Hungary 2010: Webber's 43 laps on super soft tires
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It was amazing to watch Webber do 43 laps (or was it 42?) on the super softs which everybody ditched after 10-15 laps. I have not seen many discussions on this. Webber drove superb, he deserved this win and I expect now he is #1 at RedBull. I am sure Vettel and others are kicking themselves for not sticking with the tires longer.
Oh yeah, a new member here, a Ferrari fan and I am now rooting for Massa after what happened in Germany.
Yh, seemed like the early stages set him up to be able to do that. Getting stuck behind Alonso forcing him to run the car nearly 1sec/lap slower than he might have treated the tires well, enabling him to go on to extract the maximum life from them.
I thought he’d be lucky to get points after the safety car, but was blown away at how he continued to set such fast times so late in the stint too.
I don’t think it was that particularly special, Martin Brundle said in the commentary that the teams believed the super softs could go the whole race distance!!
Mclaren pitted Button as a strategy move because Rubens was on the mediums and they wanted to try and get ahead of him in the only way possible in modern F1, i.e in the pits! Most of the other teams pitted as a reaction to the safety car, not because the tyres had gone off.
Red Bull split their driver strategy by pitting Vettel as he had a huge lead and was sure to come out very near the front and letting Webber stay out during the SC and getting the lead. I’m sure that the tyres would have lasted longer if needed and they pitted him on lap 43 as he had built up enough of a lead to pit without losing the lead.
I thought it was quite good. The tyres probably could have lasted until the end (if the rules had allowed that of course) but I don’t think they would have been in a very good state at all.
I thought what was the most impressive part though was that Webber was banging out the exact laptimes he needed to. The RBR was by far the quickest car that weekend but Mark had been the slower driver and not completely on it until then but he ended the race with the job done and a quicker average laptime than Seb.
Also welcome nutsandbolts, it’s very nice to have another Massa and Ferrari fan here! :)
I think it was really impressive driving from Webber doing almost 24 seconds in about 22 laps with Alonso chasing as best as he could. But from the time differences and comments from the team, i think the tyres would not have last much longer at that speed (Webber said the left front was very bad in the last 2 laps and the time differences were down to about 0.5 seconds).
Good points guys! Thanks for the welcome Steph, good to know there are other Massa/Ferrari fans here.
Right, Webber did say his front left was almost gone when he came in. So yeah I think he could not have gone much longer without starting to loose time at some point. I guess it was the knee-jerk reaction to SC people pitted and I guess Webber was left out since they did not want to stack them at the pits. In the past I have seen this kind of driving from Schumacher so many times. Webber loved it, when he lapped Schumacher he had to call in say it felt good.
Anyhow, Martin Brundle comments on tires, yeah we do not have BBC F1 here, I wish we did. We watch F1 on Speed channel, it is not so bad but a lot of times I notice things during the race the commentators never mention or may be notice. There are a lot of things to talk about for the commentators to cover in detail, but no such luck.
If anything, it told us that ‘super-soft’ is something of a misnomer. Perhaps the Japanese for ‘not very’ was mis-translated as ‘super’?
In some previous races it was nice to see some people not reaction to cars behind them pitting for fresh rubber. This showed in some cases that the supersoft was faster than the fresh hard rubbers. It does depend from track to track when what is best. But we might get more of this actions soon.
And let’s hope next year tyres will open up more variation in strategy!
Why do all the teams pit so early? Kobyashi showed you can race a whole lap on some tyres so why do people try and do about 10 laps on tyres that can do much much much longer.
Tommy, it’s because in many cases fresh rubber will be faster, so you can jump the car(s) in front of you if you are pretty close. So it’s a case of being the first to do it.
Button did almost the whole Aus GP on a set of Softs, so to see a set of super softs last 43 laps wasn’t that much of a surprise for me…
“At the Hungaroring Mark Webber completed 75% of the race on the softer Bridgestone compound. Speaking about Webber’s strategy Felipe Massa said: ‘At the time, we opted for a double pit stop, with me coming in after Fernando, so why did we do this, instead of do what the winner Mark Webber did and just keep going on the soft tyres for longer? What Webber did was right, but only because of the pace he had in his car which allowed him to build up enough of a lead to pit without losing first place. This was the only reason and it would not have worked for us'”
http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/240497/massa-webber-s-strategy-wouldn-t-work-for-us/
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