Kvyat’s fourth place not down to luck – Tost

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In the round-up: AlphaTauri team boss Franz Tost has said that Daniil Kvyat’s fourth place finish at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix was down to team strategy and on-track overtaking, rather than something gifted by luck.

What they say

Kvyat’s fourth place, AlphaTauri’s second-best result of the year after Pierre Gasly’s Monza win, was a potentially vital result for the driver who is yet to be confirmed on the grid for the 2021 F1 season.

Tost said that the performance, gained via a run of overtakes by Kvyat on fresh tyres following the Safety Car period, was not down to luck but the team managing strategy better than their rivals:

Let me say it in this way: we were not lucky. We took the right decision because all the other teams could have done the same.

Some of them did it, some not and we did it. We got something out of it, three places, because he was seventh and afterwards he was fourth. He overtook Perez, Leclerc and Albon and finished in fourth position just behind Ricciardo. And with more laps to go I think he would have had a good chance to overtake him, too.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

After another round of F1 Esports this week, Mark Zastrov notes Yuki Tsunoda comparing the feeling of seeing mechanics remove tyre blankets from an F1 car in real life, something he’d only previously seen in the Codemasters games:

I love how he relates the experience of watching the tyre blankets come off to the Codemasters games.

This just a few weeks after Lewis told Mick Schumacher he related to his father by playing as him in Geoff Crammond’s GP2. It shows just how important those games are to firing the imaginations of fans, drivers, and mechanics, young and old, and giving us an opportunity to interact with the sport in a way we never could in real life.
Mark Zastrov

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Hazel Southwell
Hazel is a motorsport and automotive journalist with a particular interest in hybrid systems, electrification, batteries and new fuel technologies....

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34 comments on “Kvyat’s fourth place not down to luck – Tost”

  1. Really agree with COTD.
    I had the original Geoff Crammond GP game on an Amiga. I still have the manual today. For an 8 year old, it was like a bible. The amount of info about car setup, driving style, etc was ahead of its time for a game and really indoctrinated me in the technical side of F1. Then GP2 came and opened me up to the world of the modding community, so yeah, I really appreciate those games.

    1. Geoff Crammond still makes the best F1 games even if they are now over 15 or so years old.

  2. Thanks for the COTD, @hazelsouthwell! :)

    1. Thanks for the CotD @markzastrow!

  3. There clearly is an element of luck for Kvyat taking P4 of course. If Gasly and Verstappen had made it to the end of the race he would more likely have finished on P6 instead.

    On the other hand, it does show that Perez could also have done better with this same strategy.

    Leclerc and Albon gambled on staying on their old tyres and lost out heavily. So who’s to say Perez would have done better with that one, when Kvyat showed that switching to softs did work.

    1. Yeah, it definitely seemed like a gamble to switch to new tyres, before we knew the outcome. Often, track position is king and the advantage of a fresh tyre is largely negated by the loss of downforce of being behind another car. And once the tyres of the car in front warm up, that advantage tends to disappear. So usually the driver in rear has a very brief period where they have a relatively small advantage, which is often not enough to compensate for the loss of places due to a pit stop.

      Of course, in hindsight it is clear that the advantage was larger than average on this track, but clearly the teams didn’t know that at the time, or they would have all pitted.

      1. @aapje The funny thing is that Perez felt this strategy was a huge mistake. While for Kvyat it’s described as a great strategy that others could have chosen as well.

        1. @f1osaurus

          Perez’ driving style might have hurt him here, as he’s known to be easy on his tyres, but perhaps that means that he let his fresh tyres cool off too much.

          1. @aapje Could be yes. He would have been in a lot more trouble if he had continued on the harder tyres then though.

    2. @f1osaurus Albon lost out heavily, but Leclerc got overtaken by Kvyat only, so only lost a single position, while Ricciardo, of course, managed to stay third until the end.

      1. @jerejj Well Leclerc was a lot slower. But true Ricciardo was also on the strategy with Leclerc and Albon and did a lot better.

        While Kvyat did a huge lot better than Perez on the softs.

