Carlos Sainz Jnr, McLaren, Circuit de Catalunya, 2019

Sainz certain McLaren’s rivals “can go much faster” despite topping times

2019 F1 season

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Carlos Sainz Jnr believes McLaren’s rivals are capable of lapping much quicker than the new benchmark lap time he established in today’s test at the Circuit de Catalunya.

Sainz’s 1’17.144 is the quickest lap of testing so far and faster than anything seen in pre-season testing last year. But he has no doubt their rivals could beat it.

“A 17.1 around Barcelona is fast but I guess teams like Red Bull, Ferrari can go much faster than that,” said Sainz.

He believes the team still has “big areas of improvement” with its MCL34.

“The important stuff to come out of this seven or eight days I think that every time I’ve been on the track I think the car has been progressing. The car balance has got better over the last few days and it’s allowing us to extract a bit more from it.

“The team is working well. We are understanding the underlying balance issues and we are correcting therm little by little.

“But still there’s a long season ahead and there’s still big areas of improvement where we need to keep working. We’re still not where we want to be is definitely the right answer. We need to keep working hard.”

Sainz, who will use Renault power for the third year in a row this season, was cautiously positive about the gains they have made.

“It feels like a good step,” he said. “That’s the only thing I can say because until anyone turns up the engines in Australia and we see the top speeds it’s going to be very difficult to find out how good the step is, or if the others have done a step as big as we have done.”

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2019 F1 season

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11 comments on “Sainz certain McLaren’s rivals “can go much faster” despite topping times”

  1. Is McLaren starting to become the new Mercedes now? Talking up the opposition, only to demolish them come Australia as they take a 1-2? Yeah…No. They’re probably being genuine.

    1. @mashiat

      No. They’re probably being genuine.

      LMAO

    2. Nice one, but to be fair to McLaren, that time altough it doesn’t mean very much for the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari or RedBull, it means a lot for the midfield teams. In a season where the technical changes were supposed to set the aero back and make cars 1.5 sec slower, to be able to beat the 2018 test time is not a small feat for McLaren. Not sure many of the midfield teams can beat this time on a C4 tire, after all it’s only 1 sec shy of HAM’s pole time last year. But, as always, we can’t read anything into it just yet.

  2. Well, considering last year’s qualifying time was 1:16.173 I’m sure he’s right.

  3. I think it’s fair to say that a couple of teams will turn up their motors and do a couple of true quali runs (albeit possibly with higher fuel) before testing is over.

    Then we might see a small part of how things actually stand.

    To go to Melbourne without testing qualy engine modes would be somewhat dangerous.

    It seems though that most teams are at this stage focused on getting mileage – Renault, Ferrari and Merc in particular seem to be racking up as many laps as they can without really showing their hands.

    1. petebaldwin (@)
      28th February 2019, 3:17

      They can do a quali lap on low fuel but bail out of it in the last corner. I’d love to see the fastest sector times so far because I think that would paint a different picture to what we’re seeing….

    2. @dbradock
      It’s always the last two days when the top teams put in their low fuel and soft compound runs. I’m guessing today afternoon onwards we’ll see the lap times tumble.

    3. They don’t need to do quali runs with party modes during the testing because they can do that in the engine dyno. The engine dynos are pretty advanced machines nowadays and they can run complete qualifying and race session simulations using the real engines. Things like airflow and heating/cooling of course need to be verified on track just like all aerodynamics but you don’t need an actual qualifying lap with party mode for it unless you want to check for engine wear and find problems but then again a lot of that work has already been done before the car has driven an inch. As far as I know honda is the only one that still uses/used static engine dynos whereas the others use dynos that can move to create g-force which change the way liquids move inside the engine and how the fuel pickups work etc…

      Here is one that porsche used some years ago for their road cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv53RbvgfGc

      1. @socksolid Certainly a good help but still far from reality. A bit misleading when video states that it replicates the G-forces which is mostly wrong as all it does is replicate the tilt but with 0G. I guess nothing beats a real world test.

        1. The tilt in that specific engine dyno does simulate the g forces when you go through corners, brake and accelerate and go through bumps. The tilting changes the direction of the resultant total force of gravity which can be useful for validating your fluid dynamics data (where does the oil go inside the engine, where does the fuel go in fuel tank, do the pumps work when the fluid moves to different place) just like driving on the track is good for validating your aerodynamic data (where the air goes).

          Because both are results of engineering that has been done using physical simulations on a computer. Sure the engine dyno probably can only do 1g of acceleration but it can do that in all directions which really is more important than how much total g-force it can generate. The oil in the engine for example ends in the same place whether it is 1g or 7g as long as the direction of that acceleration is the same. That difference sounds like a lot but it is not as the oil goes accelerations that are many magnitudes higher at different parts of the engine.

  4. Has anyone read the article on Autosport which goes on to say that Renault is at the bottom of the ‘Real F1 Ladder’ ?

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