I agree, Max is a superior driver to Perez, who remains a decent fellah to have in your seat, that’s clear. However Perez tends to listen to engineer suggestions about varying his pace and tyre management etc., Max less so it seems!
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From what I have heard and read, Max, like Lewis, is very much a contributor to the teams strategy and setting up the car and such. So I wonder how much it is disregard of some orders vs a symbiosis between him and his team. I can imagine if he binned the car due to being opinionated it would be a different story but in the current situation I would imagine the team being totally OK with him disagreeing with some orders and ending up with the results he’s been having.
But I am no motor racer so just my opinion based on the info available.
I think @Kryptos ’ point was that if Verstappen is asked to drive a 1:35, his laptimes will consistently be within a tenth of that. Lap after lap. Ask Perez the same and there’s up to half a second of variance.
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Yeah this is precisely it. I, like @mbear, also saw Perez suddenly lose time on the timing sheet. They never showed what happened but indeed he suddenly just dropped. Not that Max does not sometimes do silly things (mowing the lawn in Australia, for example) but he just does so less than just about everyone else.
One thing that’s telling is the chit-chat over the radio. “Upshifts aren’t as smooth as they could be”, discussing strategy etc. Only a few drivers can do this, the rest need all of their focus just to drive the car fast.
Alonso, Hamilton, Leclerc & Verstappen are the only ones I can think of out of the current drivers that have this extra mental capacity. Perez doesn’t.
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I had to laugh Sunday when his engineer told him to mind his own business and focus on driving at one point 
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Yes that was funny
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The main problem at the moment is that RB would be first and second probably with any of the 20 drivers on the grid. The rest of the racing is pretty good with some average cars from Merc and Ferrari.
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I expect Aston and hopefully Ferrari and Mercedes to catch up once the penalties start having their effect. At least for the racing, I think the title will not be in danger.
Ferrari saying their car is very, very tricky to drive, understeering one corner, oversteering the next. A wide performance margin between tyres, which also varies between drivers and circuit.
Sounds like they’ve fallen over the edge rather than just approaching it.
Yeah dunno what happened there. They were looking very promising last year aside from strategy and engine reliability. Thought they would have both sorted this year. Binotto must be laughing into a glass of red at his vineyard.
Most of this is stating the obvious, but a few points are interesting.
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Yes there was a lap where Perez had an incident and lost a second. The Sky analyst mentioned it but it was never shown
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Not convinced that Leclerc can do this. He always seems very stressed. But maybe his current car is very hard work.
My highlight of the race was Alonso complimenting Stroll on an overtake. He had been watching the race on the screens while racing.
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I think I’ve seen (heard) him do it, but other than that he’s not (yet?) in the same league as the other three. Too many mistakes still.
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He even said this during the post race interview, LOL.
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I’m interested to know how the Honda/rbr power unit went from being a “gp2” engine to the cream of the crop. I thought the FIA had very strict rules on upgrades. Also hearing that Aston want to have works Honda unit for 26
Engine freeze is only since last year if I’m not mistaken. And even in the year(s) before that, the Honda engine wasn’t so bad any more. The Honda GP2 engine days is quite a while ago, 5, or even more, an eternity in F1 terms.
And the freeze means that one can only work on reliability. You can make a fast engine reliable (worst case scenario by throttling its performance), but not the other way around.
I think that’s also why last year reliability was quite low. Manufacturers had anticipated this, so for the first year they build theoretically fast engines that weren’t reliable and hence were run “slow”. And it’s now become a game of unlocking that theoretical performance by bringing reliability upgrades allowing them to run it faster. Age old thing of F1 teams finding the loopholes in the rules.
Edit: It was 2015 when Alonso revered to it as a GP2 engine, 8 years ago.
Thanks. Interesting
I suppose I was thinking Mercedes had always been regarded as the gold standard but isn’t the most powerful now
I think I’ve read that current thinking is that Ferrari has the most powerful engine, and that RB & Mercedes follow closely in 2nd, more or less on par with each other. Renault being a bit behind.