  4. Interesting to see that Mercedes is claiming to help the disadvantaged by investing in schooling in London, while the London metropolitan area is an extremely wealthy area, generating 1/3th of the UK’s GDP. What about those in the much poorer, entire rest of the UK?

    Also, fact is that white working class boys are doing the worst in the UK. Only 13% of white boys entitled to free meals end up benefiting from higher education, which is half! of the next worst performing group, black Caribbean boys at 27%. Then we have Pakistani boys at 42%, black Africans at 51% and Chinese boys at 66%. And girls do better than boys in every ethnic group.

    So this focus on getting as many non-white people in that school and the extra opportunities given to girls, by having a girl-only school, but not (also) a boy-only school, is ignoring the most educationally disadvantaged group. Yet facts are clearly not of interest to those in charge of such things, who instead prefer to act on prejudice.

    1. They are investing in parts of the city where poorer kids have trouble making it along especially because things there are expensive though @aapje.

      And the focus is on black, asian backgrounds AND those disadvantaged – which means poorer white kids too.

      1. Tower Hamlets is the poorest borough in London on 3 of the 5 measurements, and ranked 3rd worst borough overall. Those on free school meals (therefore on benefits) is in excess of 40% so over twice the national average.
        No idea where the non white bit came in. Its a multi ethnic area but I’m pretty sure they don’t exclude by colour. Unless you know differently?
        Putting aside the revelation that a girls school doesn’t have boys, not sure why you have ignored the other two Mulberry establishments that are mixed.
        And they are probably working with Mulberry because of location, the pupils are high achievers, its STEM orientated and has the resources and skills to deliver.
        I assume this partnership is being driven by the issue you highlighted. Why are all these white boys doing poorly at the STEM entry level yet seem to have the vast majority of the STEM jobs at the end of the process?

        1. That was in reply to Aapje

        2. Thanks for filling in some well needed facts there Ian.

        3. @ian dearing

          Tower Hamlets is part of Inner London, which as I noted in my comment to bascb, actually has relatively high educational achievement, for the poor kids that live there.

          Putting aside the revelation that a girls school doesn’t have boys, not sure why you have ignored the other two Mulberry establishments that are mixed.

          Because if you set aside one school for only girls, but don’t also set aside a school for boys, then girls have more opportunities. Note that research has found that students at single-gender schools perform better academically, so girls get this advantage, but boys do not. This increases the already existing educational gap between boys and girls.

          Not sure why you expect me to give credit for the mixed schools. If a company tells you that you that they discriminate against black people at the London office, but not at the York office, would be be fine with that? After all, black people would then still have a place where they are not discriminated against.

          Its a multi ethnic area but I’m pretty sure they don’t exclude by colour.

          I interpret this as a claim that they do affirmative action:

          A lot of hard work over many years has gone into placing students – the majority of whom are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic and disadvantaged backgrounds – at the forefront of STEM industries, but this hasn’t moved fast enough. The Mulberry STEM Academy takes explicit, positive action to address this.

          Affirmative action is on shakier ground in the UK than in the US, where the supreme court has explicitly allowed racial discrimination for a limited period. Yet even in the US the universities are being devious about it. It’s pretty clear by the outcome, where the percentages of students admitted from each ethnic group closely matches the percentage of the population from that ethnic group, that they are using quotas. Yet instead of openly saying so, they are marking Asian students (who are most discriminated against in the US) as having poor personalities based on their applications, even though in person evaluations note no such deficiency. Note that this is the same method they used in the past to discriminate against Jews, after they first wanted to explicitly use quotas, but decided against it. Lots of applications by Jews were instead deemed to show ‘poor character’ and denied on that ground.

          So it’s then a bit unreasonable to expect me to find evidence of Mulberry explicitly stating that they discriminate, when saying this would open them up to lawsuits. I think that the words “explicit, positive action” make it clear enough that they are not merely content with their student body being representative of their surroundings.

          Why are all these white boys doing poorly at the STEM entry level yet seem to have the vast majority of the STEM jobs at the end of the process?

          I was talking about poor white boys, who surely don’t end up with that many academic STEM jobs, although they might be overrepresented among simple mechanics. Yet as you note, Mulberry is for high achievers, not simple mechanics and such.

