GP2 - Hungaroring Weekend Thread!!

[chunterer]

Well folks onto Hungary.

We know who's been the pacesetters this year but that hasn't often been reflected in race results!!!!

On paper it ought to be a dust up between Pantano, Senna and Grosjean with Di Grassi, Chandhok, Buemi, Conway, Parente, Zuber and Kobayashi sniffing at their heels?

But which one will take the honours here?

[Kai]

One would have to say Grosjean, Zuber, and di Grassi seem to be spot on the pace, with Senna & Pantano lagnuishing on the fourth row (granted it's a very tight grid!). Grosjean really needs to win tomorrow if he's going to stay in the title hunt, he's probably a bit annoyed by what happened last time out.

[kerrmanningjarv]

Who knows who will win... Grosjean will probably be penalised for something, di Grassi will be a slowpoke and Zuber will chuck it into the scenery somewhere. So I think Conway has a good chance of winning (and Petrov and Chandhok as well). Not sure if Senna and Pantano can make up a load of places with the current generation of car... storming through the field is difficult.

[chunterer]

Oh a classic line from Croft there:

"Anything can happen in the next 37 laps, so don't miss it"

Cue ad break......

Deary me...

Anyway for those not in front of a screen. 'Fatjohn' ballsed his start and slipped to 5th behind Di Grassi, Zuber, Petrov and Senna and then had a rather unecessary barging match with Pantano on lap 2 leaving the Italian spinning to the back and Seb with a strangely handling car!

Di Grassi leads with 3 secs on Zuber, then it's Petrov, Senna (blinding from 8th on the grid!), Conway, Chandhok but some peoples tyres are already going off so the pit stops are starting.

[chunterer]

Looks like Petrov's out with 18 to go.

Maldonado leads but is staying out as long as he can to try and get into the points. Aparently he's lapping almost a second quicker than Buemi who is 8th.....

Di Grassi still ahead of Zuber but they are close and i'd put money on Andreas giving it an all or nothing effort towards the end. In which case Bruno Senna currently in 3rd, could be laughing come the chequer!

Elsewhere, Parente got a stop go for speeding in pits - he had been as high as 8th. Grosjean's all over the shop.

Pantano gradually working his way back up but he won;t get any points this avo I dont think?

[chunterer]

For god's sake why isn't Pastor stopping now with only 9 laps left??!! He's almost guaranteed at least 8th place and pole for tomorrow. Tyres are now past best so don't risk another silly stack!

Correction, been in with 7 to go and rejoined in 6th, That is a sensational drive!!

[Mekola]

Di Grassi finally won... it's fantastic, he started after Montecarlo and he's now third in the stats!!! Brave move by Campos and their people to contract him
Zuber finished a solid 2nd and Bruno as 3rd shortened the advantage of Pantano to just nine points.

[chunterer]

Yes good result for Di Grassi, he had Zuber covered although as Chris Goodwin said on the ITV4 commentary, Piquet Sports clearly have a good set up at the moment so he was i the quicker car.

Maldonado has put a few dodgy races behind him with that 6th place from the back. Good stratgey to keep him out for a long time, but how he kept his tyres in such good nick inspite of the heat and running behing a lot of sower cars and passing people in the early goingbeyond me!

As you say Mekola, Senna's really piling on the pressure now in the standings. He's got the gap to Giorgio down to 9 points and with Pantano still having to do some serious work to get in the points in the morning, Senna looks odds on to close the points gap even further.

Chandhok and Conway drove good races (4th and 6th) Buemi is well placed for a win tomorrow with a 7th but another driver who's starting to show that he has decent potential is D'Ambrosio who had a good run to press Soucek for 8th, just coming off the worse.

Filippi had another disappointing race, well off the pace, he's really having some issues isn't he?

Grosjean threw away what would've been a likely top 3 result with that bad start and then struggling early on resulting in several off track excursions and that needless bump with Pantano who wont be very happy with the Frenchman for that!!

So Soucek, Buemi, Conway, Maldonado on the first 2 rows tomorrow, all of them will be hungry for the win but can the i-sport cars, Di Grassi and Zuber force theire way to the front??

