The sprint in Shanghai was pleasant but needs to be included in a precise context of eventswhich at a certain point generated a lot of action on the track and which at the same time hid a lot of the potential performance of the cars, even the scale of values appears to be the usual seasonal one and unchanged.
Norris dramatic, Verstappen out for a walk
The start saw a lightning-fast sprint from Lewis Hamilton and a frankly difficult-to-understand attempt from Lando Norris, who perhaps wouldn’t have had the chance to win this Sprint anyway, but at the same time he threw away any hope right from the first corner, confirming his difficulties to be incisive in key moments. After taking the lead, Hamilton tried to find his pace, but he could do nothing with his W15, which was actually slow and complicated to drive on this track, compared to Verstappen who took the lead and soon disappeared at the horizon.
The key for Verstappen was to have a performance surplus such as to guarantee him a quick and clean overtaking on Fernando Alonso, with the Aston Martin Spaniard then having a fundamental influence on the result of the race, despite his retirement.
Alonso acts as a stopper but Sainz doesn’t pass him: the situation heats up until the clash
Once past Verstappen, Alonso finds himself in third position having to defend himself from the oncoming Sainz without even being able to use the DRS to try to keep the position, but a vicious circle is triggered between the two which characterizes much of the central phase of the race, as it is also clear from the graph. There deficiency in traction in the sections with higher lateral load noticed yesterday on the SF24 it manifests itself clearly at the exit of turn 13, the one that leads onto the long straight which constitutes the most tempting opportunity for overtaking, with Sainz’s Ferrari remaining very close to Alonso’s Aston for the entire lap but is unable to contain his momentum in that stretch. Sainz’s tires also suffered from a battle in the very first laps with Max Verstappen and the Ferrari Spaniard seems to have a rear outside the temperature window without however having the opportunity to let him breathe given the continuous brawl in which he races, with Alonso more in front slow and Perez behind under great pressure to take the position. Things continue like this and a little train forms behind Alonso which prevents us from even evaluating the race pace performances in terms of average and times, given that Sainz, Perez, Leclerc and Norris are all forced to keep the same pace behind the leader . That is until 4 laps from the end, when Sainz finally invents an overtaking by changing point of the track and even doing it on the outside of turn 7, a fast corner. Alonso, however, is not willing to suffer an overtaking of this kind and reacts with pride (even too much in our humble opinion) by clearly forcing the inside entry into the following set of curves, ending up colliding with Sainz heavily and ultimately giving free way for Perez, who takes advantage of it by performing a double overtaking that is a bit reminiscent of the final race at Silverstone in 2022. Sainz ends up in difficulty, Leclerc seems to have it to fight with Perez. The finale then sees the (physical) clash between the two Ferraris, with Leclerc passing Sainz who in turn defends himself in a slightly too impetuous manner, although this should not be too surprising given the contractual situation of Sainz, who takes to the track without a guaranteed place for the 2025 season understandably having as the first objective that of beating his teammate to maintain an important business card on the market. In the end, however, Leclerc passes and the impression from the times is that in a linear race Perez would not have flown away, unlike Verstappen.
The anterior-posterior dilemma
What emerged in this race is then the difficult compromise situation which the Shanghai track forces drivers and teams to do. On the one hand, long curves at medium speed put enormous strain on the front, which needs to be protected with an aerodynamic and mechanical balance shifted towards the front end, on the other, in overtaking and defense operations, traction plays such a fundamental role that if the balance is shifted too far to the front you end up stuck behind a slower car or defenseless in hand-to-hand battles. It is no coincidence that Perez himself opened up on the radio during the race complaining about not having enough traction, and that, according to what was reported by Sky after the race, the Mexican himself decided to make some set-up changes to his RB20 taking advantage of the open park.
Park open and qualification
And precisely on the topic of open park, we will see if and how the set-ups of the cars will change after the experience gained in the Sprint, considering that the engineers and mechanics can freely modify the single-seaters in view of qualifying. The impressions gathered must obviously be calibrated from the perspective of a race in which we start with a full tank, therefore with completely different stresses on the axles and dynamic responses. With the setups seen in the sprint Verstappen’s Red Bull was obviously absolutely dominant with Perez who instead appeared attackable by the Ferraris, second force on the track. McLaren appeared to be the third force, but the expected difficulties on the Chinese track seemed to emerge in the dry, while Mercedes clung to Hamilton’s second place, which however was achieved thanks to everything except the W15: the driver’s talent between starting and managing and the Alonso contingency which blocked a group of cars all with better potential than Brackley’s car as is also clear from the graph. We will therefore see if these impressions will be maintained in the next session or if there will be significant changes.
Tags: Chinese telemetric analysis Sprint Ferrari suffers Technical Analysis