      2. @bascb

        One of the poorest regions in London is Inner London, where 45% of children live below the poverty line. Yet nearly half the children eligible for free school meals in Inner London go on to higher education, versus 26% of children eligible for free school meals who live outside of London.

        So apparently, the expense of living in London is not actually detrimental to upward mobility. I bet that the poverty in London is far more temporary than outside of it. There is a lot of migration to London and migrants tend to have strong upward mobility, so they need extra help far less than those with generational poverty.

        Of course, companies who advertise through charity tend to like to push an open door, since it means that it’s not actually necessary to improve things. They can get credit for successes that would happen without their involvement, while trying to actually make a change often fails. If it was easy to do so, it would usually already have been done.

        And the focus is on black, asian backgrounds AND those disadvantaged – which means poorer white kids too.

        I don’t believe you. I constantly see ‘social justice’ leftists make claims that they do so and yet they then adopt policies that either don’t help poor white people or actually disadvantage them. Often, they do a sleight of hand where they claim to want to help the economically disadvantaged, but they then classify entire ethnic groups as economically advantaged or disadvantaged. Their policies then treat everyone from these groups according to this classification, stereotyping people, rather than looking at the actual situation of the individual.

        For example, the children of the Obama’s get a huge leg up when applying to American universities that use Affirmative Action, even though they have a net worth of over a 100 million dollars, yet the kids of a poor Appalachian miner actually have it harder during the application process due to their ‘advantaged’ ethnicity. Note that some of the poorest communities in the US are mostly made up of Appalachian white people.

        Affirmative Action policies seem to work this way everywhere, including in the UK, so this is not an American fluke.

        Affirmative Action is also very sensitive to being gamed by how they choose to group people. Asians on the whole have slightly lower incomes in the UK than white Brits, but Indian and Chinese Brits actually substantially outearn white Brits, while Pakistani and Bangladeshi Brits earn substantially less. Yet by (falsely) treating Asians as one ethnicity with one level of privilege, Chinese Brits who already do very well get an additional leg up, which just increases inequality of opportunity.

        1. This is such nonsense, what motivation would they have for that.

          I don’t believe you. I constantly see ‘social justice’ leftists make claims that they do so and yet they then adopt policies that either don’t help poor white people or actually disadvantage them.

          Just go out of your bubble and look at reality instead of what you get feeded.

          1. @bascb

            This is such nonsense

            And yet I support my claims with a large number of verifiable facts that you apparently cannot rebut, while you merely made incorrect claims in your rebuttal to me.

            Again, fact is that if you want to help the most academically disadvantaged, you need to help poor people outside of London. And if you insist on separating people out by ethnicity and gender, then you need to focus most on poor white boys outside of London, who are the most academically disadvantaged.

            what motivation would they have for that.

            I think that it’s sufficient for me to demonstrate that people like you claim that they want to help the most disadvantaged people and yet when presented with hard evidence that your preferred policies are not beneficial to those who are most disadvantaged, are not open to changing those policies.

            I can’t really know why you have this inconsistency.

            Just go out of your bubble and look at reality instead of what you get feeded.

            The irony.

        2. @aapje you claim that those are “verifiable facts”, but you have not provided any sources for those claims and some of those figures appear to be rather inconsistent with previously published data from the Department for Education (e.g. in the report “Lessons from London schools for attainment gaps and social mobility”, 2014, the figures for those in inner London who were receiving free school meals, which you refer to, was noticeably lower than the figures you are claiming). There are also questions over what exactly you are classing as “Inner London”, given that you are lumping in some of the wealthiest boroughs in London – for example, places like Westminster – into that rather crude headline.

          Furthermore, when you say that “nearly half the children eligible for free school meals in Inner London go on to higher education”, that does rather skim over what exactly is classified as higher education and what those individuals are actually studying at that level.

          In the case of Tower Hamlets, those poorer students are not doing better than average when it comes to acceptance to studying STEM subjects. It is still the case that those students coming from an impoverished background will have a lower success rate for being accepted for those subjects – they’re not as heavily disadvantaged as other boroughs, but that doesn’t mean that they are not still at a disadvantage.