Goona be verrrrrrry interesting........

[kerrmanningjarv]

Decent race... not a lot of overtaking but we've come to expect that this year... I guess the thing everyone will talk about is Pastor's storming drive, which was really impressive.

I am glad di Grassi won as I supported him last year, and was so happy when I heard he would be driving again this year... good for him.

Grosjean having another bad race - that guy is quick but so inconsistent... and the poor start ended with the Pantano incident... the net result being that Senna closed down Pantano and di Grassi passed Grosjean in the standings.

Should be a good race tomorrow with the quick guys a bit of a way back on a tight circuit .

[BootsOntheSide]

That was about as good a race as you're ever likely to see in the dry at the Hungaroring. Battles throughout the field, even if most of them didn't result in an overtake, a couple of incidents and talking points, and a few great drives - di Grassi and Maldonado especially. Pastor's gotta be favourite for the sprint win, if he can drive at that pace again.

[META4]

Congrats Bradrive

[Jackman]

For those keeping score on Herck, he really outdid himself yesterday: hit the wall coming into the pits and bent his suspension, failed to switch off the car when instructed to, resulting in the mechanic reaching in to turn the car off, kept his foot on the brake while being pushed out of the way for Nunes' stop despite the mechanic screaming at him to take his foot off the pedal, and then stepped out of the car into the path of his teammate.

Well played, sir!

[Alex K]

Maybe he doesn't speak English?

[ivanalesi]

more like may be he's one very stressed kid

[chunterer]

Well Soucek gifted Buemi the win today by going wide at turn 10 (?). Di Grassi shunted Conway on lap 2 or 3 I think it was and (got a drive thru for his troubles which took several laps to be given and subsequently taken....) Before taking it a rather annoyed Lucas proceeded to hold up Maldonado and Senna with what I believe to be a slightly bent left front wing?

Pastor pulled off with only a couple of laps left after some kind of engine problem, just as he was looking like sizing up Soucek for 2nd. Senna solid again for eventual 3rd but maybe disappointed not to have continued to make a bigger dent in Pantano's points lead as the Italian took 5th just behind the sensible driver in ART; Yamamoto.

The favoured ART guy, Grosjean again had a scrappy race locking up, going wide and raising eyebrows by taking another driver off track, this time Parente. Trying to force his way up towards the points the pair were battling for 13th or something. Seb had done Alvaro up the inside into turn 1 but gone wide allowing Parente back alongside but on the outside heaing into turn 2 , but Grosjean decided to fight the line and the resulting collision meant Parente was despached ff on the outside!

Grosjean is fast but needs to calm down. If he can just do that then it's obvious he will be a more consistent contender next season as 2008 is lost for him now real.

[Russfeld]

I don't understand why people care about Herck one way or the other. He's a non-entity.

Buemi however, completely underwhelms me.

[chunterer]

Buemi is an interesting case. He's always at the periphery of the top 6 or 8 on saturday's almost as if he knows he can't qualify or race for the win on Saturday but can possibly do it on the Sunday? That may be down to Arden being realistic at the moment aboout their ultimate chances and trying to be clever on strategy as long as their main driver doesn't come a cropper during Saturday's race of course!!?

Overall though he looks like Villa did last year....

Maybe a driver just needs to be in an ART, RE, Campos, I-Sport or Piquet run car to be in with a genuine chance of a 'competitive' win at the moment?

[META4]

Good result for Sakon Yamamoto, 4th for his second Race week end , not bad i guess

[chunterer]

Felt sorry for Maldonado today. He produced one of those performances yesterday that he is capable of if only more consistently?

Today he was a solid with 2nd a possibility when reliability took him out.

There is definite talent there but Zuber has generally had the upper hand recently which is a trend Pastor really needs to halt if he's to keep his career seriously going forward.

Jerome D'Ambrosio is impressing me. The quality of the field and the number of truly front running cars means that it's difficult for anyone to come in and do a good job in their first year, if their not driving for ART, I-Sport, RE, Campos, or maybe Piquet now as well, but he's shown flashes that suggest to me that with this years's experience under his belt, he could be a title contender next season in the right team. Maybe that could still be DAMS if they can just find that little extra on the engineering side?

