What the hell did Williams do under the hood? That was an absolutely impressive run for them.
1.6s front to back and people complain about F1 not being close or not offering good racing. People used to finish 5 laps down and qualify 4s off the pace.
To be fair, qualifying is typically thrilling. It’s just race pace gaps that are brutal. 0.7sec off the pace in a race is rough over 70 odd laps.
Yeah, the 107% rule used to be quite tough for some teams.
I thought merc brought upgrades…well I’m sure next set of upgrades™ will get us back to the front 🤦♂️
Williams’s go faster livery clearly working, they should stick with it!
Alonso manages to keep tumbling down the order in every team he settles at
His bad luck is impressive
To be fair this is practice and they’ve had maybe 2 mediocre races lmao.
I think he made the most out of the quick AM car in the early season. It’s rough seeing them get caught up and probably passed though.
There was so much hype around AM’s 2023 car being a great platform for in-season development and yet it feels like they’ve stood still. It was said that AM didn’t understand their W10 clone well enough to develop it further and I’m wondering if that’s happening again.
They have way more and better people working at the car now than they had during the Pink Mercedes days, so I don’t think it’s that simple.
The first place to look is money, I think - the budget cap. It’s possible they spent a majority of their available development budget for the season over the winter just to get this platform ready.
Let’s also look at RB’s advantage and be realistic. From the start AM have said they want to be winning races in a couple of years, not this year. Considering the gap, trying to spend money on development for this year is honestly just wasteful. Nobody is going to catch Red Bull and if AM were actually trying to they’d be making a mistake.
All development should focus on next year and beyond. If any of that can be translated to upgrades that can be fitted immediately then great, but the only priority should be the future, as sad as that will be for the remaining races of this season.
Now that AM train has died down I think we can board the Williams hypetrain Albono racewin by winter lets go