          1. @Anon

            I took the relevant figures from here:

            https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lost-boys-the-white-working-class-is-being-left-behind
            https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8850915/PROFESSOR-MATTHEW-GOODWIN-White-working-class-boys-deprived-Britain.html

            These articles are from 2020.

            There are also questions over what exactly you are classing as “Inner London”, given that you are lumping in some of the wealthiest boroughs in London – for example, places like Westminster – into that rather crude headline.

            I don’t see how that would play a role, as I’m specifically looking at the prospects of kids eligible for free meals, so that would exclude the non-poor.

            In the case of Tower Hamlets, those poorer students are not doing better than average when it comes to acceptance to studying STEM subjects.

            I primarily care about people having a somewhat similar chance to be successful. Ultimately, I’m not illiberal, so I’m fine with people making different choices, also when they make choices similar to others of their gender, ethnicity, disability status, character, etc, etc. I recognize that it is often claimed that there are huge barriers to entry and that there is little free choice here, but those claims seem to be very much at odds with the evidence.

            Of course you may consider it more important that there are more black people in STEM and such, than to help those with least opportunity of moving up. Lots of people who consider themselves to be on the left seem to have that preference nowadays. It’s not my preference.

          2. @aapje the concern is that you are using articles from the Daily Mail, an organisation which former journalists have described it as a propaganda machine that is quite happy to falsify or manipulate information to push a hard right political agenda – it is often considered to be so biased and unreliable these days that there are now several organisations that classify it as a propaganda editorial, not a newspaper.

            Similarly, that particular professor is also rather noted for tacking quite far to the political right and who associates with individuals who have promoted extreme right wing views (such as promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about covid-19).

            Therefore, most would be rather suspicious about accepting an article from an individual and organisations that will be pushing a view that is designed to appeal to individuals like yourself.

          3. @anon

            Ad hominem.

        3. Berry people with nonsense, call them facts and repeat that process over and over again.
          After some time others are getting tired of countering these nonsense and “you win”.
          Trump method…

          1. @erikje

            Who are the berry people?

            I can understand why people like you get tired of being unable to counter my real facts with your truthiness. It’s rather funny that you think that I’m being Trump-like here, though.

  5. The tweet about the super license points system is something that got covered at the time of announcing it back in 2015, and that quite a few drivers would’ve got their F1 debuts delayed had it existed earlier.

  6. I still think the super license point system was (Like many things in F1) an unnecessary knee jerk reaction to fix a problem that in reality wasn’t really a problem.

    All the complaining about Max Verstappen been able to go from F3 to F1 at age 17 & not been ready, Good enough or some sort of danger were all disproven within a few laps of him been on track in an F1 car & I think he’s easily been one of the most exciting things about F1 the past few years.

    I also don’t think it’s a good judge of talent, Especially given how weighted it is towards the FIA backed categories that they want to be the ladder to F1. If a driver is good enough then they are good enough regardless of what path they may end up taking & that should be the only consideration to handing them a super licence or not.

    1. @stefmeister Verstappen did a lot of crashing at t he beginning though. It really makes sense that drivers first go through a season of F2. Or show some other references for being able to sustain a title fight.

      1. Verstappen did a lot of crashing at t he beginning

        well not really, but some wanted to created that image. “crashing” definition is a bit strange for some..

  7. I South Africa they have what they call affirmitive action where black people will rather get the job due to skill colour. 26 years after aparteid was kicked out. Is that a answer for Britain?

    1. An answer to what?

      Such a policy has all kinds of repercussions. For example, having higher standards for one race than for another, means that the worst performing people will disproportionately be of the race that got held to a lower standard. So people will then be implicitly taught to expect less from people of that race.

      So it may work to get (somewhat) equal representation, but it can actually increase prejudice at the same time.

  8. Willem Cecchi (@)
    6th November 2020, 12:18

    Re. Comment of the day. The importance of F1 games being available to the public can’t be overstated.

    I grew up watching only F1 and very little other sport. My adoration of F1 switched to football when I started playing FIFA in the mid 00’s and I only returned to following F1 again after the mainstream Codemasters games returned in 2010.

    I wonder how the resumption of BTCC games in 2022 will impact the following.

  9. I was very happy for Daniil. He had a great race.

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