Maybe, but Max has the benefit of a rookie driver making the car look difficult. I'm sure it is, but the McLaren bites, too. But I think we have two really good drivers who have a handle on it. Lawson does't need anyone else piling on, but imo, he'd have fared no better in the McLaren. After all, we were told that the Red Bull was made to be easier to drive this year.
This is wild, hahahaha. Lawson drove last year too, in a different car, and made Q2 on every occasion iirc and scored points.
Nothing suggests that he would be P20 in the McLaren, same as nothing suggests the Red Bull has been made easier to drive. Wache actually said they specifically were not doing this.
Don't know why you say that, Wache said specifically that they WERE doing that - that they left performance on the table to widen its performance zone and make it easier to handle, and that was the entire point of their winter development. Maybe they failed, but if so, then they failed to develop the car at all over the winter, which is pretty damning. The car should be easier to drive than last year.
“What we did this year, is to maybe reduce the complete potential of the car, the peakiness, but giving a more easy way to use by the driver – that’s what our main purpose was, especially on the entry of the corner,” Wache said. “It’s not as simple as that, because it’s a characteristic that the peak of downforce is not only on one dimension. It’s a multi-dimensional system that is not only downforce – it is also suspension-wise and what the kinematic is doing, but is an overall car characteristic of how the driver feels.
“But, fundamentally, it’s exactly that – reduce the overall potential in grip and capacity of the car to make it more flat.
“That’s what we are seeing at the moment.
“Last year, we had a quite difficult car and, to rebalance it, it would put you in a corner in terms of what you could do.
“Now it is giving us a wider range of setups that we have to explore.
“And it will take time to see what the best compromise is, and the compromise could be quite different from track to track, because it gives us a lot more freedom.”
Wache added that the work done on the RB21 was more extensive than the “patch-up” job it did on the RB20 which saw Verstappen add two GP wins late on in the 2024 campaign.
“[It was] a patch to reduce the potential a bit, make it a little bit wider, but it was a small patch,” he said.
“Now we did the full concept of the car in this direction.”
It's McLaren who did the opposite, and we know that from both drivers and from Stella. Is it as difficult as the Red Bull? No way to know, but the Mclaren certainly doesn't qualify as tame. Lawson's performance last year only shows that he can handle a tame car, and his performance this year, relative to last, shows that he's not adaptable enough at this point in his career to handle a difficult car. We're also well aware of Lando's ability to drive around problems (vs Ricciardo), and the same for Oscar, who was equally at home in the McLaren from the start. Lawson's performance at RB, btw, was overall quite similar to Danny's, vs Tsunoda (Lawson 20% vs Danny 27% outscoring Tsunoda). We'll see soon enough if Tsunoda is more adaptable, but we've seen nothing that says Lawson would be adaptable enough to fare any better in this year's McLaren vs the Red Bull.
McLaren have a very high performing but tricky car, and we're fortunate to have two very adaptable drivers who can keep it under control.
But you guys go ahead blaming Max's mistakes on his car while blaming McLaren's on the drivers.
Edited by pup, 28 March 2025 - 16:42.