[Bleu]

d'Ambrosio has been quite unlucky with feature races, three times 9th. I mean, it's huge difference in this series to finish 8th or 9th, as 8th place gives pole for race 2.

Just like in Euro F3 or WTCC.

[bradrive]

[QUOTE=Maybe a driver just needs to be in an ART, RE, Campos, I-Sport or Piquet run car to be in with a genuine chance of a 'competitive' win at the moment?[/QUOTE]

Generally in GP2 the influence of the car on the result of a driver is overestimated.
GP2 is a series with single chassis/engine/gearbox/tyre suppliers. Consider that all chassis/gearboxes have identical parts, the freedom of the teams to modify these parts is zero. Apart from Monaco (where everybody is running on a different mandatory max downforce aero configuration), Monza (where everybody is running min downforce) and Valencia/Spa (mid downforce)everybody is allways using max downforce (the car's max downforce is artificially limited). Unlike in Euro F3 (where teams can use different products (3,4,5 or 6 dampers per car), in GP2 dampers are not free (and the way to tune them is also restricted a lot).
All the teams employ experienced engineers and nobody is doing "strange" things. As a consequence the cars are setup not too differently by the
teams.
The most significant variable in the car/gearbox/engine/tyre package is the engine, partly because they loose more power from "fresh" to "in need of a rebuild" than what is considered normal in a single spec formula and partly because the they are not even equal when freshly rebuilt. The teams never know how fresh the engines from the competitiors are and try to figure it out by observing the aero settings of the competition and comparing these with topspeed measurments. Influence of the engine on laptime is by far the biggest variable (up to 0.5secs from rebuilt to in need of rebuilt).
The difference in laptime comes mainly from (apart from obviously not all drivers having the same pure raw speed) how many times the drivers has raced on the circuits, where GP2 runs, e.g. how many years he has spent in GP2. This has an enourmous effect of how to get the grip from the tyres in QP.
Also the brakes are very difficult to manage. The way the driver is applying the brake force has the singlest most big effect on whether he locks the brakes on the front or on the rear. The way he brakes in a warmup/cooldown lap has a huge effect on brakebalance in the following lap (the friction material is far inferior to the one used in F1), which has a big effect on confidence on a qualifying lap. The GP2 brakes are very difficult to understand and the driver (not the team) makes the big difference.
Where the team does make a difference is in car preparation. Ensure a consistent gearbox/clutch operation is the thing to strieve for (and it is not simple, e.g. more complicated than in F1 or in any other single spec formulas).
The cars have a extremly heavy steering (F1 has powerassisted steering, GP2 not). Generally drivers underestimate the amount of physical preperation involved to race in GP2 in their 1st. season.
So be careful in judging drivers.

[bradrive]

Originally Posted by META4

Congrats Bradrive

Thks

[Jackman]

Two examples that bradrive could have given from his own experience: look at the difference that Pantano made when he came onboard at the time that the team also made a big investment in itself, and then the difference this year between Hanley (who is a decent driver but couldn't qualify, for many of the reasons given above) and di Grassi in the same car.

[bradrive]

Originally Posted by Jackman

Two examples that bradrive could have given from his own experience: look at the difference that Pantano made when he came onboard at the time that the team also made a big investment in itself, and then the difference this year between Hanley (who is a decent driver but couldn't qualify, for many of the reasons given above) and di Grassi in the same car.

Correct, Hanley has equal or more raw speed compared with Petrov, but he could not put together a quick QP lap due to his lack of knowledge of how to manage the brakes. This knowledge you can only get in racing a GP2 car. This partly justifies why quick "1st year GP2 drivers" as Grosjean or Parente are not consistently quick.
If you do not have confidence in the brakes you cannot attack at the limit as required in QP. Obviously some drivers learn quicker (being probably a bit more intelligent than others) than others.

[META4]

With obviously Fillipi, Javier Villa is also very disapointing this Year. Not sure if AOB will support him for a 4th season