Albert Park is just over 307.5km - so, if you have two cars achieve that distance, along with racking up about 30 laps each during practise (a cautious estimate, assuming 10 laps per practise session), plus a handful of laps during qualifying, I reckon that they'd be approaching nearly 1000km of running, which would already put you well on the path of understanding your car.
After all, last year in Melbourne, were the 107% rule applied, HRT would barely have got both cars onto the grid (they'd be under two tenths off a double DNQ), and there they'd managed to rack up a fair few laps in practise beforehand, as well as the practise running in Bahrain.
And you're right that d'Ambrosio can't rest easily either - Hulkenberg was watching the 2011 cars in Barcelona, and thought that the MVR-02 looked like a very difficult car to drive. It seems to have marginally better reliability than the T128, which was having quite a few problems with the cooling system in testing, but a lack of downforce, as Hulkenberg reported that it was sliding around quite a lot on track.
I'm 20 today. That means that I legally can buy any sort of alcholoic beverage in Norway (Under 20% is 18yrs and over 20% is 20yrs) 
