Quote:
Originally Posted by TF110
I don't see how you're suggesting that. You don't have to look far to see it wasn't just me that thought they would be faster. Motorsport.com article Jenson Button said he expects to be in the teens during the race. Rebellion was expecting to be there based on going faster than the test day. When two teams expect to be in the teens and are not, I think that's reason enough for 'people to expect' them to be faster than what the were. They didn't even reach the times they did in the test day which was 3:19.6 and the track clearly got better. I don't know why but I was disappointed they couldn't even get that pace. Maybe they went backwards in terms of setup. We did hear some complaints in the race from the Rebellion drivers. There was multiple 3:20 laps but none broke that barrier.
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I suggest it because it's completely unrealistic. They can say they'll be in the teens, but that'd require a step in performance that'd be hard for a manufacturer to accomplish, nevermind privateer, and with no testing in between.
The test day is almost ideal conditions. Similar to qualifying you've got a half-empty track as half the grid is in the pits at any one time. You get nice clear runs. That's where these qualifying times come from. Then add in a qualifying simulation and that's where you're getting the 3:18s from.
Come race day, you're not on qualifying runs, you spend the time on new tyres with a full tank, and you've got an entire grid of 60 cars to deal with as traffic. As said, the traffic is a bigger killer for the non-hybrids because they don't have the incredible torque to help them. You're not going to get qualifying style times in that situation, no matter what.
The Toyota dropped off 2-3 seconds from its qualifying time, which is about normal. The LMP1 non-hybrids did too. Why would we expect anything different?
Whilst I understand being disappointed that they weren't closer, it shouldn't be surprising. Any hope of them being closer required a massive jump in performance from Spa - not only to gain back 2 laps over 6 hours, but to also make up the extra from the pegging back they got after Spa. That's not going to happen for any private team. You're basically asking them to close the gap to a factory team, by several seconds, whilst being given less fuel to work with than they had previously. I don't know why anyone expected the gap to come down?
Again I'm not saying Rebellion and SMP should be nagging the back of the Toyotas. That's a totally different discussion. But they said they'd get them within half a second and made changes contrary to achieving this. The result was very very predictable. So unless there is a huge swing for Silverstone, then this is what we'll have again.
But again, the plus side is nobody sand bagged. ACO said anyone faster than Toyota would get a penalty and that's just an anti-sand rule really. Nobody hid anything and we knew what everyone had. It's a refreshing change from GTE really. So now if they really want to balance it, we have a perfect baseline to use.