The Russian Grand Prix is taking place later in the season than it did last year. So instead of having 12 months’ development since the cars last tackled the Sochi Autodrom, the teams have had more like 17.
On top of that Pirelli have brought their considerably quicker hyper-soft rubber to this weekend’s race. As a result, most teams are more than a second quicker at this track than they were last year.But Williams is the exception. For the fifth time this year the FW41 is slower than its predecessor was at the same circuit in the previous season. This was the case in four of the first seven races of 2018: Bahrain, China, Azerbaijan and Canada.
It had seemed that, following the progress the team made with its car at mid-season, it was now on an upward curve. But Sochi highlighted the difficulties the team still has with its car. Lance Stroll described his car as “undriveable” during first practice yesterday.
Qualifying probably exaggerated the team’s plight after Sergey Sirotkin spun during his final run, which also compromised Stroll’s last effort in Q1.
“Sergey got a reasonable lap in [on the] first run,” explained chief technical officer Paddy Lowe. “Lance had a lock-up and got a fairly poor second lap down.
“With their second set of tyres it obviously went wrong [when Sirotkin spun] although they were both quite well up at that point. So we would have liked to get both cars ahead of both McLarens, I think was do-able, we didn’t quite manage it.
“What particularly wrecked [Stroll’s] lap was not the yellow flag, he could have lost only a small amount of time with a lift as you need. But Ricciardo had slowed down considerably through the yellow and you can’t overtake. So it was actually Ricciardo that lost him the lap because he slowed down so much.”
For the ninth race in a row Sauber posted the biggest year-on-year lap time gain of any team (excluding France and Germany which were not on last year’s calendar). They are almost four seconds faster than they were in 2017, and got both cars into Q3.
Valtteri Bottas lowered the all-time track record at Sochi by 1.8 seconds with his pole position lap. This year’s cars are almost five seconds per lap faster than the first generation of V6 hybrid turbo cars were at the inaugural Russian Grand Prix in 2014.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Quotes: Dieter Rencken
2018 Russian Grand Prix
- 2018 Russian Grand Prix team radio highlights
- Top ten pictures from the 2018 Russian Grand Prix
- 2018 Russian Grand Prix Star Performers
- Verstappen did 2018’s best recovery drive yet – in eight laps
- No backsies for Bottas: Hamilton wins on Mercedes team orders
Jere (@jerejj)
29th September 2018, 19:41
It’d be interesting to see a side-by-side split-screen comparison of this season’s pole lap Vs., the 2014 equivalent, LOL.
Tango (@tango)
29th September 2018, 23:33
I’d probably say : Williams chassis+driver combination is slower than last year, as we know the engine is better
Dale
30th September 2018, 22:37
Their drivers are a weak link, but evidence suggests the Mercedes has progressed less than the other engines (except Honda).
Relative to all the other cars across races so far in 2018 …
AMG Mercedes, Force India & Williams are nett slower than in 2017.
The biggest improvements are from the Ferrari customer teams, with Ferrari themselves just marginally slower than 2017.
Red Bull & Renault are the only other teams nett faster than in 2017, with McLaren only just slower.
socksolid (@socksolid)
30th September 2018, 3:10
Just to note. Last year massa was .4 faster in q1 compared to stroll and 0.9s faster in q2. Last year the softest tire for the teams was ultrasoft. This year it is hypersoft which is one step faster. I don’t know the time difference of those two compounds but I’d guess it is somewhere 0.2 and 0.4s on one lap.
Now if you compare stroll’s lap times. In 2017 he did a 1:35.964. This year his best was 1:36.437. Adjusting for that 0.4s tire difference the current williams car seems to be about 8 tenths slower per lap. But it grows to 2s if you compare massa’s last year lap times to stroll’s lap times. I did not watch the qualifying so I don’t know if stroll had any issues though that affected his qualifying lack of speed.
Meanwhile mclaren did the same lap time as they did last year which would make their car 0.4s slower when adjusted for tire compound difference. On fast tracks like spa and monza mclaren has been quicker this year. In spa they were 0.1s faster with harder tires and in baku the difference was 0.3 faster with softer tires. It is hard to compare mclaren’s lap times because they had so many problems with the honda engines. A lot of the times they had so many grid penalties that it did not make sense for them to push in qualifyings which may skew the numbers. Would be interesting to actually look at the qualifyings and see whether mclaren’s claims are backed by evidence.
bosyber (@bosyber)
30th September 2018, 9:51
@socksolid According to Williams, Sirotkin’s spin didn’t directly harm Stroll, but Ricciardo, who was ahead of Stroll, backed off to the yellow flags (unlike Verstappen ahead of him, it seems), and that meant Stroll then had to back off too (curious if they’d otherwise had been faster but also penalised like Verstappen was though, but that’s what Williams said, more or less blaming Ricciardo to avoid having to blame Sirotkin), so I’d say Stroll otherwise might have been noticeably faster.
I also missed the qualifying myself, so can’t confirm all that first hand though.
rick bradner (@3304hl)
30th September 2018, 4:53
It would have helped if Williams had been able to sign Kimi for next year as they REALLY NEED an experienced driver to help with development.
Having faild to do that, perhaps someone with actual proven talent would help…
Ocon seems a reasonable choice since MB is so keen to keep him in F1, of course they’ll need to bring cash as this is Williams and they don’t seem to be able to race on their own dime anymore…
falken (@falken)
30th September 2018, 11:17
Clearly Williams think they can buy their way to better..