Fernando Alonso, McLaren, Silverstone, 2018

McLaren ‘made a step forward’ at Silverstone – De Ferran

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In the round-up: New McLaren sporting director Gil De Ferran says Silverstone was an improved performance by the team.

What they say

De Ferran was encouraged by what he saw on his first race weekend in charge at McLaren:

One thing I’ve noticed, everybody’s putting a lot of hours at the track and back in the factory. I think this weekend was a little bit of a step forward in competitiveness. The midfield is kind of tight but I think we’re a little bit closer to our nearest competition. We’ve just got to keep our hands down. The only thing that we can control is our own performance so we’ve just got to keep moving forward.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Snapshot

Renault, Goodwood Festival of Speed, 2018
Renault, Goodwood Festival of Speed, 2018

Renault ran a special livery promoting “The Incredibles 2” at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The team told RaceFans it was a one-off for this event and will not appear at an F1 race.

Social media

Notable posts from Twitter, Instagram and more:

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Comment of the day

F1 should have an end in mind when tweaking its points system:

Before we talk about changing the points system, we need to understand what points mean.

Every time we change the points structure (scores, number of places awarded a score) we are rewriting the purpose and value of scored points.

On the one hand, we would like points to have rarity and exclusivity (top 6 awarded points) but on the other we would like some means of differentiating between the teams at the foot of the table (top 15 or 20 awarded points).

It’s not an easy decision and there are many bad solutions. Any solution will upset one group or another.

The easiest (least politically dangerous) path is to change nothing, which is what I expect to happen.
@TribalTalker

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On this day in F1

  • 35 years ago today Alain Prost won the British Grand Prix at Silverstone for Renault

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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24 comments on “McLaren ‘made a step forward’ at Silverstone – De Ferran”

  1. Was he smoking some good, strong stuff during the weekend?

    Vandoorne qualified 17 out of 18 cars taking part in Qualy

    Their fastest lap of the whole weekend was over 2 seconds off Mercedes, 1.5 off of Red Bull, they were, at best, 3rd slowest team over the whole weekend, 2 tenths off the worst of all.

    They benefited from 2 safety cars in the race, the 2 Haas cars tangling, the retirements of Verstappen, Grosjean, Sainz and Leclerc and could still only bring it home 8th, 31 seconds off the lead. Vandoorne still couldn’t score points and finished with the Pit lane starting Lance Stroll in the slowest car of them all right behind him.

    The only way you can define them as being a little closer to their competition is if you call Williams their opposition.

    1. So much wrong with this comment.

      Alonso was half a second faster in clean air than Renault. Closed down a 5 second gap in 9/10 laps after his pitstop. NOt an opinion, just a fact. Lap times are out there for you to check. Yes, Alonso’s car was damaged too, the entire chunk of the right side of the floor was missing and he had a dented sidepod too. Again, proof is there for you to see.

      He was already P9 AHEAD OF SAINZ, GROSJEAN AND MAGNUSSEN before the safety car . Pitting during the safety car just put him behind KMAG and he repassed him.

      But hey let’s not facts get in the way of complete “Fake news”.

      1. Lets not casually ignore that Magnussen had a damaged car from lap one after Grosjean went to the side of him (which probably gave him problems too). Hulk was on that weird strategy of running the harder available tyre, which in itself justifies his pace compared to Alonso

        And how and where did Alonso got so much damage in his car?

          1. ah! thanks

            missed that completely somehow, from the footage it looks like Perez lost it on his own without hitting any other car, which clearly hasn’t been the case

          2. Looks like Alonso gets faster each time he has a damaged car, McLaren engineer should have a closer look at what this genius is doing.

        1. Turn 1 and it was much more significant than Magnussen.

          Damage :
          https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhqjY01WkAAtkxd.jpg

          Perez lost the car and hit Alonso in the process which is what made ALO’s pace even more impressive. He was stuck behind KMAG in his first stint and that’s why they pitted him early and his pace on mediums was half a second faster than anyone else in the midfield and by the time the other cars pitted and came out, he had jumped literally half of the midfield and came out behind Ocon and Hulk and then closed down the gaps at 0.5/0.6 second per lap and just before the safety car was right on the tail of Ocon!

          Damaged MCL33 in Alonso’s hand was better than any other midfield car on race day at Silverstone. If they somehow, if they somehow find the quali pace and start P7, they would be in no man’s land.

  2. Looking at the above photo I think we’ll have to drop the “coke-bottle” nomenclature, it’s definitely an “orangina-bottle”. C’mon Zak, you’re the sponsorship guru, sign them up.

    1. @hohum – I now cannot unsee the blue cap that is the rear wing.

    2. Zak is too busy complaining that his staff is not working at maximum capacity in this new interview.
      If chocolate carrots don’t work, then why not use the stick.

  3. thepostalserviceisbroke (@thepostalserviceisbroke)
    16th July 2018, 1:03

    What a yoke.

  4. New sporting director, same old tricks… Can’t they just shut up? Who are they kidding anyway? They finished inside the points because others made mistakes, specially the Haas guys. There was no change compared to Austria or races before.

  5. Great article though.

  6. Michael Brown (@)
    16th July 2018, 3:40

    How the great British F1 teams have fallen

  7. “…we’ve just got to keep our hands down” I’d say that’s the last thing McLaren should be doing!

  8. pastaman (@)
    16th July 2018, 4:48

    Sad to see IndyCar leaving Sonoma, but I can’t really complain if the replacement is Laguna Seca!

  9. No doubt “everybody’s putting a lot of hours at the track and back in the factory”. It’s all for them frog chocolates.

  10. Nothing came home to the UK except Trump.

  11. I agree with the COTD. It points out an interesting aspect.
    – That ‘one-off’ livery on the Lotus E20 (2012), though. BTW, Why are Renault using the 2012 car for the demo runs and other stuff outside the race weekends, etc., I mean why specifically that car, and not, for example, its successor E21 instead, which was more successful than E20 during its active season results-wise, or even better R25 (2005 title-winning car), or R26 (2006 title-winner)?

    1. Champagne Papi
      16th July 2018, 12:04

      Because people at Goodwood just wanna see a loud V8 F1 car doing it’s thing. It doesn’t matter if its successor was half a second quicker around a lap or whatever, it makes zero difference to the viewing public.

      The older cars are more fragile undoubtedly and would probably need additional support staff to run it, the newer car probably runs on more readily available lubricants and starter motors etc.

      And finally they will run the car that costs the least to insure and which they own outright. For example, Mercedes brought all the hybrid era cars to Goodwood but only ran the 2016 car as it’s probably worth the least, well Lewis’s one anyway as it was an unreliable piece of crap.

  12. re COTD – we already have a way of distinguishing between the non-points scorers. surely our memories are not so short as to forget those epic battles for 12th place between caterham and marussia??

    1. spot on @frood19.
      (fighting for) Positions above 10th are just as important as the top 10 for those who don’t have a point yet.

  13. Would love to see IndyCars at Laguna Seca!!

  14. It’s a tight midfield – it’s very subjective to say Mclaren have improved, because it could mean “we are better than the other teams around us” or “we aren’t falling behind to the teams around us”. I think it’s more of the latter right now. Alonso and Vandoorne had the 10th and 11th fastest laps in Silverstone, but in Paul Ricard it was 6th and 14th though Nando retired.

    My totally unscientific analysis concludes that it is a lot of Alonso wringing everything out of the car as well as some clever strategy work that has allowed Mclaren to score points the past few GPs.

Comments are closed.